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[Merged] General Criticism of Islam/Islamophobia Topics

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Humes fork said:
Are the Taliban Salafists/Wahhabists? Yes or no?
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They're Salafists who are not directly Wahhabiyya, but who are a variant of the ultraconservative Deobandi of Pakistan that were heavily and directly influenced by the Saudis, particularly during the rule of the dictator Zia-ul-Haq in the 70's and 80's (the madrassas that the Taliban were talibs at, for instance, were established with Saudi money to each a distinctly Saudi-flavored brand of Islam).

EDIT: A good book detailing the connection between the Wahhabiyya and the Taliban is Charles Allen's God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad.
 
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Humes fork said:
He is indeed a nut, but it doesn't justify a death sentence.
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So you're going to stick with your belief that he's nothing more than a former salafist that some Saudi cleric declared a death sentence on, and ignore all of his far-right Christian rantings and the bizarre inconsistencies in his purported story?
 
A'isha said:
They're Salafists who are not directly Wahhabiyya, but who are a variant of the ultraconservative Deobandi of Pakistan that were heavily and directly influenced by the Saudis, particularly during the rule of the dictator Zia-ul-Haq in the 70's and 80's (the madrassas that the Taliban were talibs at, for instance, were established with Saudi money to each a distinctly Saudi-flavored brand of Islam).

EDIT: A good book detailing the connection between the Wahhabiyya and the Taliban is Charles Allen's God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad.
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The Deobandis are not Salafists. I know that many of the Salafists dislike the Taliban due to their Sufi influences, such as worshipping at the graves of dead people.

And the Deobandi school of thought was, if I'm not mistaken, actually founded as a reform movement.
 
Humes fork said:
The Deobandis are not Salafists. I know that many of the Salafists dislike the Taliban due to their Sufi influences, such as worshipping at the graves of dead people.
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Um, go back and read what I wrote again.

The Taliban are a Saudi Wahhabiyya-influenced offshoot of the Deobandi movement.
 
I think that if The Demon-Haunted World and The God Delusion became widely read in the Muslim world, it (and by extension the world as a whole) would be a lot better off.

What do you think?
 
Humes fork said:
I think that if The Demon-Haunted World and The God Delusion became widely read in the Muslim world, it (and by extension the world as a whole) would be a lot better off.

What do you think?
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I think you should answer questions other people ask about your posts, like this one:

hgus said:
Do we have any other evidence of that death sentence than his word?
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Stop Gish-galloping and name-calling and start actually debating the topic. Some original thought of yours would also be a nice touch.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
You seem to be arguing that there is no movement to modernize Islam by reinterpreting the Quran, based on your own incredulity or unwillingness to look
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There is no counterpart in islam to liberal Christianity and Reform Judaism. Not to mention 'progessive' Christianity*. Finally even most of islamic jurisprudence is still with us (what chances are there to admit that even the quran is not innerant?). That says everything.

The conclusion one can draw from the existing realities is that even well intended people cannot 'bend' the basics of islam beyond certain points. It is true that in our times they 'bended' it even more (irrationaly often) but still this is too far from assuring full compatibility with Modernity and prevent at least partial falls toward the discriminatory past (some injunctions are considered immutable, addressing them head on is plain apostasy, some dark parts of islam cannot really be explained away, even innerantism of the quran has to go).

That's why Reason must be regained by islam (but going well beyond the Mu'tazilites, who can be seen at most as the counterpart of the scholastic Christians immediately after Thomas Aquinas or the American innerantists of our days, like accepting some of the ideas of Enlightenment regarding unaided Human Reason) for only the transformation of islam (involving important change) can really do the job.


