Questions Muslims don't like to answer

Maybe in an Islamic country, but even in Islam such things are in the hands of the state not the church. My suggestion is just to not to do something silly like move to Afghanistan. This is not to make light of this issue, but to emphasize that the nature of our country, our government and our laws make such issues a mute point.

Granted it would be nice for Islamic countries to evolve, to a more enlightened state on such issues, but that is their internal concern, not ours. We can not force change upon them out nor even encourage change from within, countries and cultures must evolve on their own.

Iran is a prime example. We would probably see a massive revolution or evolution in Iran if we would simply back off and allow things to change from within. There is great descent within Iran about their current political situation but every time we try to nurture that descent we do more harm than good. An interesting article on the Iranian political situation from a Muslim prospective can be found at http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.ph...olution_increased_level_of_repression/0012382

 

KLB:

Are you really that out of touch?

Do a bit of research into the number of honor killings in Britain.

These are not killings by the state, they are killings by the religion -- through the hands of family members.

If my wife is murdered for her lack of faith or for the act of marrying an infidel, it won't be by a government -- it will be by a male relative.

Also, it's not "mute point", it's "moot point" -- and you are even using that phrase incorrectly.

 

I suspect if he spent some time at Apostates of Islam instead of seeking out the thoughts of apologists more experienced than he is, he might stumble on to some reality.

 

You seem to think I've singled out Islam here. You might want to re-read what I said.

 

Sounds a lot like Islam.... That does not make it ok though.James Madison

 

Do you really want me to answer this?

 

But isn't that pretty much the same thing?

 

That is a great piece of journalism. Too many of the bobbleheads who call themselves journalists today simply take everything they are told at face value. It's good to see that at least someone is thinking.

 

There was a Muslim that was on Barbara Walter's special who said that anyone who believes in God (including Jews and Christians) will go to heaven because that's what the Koran says.

Meanwhile the Koran actually says Jews and Christians are pretty much first in line for hell.

My wife had a hard time understanding why someone would lie like that. It's simple: because their truth is lies and they have to lie in order to even come close to telling the truth.

If all Muslims would start believing KLBs lies we'd all be better off.

 

Indeed. I did reread your post and I'd have to agree with it the way it is qualified. The maltreatment of women is not exclusive to any one religion or culture. It spans all religions and all cultures, to a greater extent in some and to a minimal extent in others. The problem is that a large amount of mistreatment we see of women in Islamic countries is against the teachings of Islam and was the same thing that Mohammad was speaking out against 1,500 years ago. The reality is that certain cultures and regions of the world have been treating women very badly for thousands of years (and yes the Middle East is one of those areas).

In my research today I found an interesting article on the topic of women Islamic scholars. Unlike in the Christian religions like Catholicism which excluded women from leadership roles in the Church, throughout history from the point of Mohammad's death when his wives carried on his teachings and started to write down the Koran, women have played pivotal roles in the teaching and scholarly study of Islam including writing down many of the Hadiths. See: http://www.islamfortoday.com/womenscholars.htm

Basically it would appear that for over a millennia women were treated very well and had generally good opportunities not only to become well educated but to be well respected religious leaders and teachers within Islam (at least compared to their Christian counterparts). The problem is that things slipped very badly for women in some countries over the past several centuries.

The article "Women in Islam" by Seyedeh Dr. Nahid Angha (http://www.ias.org/articles/Women_in_Islam.html) addresses some parts of this issue from women's role in Islam in the beginning to their loss of equality to looking forward to a solution. Here are some quotes:

