The Sufi, of course, provided they meet the appropriate social requirements: religious freedom (including the acceptance of apostacy), equality of the sexes, tolerance of homosexuals (to the point they aren't condemned to death anyway). I imagine this is likely since they don't subscribe to a specific madhab? What islamic nations are presently guided by Sufi philosophy?
Good now all that remains is for you to convince the various sects that Islam no longer practices religious heterodoxy.
Especially the Salafis who probably don't even consider Sufis as Muslims.
Regrettably, their nations do, and it would appear from the attitudes of islamic immigrants to the West that many of the inhabitants of those nations do in fact accept the tenets of islamic supremacism that make up "extremism".
From all Islamic nations? Where are most of these immigrants coming from?
The inequities of Western society are not legally prescribed as such; they are failures of the system, rather than examples of its correct application.
Which are in themselves
rather recent wouldn't you say? Do you hold all nations to a standard which 60 years ago were not met even by educated Westerners?
Can you give me an example of a nation other than Israel which, on being attacked by foreign powers bent on genocide, returned land won in a defensive war? Can you give me an example of another nation in the ME which is not islamic? Is one such nation too many? Why do some Moroccans agitate for "their" lands in Spain to be returned? What does their hanging a key over their hearths symbolize?
The Holocaust did not happen in Morocco or Palestine Geoff, yet it is the Palestinians who have paid most for it, after the Jews of course.
Well, American interest in the ME is a recent phenomenon too. Which came first, gasoline and evil commercialism or Wahhabism? Qutb (if you want to blame him alone) hated the US and Western society on merit alone. Why are you seemingly defending the Saudis?
American interest in the ME followed British interest which followed the dilineation of the ME countries by the British for economic interests. The ME is a creation of Western economic chess with the countries as pawns. The promised independence by the British was promptly set aside for oil interests, its been an
ongoing drama since 1927, not an overnight phenomenon.
Qutb too used to be a little known
social reformer before being tortured by one of many dictators supported by the regime.
Defending the Saudis? Come now, don't tell me you too resort to the "terrorist supporter" cry to circumvent Western responsibility. I'm not the one who's
kissing the Sauds or
forming pacts with them to ensure the hegemony of the dollar.
In 1971, notes Dr. Petrov, the Nixon administration severed the last remaining link between the dollar and gold. From that point, "the United States had to force the world to continue to accept ever-depreciating dollars in exchange for economic goods and to have the world hold more and more of those depreciating dollars. It had to give the world an economic reason to hold them, and that reason was oil." The link between the dollar and oil, Petrov asserts, resulted from "an iron-clad arrangement with Saudi Arabia to support the House of Saud in exchange for accepting only US Dollars for its oil."
F. William Engdahl, author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order, describes the U.S.-Saudi pact in detail:
By their firm agreement with Saudi Arabia, as the largest OPEC oil producer,... Washington guaranteed that the world's largest commodity, oil, essential for every nation's economy, the basis of all transport and much of the industrial economy,... could only be purchased in world markets in dollars. The deal [was] fixed in June 1974 by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, establishing the US-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation. The US Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve would "allow" the Saudi central bank, SAMA, to buy US Treasury bonds with Saudi petrodollars. In 1975, OPEC officially agreed to sell its oil only for dollars. A secret US military agreement to arm Saudi Arabia was the quid pro quo.
Lets not lose sight of who's really supporting the Sauds here.
"Them" and "us"...as the distinction is so clearly made in the islamic world? You seem to imply that I want to arrange such a mentality here: nothing could be further from the truth, unless perhaps you were to accuse me of the intent of genocide. Rather, I wish to avoid islam's ascendance in the Western world, when clearly every example of islamic majority in the eastern one necessarily incorporates sharia and actual segregation in the form of dhimmitude. That is the real, and best example of, "them" and "us" thinking.
Islam's ascendence in the Western world? What a laugh! What paranoia is this that gives reality to something that has so little chance of ever occuring while completely ignoring the very real problems of Western ascendency in the ME? What think you of the realities of 80 years of war in Palestine? The twice-occupied Lebanon? The Iran-Iraq war? The support for genocidal regimes and dictatorships? The present war in Iraq? Do all these portend
Islamic ascendency to you? Or a backlash from extremist groups?
