Many of our readers, both Muslim and non-Muslim expressed their opinions about our course that varied from total support to death threats. There were also many questions about what is the reaction to our plans to reform Islam. Well, now everybody can express their opinions and gauge the reaction at the same time.
Please note: you cannot vote more than once in the same poll.
If you chose "Yes, but your reforms go too far" or "Yes, but your reforms do not go far enough", please feel free to elaborate in the comment section.
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16 comments:
Thank you for your interest in Three Faces East #19. I touched upon similar issues in #30 and in #34. Your comments are always welcome. The mixture of religion and ideology presents difficulties for many non-Muslims to understand the problems and what is at stake in accommodating Islam, whether it accepts change or not. We try as best we can to overcome those difficulties and allow for better understanding. All of the great religions should join hands and help each other. hjs
I've only just come across this blog so I don't have a good idea of what you believe are the proper reforms for Islam. However I do believe that the religion is in desperate need of reformation.
The problem is that Mohammad was what he was. How do you seperate the religion from its founder?
Prophet Muhammad was a product of his time. We believe that if he were to live today, he would do many things differently.
You know....I'm not sure what to check off on the polling. The choices are too narrow.
What other options should we add?
Hi MASHers,
Thanks for the invitation to take part in the poll, which I had already done.
Today I have a posting on an essay written by Sam C. Holliday, with whose work you might be acquainted. Anyway, he has a few interesting suggestions which you might like to check out.
URL at http://millennium-notes.blogspot.com/2007/10/effectively-communicating-jihad-spade
Really appreciate the coop.
Cheers, Cass.
I have a problem, which is that I am basically against Islam because I believe it’s impossible to reform it for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, ignorance: Islam has amongst the highest rates of illiteracy of any major religion amongst many of its adherents. World wide Judaism has virtually 100% literacy, followed by Christianity at about 85%, Buddhism is about 70% in Thailand, and Hinduism has about 60% worldwide, but Islam is below 60% (with big variations) e.g. Djibouti stands at 46.2%. Maybe more typical is Egypt with a reported rate of 51.4% (63.6% of men and 38.8% of women).
These rates have not changed much for decades in the more populated Muslim countries, as the higher the birth rates the lower the literacy is a universal truth in all cultures.
This means that the unscrupulous can twist the meaning of Islam anyway they wish and be believed. They use this power to play on greed, envy and other emotions to prompt mobs onto the streets or violence against non muslims nearby.
This is made easier as the Koran is in Arabic, and the translations are often not exact e.g. The Wahhabi English texts are notorious for having slanted translations that make violence against non Muslims even more acceptable.
Throughout the world, literacy erodes traditional society and the religious grip of both priests and mullahs. It’s no coincidence that as literacy grew Christianity declined in its grip, even in traditionally catholic countries such as Spain. Muslim Bahrain has a literacy rate of 85% (89.1% of males and 79.4% of females) and is one of the more tolerant Islamic Gulf States.
Both the traditional life of Muslims as well as Muslim theology have been frozen in time in many places, such that Muslims are repeating in compressed time trends long at work in the West, and this is because of illiteracy.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HB07Ak02.html
Secondly, if Islam had one central point of authority for its current beliefs then I believe that you might have a chance, but who are you aiming at? If there was a pope like figure such as a recognised Caliph, who could speak for all or the majority of Islam, then there could perhaps be dialogue, reason and persuasion, between Islam and the non Muslim. And more importantly some focus for your campaign to be aimed at, but who can talk to a hundred thousand heads?
There are thousands of schools of jurisprudence in Islam today; most of them appear to believe in Dhimmitude, which is where one of the basic problems stems. If the non Muslims are kafir’s (ingrates), and must be made to feel lesser and subjugated, then how can there be dialogue?
I have posted your manifesto on my blog site because I am sympathetic to your general aims, but feel that you just won't get the audience numbers to have any impact.
Life in the Northwest,
While we cannot argue with the facts, we disagree with your conclusions. It is true that the followers of Islam are among the most illiterate people on earth, which makes them more susceptible to radical indoctrination; it is not the reason to write us off. What needs to be done is that Petro-Islam, the engine of radicalism, must be eliminated.
Let’s take the United States as an example. 80%+ of American mosques are funded by the Wahhabis. Imams in those mosques preach religious divisiveness and Islamic supremacy. The Wahhabis would not be able to wage their worldwide radicalization campaign if the weren’t swimming in Petro-dollars. How are we supposed to change Islam, if the West is funding the radicals?
Illiteracy is not an insurmountable obstacle. Neither is eliminating of fundamentalists’ financing. These problems could be solved, but they take time and effort. Confucius said: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Consider our effort as the first step. Besides, what’s the alternative? Do nothing?
As for our audience, it is the Muslims who have no voice due to the fact that most of Islamic establishment is hijacked by fundamentalists who are funded by Petro-dollars; our audience is the Muslims who want to take back our faith.
Maybe I am being too pessimistic, and undoubtedly the Petro-Islam that you speak of, principally Saudi Wahebism is a very great problem, especially in the West where cowardly politicians sell their countries security down the river for a buck, e.g. The Bushes and the Bin Laden clan, but it's not the only driving force in a billion adherents.
The crowds that flock to the streets in Lebanon, Palestine, Dacca and Islamabad etc can't all be being influenced by Saudi backed radicals. The chants of “Death to America, Death to England” (‘Marg Bar Amerika, Marg Bar Angeleez’) don’t come purely from the Saudi backed Madrassas.
If there was the possibility of reform then surely it would have a foot hold somewhere, but I see no evidence of any appetite to change in the Muslim world. Only in Turkey is there just a possibility that a secular led reform of islam might take route.