Islam covers many lands with many diverse cultures. From the borders of Arabia to the coasts of Africa, from Bosnia to Indonesia, large groups of people practice Islam. Islam is growing in European and American countries. Each one of these Islamic nations has its own distinct culture; there is a great diversity of cultures within Islam. One cannot bring all these cultures, political systems, national heritage, belief systems, geographical locations, historical backgrounds, and the peoples who embody them under one uniform category or think of them as one system. Islam is practiced in each nation according to those nations characteristics. And nations are, by existing as nations, distinct and different from one another. No two cultures are alike.
....
[Mohammad's] teachings regarding education, social and political rights, property rights, and ultimately human rights, are among the most valuable chapter in the book of civilization. Education: "The pursuit of knowledge is a duty of every Muslim, man and woman", said the Prophet (swa). With this instruction it became a religious duty of Muslims to educate themselves, their families, and their societies. Education and learning became a religious duty, no Muslim could prevent another human being from the pursuit of knowledge. Gender or race, culture or tradition could not become the cause for prohibiting a person from educating one's self. Pursuit of knowledge became a religious law, therefore necessary to attain. With such instruction, the Prophet (swa) not only created an equal right to education, but also opened the door to a better understanding.
.....
"Paradise lies under the feet of mothers", announced the Prophet (swa). With this instruction, a Divine law, it became a religious responsibility, a praiseworthy act, to respect and honor women. "Men are support for women," "Among the praiseworthy acts to Allah is to treat your mother with honor and respect," "Be just among your children, daughters and sons, provide them good education and proper upbringing." Narrated from the Prophet (swa). With these Divine laws, it became religious duty for every Muslim, male or female, to honor women, treat sons and daughters justly, and for male to provide support, not obstacles, for women and their achievements.
....
There are also recorded in the history of Islam that men and women, equally, would take bayat (agreement) with the Prophet, voting and choosing him as a political leader. Such positions, rights and equality among all were the result of the support and the teachings of the Prophet (swa). Women could take part in social, political, and military affairs. The result of his teachings was not only promoted human rights but also encouraging individuals to stand for their own rights.
.....
A man, a brother, has the obligation, by the rules of Islam, to support his mother, wife, children, sisters, and the children of his sisters if necessary. If a woman, a mother, a sister did not have the wealth or the desire to support her children, it would become the duty of her brother to support them. The Prophet (swa) has introduced the rules and the laws for humanity, some honor the rules and some chose not to. Under Islamic law, women also have control not only over their property but also dowry claims. Once she is married, she may demand her dowry from her husband at any time, and in the case of divorce, she would receive her share of the property.
.....
According to the laws of Islam a man and a woman have the right to choose their partner and they should not be forced into marriage.
.....
A few centuries after the Prophet (swa) many of these rules changed into cultural, national, or political regulations.

Islam entered different cultures and each culture embraced it according to its own traditions. Even in its homeland, rules and regulations changed according to the political rulers and the traditional culture of the land within one or two centuries after the passing of the Prophet (swa). Let us examine a few of these changes: Prophet had said (Quran, XXIV:30, 31): "Tell believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty, that will make for greater purity for them and say to the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their modesty and they should not display their beauty and ornaments...." In the course of time, this law changed into the rule that women should wear veils, covering themselves from head to toe. Being modest changed into a dress code.
.....
Women, who at the beginning of Islam, were leading armies and making political decisions, were now, a few centuries later, expected to sit separately from men in mosques and in prayer ceremonies. A similar situation also obtain in non-Islamic countries. For example a century ago, when the World Anti-Slavery Association met in England, the women delegates were refused seats. They had to sit silently behind the curtain in the balcony.
......
The Prophet instructed that women have the right to own property, to choose their own partners, and have equal rights to education. In accordance with prevailing culture, these rights became transformed into the duties of women to take care of children and remain in the house. This is not all that different than a century ago in America where women were expected the duties of "Republican Motherhood," which did not take them beyond the household sphere.
.....
To justify the prejudice held against women, we can blame a religion, we can blame a culture, we can blame a system, and we can even blame women themselves. Yet these superficial "making you feel better" justifications will not remove the responsibility from generations of humanity.
......
It is not Muslim women as such, but women everywhere who have been imprisoned by prejudice and cruelty. This form of prejudice that goes beyond simple racial or national boundaries, is sexual in nature. Whether women are constantly being held to an impossible standard, or subject to discrimination solely based on the fact that they are not equal to men, they are, by far, the group most affected by this form of prejudice. Depending on the society women may be seen as having the wrong weight, the wrong height, the wrong level of intelligence, or the wrong religion. We can conclude that women have yet to be welcomed with open arms into countries that they have been a part of from the beginning.​

One of the many things I find interesting about Islam in regards to women's rights as opposed to Christianity is that divorce is specifically allowed in the Koran if there is just cause. This means unlike a Christian woman of 100 years ago who was stuck in an abusive relationship, a Muslim woman under Islamic law had the right to divorce the man and escape the abuse. The problem we see today is that the governments and peoples in some primarily Islamic countries (particularly in the Middle East) have turned their backs on Islamic law in regards to women.

