Ahh well the thread has been hijacked and there is no one to answer my questions anymore. C’est la vie.
Did the hijack begin when I defended you and your questions, or only when I defended myself and my friends?
That is a very good point and one I hadn’t considered when compiling my previous post. I googled about a bit to see if there was any information which could provide basis for a general assessment of how many Muslims would support a program of coercive exportation of Islam to other countries but I couldn’t find any. My ‘gut instinct’ tells me that the sort of person who would generally approve of violence against civilians in defence of Islam would also probably be the sort of person who would be at least ambivalent to such a program. They may even consider it a Utilitarian good, ultimately beneficial to non-muslim residents of other sovereign nations. Then again, they might not. That’s just a baseless opinion and doesn’t really count for anything. If anyone has any statistics on this question I’d be very keen to see them
Very true. I never meant to suggest, even for a moment, that those Muslims who leant either material or moral support to the pursuance of radical Islam constituted anything close to a majority. My point was that while they are certainly a minority, they’re not just a negligible fringe minority. But, as John Mace pointed out, the fact that these Muslims may superficially support the tenets of Islamism in their own countries doesn’t necessarily imply that they want to impose these tenets on other nations.
Good question. I think that the rise of popular Muslim support for Sharia districts is one that should concern us, even if those pursuing it are willing to work alongside the established British system. My general impression is that the majority of radicalised Muslims in Britain are merely disaffected young men who grasp the faith as an anchor to help provide, among other things, a measure of personal identity. However, I am concerned that they are being led by more dedicated contingents who would be quite happy to see the British system entirely replaced by Sharia. I am worried that these hardliners are using the notion of divergent but simultaneously concurrent legal systems as the thin end of the wedge to further their ambition to supplant Britain’s secular legal system with an Islamic one. This alone would be reason enough to resist the encroachment of Sharia in British society. However, a further complicating factor is the threat of jurisdictional disputes between districts legislated according to Sharia & districts legislated according to British law. It would be naive to think that all those who support the introduction of Sharia would quietly acquiesce to the superiority of established British law in such disputes rather than using such cases as opportunities to extend Sharia influence.
That’s very encouraging news. Thanks for posting it. It is confusing, though, in light of previous polls on the subject. I guess the thing these polls prove more than anything else is that people are unpredictable. Anthropology makes my head hurt 
That’s a very interesting article. However, I’d be keen to see the exact wording of the PIPA poll. I tried looking for it but couldn’t find it. Do you have a link to the poll itself? Cheers.
I hadn’t realized that mswas ministered to the folks at the Reserveration. Good for him!
Quite a few of the inner city stores are run by Muslims. In fact, we have home-grown Muslims who live in those neighborhoods.
I won’t judge those who choose to live in monocultural rural communities–they have my pity. How many of them are posting here?
In defence of Americans:
The above quote is from the article Gala Matrix Fire linked to earlier. I just wanted to suggest that the 17% of Americans who think torture is “Rarely” justified should be grouped with those who say it is “Never” justified, rather than those who think it is “Often” or “Sometimes” justified. As I said in my first post, I am generally opposed to torture, but one could certainly compose rare hypothetical scenario’s which would incline me to change my mind in those specific instances. If the torture of a terrorist could decide the fate of millions, his discomfort would cause me no moral concern. Indeed, I would likely conclude it would be immoral not to torture him. But that would only hold for the kind of bizarre thought experiments confined to ethics textbooks and episodes of 24. Nevertheless, if polled on the subject, this concern would prompt me to answer that torture was “rarely” justified. I think that grouping the “Often”, “Sometimes”, and “Rarely”, respondents together gives a false picture of American aggression.
The discussion of idolatry more than anything. Not that it’s a bad discussion. I just wish there were more response to my questions about Taqqiyah/Kitman, Apostasy, and Honor killings. The side that sees a major threat in radical Islam find Taqqiyah/Kitman to be very important. Here on the Dope you can’t even get a response to the subject. I appreciate your defense, and I think you’ve added a nice element to this thread. My complaint is not what IS being discussed as much as it is about what ISN’T being discussed.
I’d really like to see a bit of a dissection as to who the tribal players are. Is radicalism more prevalent amongst Arabs? Why? Arabs seem to have more of a warrior tradition. When they ruled they often ruled over a system whose intellectual tradition was dominated by Jews and Persians. Conversely, I have heard people express and even greater fear of Shi’ite terrorism due to a perception of capability. Hezbollah comes across as far more capable than Al Qaeda. One thing I’ve heard, is people fearing Shi’ite sleeper cells in the US that can wreak havoc in case of a bombing of Iran.
