I suggest you might want to try reading this before you start dismissively mocking Kobal2 as a man who just doesn’t get that no woman would voluntarily want to wear Islamic head and/or face covering. Because the issue is a lot more complicated than you seem to think.
And the vast majority of Muslim women can not only vote but drive too. In the world’s one and only actual Islamic theocracy, Iran, for instance, women drive taxis and not only can vote, they can hold elective office.
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Human rights are just a set of laws like any other – albeit with a fancier name.
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I don’t think they are - and I don’t think the blokes who started the train back in 1789 thought so either. Human rights are the package of innate , farm-raised, all-natural, organic rights any human being is awarded by simple virtue of being one (1) unit of human meat product(c). And alive.
And that when states’ laws contradict or infringe on those rights, they’re implicitly and morally wrong. By the very definition of human rights.
I am fully aware that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, but in re human rights, when I was in college in the late eighties, the head of the campus chapter of Amnesty International was a Muslim woman.
She’s now a doctor - in fact, head of Community Health at one of the more important hospitals in Atlanta. She’s a devout Muslim, even though she’s married to a non Muslim, doesn’t wear a niqab, burkha, or even a hijab, and goes by her maiden name. And after she had her children, she went back to work, while her husband stayed at home to raise their kids. Perhaps she’s an outlier in the Muslim community here, but she does show that Muslim women can, y’know, go outside.
All of those are very positive qualities and I know lots of Muslims like her, but what makes you label her a “devout Muslim.” Did she pray five times a day.
Note that amongst Western Muslims that she isn’t IMHO an outlier.
BTW, what’s this hangup people have with Burkas and asking about Muslim women wearing them.
Very, very few actually do, particularly among Western Muslims. The more traditional Hijab of course is a different story.
I’m not sure why Muslim women wearing Hijabs is any weirder than say men wearing Kippas or Jewish women keeping their hair covered or Christians wearing crosses.
Come, now. You know how this game works. If one Muslim does it somewhere, all Muslims are guilty of it everywhere. Thems are the rules. If they seem unfair, unrealistic and stupid to you, you’re just not phobic enough !
Because if one needs to demonize Islam, one needs to pretend that Islam is unique in all its practices and that all those practices are evil. It has nothing to do with facts, far less with truth–just a need to spew ignorance and hatred.
(In fairness to the bigots, the burqa issue arose when the Taliban began to enforce its use in Afghanistan which had, years earlier, been the location of a fairly modernist version of Islam, with a high number of women being educated at local universities, holding decent jobs, etc. Of course, (as demonstrated above), they have no idea how the burqa is worn and they confuse the practices of individual countries/cultures with the practices throughout the world. However, they were given an issue to allow them to parade their ignorance in the extremism of the Taliban.)
And the burqa does seem pretty damned oppressive. The wearer is covered from head to toe in a garment that doesn’t leave any skin visible and obscures their identity. It’s hard to say that a society that makes women wear them respects their rights or individuality.
Or possibly it imagines itself as a society that protects them - from the promiscuous gaze of men, from rape, etc…
I don’t agree with that argument myself, BTW, or that particular solution to a problem as old as the world. And Og knows the societies where that solution is enforced tend to be misogynistic all around.
But it’s not absolutely invalid or bonkers, either. And I could see (some) women buying into it voluntarily.
When the government mandates that it be worn by all women in public, it is certainly oppressive, just as it would be oppressive if a government mandated that all women in public wear bikinis or Daisy Dukes.
Interestingly, one of the protests used by the opponents of the Shah of Iran was the wearing of the burqa because he had banned it as part of his persecution of Islam in that country. I suspect that if the U.S. had not overthrown the elected government to put him in power, (or had treated him more as a genuine puppet and forbidden him to persecute Islam), we would not have handed Khomeini and his bullies the tools to install a theocracy in that country.
Put him back into power, btw. The Shah went into exile after his attempt to dismiss Mosaddegh failed. But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m not talking about government mandates. I’m talking about the culture. A society and a culture that has women dress in burqas doesn’t respect them or treat women as equals.
none of that was done in the name of any religion. But you knew that.
here’s a current list of terrorist groups. A substantial number of them are based on Islamic dogma. They cannot be explained away by poverty as you’ve attempted to do in the past. The world isn’t made of up poor Muslims and everybody else.
That is true. But what exactly is the connection between Islam and these terrorist groups? Has Islam made them into terrorists? Or was it maybe something else, and they are only using Islam as a tool? Would they perhaps be using Christianity instead, if they happened to have sprung up in a Christian environment? It’s not like that does not happen. You are observing a correlation between terrorism and the religion of Islam. I can see the correlation. From that you infer a causation. That I find unconvincing.
