If that’s true, and if it’s perceived for some bizarre reason to be a problem, it’s a problem that’s easily ameliorated. Stop sending so many people to prison.
(Cue The Knack)
MMM-MMM-MMMA My Sharia!
There are tons of Islamic people in my town. But they are pretty much all immigrants or the children of immigrants. JWs come to my door. Baptists have come to my door. Mormons are all over the place but never drop in because my house used to be owned by Mormons and the lamb’s blood is still fresh. Muslims have never come to my door.
And if anyone is trying to impose any kind of Sharia law both the local paper and the freaky old white guys have missed it.
We have a particular problem in the UK. For many years up to half of all schools were run and administered by either the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Churchusing largely public money. Most CofE schools were barely more than philosophically Christian with no attempt to encourage church attendance. Catholic churches were somewhat more aggressive in supporting Catholicism but not beyond reason, with many attendees being rom Islam, Judaism, or atheists/agnostics because of the high quality education. There were a minimal number of Jewish schools.
This typically British mish mash of an organisational structure was overseen by Local Authorities who had loose control over all the schools. Right wing governments then freed most schools from Local Authority controls leaving them with considerable freedom over their organisation. At the same time there was a rise in the demand for Islam based schools.
We now have a situation where some schools are leaning towards creationist teachings if conservative protestant influenced and toward Islamic rather than liberal values if Islamic.
I admire the complete separation in schools in the USA and wish we had chosen to do the same.
We haven’t entirely chosen that. The public school system is that way. Private schools also exist that frequently are run by religious institutions. They fall under state requirements to some extent but not generally to the extent your local authorities controlled schools if my quick search gave me an accurate picture. Some states have “charter schools” that are publicly funded but given more leeway to develop specialized curriculum.
I guess 16.4% (click second tab) of Catholic school students in the US are non-Catholic, which seems incredibly low to me, but it probably varies by school. And yes, for many the quality is the consideration.
I was considering public funded schools. Of course there is less of a problem with schools not paid for from public funds.
The PEW Forum reports that conversion to Islam is more or less matched by people leaving Islam. This is generally my sense of things too but it is very hard to find decent evidence one way or the other. Many of the numbers touted online are very sketchy.
It’s safe to say that relatively large numbers (the figure bandied about is 70%, though I’ve never seen the actual study this is based on) of converts to Islam leave after some time, and some number of apostates return. Some conversions may just be for marriage and the convert may not actually practice, even if he is registered somewhere. In the US, conversions (especially of white women) are touted very highly by many Islamic communities, while apostasy is often hidden and open apostates can face severe repercussions. On the other hand, registering with a group or a mosque is not necessarily the norm for many Muslim communities, and this can lead to undercounting.
“Creeping Sharia” is dumb on its face because Muslims in the West do not really have the power to do such things in an open way, even in areas where instituting “Sharia” (definition left vague) is a more popular ideal. Truly powerful groups have the police and larger social institutions on their side. Some gang of bearded louts proclaiming themselves “Sharia Police” in some neighborhoods in London or Berlin is a sign of the relative powerlessness of this activism, even (especially) within most Muslim communities in the West.
Now, this does not mean that there are not real problems in Islamic communities in the west, or that they cannot oppress people in/around them, but we just need to deal with such things calmly, not freak out. There are many potential allies in these communities that can be positively engaged if the larger societies have goals that include treating them decently.
For Europe, I think the big scare theory popular a while back was called “Eurabia.” Googling “Eurabia Debunking” might lead to mainstream sources useful for the OP’s questions.
How is it not self evident that by and large most immigrating Muslims are, in part, doing so to escape from the oppressive fundamentalism that has hijacked their religion in their homeland?
That they don’t want ‘that’ for their sons and daughters, seems to indicated they won’t be supporting such movements toward ‘that’, in their new homes.
They often come from states that have been extremely oppressive toward any dissent, for decades sometimes. And have taken on the deeply engrained need to NOT speak up, not denounce. Almost always appearing outwardly neutral, in the face of controversy whatever the stripe, within their faith.
The politics of fear, in those countries, involves disappearances, beheadings and stonings. Here in the West, the politics of fear only needs old people’s own prejudices and willful ignorance to create fear of invented nonsense. So sad to see.
But make no mistake, the politics of fear are evil in both cases. It’s a little easier to excuse the ignorance of an uneducated, population, kept so for decades, often at the point of a sword, in some backwater than the willful ignorance of zealots in the west. But ignorance is ignorance.