The interesting thing about all religions is that they are melded and adapted to fit the realities, customs and social norms of the countries they are in. The way a second or third generation Muslim American woman in the U.S. is treated is going to be vastly different than a Muslim woman in Afghanistan.

In many Muslim countries yes they are essentially the same thing, but in other countries they are not. In many cases the way Islamic law is interpreted is done for corrupt reasons by those seeking to use Religion to maintain a grip on power and suppress the people.

Saudi Arabia is a perfect example of this. The monarchy that was installed by the British after WWII is exceedingly oppressive and they have manipulated religion to consolidate their power and to allow the royal family to live corrupt decedent lives while their people suffer terribly. They have used their control over religious leaders to corrupt Islam and turn it into a tool for oppressing their citizens so as to maintain their grip on absolute power.

Iran is another example of this. The people want to become more Western like and the woman are demanding equal rights, but the powers to be are suppressing the people. Read: http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.ph...olution_increased_level_of_repression/0012382 This is an article on a Muslim website talking about the suppression of people in a Muslim country (Iran).

The Catholic Church during the Dark Ages is another great example of the corruption of a religion by those who were hungry for power. We should all be very painfully aware of the excesses and abuse of power by the Catholic Church during that time.

Continued on

 

Continued from http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=1995074&postcount=490

Okay I did and here is an article on this subject (it is very disturbing): http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0707/p06s02-woeu.html
Another detailed article on this subject is http://www.mwlusa.org/publications/positionpapers/hk.html. This article is exceedingly frank about this issue. From a contextual prospective it should be noted that this article was published in April of 1999, two years before 9/11 and thus before Islamic leaders felt enormous pressure to go on a PR offensive.

In regards to crime and punishment, an interesting parallel case to honor killings was the 2001 case of a Nigerian woman who was sentenced to death by stoning because she became pregnant outside of marriage. The following article is a legal analysis of that case based on Islamic Law and it very carefully lays out why under Islamic law the woman could not and should not be found guilty: http://www.mwlusa.org/publications/analysis/islamic_legal_analysis_of_zina.htm

Afghanistan's Taliban: Not a valid interpretation of Islam (1998) http://www.mwlusa.org/news/afghan2.html:

ndeed, the extreme position taken by the Taliban hardly deserves to be considered an "interpretation" of Islam. That implies the position has some degree of validity, when it is really an aberration in violation of the most basic tenets of the faith.​

Honor Killings, Illicit Sex, and Islamic Law ( http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/Pages/honorkillings.html):

Some have viewed honor killings as a logical extension of traditional Islamic gender practices, the natural consequence of system that enforces sex-segregation through veiling and female seclusion and harshly punishes violations of these boundaries. Others have argued that honor killings are the antithesis of Islamic morality. This latter view is essentially correct from the perspective of Qur’an, prophetic traditions (hadith), and Islamic legal thought, as a careful analysis of the relevant texts shows.
....
In Qur’an, prophetic tradition, and law, one finds a very strong presumption of women’s chastity along with numerous safeguards to prevent any imputation of unchastity. Within such a context, honor killings are utterly criminal. Numerous prophetic traditions report that when asked about a husband finding his wife with another man, the Prophet agreed that the husband must procure three additional witnesses to her act before the public authority can judge her offense; otherwise he would be liable to lashing for publicly accusing her or to being killed if he killed.
....
Some have suggested that the best means of combating honor killings is to insist on a strict application of traditional law, under which only the public authority is empowered to punish illicit sexual intercourse, and then only with incontrovertible proof of wrongdoing. The evidentiary requirements for conviction in cases of zina (four eyewitnesses to the actual act of penetration or confession by the offenders) ensure that punishment will virtually never be carried out.​

So, under Islamic Law honor killings are illegal and those who commit this murder must themselves be killed. Furthermore, capital punishment can only be carried out by the "state" in accordance with the law, which set the burden of proof so high as to be virtually impossible to prove guilt (reading the article on the Nigerian case will show that even pregnancy is considered circumstantial evidence and thus not admissible according to Islamic law).

http://islamtoday.com/show_detail_section.cfm?q_id=154&main_cat_id=6

There are false practices to be found in some Muslim societies are only but these are alien to the Islamic legal injunctions. Such practices cannot in any way be attributed to Islam. You should know that the Muslim scholars’ objective is to remove these unsavory regional customs and steer Muslim societies towards the true teachings of Islam.

