Are you saying you aren’t? Because I would find that very disappointing.
The OP mentions ‘islamist society’ in the title, which I interpreted as a muslim majority country based on how he phrased it. I don’t think there would be any legit freedom of speech in an actual islamist society, even muslim majority societies seem to be struggling with it (but 3 are rated free by freedom house).
Sigh.
I have never claimed I was an expert on Islam or the Middle East/Near East. Since I don’t understand any Arab dialects, including Quranic Arabic, it would be foolish to do so.
Beyond that, his information seems to be gleaned entirely from bigoted hate sites.
To be very blunt, we were discussing Jewish history and he was making nasty comments about Jews and using links to Stormfront to justify his views I suspect most people would be reacting far harsher than I am presently.
Was anyone actually making nasty comments? I see some criticism of Islam, the assertion that there are Islamist/Islamic countries which do you not have freedom of speech and, one could argue, the implication that Islamist/Islamic countries generally have a weaker record in freedom of speech.
From my fairly anti-religion perspective it appears that it’s more a case of you taking offence at the criticism of your religion of choice. You’ve made some good points but they’re largely quite defensive and deflective. That’s not to imply you’re the only one at fault; this is one of the worst quality “debates” I’ve ever seen here. Is this topic too sensitive for SDMB?
The concept of personal freedom simply does not exist in Islam. Islam is so controlling that there are rules regarding what foot you may use to enter and exist the bathroom (left to enter, right to leave).
Yea? Just like it doesn’t have slavery?
It would seem what I had heard was possible, because, if a great number of people can be riled up to kill and maim people because they tear up a book written by a human many years ago, it would indicate that they do not allow others to disagree with them. or are stirred up by some other people. I sometimes wonder if the people are paid to riot. It is one way to earn some money.
I do know that the head of the Greek church has a writing from Muhammed himself that says all religions should be respected, Just as many Christians and others don’t follow the person who started their religion, some Muslim sects do not follow the teachings of Muhammad!
You can’t really infer how a religion operates in a particular society from the minutiae of its theoretical law codes.
Traditional Jewish law, for example, is also very “controlling” in small details (to the extent of prescribing to the observant Orthodox Jew which foot he should step on first when getting up in the morning, for example). But that doesn’t mean that being Jewish is fundamentally incompatible with a civil society that allows very wide latitude in personal freedom.
Likewise, as has already been noted in this thread, there are some majority-Muslim societies that are very repressive about personal freedom, and others that are much more liberal about it. Just because they both fall into the general category of “Islam” doesn’t mean that they can’t be drastically different.
Bud, Islam doesn’t consider itself merely a religion it considers itself “a way of life”. In Islam, there can be no government except one that operates under shariah. The popular Muslim saying goes “Islam is our religion, the Qu’ran our Constitution, and our sword the instrument of Allah’s will”. Any country that is secular and values personal freedom is, by definition, unIslamic, and this is the consensus among the ulema. The liberal Muslim counties you speak of are unIslamic, and there are forces out there moving to overthrow them and replace them with more strict Islamic states, because the movement in nearly all Islamic countries is toward the more strict puritanical pure form of Islam, nearly unchanged since Muhammad preached it in the 7th century. But even in these so called liberal Muslim societies, there is no right to blasphemy or even legitimate criticism of Islam…none whatsoever. Malaysia, one of those liberal Muslim countries, was recently prosecuting some Hindus and Christians for minor perceived slights against Islam, and it’s supposedly a model to the rest of the Muslim world on tolerance
But there are plenty of places in the Muslim world where that doesn’t happen. And there are places in other parts of the world where riots can occur over other things related to speech, if not religion.
That’s certainly true.
In SOME versions of Islam, that’s true. But many millions of Muslims co-exist just fine with secular or nearly-secular governments. In most Muslim countries, there is certainly no clerical rule like in Iran. In some, Shariah is relegated only to a way of interpreting certain sections of law, kind of like common law in our system.
In most Muslim countries, though, the Quran is not the constitution, and most muslims in most of those countries would probably not subscribe to the saying above.
At the risk of repeating myself…
Do you care to back up that assertion regarding the absence of personal freedom in Islam?
This is simply rubbish.
Here are some quotes from an actual Muslim source about the concept of personal freedom in Islam (a site called “The Concept of Freedom in Islam” - pretty good source, huh?)
http://home.swipnet.se/islam/articles/concept-freedom.htm
Of course, this may not speak for all Muslims or Muslim sects. It destroys the silly notion that “there is no concept of personal freedom in Islam” though.
But do they put sugar on their porridge? 
Seriously, you’ve got a very True-Scotsman definition of “Islamic” operating here. If you want to use the term “Islamic” to mean specifically “abiding by a strict Salafist interpretation of shari`a law and its role in society”, and consequently to declare that millions of self-identified Muslims worldwide are automatically by definition “un-Islamic”, sure, you can do that. But you need to warn us that you’re using the term in a rather unconventional way.