Another side of this discussion is the positioning of the radicals. Who are they and what kind of power do they have? One can only learn so much from raw data from polls regarding statistical attitudes.
George Kaplin I thought about pointing out the ‘rarely’ distinction in Gala Matrix Fire’s post, but he was quoting a poll so I decided not to. It’s an important distinction though.
Bridget Burke My local deli is run by Yemeni, they are quite friendly. I like them.
Taquiyah is a Shi’a concept. It means that if you know you’re going to be killed for your beliefs, it’s not a sin to lie about them. This is important because a lot of times, in Sunni states, Shia were imprisoned or killed for being Shia. The equivalent I can think of is the idea of a Jew during the Holocauist pretending he’s not Jewish. Sunnis don’t believe in taquiyah…the Sunni response is that if you’re being persecuted, you should embrace your martyrdom, and that lying about your faith to avoid persecution is cowardly.
Kitman just means “hiding”, and refers to keeping secrets. It doesn’t have any particular religious connotation, except that Islam says that kitman can be good, like when you keep a confidence, or keep vital information from the enemy in time of war, or something like that, and it can be bad, like when you don’t give to charity, or you know something that will help people and don’t share it, or whatever.
This has been a really interesting thread, and I’m glad I read it and participated.
George Kaplin,here’s a link to the article on the PIPA web site. The PIPA poll quoted in the Christian Science Monitor article specifically dealt with American and Iranian views about terrorism.
Some of the other information in the article was from this site.
You put “insignificant minority” in quotes. Is that because you’re quoting someone? If so, whom?
If you’re paraphrasing me, you’re doing a damned poor job of it. Once we get past the OP’s admittedly poor phrasing, once we get past the anti-Muslim folks who treat Islam the way Der Trihs treats Christianity, we clear the way for discussion of the real problem. I like Paul Krugman’s phrasing: there’s a death cult that’s gaining popularity among formerly Muslim folks. It’s as if Jim Jones had gained millions of followers. We wouldn’t conclude that the Bible preached mass suicide (well, most of us wouldn’t conclude that), but we’d have every reason to be worried.
I don’t have any stats on this. All I have is a hypothetical, which I’ll phrase as a question since I have no way of proving that what I suspect is true.
First, look at how many people responded to 9/11 by calling for carpetbombing Afghanistan, regardless of the loss of innocent life. I remember right after 9/11 hearing folks that I thought were reasonable people talk about how we should turn the Middle East into a giant plane of glass.
That’s after a single attack on us.
Imagine for a moment if somehow Bin Laden managed to overthrow the US government, and hundreds of thousands of his supporters invaded the US. Imagine that, in an effort to wipe out any resistance, innocent people were being killed. Imagine that bin Laden had assigned a Mosque’s youth group to guard some of his inner circle, and that youth group massacred a bunch of American civilians in downtown New York, and bin Laden said that Sharia law would not allow for them to be punished.
Think back to those Americans who were calling for nuking the middle East after a single attack. Imagine you could poll them now on whether attacks against civilians were often or sometimes an appropriate response. How do you think they would answer?
I think you’d get numbers similar to what you’d find asking that question in Iraq.
Of course the parallels aren’t exact. But I think there’s good reason to believe someone will support the horror of attacks on civilians as a defense, when they wouldn’t support the horror of attacks on civilians as imperialist expansionism.
Daniel
I have responded to all of those topics in the past, the Taqiyyah one very recently. You’ll forgive me if I burn out after seven years of doing so on this message board. One just gets sick of the topic and I’ve been honestly trying to avoid this thread. But since you asked…
The good Captain has already outlined the issues with Taqiyyah. While your link claims Sunni Muslims are starting to take up the idea, I haven’t run across a lot in academic literature to back it up - the sort of radical jihadist Sunnis most folks fear tend to regard Shi’a as takfir and are unlikely to embrace such a thoroughly Shi’a concept. As I’ve noted before not even all Shi’a embrace Taqiyyah - the Zaydi Shi’a of Yemen consider it antithetical to their belief system ( the Zaydi split from the larger body of quietist Shi’ism occurred right before Taqiyya was introduced as a concept ). Sunnis certainly don’t as a matter of course - the concept is a shibboleth for ideologues.
