format_quote Originally Posted by
maryam11
hi,
can you please explan this concept to me. becuase as far as my logic goes, the true followers of something, should be like that of the followed (thats not to say that i think Islam is hostile (a3ootho bilah-I seek Refuge with Allah, from that).:)
I will try. You have to note that first I said that I found Muslims to be friendly. So, before being on LI, my experience with Islam was based primarily on three sources:
1) What I saw on TV.
2) What I read in the Qu'ran and books on Islam.
3) What I experienced in my personal relationships with persons who were Muslims one-on-one.
The only negative information I got was from TV, and of these information sources, TV was the one most easily discounted because I know that it likes to sensationalize things. So, as I learned about what I considered to be the genuine everyday practice of regular Muslims, I had a pretty positive view not only of my friends, but of Isalm as a whole.
However, on LI, I learned that there were others in Islam whose primary goal was to belittle me, mock my beliefs, create strawmen with regard to my theology so as to more easily dismiss it, and otherwise denegrade as much as they possibly could regarding Christianity. I assume as a means of buildinig up their own faith. There are people like this in Christianity who attack others in similar ways. I have never been impressed by them, but until coming to LI, I had never meant any people so inclined in Islam. Except for images of mass street protests I saw on TV, images that I dismissed as not be truly representative of genuine Islam because I suspect TV of going for the sensationalistic over the mundane, I had not had anything but positive encounters with Islam. Well, coming here taught me that this will not always be the case. And sometimes the only thing that a person has to know about me is that I am a Christian to be discounted, dismissed, or deprecated. Some Muslims have been so strident in their arguing for their own faith, that they have even refused to let me define what it is that I believe for myself and tell we what I as a Christian must believe (which rarely is what I really believe) and then they proceed to tell me why it is unreasonable, oblivous to the fact that I don't consider it to be a Christian belief in the first place. Moreover, while not every person engages in that type of behavior, many more who don't themselves behave this way actually applaude their efforts. I see this as an anti-Christian bias within Islam because it won't even let Christianity speak for itself. Take the key Christian concept that Jesus is indeed God incarnate. Well, I knew that Islam and Christianity disagreed on this concept, but until I was here on LI, I didn't realize how much verbal venom could actually be produced simply discussing this. And these are not just the protestations of a few rogue elements. Islam itself promotes these views by labeling us kuffar, our beliefs as shirk. So, these are things I learned about Islam here that I had not associated with it previously.
And then once we have been declared nothing more than kuffar, we can be treated in just about anyway, and that is seen as justifiable, because one of the "good" things that one can do in Islam is to rid the world of anything shirk or kuffar. Now most decent people don't do that with people they have personal one-on-one relationships with. They find otherways to work out differences, sometimes learning to respect, even sometimes to appreciate those differences. And Muslims are decent individuals. But group mentality can effect a Muslim just like anyone else. Thus, let one begin to cast others as nothing more than kuffar, and the Ummah as needing to stand against it, and you soon have an Us vs. Them way of looking at the world. So, then what does one do in that environment. Well, one might genuinely think a reasonable response would be: let's clean up the world everything that doesn't belong in the world we envision. But in this case we are not talking about objects, rather we are talking about people who have been de-humanized into nothing more than objects.
perhaps that associated with the west invading out countries,raping our women, leaving our children homeless, etc. :)
i dont mean to start an argument, just want to clarify why that may be.
:sl:
Maybe? I'm not here to judge cause. Of course, that means that one views the west as a monolithic whole. You realize it isn't, don't you? Is it fair that some people view all Muslims as radical extremists because of those who make threats or commit violence in the name of Islam?
I was surprised last spring by an LI member, a young 20+ Muslim man living in the eastern USA, who had been brought here as a young child and raised here by his immigrant parents. He spoke English as his primary language, didn't even know how to speak Arabic well enough to read the Qu'ran. He was at the time availing himself of all the rights and priviledges of being a permanent resident of the USA, attending university at resident tuition rates, using the country's infastructure, and benefited from its economy in finding work, but then at the same time vilified it and said he couldn't think of one good thing about it.
Why couldn't he? He was able to live exactly as he wanted to live. To worship as he wanted to. Even to speak as he wanted to. And if he really hated it here, he was also free to leave. But he chose to stay, saying that he didn't want to leave, but he would never be an American. Well, certainly he didn't have to become an American, and if he so chose he could still be proud of his country of national origin. I have a son who arrived here as an immigrant refugee from another country and culture, I understand these things. But to say that there is nothing good here (his parents must have thought there was something good here), and yet to stay here. That is the height of folly to my way of thinking.
You know there are Muslims living in the west. Muslims in the congress of the United States, voted in by non-Muslims. Muslim women may wear the hijab with complete freedom in the USA, while in countries like Turkey it is restricted. Muslims may criticize the government in the USA, while in Iran it is proscribed. (Don't tell me it is not, I have a friend who was born, raised, and currently lives in Tehran.) Muslims may read anything they want in the USA, while, as I understand it, in Saudi Arabia even possession of a Bible is against the law, even it is just for compartive religion purposes. (This even though the Qu'ran does not actually forbid reading it.) So, if Muslims are going to take advantage of these things, and they do and should, then let us not them label all things western to be bad.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about this anti-western sentiment, is that I often here it brought up because of the decedance of western society. Hey, I agree that it is. But, there is decedance in every Muslim country too. Listen to the music on the streets of Egypt and Malaysia. How many bars are there in Istanbul? And good "proper" bars where the women dance only with women and the men dance only with men. (Sure, while drinking alcohol, playing music, and socializing at the tables with members of the opposite sex.) But the worst decadence I know of in the world is that reported to be by another friend who is a cab driver in Tripoli. He tells me of Saudi businessmen, who come to Libya supposedly on business, but the first thing they wants him to do for them when he picks them up at the airport is to find a young male prostitute for them on the way to their hotel. I told him I didn't believe it, except that there are bad apples in every crowd. He said it wasn't one or two, but the whole barrel. This isn't decadance that the west has fostered upon Islam. This is home-grown decadence.
The west has plenty of things it needs to correct in the way it relates to the rest of the world. Western wrongs cannot be excused by pointing at wrongs others do. But Muslim wrong doing can't be excused by pointing at western wrongs either. We each need to clean up our own mess. Be it military aggression, imperialism, terrorism, or simply moral terpitude, we need to point it out when we see it, say that this isn't who we are and let it be known that such behavior is simply no longer acceptable.