AbdullahD said:
I made an assessment of you and critiqued you honestly, in a semi private forum. Something I was taught as a child, not to expose peoples shortcomings for all to see. Since you persist in child like actions, it seems I must develop my arguements more.
Jarnhammer, yes I was getting annoyed. Hence why I extricated myself from our conversation. In my version of the truth,
people must differentiate culture from religion. I also believe
people must assess all angles before they make decisions.
So when so many prophetic teachings trump and contradict many things cultural Muslims do, we should be able to discern that what they do is not Islamic. Hadith collections like Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi etc have many stories on womens rights. So we should, in my little world, see what the scholars have taught historically and recently and where they get the proof from and if other proofs exist.
Then to further that a person should, again in my world, assess how the prophet sws said sharia and Quran should be interperted. Then apply those rules and see if they hold weight. Which in many cases proper interpretation of the Quran and sharia, makes a big difference. There is more then 15 qualities a person Must have before he is eligible to give exegesis of Quran.. that way he doesnt corrupt it's true teachings (which is what cultural Muslims have done).
Also as a side note, some of those verses you quoted I did not see the correlation to the arguement you made. I will concede that their are things about Islam you may not like, which is all fine and dandy. Our views of capital punishment and modesty, a lot of people disagree with and that is fine. But if you think we treat our women like crap that is a gross injustice, makes me think, you think many Muslims are less then human. I have a daughter and any so called man who wants to treat her like crap, will have a rude awakening, yet I expect her to practice Islam as much as she is able to.
btw those first links were to substantiate that you can find anything on the internet you choose to. Anyone who takes stormfront seriously, I dont want to waste time on. So I'm happy you didn't even look
it was just for illustration.
Now Brad, your ignorant and narrow view of the world is why I pity you. You seem to only think a half dozen Islamic countries exist or are worth citing, which is quite pathetic. There are many Islamic countries in the world and they range from Progressive to regressive, from liberal to conservative, from rich to poor. Most people know and understand this, which makes a lot of people shake their head at your arguements. Quickly google up Islamic countries in the world and realize that we are contributing a lot to this world. Take a look at how Muslims helped shape your so called western world. Whenever you make general statements about billions of people, you tend to look the fool.
Now I am not sure why I am responding to you, cause I had you pegged a while back as an Islamophobic. But meh, I wasted time from my life in replying to you... honestly I should just google articulate and educated responses to your questions and copy paste them here instead of typing my own.
As a final note, if people have not noticed. I do not post in other areas in authoritative ways, because I have no clue what i am talking about by my own criteria. So I am limited to posting here, because I have some small knowledge. Until and unless I learn more, you will find my posting on this site limited to very few topics.
Abdullah
I promised myself to stay out of this discussion, but I do need to comment on two of your points, the ones I highlighted:
First ~ I agree with both; and
Second ~ I think
you're the one who is missing the point.
I have said
many times and over many years in these fora that the problem with the
Islamic Crescent is cultural, not religious. I have little knowledge of and no brief for or against Islam ... I simply regard it as wholly inconsequential, on about a par with, say, Shinto or Sikhism but with more adherents. What I have spoken about, at some length, is that
culture matters.
My assessment based on 70+ years of living, working, visiting in too many countries to count on five or six continents and several island regions is that people, regardless of race, creed or sex, are all roughly alike: smart and stupid, honest and venal, brave and cowardly in pretty much the same proportions everywhere. So why do some "cultures" dominate others? The answer is in the question:
culture matters. In my opinion the cultures of Africa, all of it, the Middle East and West Asia and of the pre Columbian Americas were ~ and still are ~
weak, even
retarded, in the sense of lagging "behind" others. My simplest definition of cultural retardation is the notion of people as property. If your culture treats women, for example, as inferior to men, for whatever reason, then it is a
retarded culture and it will not succeed in and beyond the 21st century. If your culture condones or, worse, practices slavery then it, too, is retarded, or worse, and, perhaps, should be put out of its misery if it will not reform itself. Those markers are not, in themselves, overly "cultural" they are, in fact, measures of
societal "efficiency," efficient societies make the best possible use of all their human resources and that means that men and women must be treated as equally valuable resource elements and we all know, from economics 101, that slavery is an inefficient use of resources. Many, many smart people in the
Islamic Crescent and in other regions know that to be true and they are trying to make changes but the cultural weight is too heavy and, in some cases, religion reinforces or, more often, simply conforms to cultural norms.
(One of the first things Zhou Enlai needed to do in 1949 was to (temporarily) suppress Confucianism while he forced equality on to China... Confucianism adapted and returned,
accepting, as has most of Christianity and much of Judaism, the basic principle of equality.)
So I am with
Brad: the problem is that we need to protect and promote our strong, "
right" cultural norms here at home ... and that may mean insisting that people who come here
adapt their
beliefs to suit our environment. After all, we didn't conscript anyone from Indonesia, Pakistan, Eqypt or Algeria and force them to come to Canada, they all wanted to be here rather than there, for whatever reason, and it is not unreasonable to expect, even demand that they contribute to our ways rather than to try and change them holus-bolus. I do not believe that Islam, per se, is a problem ... it's just another superstition, one amongst many. I do not believe that Muslims are, inherently, less able or less law abiding or less (or more) anything. I do believe that Muslims in Canada must adapt themselves and Islam in Canada to suit Canada, not try to make Canada fit Saudi Arabian cultural norms.
That, in my opinion, is the point.
