In that it meant nothing to the vast majority of Muslims because it was from an Ayatollah and didnt go through the necessary channels and get the required authority. Not meaningless because some people were killed. The Rushdie affair is prime evidence for sweeping generilzations.
Islam vs. the Western World: off-topic posts from a Religion thread
- Thread starter kks
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In that it meant nothing to the vast majority of Muslims because it was from an Ayatollah and didnt go through the necessary channels and get the required authority. Not meaningless because some people were killed. The Rushdie affair is prime evidence for sweeping generilzations.
Fatwas are a dime [or more] a dozen. People barely pay attention to their own imams, let alone foreign ones.
If you were to ask me, for example, what fatwas were passed by the imam of my masjid in the last week, I'd have no clue, regardless of how earth shattering it was. Someone killing an English author over a book is as relevant to an Iranian as someone killing an Iranian scientist over a nuclear threat is to the English.
Pretty much all of what DH says is complete bs. He appears to be a Muslim propagandist of the intellectually dishonest type.
Surely, you've got to be kidding.
How is killing over a book the same as killing over a nuclear threat?
Ah, so the threats to Rushdie are imagined?
How does the entire Muslim population qualify as "insignificant personal?"
Oh I see, you know very little about it. Never mind, then.
He's a Mumbaikar. No stranger to people breaking into and beating the crap out of newspaper editors over random stories. If he started acting like he was some la-di-da westerner who lives in the clouds, he's only fooling la-di-da westerners with heads in the clouds.
Quote DiamondHeart
There is certainly an immense amount of disinformation regarding the reality. Bush`s alleged "war on terror" was aimed squarely at Muslim nations, tarring them all with the same brush. Invading a nation based on false information leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths places a HUGE question mark regarding morality and integrity.
These are facts.
Answer the question. Why is the US so interested in promoting "the American way" outside of the US, particularly in Muslim nations? These are facts, and fickle responses such as to promote "democracy" and "freedom" are simply false. If this was even the intention (which it is not), this has absolutely and utterly NOT been achieved. All that has been achieved is division and conflict.
Once again, these are facts. Lets face it, even the financial systems within the US is morally bankrupt.
Where are the folks that Bush wanted "dead or alive"?That is the reality that your average Muslim in the conflict zones lives with every day.
A utterly understandable reaction to the constant psychological and military assault on the Muslim world. Jewish Israel can have a nuclear program AND nukes, but Islamic Iran pursuing a nuclear program is immediately branded a DANGER to the world. Yet Israel has the ACTUAL history of aggression and bloodshed. Can you see the hypocrisy?
These are the remnants of colonialism and the fruit it is bearing today. It is happening, it is not a dream.
Once again, and oppressed and demonized people WILL revolt and strive for freedom and dignity. What is there not to understand?
Remove the emotional anti Muslim rhetoric constantly emanating from Western media and governments and research the facts.
What the US (and British and Israeli) foreign policy in the ME has achieved is an incredible militancy and anti Western sentiment that is kept at bay only by certain economic factors (and other such as dark ops) at play. You will not recognize this planet in 30 years time.
Not when they come from a sitting head of state, they aren't.
Probably, but people surely payed attention to this particular fatwa. They took it upon themselves to kill many people, in many different countries, and made a point of publicly attributing these acts to Islam.
It may well be that these people don't have any legitimate claim to represent Islam, but then, actions speak much louder than words. If the rest of Islam isn't going to stop radicals from killing in their name, or at least voice sufficient opposition to prevent any reasonable person from taking the killers' claims at face value, then we're left with the obvious inference.
I would add that you seldom hesitate to make sweeping generalizations about other nationalities/religions/etc. based on the actions of a few. So you have very little credibility on this subject.
I must form no opinions of the Muslim religion, because of the evils being perpetrated by my government against some Muslims? I am not to think of anything except my government's evils when the subject of Islam comes up?SAM said:
That wouldn't even make sense if my government were committing these evils because the victims were Muslim.
The Rushdie affair predated most of this current horrorshow in progress, btw.
I know. They resembled your words now. Clueless, regarding one of the more important and foundational principles of any free society.arsalan said:
The vast majority of Muslims that "responded" had read none of his books ever.arsalan said:
There are hundreds of examples of such books, in the Western world. And there are no persecuted authors of them, neither is there a long list of banned books and movies. The only thing I can recall a book being banned for is obscenity, many years ago, and even then the author was under no threat of mob violence.arsalan said:
And this again is part of the typical reaction I recall from the Rushdie affair - what if someone were to write insulting novels about Jesus and his mother Mary? Or revered historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington? Clueless. They could have walked down to any large library and found dozens.
To the average Muslim there is very little difference between Americans bombing a million Vietnamese because they are anti-communist or a million Iraqis because they are Islamophobic and random extremists killing people in the name of Islam. The difference is only one of scale. They're all nuts as far as we are concerned. The one resembles secular democracy as well as the other represents Islam.
"We?" Speaking of individuals with zero claim to speak for "Islam"...
The assignments of motive here are enough to set of flashing lights and alarm bells in any reasonable mind, by the way.
Apples and oranges. Secular democracy is not an organized religion.
Not to mention that you don't seem to actually adhere to this supposed equivalence. You regularly leverage said events to promote ugly generalizations of entire nations and cultures, while getting your panties in a wad whenever the same is done to a group you identify with. And you routinely invoke said differences in scale to justify this double-standard, when confronted.
And the funny thing is you won't see these unorganised secular democracies getting their panties in a wad when it comes to bombing civilians. In fact, the allies are all gung ho to get in the act. And they'll whine on behalf of an author who isn't even dead while ignoring the innocents they kill everyday.
Like yesterday, for instance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-rXBgVcADc
See any hullaballoo over these deaths? But the vainglorious and still breathing Salman Rushdie is an ever throbbing wound.
Double standards at work: people can villify and desecrate important historical personalities under Freedom of Speech, but when anyone dares to use that same Freedom of Speech to denounce that work, its called "being clueless". Nice to see some acknowledgement of this.
If you think that response was just to 1 book, you are sorely mistaken. For years he had taken the piss out of various countries, religious groups and social groups. This was jsut the straw that broke the camels back.
Rushdie isnt persecuted. First of all, Sunnis couldnt give a rats what an Ayatollah wants, secondly, the fatwah had no such authority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_U.S.
http://www.adlerbooks.com/banned.html
http://712educators.about.com/cs/bannedbooks/a/bookbanning.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_films
etc
etc
Just like they can about Islam. Fact of the matter still remains that Rushdie has not been hurt, the fatwah is not seen as authoritative by the vast majority of Muslims and Muslims have used their words to denounce the book and his other works with perfectly understandable reasons. Or should we only allow Freedom of Speech when attacking a group of people and not when those people write back?
Sucks to be them, then. Jhumpa Lahiri writes preditable, trite fluff, while Rushdie is undoubtedly among the greatest living novelists on the planet. We're talking top 5, easily. Maybe even top 3, what with the recent losses of heavyweights...
And I'd say that Lahiri targets Western audiences much more so than Rushdie. You have to wade through all kinds of Indian history, religious lore and other sources to make heads or tails of Rushdie. Lahiri, meanwhile, is the kind of stuff that gets adapted into Hollywood movies before anyone has even read it, so perfect is its pitch to Western eyes and ears.