This would explain all the Muslim politicians and corporate bigwigs.
If the Catholics would hold up their end of the bargain by giving up on that whole “birth control” thing and go back to having eight or nine kids per family, this wouldn’t be a problem.
This is especially true of many Iraqi refugees that are coming to places like southern California. Technically they’re Muslims, but you’d hardly know it otherwise.
In general it’s similar (though on a such a smaller scale) to all the people in the U.S. who call themselves Christians but don’t really practice it. America is not actually as religious as it says it is. It just likes to say it’s religious.
Unless you are speaking to a few countries like the Iran or the Saudi arabia, this is not a relevant thing to most immigrants, who leave - it is called al-hogra in my dialect - are doing so because the economy is bad and they want a better life.
Despite the idea that so many in the west have and are so surprised on an actual visit, most of the muslim world does not in any follow the rules or the normes of the Saudis. and most governments are as a real experience entirely secular.
this is not relevant in almost the entire islamic world despite the strange ideas held about it.
Yes and those states have been overwhelmingly secular governments that are much more likely to have been oppressing the more conservative religious people - not for any real religious reason but for the perceived threat to the power structure.
this complete misunderstanding of the history of the arab region and most of the islamic world leads to deep misunderstanding of what the word and the experience of the "secular" government has meant in these regions. It has meant dictatorship and oppression, it has not meant any liberty or any freedom of expression - except for the Potemkin village façade of women’s rights that many secular dictators promoted to the adoring reaction of the west, which did not recognize this promotion was a façade and really only concerned the elite wives of the male ruling class.
It was this kind of experience that generated the Iranian revolution and it remains a minority experience to have an Iranian type government.
I am for the liberal secular government and you find it develops fine in the Senegal, and even in the Mali, where no foreign power has had great interest to intervene.
but please let us stop the constant commentary that mistakes the Saudia Arabia, the Gulf and the Iran for the entire Islamic world. It leads to the false conclusions.
I must say also the salafistes always try to taunt the seculars like myself about the conversion to their thinking in Europe and they use almost the same kind of the numbers and thinking as the Islamophobes. I mock the salafistes as being a shame to their ancestors who invented so much of the mathemetics, and yet they the salafistes who worship the past are so very bad at it.
because the USA overthrew a secular dictator who previously oppressed the religious conservatives (among the others, or anyone who challenged his power), allowed no freedom of speech and thus made no basis for a proper liberal democracy.
but it is religious sect tied violences not a religious rule that they flee. The laws of Irak have not greatly changed for personal beliefs.
OMG. these people sending you these messages are right. Islam will take over the US!!!
In ~ 500 years. Assuming that rate stays steady, which it won’t, of course. And assuming these converts stay converted, which many won’t.
My experience has been that most prison converts are Sunni Muslims.
I have no solid figures, but my impression has been that from the 1970s through the 1990s and bit beyond, most prison conversions would have been to The Nation of Islam, but from the 2000s to today, the converts to Islam have been rising.
Given that the Nation of Islam is estimated to have up to 50,000 members (most of whom, presumably, are not in prison), while the number of Muslims in prison is estimated to be around 350,000, it would seem that mainstream Islam accounts for far more conversions than the Nation of Islam.
I must make the observation for these black american converts from prison that visit Africa that I have met, I do not find they are very strong or very interested in the religion. The majority I have met seem to have it more as an african identity movement and keep essentially the american christian ideas and practices. But this is only anecdote. I might have met the wrong ones.
It is important to note* that the group that uses the ‘Nation of Islam’ name today is a splinter organization with rather heterodox teachings ( it is arguably a bit heretical ). The majority of the NoI mainstreamed into a more or less normative version of Sunni Islam over a decade or two starting in the mid-1970’s. So paradoxically many Muslims who came to Islam in prison may in fact have been converted by former NoI cadres, but they are still not currently NoI.
- I know tomndeb knows this :), but still worth making the point.
The only real concern, and it’s isolated to European nations, is the growing demand for acceptance of Sharia principles among the Muslim immigrant communities. It’s like saying “yes we’re living in your country but we want our own set of laws to abide by within our community.”
As noted by others, Muslims who immigrate to the United States are crossing an ocean, losing ties to the Old World, and are willing to assimilate to American legality and society.