Apostasy - Eight ( out of 40-odd ) Muslim/Muslim majority countries have it on the books as a capital crime, but it seems it is a very rarely prosecuted one. When it has been, it just as often a tool of political smearing as with Hassan al-Turabi in the Sudan ( an ardent Islamist who sheltered ObL at one time, but has very liberal ideas on women’s rights and apostasy, at least as Islamists go ). It’s a problem, but not a common one.
Honor Killings - Like FGM, highly variable in the Islamic world. Practically speaking it ( and FGM, really ) is much more of an issue than apostasy laws, IMHO - the death toll at least is certainly much, much higher. Actually, the two highest concentrations seem to be the Middle East ( very loosely defined ) and Latin America. There are still ( or were until recently ) laws protecting the rights of cuckolded husbands to commit murder in the heat of passion in countries like Haiti and Brazil. A few Muslim countries, Pakistan and Jordan being notable examples, still have vile laws of that sort on the books. It tends to be rather less common in south Asia exclusive of Pakistan, far as I can determine
Like FGM it is certainly a cultural practice, not Islamic per se. It’s religious justification is by inference, something patriarchal Abrahamic religions make perhaps a bit too easy.
Well that’s mighty 20th century of him. Just to clarify, if nobody is worshipping a non-Islamic antiquity then Omar will graciously allow it to stand. Might this mindset be construed as making the world a noticeably different place if Islamic doctrine were imposed?
I hope nobody starts worshipping Mullah Omar.
Why would they think they could make those kind of demands if they just started working there? They knew they were coming there right? Where is management?
Has anyone told them how unrealistic their attitude is? That kind of disruption in the workplace isn’t worth it.
Well, if nobody’s worshiping it, it’s obviously not an idol, so the question of “Should we destroy idols” is moot.
And the mindset can be construed as making the world a noticably differnet place if Mullah Omar’s version of Islamic doctrine were imposed. But I think you knew beforehand that Taliban rule wasn’t very “fun”.
How is it moot? The mindset still exists. The antiquity exists. The second somebody walks up to it and starts praying it’s now cannon fodder.
It’s the mindset of intolerance that’s the point of discussion. The idol is secondary. It could just as easily be a drawing or a book that is not tolerated.
It’s moot because the restriction is against worshipping idols, or, for the Jewish and Christian equivalent “Thou shalt have no graven images”. So if you’re somebody like Mullah Omar, who takes that seriously and who thinks, yes, idols should be destroyed, then whether those statues are idols makes a pretty big difference as to whether or not they should be destroyed. For you, who neither takes it seriously or thinks idols should be destroyed, it’s silly, but it’s not silly to him.
And it’s not the mindset of intolerance that’s the point of discussion. Obviously Mullah Omar is (was? Did we kill him?) intolerant, and obviously the Taliban is intolerant. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who will dispute that.
The Buddha statues were never left alone or intact, even before the Taliban took over Afghanistan. The defacement of the statues described from this link predates the final destruction of the statues by the Taliban. They simply lacked the technology (C4 or Semtec) to do the job thoroughly.
40-odd?
TheCairo Declaration on Human Rights 1990 has signatories from fifty seven Muslim controlled countries, including the so-called “secular” ones (Egypt, Turkey, Malaysia et al).
All of the countries that signed this document, which qualifies its “human rights” in fourteen of its 25 Articles as requiring to be in compliance with Islamic law, includes the all encompassing:
Those 57 countries have signed an agreement to comply with Islamic law. That includes agreeing to the death penalty for apostasy, does it not? 
Do you mean to imply that FGM is also a feature of the other “Abrahamic” religions, such as Judaism or Christianity?
If so, please provide at least one reliable source.
Sorry, there are more than one source for such statements:http://gs.fanshawec.ca/soci270/week%208/section_one_what_is_female_genit.htm
The point is that it is cultural, irrespective of religion and making a claim that it is promoted by religion is to simply engage in malicious and false claims.
I’m not Tamerlane, but he never said it was a “feature” of Abrahamic religions, although when it comes to the Skoptsy, I’d certainly consider it a feature. He said the various religions made it easy to justify the practice. If you want a cite that it is practiced by members of Christianity or Judaism, and that they use their religion to justify it, is the State Department reliable enough for you?
It does not, unless it is actually written into the legal code of the countries in question. Otherwise it is just a symbolic “rah-rah” moment for domestic consumption, one that has a nicely ambiguous out, given internal Islamic debate over apostasy ( and virtually every other controversial feature of Islamic law ).
Others have responded to the FGM argument, but I’ll add this handy table, again courtesy of the U.S. State Department: We apologize for the inconvenience... - United States Department of State