comments on What is Islam?

posted by Vince Lombardo, August 3, 2009:

You write: "I am sure the vast majority of you (Muslims) favor peace, no matter what is written in your old religious texts.”

It profits us little to conjecture about the peaceful intentions of Muslims when they have declared themselves....

Again, all this is not conjecture. These are facts about Muslims, facts about Islam.

Elsa's reply, August 3, 2009:

I feel like I've landed on another planet. Two things come to mind - being a Jew in Nazi Germany, unable to believe what I was seeing; and being a woman in a non-feminist world, and again not being able to believe it. Facts about Islam? So many are hard for me to believe.

I'll get back to that, but first, thank you once again, Vince, for the wealth of facts about Muslims and facts about Islam that you possess.

These are amazing statistics you've just handed me - that among the Muslims surveyed who went to Mecca (which led to a considerable move away from approval of violence in the name of their religion):

* about 1/3 still approved of the terrorist methods of Osama bin Laden;

* and even worse (from my non-Muslim perspective), only 13 percent reject his goals (a Muslim world following Muslim rules, whether we like them or not).

As for those who didn't go to Mecca, the results are even more abysmal (again from my non-Muslim perspective):

* only 16 percent distance themselves from Osama;

* and only 7 percent distance themselves from his methods.

The math is astounding - and basically unbelievable for me! That means, of those who did not go to Mecca, 84% approve of terrorist methods, and 93% approve of establishing a Muslim-ruled world. Even among those who got to Mecca, one-third approve of OBN's methods.

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I've also read dismal statistics (from a non-Muslim perspective) - a study on young British Muslim males. A widespread idea is that some miniscule minority of Muslims - say one in a thousand, or at most one in a hundred - approve of terrorist methods, like the bombing of the London underground. I'm not certain of the exact numbers, but I remember they were at least 20%. Actually I think they were higher.

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Even if all these statistics are considerably off the mark, Muslims in favor of the methods and goals of Osama bin Laden are undoubtedly a powerful force. I believe there are over one billion Muslims in the world. Even if only ten percent (way below these stats) favor the use of violence to further the establishment of a Muslim world, that is still over one hundred million people.

And then there is that equally undesirable thing - from my non-Muslim perspective - the Islamic goal of a Muslim-ruled world. Sharia, for instance. I think of all the things the rights movements have been fighting for, including full equality between women and men, gay rights, animal rights. Here is a religion that has animal sacrifice. As for gay rights, forget it. And women's rights? The Muslim prophet married a six-year-old, and was about to marry a baby (except he died first, over sixty years old).

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As I've said, two things come to mind:

* one, being a Jew in Nazi Germany, and not being able to believe what the Nazis were saying they thought of Jews and wanted to have happen to the Jews;

* two, being a woman at the start of the current women's rights movement, and hearing all the awful things about the situation of women, and just not being able to believe (or it could be a non-politicized black at the start of the civil rights movement - or a non-politicized gay or lesbian as the start of the gay rights movement).

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I was one of those women. All this stuff I was hearing - about all the discrimination against women, the barriers, the unjust laws, the rape and battering. It just didn't make sense. Of course women were equal. My father had always been very pro-women's rights. He wanted his daughters to be able to do whatever they wanted.

In many ways I was insulated from the worst of things. I didn't want to go to a university that had barriers against me. I was not aiming (then) for a part of the work force that had big barriers against me. I didn't go out with a sexist jerk.

In a way, being in Canada gives me the same kind of insulation from the facts about Islam, the facts about Muslims, you present.

I ended up getting very involved with feminist issues - even taught quite a number of Women's Studies courses. On some level I still find it incomprehensible that some people do not see women and men as equals, deserving equal rights. But I came to deeply recognize the reality of the situation of women - and came to know the statistics on incest, rape, battering, and the findings of women's general exclusion (almost no books by women in literature courses, no women artists in an art history course, almost nothing about the achievements and history of women).

In that case, I didn't have to face the threat of violence if I recognized the barriers against women. I could get rude comments and ridicule. Quite different from what the Muslim religion sees fit to do to infidels. There are some nasty facts about Islam, starting with their prophet.

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And that brings me to the first thing that came to mind when I was reading your facts about Islam. I imagined being a Jew in Nazi Germany, when the Nazis had just come to power - 1933 - and not being able to take them seriously. After all, there had been Jews - and anti-Semitism - in Germany for centuries. Impossible to believe much would change with Hitler.

The Jews who did not react quickly enough generally did not survive. (By the way, 70% of German Jews managed to flee. They had 6 years - and despite the massive barriers put up by the rest of the world, a bit more than two thirds got out of Germany in time. The vast majority of Jews murdered in the Holocaust came from the countries conquered, in 1939 or so, by the Germans: Austria, Poland, Hungary, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia.)

Here, we have nowhere to flee to: it's our world - non-Muslim and Muslims, we share it.

So I think it makes even more sense to take the threat seriously.

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What best to do?

I think of 3 main directions:

* educating those in the West about the facts about Islam, while of course recognizing that not all Muslims favor terrorist methods, or even a Muslim world - which is exactly like recognizing that, even in the worst of times, not all men favored keeping women down; not all whites favored racism; not all heterosexuals favored racism. ( A huge majority did, though, at the worst of times.) We need to recognize the facts about Islam. We need to recognize what we are facing.

* reaching Muslims. The study you quote from favors contact between Muslims and non-Muslims. I agree that this can be vital to create change. I have had Muslim students tell me that it took them years of living in Canada, going to school with classmates from all kinds of religious backgrounds, before they were able to recognize that Jews were actually full human beings. It came from ongoing contact. Facts about Islam: such contact is anything but encouraged.

* addressing things openly, both with Muslims and non-Muslims. In general, the West is better at addressing prejudice by the dominant groups (whites, men, non-Muslims), rather than the nasty stuff coming people in in non-dominant groups (in this case, Muslims). Hatred of outsiders, disdain for outsiders, belief in the inferiority of outsiders - those facts about Islam really need to be brought out in public.

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