The mistakes of Muslim people should not be attributed to Islam. You know from history that the massacres of the Native Americans and the slavery of Africans should not be attributed to Christianity, even though these atrocities were carried out by beople who called themselves Christians.

The events you have mentioned are unlawful and the one who commits such crimes is a criminal for illegally killing someone.​

"Honor" Killings: Condemnations Are Not Enough (http://www.altmuslim.com/opinion_comments.php?id=854_0_25_0_C)


From Ending Domestic Violence in Muslim Families (http://www.themodernreligion.com/women/dv-ending.htm):

What is the Islamic Stance on Violence Against Women?

Under no circumstances is violence against women encouraged or allowed. The holy Qur'an contains tens of verses extolling good treatment of women. Several specifically enjoin kindness to women (2:229-237; 4:19; 4:25). These verses make it clear that the relationship between men and women is to be one of kindness, mutual respect, and caring. Some verses, where Allah calls men and women "protecting friends of one another," refer to the mandated atmosphere of mutual kindness and mercy in the marital home (30:21; 9:71). Others show disapproval of oppression or ill treatment of women. Surah two, ayah 231 condemns taking women back after a separation in order to hurt them; Surah four, ayah 15 specifies taking an oath against a wife rather than doing violence to her if a husband suspects adultery; Surah four, ayah 19 prohibits forces marriages; Surah four, ayah 29 prohibits deliberately causing a wife suspense or insecurity; Surah five, ayah 92 removes the legal effect from oaths against wives made in anger; and Surah 17, ayat 90-91 require the fulfillment of oaths, verbal agreements, and commitments. Even in the case of divorce, spouses are instructed to bring an arbiter from each side of the family to attempt reconciliation (4:35). If this fails, the instruction is to get back together with dignity and fairness, or to part on good terms (2:229 and 231). Anyone who violates the limits set by Allah is labeled a "transgressor" in the Qur'an.

Added to these verses is the inescapable fact that the Prophet vehemently disapproved of men hitting their wives, and that he never in his entire life lit any woman or child. In the Prophet's last sermon, he exhorted men to "be kind to women-you have rights over your wives, and they have rights over you." He also said, "Treat your women well, and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers," and at a different time, he said, "The strong man is not the one who can use the force of physical strength, but the one who controls his anger" (Bukhari).
.....
In the abusive mindset, all of these verses and hadith are ignored, and males misquote two specific verses and one hadith to justify complete control of females. The worst interpretations go so far as t assert that a woman is mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually permanently disabled, and is prone to immorality, putting her in constant need of male supervision.
.....
The real question is, did the Prophet practice, encourage, or even condone surveillance and control behaviors towards women? He never did. Knowing this, it is up to each individual Muslim, as husband and wife, as extended family member, or as community member, to shape morally, ethically, psychologically, and physically sale and healthy society where families can raise happy and contributing members of society. ​

The whole article just cited should be read as it goes into great detail discussing the misquoted verses and hadith and explains how those readings are misused. The article also points out that some hadiths that were completely logical in 7th century Arabia when the roads were full of bandits are obsolete today.

And that would be a violation of Islamic law. Throughout the articles I have cited in this post there is the reoccurring theme that the administering of punishment can only be done by the state/government not individuals, this is especially true when a crime calls for the death penalty. In Islam individuals who kill on their own accord (even if they think it is enforcing Islamic law) are murders and must be punished by death (by the state).

---Footnote to post---
While working on and researching this post, I came across the following admonishment on the University of Southern California MSA Compendium of Islamic Texts:

Warning (especially for Muslims)

There are many early hadith scholars and teachers to whom we are indebted for introducing the critical science of collecting and evaluating ahadeeth. These teachers each collected many different ahadeeth. They did not allow students to quote from their collections until the students had actually come to them and learnt from them directly.