And since I don’t disagree with your remark that strict Salafist interpretations of shari`a law and its role in society (which is how you seem to be defining “Islam”) are indeed very controlling in a radical-extremist way and largely reject the concept of personal freedom, I guess we don’t really have a debate here.
There is a difference between Muslims (people who practice Islam) and Islam itself (the ideology as it is accepted by mainstream Islamic ulema.) You are correct in stating there are millions of Muslims who live in secular societies and hold democratic principles like the separation of mosque and state, individual liberty, gender equality, etc in heart, but these people are cafeteria Muslims who pick and choose what aspects of Islam they want to follow, and they are known to shed the more dogmatic aspects of the faith. You can’t point to cafeteria Muslims and try to hold them as representative of Islam, because they are living in error. The only people in the world today practicing Islam as it should be practiced are the Salafis, who have remained true to the creed originally preached by Muhammad and the early companions and have resisted this evolution in Islamic thought also known as “bid’ah”. So you’re right, there isn’t a debate here because you are talking about cafeteria Muslims and their bastardized Isam and I’m talking about Islam the pure ideology practiced by the “true believers”
Ok, so even in this example of “personal liberty in Islam” that you copied and pasted from some random website, it states pretty clearly that freedom of expression is tolerated only to the extent that it " reflects the values of the Holy Our’an". And this thread is talking about the “irresponsible freedom” that your article mentions, and I doubt even the very liberal sects who at least acknowledge some sense of personal freedom would tolerate any attempt to criticize Islam or to even preach another religion alongside it.
Just take a look at countries which implement shariah law and tell me how much freedom of expression and personal freedom is in those societies. Like Saudi Arabia or The Islamic Republic of Iran or Taliban Afghanistan or any other region of the world which is ruled by an Islamic entity. You probably will discover that as soon as Islam takes over a nation’s political system it generally starts to diminish personal freedoms, until such a time where their is virtually none and people are free to do only one thing: worship Allah. Many of these Islamic states consider it their moral duty to limit personal liberties because personal liberty/freedom really allows people to sin more easily, and since they believe that a sinner will burn in hellfire for all eternity they naturally make laws making it very hard to sin…such as by banning movie theaters in Saudi Arabia or making adultery a crime punishable by death in Iran and Afghanistan. I could go on and on but the main point is that Islam values obedience to Allah, and the human being is to be considered a slave to the will of Allah and it is the duty of a Muslim to establish upon this Earth nations dedicated solely to the worship of Allah…that is the point of Allah. Personal liberty and all this nonsense is at best a distraction and at worst an outright affront to what Islam is trying to do in the world.
In other words, you’re talking out of your tush. The best proof of that assertion of mine is your completely asinine comment above about “cafeteria Muslims.”
Great! That’s encouraging.
As I said to Valteron when he made a similar claim in a concurrent thread: Sure, I understand why fundamentalist radical-extremist Salafi clerics argue that only their own interpretation of Islam is correct, and that any Muslims who adopt a less violent and repressive interpretation of their faith are being deluded by “erroneous” and “bastardized” and “corrupt” doctrine. It makes perfect sense that fundamentalist radical-extremist Salafi clerics would think this way.
What I don’t understand is why you are supporting their fundamentalist intolerance by championing their opinions. Since it’s up to Muslims in general to determine for themselves the meaning and nature of Islam, why are you insisting that they have to stick with the most repressive and belligerent interpretation possible?
If you yourself are not a fundamentalist radical-extremist Salafist, then why on earth do you want to go around “junior-imaming”, so to speak, to scold non-fundamentalist Muslims for their alleged “backsliding” from fundamentalist radical-extremist Salafist principles?
If you had lived in the later period of the Roman Catholic Inquisitions, would you also have been bad-mouthing liberal reformist anti-Inquisition churchmen as “cafeteria Christians” who were “living in error” and not practicing Christianity “as it should be practiced”?
Hey, it says right there in “the creed originally preached” that people who want to follow other gods should be put to death, anyone who doesn’t remain in Christ should be cast into the fire and burned, etc. Would you be calling out all those “bastardized” Christians for daring to “shed the more dogmatic aspects of the faith” and spinelessly giving up on the true and pure Christian practice of executing unbelievers?
Lorry knose there are plenty of intolerant repressive “true believers” in every age and clime who loudly assert that they’re the only ones with the correct interpretation of their faith. What I don’t understand is why any reasonable and tolerant person would think themselves obliged to agree with them.
I don’t understand why individuals who are ignorant about Islam, like the above individual, insist on commenting on threads about Islam. I bet one cursory reading of the wikipedia entry on Islam is the culmination of this naive boy’s study of Islam. Come back to me when you have studied the fiqh and the opinions of the ulema past and present, son.