Muslim Dopers

This has probably been asked and answered here before but my searches aren’t working well.

  1. Are there any Muslim dopers active here?
  2. If you are Muslim, how do you feel about the radical/fundamentalist factions within your faith?
  3. If you support them why and how far are you willing to go? If you oppose them, what are you doing to stop them and their rhetoric?
  4. What can be done to improve relations between the West (read as the Europe and America) and Middle Eastern countries?
    I would prefer to only get responses from Muslim members but shout outs from non-Muslims to get the attention of Muslims would be appreciated. Notice, I am not referring to a particular sect or division of the Muslim faith or people from a particular country or region. If you are a French Muslim, a member of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam or live in the heart of Afghanistan, I don’t care.
    Although I am not being geographically specific, I believe that Muslims throughout the world would have interesting opinions about the Middle East since it is the heart of their religion, akin to Catholics views about the Vatican and papal opinions. This might be simplistic, but I would still appreciate answers and views.
    I am asking because the SDMB seems to contain a pretty diverse mix of relatively intelligent people and I believe we could possibly get some creative and reasonable opinions.

You mean there are no Muslim dopers? Come on, there has to be at least one! Has anyone even heard of a Muslim doper?

Oh, there have been a few. Among active Dopers, Angua stands out. Her faith would probably considered pretty liberal and she started a thread called Ask the Shi’a Nizari Ismaili Woman you can find here:

Other, former posters:

Aldebaran: Didn’t go into details of his faith much, but all indications were that were of a rather moderate stripe. An intelligent and educated seeming man, but he was a bit…intense in his politics. That combined with an occasionally caustic, sometimes histrionic and frequently arrogant/condescending tone endeared him to few. He consequently got caught up in conflict and eventually he went into meltdown and was banned.

bibliovore: Another former poster, seemingly pretty moderate. He wrote an Ask the Arab Guy thread:

Muslim Guy: Pretty liberal. Wrote the first and longest of the ‘ask the Muslim’ type threads, Ask the Muslim Guy and Ask the Muslim Guy, part deux:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=87474

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=92968

martin_ibn_martin: Again somewhat moderate I believe. Fairly recent convert, if I remember correctly. He wrote an Ask a Muslim Man thread:

recurriman: Former lurker, turned brief poster. Yet another Ask a Muslim thread:

Sarah W: The only consevative I can recall that we’ve had for any real length of time and not long at that. If she was the real thing and not a put on, she was a youngish American convert to seemingly some sort of Salafist branch. Ultimately she appeared little schooled in her own faith ( again, assuming she wasn’t a put on ) and quickly got in over her head in GD. Her longish thread was eventually deleted ( a pity, perhaps ).

Watermelon Guy: Non-practicing Muslim. Or perhaps ‘cultural Muslim’. However you want to put it. Not religious per se, at any rate. Wrote an Ask the Turk thread:

In addition we’ve had a few apostates. I believe current poster yBeaf is in that group, as was former poster Iridium.

Beyond those, I’m probably still missing a few.

  • Tamerlane