Today, the situation is different. The collections of ahadeeth have for the most part stabilized, and with the advent of the printing press, the collections are easily mass-produced. There is a blessing in all this of course, but there is a real danger that Muslims will fall under the impression that owning a book or having a database is equivalent to being a scholar of ahadeeth. This is a great fallacy. Therefore, we would like to warn you that this database is merely a tool, and not a substitute for learning, much less scholarship in Islam. ​

Put simply, they are saying what some of us had been trying to say in regards to the claims made against Islam we keep seeing here. None of us, GTech included, are true Islamic scholars and by simply quoting a few choice passages and favored documents from our preferred source DOES not mean that we understand what the Prophet Mohammad was trying to teach us and quite frankly none of us can claim to be right.

Since Hadiths get quoted a lot around here it would be wise to inform one's self as to what Hadiths are. A very good reference on this topic is: http://www.masnet.org/history.asp?id=538. My summarizing the article would not do justice to anyone so I'd recommend taking ten minutes to simply read this article.

One word of warning in regards to Hadiths, in my research I'm constantly finding people quoting this Hadith or that Hadith and when I try to back track to an authoritative source I can not validate the quote (see fabricated Hadiths http://www.islamonline.net/English/HadithAndItsSciences/HadithStudies/2005/06/01.shtml). While there are good online versions of the Koran, I have yet to find a really user friendly online Hadith that contains all of the Hadiths from the seven authoritative collections (see masnet.org link above). When I finally find one I will post a link.

Repeatedly quoting a few select passages from the Koran and some faux scholars on the subject to paint Islam as an evil and violent religion is shameful. Islam is not a perfect religion and many primarily Muslim cultures need to evolve, but no religion or culture is perfect. Furthermore if you are not truly a believing scholar of a given religion you can not claim to know what that religion teaches.

I am not Muslim and I am not an Islamic Scholar so I can not claim to fully understand what Mohammad was trying to teach. I am simply an individual who based on my personal experience living with and working with Muslims know that the way certain people here try to paint Islam is not the Islam I have seen represented in the practices and conduct of the Muslims I have had the honor of knowing.

While I am not an Islamic scholar, I research and post what I find to support my beliefs about Islam, because as this discussion has evolved, it has become painfully apparent that simply speaking up to provide testimony for my Muslim friends and to provide an alternative viewpoint is not enough. As such my posts are and will continue to become very long as I do my best to exhaustively research (this post alone represents around ten hours of unique research) and fully document everything I post such that people can do further research on their own.

 

I've not seen this much copy paste since that Gworld dude... Is he still around? He used a lot more bold in his posts though...

 

I find it hilarious that KLB is claiming to know Islam better than all of the Islamists out there.

If they ever get their hands on him, it's off with his head for all of their lies he is telling about Islam!

 

I tried simply providing links to other sources and was criticized for that. The only way I can counter and refute what is being posted by others here is by doing massive amounts of research and quoting what I find. The sad thing is that too many minds are closed on this matter and they are not willing to question what they believe.

I know personally I'm learning volumes about Islam, Christianity and our founding fathers that I did not know before.

Did you not read what I stated. I said I was NOT an Islamic scholar just someone who is willing to do as much research as is necessary to provide an alternative viewpoint to the hatred being spread here.

Again none of us here are Islamic scholars and as such no one here can truly claim to know the truth about Islam. What I have learned is that Islam is not a perfect religion, but also isn't the evil violent religion bent on our destruction as some here try to make it out to be.

Mia chided me for quoting so much text, but truly quoting the text rather than posting my own interpretation of what they said is a much better way of ensuring I don't interject my bias into what they are trying to say.

 

I'm sure that if I visited neo-Nazi sites, I could "learn volumes" about Judiasm, Christianity, and our founding fathers that I did not know before.

I am sure that "in their own words" neo-Nazi's aren't such bad people either. I am equally sure that, if I were to take everything the Nazi's say at face value, they would seem like very nice people too.

 

This is certainly a thread that could not have ended nicely!

 

Well spoke. That's the irony of it all.