There definitely is also a correlation between terrorism and poverty. Religiously motivated terrorist groups seem to be more frequent in the poorer countries of this world. And wealthy Muslim countries seem to see few terrorist groups.
Pretty much every post you have submitted regarding Islam over the last few years.
We have been over that, previously. You simply choose to ignore reality.
There are, indeed, groups whose actions are driven by religious beliefs–particularly those driven by the Wahabbist or Salafist ideologies. However, my claim has never been simply “poverty” as you persistently misrepresent it. The motivations include a number of things: poverty when it is the direct result of government action, the treatment of those who are already poor by governments or organizations tolerated by governments; the reactions of Muslims who have been actively persecuted by governments; and similar causes. Religion has been a cultural marker that provides a cohesive structure around which recruits to different causes may be summoned. The “Muslim” terrorists in Indonesia and the Philippines are organized around the fact that the Muslim populations of those places were persecuted by their governments. Chechnya involves a nationalist movement to break free of Russian suppression where the Chechens were able to call on other Muslims for support, (following the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan) when no one else would provide support. In Yemen, al Qaida is a strong malevolent force, but its target is the “reformation” of Islam in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Houthis also make your list in Yemen, but they are among the various ethnic tribes seeking either power or redress and are not motivated by religion. Similar observations may be made about many of the “Muslim” groups on that list.
Claiming that a simple enumeration of terrorist groups to identify the Muslims within it is nothing more than circular reasoning when one ignores all the other factors that have been involved. At no time have I claimed that poverty was the only reason for such behavior and your mischaracterization of my position is due to either an inability to read or a deliberate choice to mis-read what I have posted.
The causation is the prophet Mohammad. He used extreme violence in the creation of his legacy. When was the last time a Buddhist monk issued a declaration insisting someone die over a cartoon?
The definitive correlation between terrorism and poverty is not consistent across all religions/poverty.
so it shouldn’t be hard for you to come up with a cite.
It’s basic math. There are far more Islamic terrorist groups than any other religion. There is no argument here. You keep making excuses that you pull out of your ass as if the light of wisdom shone there. It doesn’t. You can’t deal with the reality of the disproportionate amount of violence associated on a religion based on a violent prophet. It’s a politically correct mystery to you that the Islamic fringe follow the actions of their prophet.
So did George Washington. Or Clovis. Or William the Bastard. Or Caesar. Or anybody who carved out a country in any place, at any time in history.
Muhammad was not “extremely violent” in his historical context, either, FWIW. On the contrary.
For one thing the Koran contains actual rules for warfare, treating the enemy with a modicum of fairness and an eye towards ending the hostilities (which was pretty goddamn novel at the time) ; for another since the early Muslims did not exactly number in the millions when they could avoid a fight, they did.
In places like Egypt, beleaguered Christians persecuted by the Byzantines for heresy welcomed the new leadership for example. And, in return, they were not harmed at all and the existing government infrastructure more or less remained untouched. In that way, the Muslim strategy did not differ very much from other successful conquerors like Tamerlane or the Romans - “surrender and she’ll be alright, resist and be utterly crushed”.
I suggest you look up what those nice harmless Buddhists of Myanmar have been up to over the past few decades. Or in Thailand. Or in Sri Lanka.
Muslim violence, particularly in the form of terrorism, is a recent phenomenon. Pick any 30 year period in history and a different group would be the most violent. Islam was not responsible for the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the famines of Ireland and India, the Stalinist suppression of Ukraine, Mao’s Great leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia, pogroms throughout Eastern Europe, the Hutu massacre ot Tutsis, (following smaller massacres of Hutus by Tutsis–both groups largely Christian), and on and on. And while you can ignore the actual history in order to pretend that it is all the fault of Islam, the history does not go away and it is there for anyone who is not afraid to study it. The Muslim violence that we currently see, (ignoring, as you do, the attacks on Muslims), can frequently be traced back to the naturally occurring chaos of peoples attempting to control their own destinies after being held down by the First and Second World powers during the Cold War that, itself, followed centuries of suppression by European (Christian) empires.
You can try to dismiss my arguments with personal attacks, but I notice that I provide actual facts while you can only repeat “Mohammed said it,” (ignoring the several centuries in which Islam was nowhere near as violent as Christian empire building while still following the basic words of Mohammed).
And, I will note, that I have never claimed that the fringe is not following the 18th century Wahhabist/Salafist movement interpreting what the Prophet proclaimed. I simply refrain from your choice of posting as though the fringe element is the majority.