*some tenets of progressive Christianity:

1. An insistence on personal intellectual integrity, paying attention to one’s reason and experience in conversation with traditional teachings and contemporary scholarship

2. A resistance to claims that Christianity is the only or best religion and a desire for interfaith dialogue as an avenue to peace and global understanding

3. Public advocacy for the full participation of woman and of gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender people

4. A strong commitment to social justice and ecology

5. A desire for creative worship and spiritual vitality.
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So you're the one who gets to decide who's a true Muslim and who isn't
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I was talking about who is moderate an using the same standards for islam as well. History decided it not me. Liberal Christianity embraced long ago some ideas of the Enlightenment by renouncing the doctrine of the innerantism of the Bible (actually even conservative people still admit that, although on a much smaller scale) being thus much more capable to make absolutely necessary concessions to Modernity.

That's the first mark of moderation (although not sufficient), one which paves the way to admitting even important non trivial reforms (the fact that Christian innerantists are usually peaceful, accept an important degree of secularism and that Human Reason is important do not maske them moderate).

If we were to extrapolate this to islam only a small elite is really moderate in the western acceptance of the word (capable to say things publicly, those who hide are passive carriers of the same old islam). We still wait for a real muslim Enlightenment.


Which are?
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People who fear to be branded apostates or traitors, who never come out with their true belief that even the quran is fallible (although some propose rather minor reforms publicly). I hope you agree that these kind of muslims do exist. But of course this do not make them more than passive carriers of the same islam of the past (for they do not really confront the important dark sides of islam).

There you go, assuming your conclusion again by asserting that Islam is rotten to the core. It sounds like you don't want it to be reformed at all.

What are the "rotten basics of Islam"? Be specific. Also, are you aware that the spokespeople for Islamic fundamentalism are actually a vocal minority? Just because Bin Laden got all the media attention while he was still breathing didn't make him the face of the Islamic world.
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Islam has to be transformed via the conclusions of unaided Human Reason, a reform like that in Christianity won't work. There is a cause that islam is slow to modernize and this is of course the fact that its core is much more reactionary (totally inimical to unaided Human Reason, many explicit discriminatory injunctions even in the quran and having also a lot of 'special' mechanisms to prevent important change and replacement). Implicitly it is much more difficult to bring it fully in line with Modernity.

Only an important change can bring it beyond a certain 'barrier of potential' which to make very plausible that it will not fall back toward the past (small reforms do not really work, exiling islam outside the public area included, see the near end of the Ataturk experiment, the same await the more modern approaches of many dictators in the Islamic world in the future, sadly at the base the masses are still too indoctrinated with the defective parts of islam). And here I think we have a moral obligation to catalyse the apparition of a new islam via simply telling the truth.


Maybe that's because the source on which you leaned so heavily was indeed full of logical fallacies, bigotry, and irrational fear of Islam. Most Muslims are normal people who are quite capable of living in the modern civilized world.
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Maybe you do not really understand the problem. You only reiterate here the same ad hominems which many other western apologists of islam think count as arguments (including some members here who use the same tactics gratuitously, from what they write I doubt they know the basics of critical reasoning; the first rational step from their part is to renounce at the silly accusations of 'islamophobia' and 'bigotry' when they address my arguments).

So far the reality is that innerantism of the quran is the norm in the muslim world and even the Hadith and fiqh are largely untouched**. Even worse very few dare at least "to admit that Islam has been used in a violent manner at several stages in history to seek domination over others. Insisting that all acts in Islamic history and all current Shariah teachings are peaceful is a form of deception that makes things worse by failing to acknowledge the existence of the problem" (quote from Tawfiq Hamid).

A moderate islam in the western sense is still to be born, the few islamic elites holding such ideas only propose it, a totally other religious education is necessary to implement it. Many muslims are peaceful indeed but this mere fact do not make them moderate, accepting their religious delusions uncritically in the vain hope that this will solve problems can only severely curb the secular freedoms we enjoy today.

Finally, as I already said, to not recognize at least that there is a viable secular argument against islam along the lines I outlined is indeed intellectual dishonesty (if it is not yet clear I do not adhere to the stronger theses that we have to defend the 'purity' of the 'Western Civilization', the 'white race' and so on).