 

This is nothing but an offhanded attempt to discredit without doing any research. Such an easy cop out.

Have you even bothered to look at the depth and breadth of sites I have cited through out these discussions? To criticize my reference sources in such an off handed manner you would need to discredit all of the sources I have used. This isn't even half of the sources I have reviewed. I just avoid referencing "talking head" sites (pro and con) that aren't as authoritative as I'd like (for instance I don't reference Wikipedia). I'm also providing source material so that people can do their own research and don't have to just accept what I post. In case someone wants to verify some verse from the Quran I or anyone else referred to I provided a link to an online Quran with multiple English translations (http://www.al-islam.org/quran/). If you need an online Bible to verify a biblical reference, try http://www.biblegateway.com/. It contains 21 different English translations (sorry it doesn't have the Jeffersonian Bible). Another favorite source to reference by people here is http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/law/ (this is where the warning/admonishment about referencing Hadiths I quoted earlier came from). If you want to learn a little more about our founding fathers, a website I referenced in the other thread was http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume2/ushistor.htm (these guys are associated with the Southern Baptist Convention).

Somebody mentioned honor killings so I researched and opened a post on that topic with a reference to http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0707/p06s02-woeu.html to help inform. In that post I also referenced:
http://www.mwlusa.org/publications/positionpapers/hk.html
http://www.themodernreligion.com/women/dv-ending.htm
http://www.mwlusa.org/publications/analysis/islamic_legal_analysis_of_zina.htm
http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/Pages/honorkillings.html
http://islamtoday.com/show_detail_section.cfm?q_id=154&main_cat_id=6
http://www.altmuslim.com/opinion_comments.php?id=854_0_25_0_C
http://www.masnet.org/history.asp?id=538
http://www.islamonline.net/English/HadithAndItsSciences/HadithStudies/2005/06/01.shtml

Those links helped frame the issue, provided background information about Hadith and looked at Islamic discussions on the topic that were targeting Muslim readers. Do you know what a hadtih is? I hadn't even heard of the word before these discussions so I felt providing links would help better inform everyone because understanding the difference between scriptures from the Koran and hadiths is fundamentally important to understanding Islamic writings. How can people really discuss something without some fundamental understanding of the background?

Other references I have posted throughout this thread (not exhaustive and you would need to go back through my posts to put why I linked to each source in prospective):
http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.ph...olution_increased_level_of_repression/0012382
http://www.ias.org/articles/Women_in_Islam.html
http://www.islamfortoday.com/womenscholars.htm
http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.ph...olution_increased_level_of_repression/0012382
http://www.unc.edu/~kurzman/terror.htm
http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions43.html
http://www.virginiainterfaithcenter.org/
http://www.rethinkbias.org/
http://www.rethinkbias.org/PSACampaign/Airplane - 60 secs.mov
http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/35742
http://www.cyberistan.org/islamic/quote1.html
http://www.muslimsweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2722&Itemid=324
http://www.whyislam.org/877/Services/Literature/22.asp
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp0724.html

The links I'm posting in the other thread are even more diverse. Are there a lot of Muslim websites? Of course there are. One can not discuss the Muslim religion without linking to Muslim resources just like one could not discuss Christianity without linking to Christian sources. But what I avoided doing (at least in the vast majority of cases) was linking to referencing sites that were not part of some real organization. When talking about women in Islam I often reference websites of Muslim women organizations because this was appropriate.

Not all of the links I provided painted Muslim society in glowing lights, some, even, Muslim websites, were critical of aspects of Muslim society. Some links are simply reference resources. The fact of the matter is, that these sources are reasonable respectable reference sources that as a collective provide a much more objective look at Islam and Muslim society than was being provided by others in this forum.

With the exception of maybe GTech, I doubt anyone here has ever really done any research on the topic of Islam and are instead quite content to regurgitate what they have been told and simply pass off lazy off handed comments to discredit that, which they disagree with.

Just as one should not trust a fundamentalist Muslim website to give a fair and objective view of Western society and Christianity, one should not rely on a fundamentalist or conservative Christian website to give a fair and objective view of Muslim society or Islam. Neither extreme will paint an honest picture of the other.