Them vs Us:
Ziauddin Sardar writes in The New Statesman that Islamophobia is a widespread European phenomenon, so widespread that he asks whether Muslims will be the victims of the next pogroms.[6] He writes that each country has its extremes, citing Jean-Marie Le Pen in France; Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in Holland; and Philippe Van der Sande of Vlaams Blok, a Flemish nationalist party founded in Belgium. Filip Dewinter, the leader of the nationalist Flemish "Vlaams Belang" has said his party is "Islamophobic." He said: "Yes, we are afraid of Islam. The Islamisation of Europe is a frightening thing."[7]
The clash between European liberal culture and that culture's perception of Islam gives rise to allegations of Islamophobia in a number of areas. Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's statement that Western civilization is "superior" to Islam was regarded as an example of Islamophobic.[8] In Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg requires citizenship applicants from the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to answer questions about their attitudes on homosexuality and domestic violence. [10] [11]. Clothing has become a flashpoint. France, which has a strong secular tradition separating church and state, [12] was accused of Islamophobia when girls who wear muslim headscarfs were expelled from school under a new law. [13][9] In January 2006, the Dutch parliament voted in favour of a proposal to ban the burqa in public, which led to similar accusations.[10]
Sardar argues that Europe is "post-colonial, but ambivalent." Minorities are regarded as acceptable as an underclass of menial workers, but if they want to be upwardly mobile, as Sardar says young Muslims do, the prejudice rises to the surface. Wolfram Richter, professor of economics at Dortmund University, told Sardar: "I am afraid we have not learned from our history. My main fear is that what we did to Jews we may now do to Muslims. The next holocaust would be against Muslims."
The largest monitoring project to be commissioned into Islamophobia was undertaken following 9/11 by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). Their May 2002 report "Summary report on Islamophobia in the EU after 11 September 2001", written Dr. Chris Allen and Jorgen S. Nielsen of the University of Birmingham, was based on 75 reports – 15 from each EU member nation.[11]
The report highlighted the regularity with which ordinary Muslims became targets for abusive and sometimes violent retaliatory attacks after 9/11. Despite localized differences within each member nation, the recurrence of attacks on recognizable and visible traits of Islam and Muslims was the report's most significant finding. The attacks took the form of verbal abuse; blaming all Muslims for terrorist attacks; women having their hijab torn from their heads; male and female Muslims being spat at; children being called "Usama"; and random assaults, which left victims hospitalized, and on one occasion, left a victim paralysed.[11]
The report also discussed the representation of Muslims in the media. Inherent negativity, stereotypical images, fantastical representations, and exaggerated caricatures were all identified. The report concluded that "a greater receptivity towards anti-Muslim and other xenophobic ideas and sentiments has, and may well continue, to become more tolerated."[11]
Recent immigration from Middle Eastern/North African countries has seen a rise in the Muslim population of Europe, particularly United Kingdom and France.There have been reports of discrimination against Muslims and Muslim communities in many European countries.
And, of course, restrictions on the expression of non-islamic religions in the ummah as a whole do not amount to the same thing as banning all religious adornment in France, which in any event falls much, much later than the damnation of non-muslim religions in the Middle East. Who is acting, and who reacting? And in which European nation is it illegal to build mosques higher than nearby churches, or to build them at all? Where are apostates from Judaism, Christianity, secularism or any religion at all put to death for their conversions of conscience?
Regardless, you hold a closed community to standards only
recently achieved by the West. The Holocaust, I repeat, did not happen in the Middle East.
Education can and does change things but to expect a culture to fast forward while simultaneously exploiting and demonising them, supporting or causing fundamentalist groups to be formed is incredulous beyond description.
Does it do all those things indeed? And here I was merely arguing against the phenomenon of creeping islamicization outside dar-al-islam. But, pray thee tell, Samwise: why should Israel in the Middle East not then be a reality? "Judged for not being in step with the modern world"? If by that you mean how immigrating Jews were not going to accept dhimmitude, then my sympathy fails me, as I can see yours does not. Can you really extend such support in principle even under the very circumstances you state - this "failure of lockstep with modernity" - which is dhimmitude? Would it be wrong of me to say that you seem to be opining that dhimmitude was all right, on basis of your shared religion with the majority of Palestinians? This seems to me what you're implying. I also point out that Israel is, indeed, small: why such pains over such a small thorn? 'Palestine' was no nation at the time of Israel's creation. I do indeed sympathize with their plight, and I would vastly prefer a resolution - which, given the history of dealings between Palestinians and Jews from the beginning of last century onward, and the concept of 'dhimmitude', would thus have to be a two-state one.
Very eloquent and completely ignoring the fact that the Jews were forced to leave due to the very real terror of anti-Semitism in the very advanced West.
As for the pains over a small thorn: that is exactly what Israelis are fighting for isn't it? A small thorn?
"Expected to give up"? My understanding was that lands were sold and lands were bought: perhaps complaints should be directed to the Turks, since they did the dealings after all.
I'm not even going there, but if you're interested:
http://www.cactus48.com/mandate.html
http://www.cactus48.com/partition.html
http://www.cactus48.com/statehood.html
And the whole document:
http://www.cactus48.com/truth.html
Good. If you understand my actual concern - and not the purported perspective you give me - then we are getting somewhere.
Hopefully, but I think your hypothetical concerns seem less certain than the very real circumstances under which people in the ME find themselves, and your desire to decrease fundamentalism should also consider how it is being supported and nourished by those who claim to want democracy in this region.
