Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
It's lively and diverse in Islam.
Of course it's material that if you look at places where blasphemy remains a crime, you're going to find a bunch of Catholic countries and Muslim countries, with prosecutions and penalties more common and heavier in the Muslim countries. Likewise, not a lot of legal systems have a notion of apostasy as a crime (in the Europe, there's a long history of heresy prosecutions but not much focus on apostasy; Islam has been more forgiving of deviating in your interpretation of the faith, as you would expect from a faith without a centralized structure, but less forgiving in giving up the faith altogether).
But in many areas within Islam, the fundamentalism is of relatively recent vintage, growing slowly after the breakup of the Ottoman empire and accelerating with the revolution in Iran, so the question is: why did those places become more fundamentalist? Why did strains like Wahhabism emerge and then consolidate power? I don't think the answer to that is particularly intrinsic to Islam as a religion, I think it has a lot to do with power, oil, colonialism, and broader conflicts. Blaming it on Islam usually implies there is a fundamental, unbridgeable difference between "us" and "them".
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When you say that TM is "blaming it on Islam," you show that you are missing the point. He is not saying that Islam is
inherently bad. He is not comparing Islam to, for example, racism.
He is saying that (in his view, which I share) that Islam is being taught in many places in ways that lead people to accept things that are awful -- killing people for insulting Islam or the Koran, subjugating women, etc. And (I believe he is saying, and I certainly believe this) that he believes that muslims who do not think that way need to push back.
Why does that become something muslims in particular need to do? Because muslims have more opportunity and more credibility for shaping the discussion of what Islam means, and how it is taught, than other people do. (And yes, I realize there are 2 billion Muslims, and an Imam in Indonesia may have little sway in Saudi Arabia. He'd still have more than my priest would, and while I'd rather see Imams in the Middle East and other places where radical Islam has taken root be those most vocal opponents of it, that's inherently difficult.)
If Islam itself were the problem -- inherently bad -- no one could say that Muslims should be looking to cure the problems. That would be like saying that "you racists really ought to deal with the Klansmen among you to make them understand that isn't what racism is really about."
