We have many Islams with a lot of differences among ourselves. I hope that non muslims can learn to see past the title/name and associated stereotypes.
In my time in the Oriental Church, I have learned that this is not so much the problem. Rather, the same kind of people who threatened to kill you on a messageboard are
actually killing (and kidnapping, evicting, chasing out of whole countries) Christians in the Middle East. That is the problem.
You’re a nice person, Famdigy, and I’m glad that you enjoy it here relative to other places, but if there is one thing I wish that the
Muslim would learn from the non-Muslim, particularly from the Eastern Christians who predate your religion in every place it now predominates and are today threatened with utter annihilation at the hands of its practicioners, it’s that Islam’s “image problem” if you will has to do with what people in your religion do and explicitly say they are doing in the name of your religion, and
not with our reactions to it. It really is no different than how for many in the post-Christian, post-modern West, Christianity is associated with loud and ignorant bigots with political agendas who seek to impose their fundamentalism and biblical literalism on the rest of the society. Is that the majority of Christians in the world? I wouldn’t think so, but it is hard to convince those who see it as being so when that’s the kind of person they regularly interact with, who tells them that they are doing all this in accordance with true Christian faith. This is why hypocrisy is also a constant charge against religious people by the irreligious, because paradoxically, while more and more efforts are made in the West to regulate the expression of religion to essentially be “what you believe in your own church/synagogue/mosque, just don’t try to take it outside of there”, even those who believe in a religion-free public square still recognize on some level that a religion cannot be just that – it is also what you
do.
So we can not say, as Christians or Muslims or whatever we are, “oh, there is more than one form of my religion; do not focus on stereotypes as though we are all like the bad people who claim to be X”. If they’re doing it, it is our problem, because a bad expression of religion hurts all its practitioners in the eyes of those who don’t practice it, and not because they necessarily harbor stereotypes and hatred – but because religion is not theory alone; it is also practice.
And
in practice, your religion is not looking too good in the eyes of the rest of the world. Its ways of handling grievances do not fit in with the dominant modern ethos that says you shouldn’t blow up civilians to get your way. Its traditional justice system is seen as cruel in both its crimes and its punishments. It does not secure rights for women commensurate with what is offered in secular regimes. It is expansionist and politically violent on a scale that has been foreign to mainstream versions of Christianity, Judaism, and most other religions for centuries. Despite lip service to the contrary in the Qur’an (and, I will admit, some stunning and really wonderful examples of action in the real world, sometimes), it views itself and its precepts and holy places as inviolable and never to be set upon by non-Muslims, while treating non-Muslim religious culture and its holy places and artifacts as being essentially fair game for local and regional grievances (e.g., everyone cries now that the Umayyad mosque [previously the Church of St. John the Baptist, before the conquering Muslims confiscated the land] has been destroyed, but the oldest Christian Church in Syria was destroyed by “rebels” before that, and nobody cared).
Did you do any of these things? No, of course not. Did anyone you know do them? I’d be willing to bet that they didn’t. But they are done in the name of your religion on a more or less constant basis, and non-Muslims have every right to be sick of it. You should be sick of it, too. The difference between us is that as a Muslim you have a personal stake in it in a way that we Christians do not. Whether Islam has a good image or a bad image does not restore the Christian community of Homs, nor protect the native Christians of Tur 'Abdin or the Yazidis of Qahtaniya in Northern Iraq. People’s lives are what matter, not your religion’s PR, and until the
first reaction of Muslims is to take action against those who end innocent life in the name of religion, I for one have no problem speaking in generalities about the trends that are very apparent in Islam that cause me concern. It has nothing to do with you personally or any given Muslim community, and everything to do with the fact that such things have been going on to a greater or lesser degree for 1400 years and counting, and somebody always has some reason why it’s
really not about Islam, despite the fact that the “real” motivation makes absolutely no difference when looking at the results (death, murder, dispossession, kidnappings, etc.), and that other Muslims are constantly telling us (in Arabic and other languages that most people in the world with a favorable view of Islam do not understand) that that’s
exactly why they’re doing it, and have all the Qur’anic and hadith backing that they feel they need. How exactly is a non-Muslim supposed to believe that, despite all this, Islam is really not like that?
Prove it. Prove by helping to make Islam not about that anymore, on a worldwide scale, forever and ever in perpetuity throughout the universe. Only Muslims can do that, just like only members of other religions can work to end religious violence in their own traditions. The solution is not to say “we’re not all like that”, but to recognize that some of you
are like that, and that’s a problem for all of you. For all of us. For the whole world.
) , are they written by him or written by others of what he said? Just want a little clarification.