**
When Muhammad Ali as-Sanusi (1787–1859) attempted to reopen the gates to ijtihad, he was rebuked in a typical fatwa by the mufti of Cairo, who said, “For no one denies the fact that the dignity of ijtihad has long disappeared and that at the present time no man has attained this degree of learning. He who believed himself to be a mujtahid [a scholar qualified to exercise ijtihad] would be under the influence of his hallucinations and of the devil.”

Robert Reilly The closing of the muslim mind chapter 2
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Read that book and you'll understand what I mean (it is explained there also why unided Human Reason has a much more important status in Christianity).
In spite of centuries now of exposure to Modernity the 'gates of the ijtihad' remain (almost) closed, the medieval Islamic jurisprudence (which in large parts is not considered immutable) is still with us, almost untouched. What reasons are there to expect renouncing inerrancy in the quran?
 
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Humes fork said:
From here:



They are ideologically opposed to modernity, yet seem keen to use its technological products. Interesting...
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One day long ago I accidentally stumbled across alneda.com. The site's home page came up as "Hacked, tracked and now owned by the U.S.A." I cannot find it now, but it was interesting reading. It was mostly, IIRC, terror-tracking agents posting cryptic messages back and forth. Some of it was in Arabic, some was in English. This post caused me to remember all the reading I used to do there. I assume it was once a terrorist site which was discovered by the authorities at some point. Too bad it appears to be completely gone now.
 
People who argue that one of the problems in Islam today is that "the gates of ijtihad are closed" always amuse me. The argument that the gates were never closed and that ijtihad is more important than taqlid is certainly a feature of modernist progressive interpreters ranging from Muhammad Abduh to Irshad Manji.

But it's also a major feature of ultraconservative and Salafist interpretations of Islam, following Ibn Taymiyyah and Al-Wahhab and Waliullah, not to mention the Shia. So to say that Islam is unsuited to the modern world because they've abandoned "Reason" by no longer favoring ijtihad is a misunderstanding of the situation that borders on epically missing the point.
 
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Frozenwolf150 said:
Fine, believe what you want. Keep beating on those strawmen. I'm obviously not going to change your mind.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/...gay-friendly-women-led-mosques_n_1368460.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/01/religion.uk1
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Three sites do not make an argument. Two are nearly over ten years old, do you know the results of the 'awakenings'?

My (women) friends in Turkey will tell you that in that last five years, revisionism is far, far away. And one of the other was before 'The Arab Spring'.

It is the politics of Islam that stinks, and the inability of many if not all Islamic countries to keep to/endorse secular values. If you can point where it is happening, then do so.

So far I do not see it.
 
Belgian thought said:
Three sites do not make an argument. Two are nearly over ten years old, do you know the results of the 'awakenings'?

My (women) friends in Turkey will tell you that in that last five years, revisionism is far, far away. And one of the other was before 'The Arab Spring'.
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Do you have a newer source on this then? I'd like to look it over.

Belgian thought said:
It is the politics of Islam that stinks, and the inability of many if not all Islamic countries to keep to/endorse secular values. If you can point where it is happening, then do so.

So far I do not see it.
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Which countries specifically? Turkey is fairly secular.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
Do you have a newer source on this then? I'd like to look it over..
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Do you?- you posted them, hence my asking for their development.

Frozenwolf150 said:
Which countries specifically? Turkey is fairly secular.
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Erdogan has been slowly milking the Islamic vote, mostly from the East of Turkey, the less developed part, with alleged bribes and so forth.

My friends are from Istanbul, and have been increasingly harassed for not covering up. Turkey is becoming a nightmare for 'Western' educated women.

Still it is 'fairly' secular....

That's nice.
 
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Belgian thought said:
Do you?- you posted them, hence my asking for their development.
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You claimed to know about the more recent developments. You said my sources were lacking. That's why I asked you if you had anything to back up what you said. You say you have a better source, so present it.
 
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