At the same time all religions (and denominations) seem to have a great propensity to be very frank about what they believe in their writings about their own religion because they believe their way (what ever way that might be) to be the ONE true way thus they are more than happy to share with the world what their one true way is (thinking others will only naturally have to agree). A very good, but very scary example of this is http://www.reformed.com/pub/polytheism.htm which is an almost 20,000 word long manifesto that leaves absolutely no doubt what that denomination believes.

 

KLB:

You are continuously missing the main point, which is that all of those fine happy smiling words are meaningless.

Actions speak louder than words, and the actions that we see completely contradict all of your fine happy smiling words.

So, you can keep rattling off forever in your own little happy smiling world, but you must know that it has no effect on the reality in which the rest of us live.

 

There are 1.3 billion Muslims, there are something like 3 million Muslims in the U.S. All we ever see on TV and in the news is about some awful thing that happens in the Arab world. Well guess what, not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arab. Those bad things that happen in the Arab world (e.g. abuse of women) are often perpetrated by individuals who are Muslim by birth and tradition alone and have not truly been raised in a faithful Islamic tradition. Like Christians many just do the required social acts without taking the teachings to heart. Should we judge all Christians by Timothy McVeigh or those Catholic Priests? Should Iraqis judge all Americans or the American military by the soldiers that raped and murdered the Iraqi women or the soldiers who abused the prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison?

Are there violent Muslims? Yes there are, just like their are violent Christians. Is there lots of violence in the Middle East? Yes there is. But there is also lots of violence in Africa and other impoverished/oppressed places in the world. Of the three million American Muslims in the United States, how many of them committed terrorist acts against America? When was the last time you heard of an American Muslim forcing their religion upon another American with the point of a sword? If there is a large Muslim community in your town/city have you ever been even proselytized by a Muslim? Where did the 9/11 terrorists really come from? Where they Americans?

You see, I have lived and worked with Muslims throughout my life whether it was the Iranian college students who lived with us when I was a kid, my Lebanese friend in high school, my Egyptian classmates my Palestinian coworker or the Indian and Pakistani professors at my Quaker college. I see Muslims every single time I go out. Their children attend our public schools, they shop at our malls, they work in our community, they have their own ethnic stores and they open their own ethnic restaurants. In short the only difference from them and any other residents of our small city American or recent immigrant, is the beautiful Somali or Kenyan traditional dresses and scarf the women wear. I have no more concern about them than I do any other resident in our wonderful little city.

If we were to judge the Muslim people by the majority of Muslims around the world and the Muslims we are most likely to meet on a daily basis here in America those like yourself should have never brought up these discussions about the violence of Islam to begin with because based on everything I have ever experienced throughout my life I can attest that such fears are categorically unfounded.

It is not Muslims or Islam that we need to fear. What we should fear is extremism in all its forms whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or secular. What we should fear is poverty, ignorance and oppression. What we should fear are corrupt and/or oppressive governments and suspect political agendas. What we should fear is national self-interest causing one nation to oppress or exploit another nation. Those are the things we should fear.

Relieving the desperation caused by oppression and poverty, improving education and reigning in suspect political agendas and exploitation by governments whether Western, Middle Eastern, African, Asian, etc. will remove the true causes of extremism and terrorism world wide. Even making strides in the right direction on these issues will tremendously help remove the fuel that extremists breed on.

Spreading fear and hatred based on religious reasons will only exasperate the problem. Fear causes mistrust, mistrust breeds hatred and hatred begets violence and violence only begets more violence.

As individual citizens we can do little to relive the problems in the Middle East, but we can do a lot in our own nation and our own communities to dispel the fear, mistrust and hatred directed towards our Muslim neighbors in our own communities. We can't do much about the Middle East, but we can follow the golden rule of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Be kind, respectful and tolerant of Muslims in your community and when someone commits violence against a Muslim or their mosque in your community, your state or this nation be one who stands up to be counted as one who spoke out against the mistreatment of your neighbor. When someone spreads fear and hatred against your Muslim neighbor be one who speaks out against that hatred.

No we can't do much about the Middle East as individuals, but we can do a lot to build the foundations for bridges of peace by the way we treat Muslims in our own communities.