This will never alter whilst women are held back, and education is reduced to rote learning instead of something to aspire to. Of course for Muslims who live outside the baleful influnce of the Mullahs, education is non religious and produces muslims like yourselves, who have the ability to think freely, but they are a tiny minority in a sea of ignorance.
You might find this article on Islam in India enlightening http://www.boloji.com/history/018.htm it very clearly articulates the problems faced in trying to modernise Islam, even in its most tolerant forms in India.
Some of your Muslim posters appear to know less about the Koran than I do, but are happy to post comments denigrating any and all of your positions. The fact that they do so with out ever checking any facts beforehand is symptomatic of the mind set of ignorance, that the learning of Islam appears to require.
Submission or 'Islam' is not a religion of dialogue between god and his followers. There is no room for doubt or debate, only absolute acceptance of the creed. Whereas other creeds encouraged the emergence of free thought and debate (although admittedly trying to stuff it back into the bottle again), this is not the case in Muslim countries, where even bloggers such as Abdel Kareem Soliman are imprisoned, merely for suggesting that that the al-Azhar university in Cairo was a "the university of terrorism" and that it suppressed free thought.
Apart from the fact that all these accusations can be easily thought of as true, it's still somewhat ironic that in order to prove him guilty of a crime, they suppressed his freedom to think these thoughts by locking him up. Thus proving that he was correct in his assertion that they were suppressing 'free thought', and thus not guilty of any crime, or perhaps just guilty of telling the truth.
The complete removal of the spirit of enquiry from the religion reflects in the poor education that is offered in most Muslim countries, where anything that could clash with religious teachings is removed. This is odd since there was such a spirit of enquiry in Islam for a couple of centuries in Persia and Syria when the Madrassas catered to the secular and scientific in the 11th and 12th centuries AD.
When the theologian Al-Ghazali declared “reason and all it’s works to be bankrupt” in his treatise “The Destruction of Philosophy” he reversed 250 yrs of Islamic scientific thought and translation, and by his death in 1111 AD, free scientific investigation and philosophical and religious toleration were phenomena of the past in Islamic lands.
Schools limited their teaching to theology. Scientific enquiry came to a halt and reversed. Education is Islam has been redundant ever since. No society can survive 900 yrs of no original thought in science, politics or arts, and only constant iterations of the thoughts of the past in religion.
The rote teaching of the Koran actually encourages illiteracy in some cases as contrary to Muslim myth the Koran is easily learnt by heart without being able to read. Apart from the fact that this doesn't produce 'scholars', it of course leads to fallacies developing amongst these ‘hedgerow’ mullahs.
As for doing nothing, well I applaud you and your efforts, but I think you are doomed to being meaningless until you can get a mullah / scholar and politicians to back you. It’s credibility amongst Muslims that you need not Kafirs who blog like me and the majority of the commentators.
It says a lot that the odd Muslim commenter on your site refuses to actually enter into any debate; they make the one entry and are never seen again. They will not defend their position or point of view.
Still I wish you luck in what I suspect is a long and lonely campaign.
Life in the Northwest,
Again, you raise many valid points, but you are being too pessimistic.
“The crowds that flock to the streets in Lebanon, Palestine, Dacca and Islamabad etc can't all be being influenced by Saudi backed radicals.”
Where do you think the money that finances the instigators is coming from? Sunni fundamentalists are financed by the Saudis, Kuwaitis, Qataris, etc., and Shia fundamentalists are financed by the Iranians. All of them make their money on gulf oil.
“If there was the possibility of reform then surely it would have a foot hold somewhere”
Reformist have no money, and, therefore, power. That’s why you don’t see them.
“This will never alter whilst women are held back”
That’s exactly why this needs to change.
“Some of your Muslim posters appear to know less about the Koran than I do”
Who needs to read the Koran when they can have unlimited propaganda flow supplied by their local mosques?
“As for doing nothing, well I applaud you and your efforts, but I think you are doomed to being meaningless until you can get a mullah / scholar and politicians to back you.”
We are not as far from that as it might seem.
“long and lonely campaign”
Long? Absolutely. Lonely? Not so much. We are gaining supporters among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. It is just a question of when we reach the critical mass. The West is losing the War on Terror and today’s HLF mistrial is a good example. In may be overly optimistic, but I think that we have the power to reverse this trend.
thanks for dropping by one of my own blogs. I support your ideals and your attempts to reform Islam from within. I speak from a Christian point of view, and I totally reject that Mohammed was a prophet of God for a variety of reasons, but this does not mean that I have to disavow your efforts to attempt reform whilst remaining a Muslim. What you seek to do is a very tall order, but you need to know that you have our support.
I have a radio show in Los Angeles and would love to interview one of your representatives.
Here's my email: lores@loreslive.com. Please let me know the best email and/or phone number to get ahold of a respresentative.
Thank you,
Lores Rizkalla
www.loreslive.com
While I support the reforms you recommend for radical Islam, I think this poll should include an option which does not group all the followers of Islam into one group, but acknowledges that there are moderate Muslims out there- like you yourselves at MASH- that do not follow radical beliefs that need reforming if they are to become compatable with modern life.
"While I support the reforms you recommend for radical Islam"
You must be missing the point. Islam needs to be reformed. Radical Islam needs to be eradicated.
As for options, your idea is nice in theory. In reality, many radical Muslims will never admit to being radicals. So the poll that you suggesting will not have any value. The whole idea of this poll is to determine the ratio of radicals vs. moderate Muslims.
I saw your blog when you commented on my blog. Isn't your task an uphill battle? As you mentioned, the Saudi Wahhabi missionaries & their Iranian counterparts who convert existing moderate mosques to their version of Islam are backed by petro dollars.
"Isn't your task an uphill battle?"
You have no idea!
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