| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Should religious intolerance be allowed? | |
| Posted by: | Fraser Pearce | |
| Date/Time: | 16/05/14 13:02:00 |
| In a sense, Islam had its reformation before Christianity - from the twelfth century onwards, Islamic thinking retreating from a position of reason to one of Koranic literalism and revelation. From the twentieth century onwards this dogmatic literalism has been reinforced by Wahhabi-Salafist petrodollars – and exported around the world. Now, very few Muslims are aware that the Islamic ‘Golden Age’ coincided with a relatively keen focus on reason and intellectual curiosity. The Mutazilites lost to the Asharites, and it’s been downhill ever since. --- My wife has an Egypto-Sudanese background. The elder females in her family all underwent FGM but, until around the millennium, were unveiled. Now all the women are veiled, not entirely by personal choice. I’ve seen the hardening of attitudes in the Middle East – those wanting to keep religion a private matter being pressured by the coercive and overtly religious. In Tahrir Square, my wife was punched walking next to me for being unveiled. We were stopped by the police at gunpoint late at night for being a prostitute and punter (an unveiled brown woman late at night with a white foreigner regarded as a woman of low morals). For a while, our home town in Madinet Nasr became the epicentre of the Muslim Brotherhood. They clamped down on all manner of things (the internet café I’ve posted to this forum from, for example, is now shut, the owner being Christian). The nutcases came out of the woodwork. A member of the family – a professor of modern art – fully expected to lose his job under the Brotherhood due to the likes of Henry Moore being judged un-Islamic. Another was on a list to be interned, for being a journalist with secular views. Another – a retired judge - faced death threats for stating a legal position (that marriages where Christian girls are kidnapped, married off to Muslim men and threatened with death for apostasy if their return to their families, are not real marriages at all and should instead be regarded as illegal kidnappings). --- Unfortunately, much of this ignorance, misogyny and bigotry has been imported into the West and the UK. FGM, honour killings, child grooming, consanguineous marriage, sanctified violence and misogyny, threats to free speech and freedom of conscience, etc, etc.... My late father-in-law didn’t want my wife to study here due to the perceived extremism on English campuses. In London, the sheikh officiating our wedding advised me to “Try not to hit your wife”. I doubt your average Catholic padre offers similar advice to the newly married! A member of our family in the Middle East was sentenced to death by a cleric granted asylum in the UK. A friend was beaten up in the East End for being on a “Muslim estate”. The police said there had been over 20 similar attacks but their hands were tied (they’d speak to ‘community leaders’). My car was surrounded and kicked after doing a three-point turn outside a mosque. The gay couple downstairs from my sister moved out due to the perceived threat from Muslim youths. My sister and her flatmate took cabs the half mile home from the station to avoid the sexual harassment. In the East End, a friend was disavowed by her family for the dishonour of leaving her imported husband after repeated beatings (a blind eye turned to his affairs with white, non-Muslim women). Another friend’s imported husband had never worked – as he was too busy escorting his wife to and from work in order to make sure she didn’t speak to other men. The above examples aren’t the norm, but they’re there, lurking, growing and largely ignored. Last year, we even removed our children from Saturday Arabic school… They’d been taught the downright offensive - nursery rhymes about the “kuffar”, scolded for mentioning pigs when singing Old MacDonald Had A Farm. They’d also been taught the outright banal - how many times a Muslim should knock on a door, for example, my son scolding me for not knocking on our neighbour’s door an Islamic three times. --- It’s no good relativizing away the wrongs of modern Islamism by making comparison to the religion of the past (or comparing Islamism to the likes of Westboro Baptist Church). We live in the here and now. The double standards, intolerance and backwardism shouldn’t be tolerated. |