I recently watched a vlog by Reza Aslan on the intolerance of the west towards Islam. I hear Reza’s point but have to beg to differ with him on the real issue as I see it. Also I find it hard to take him seriously on any of his well put arguments, while he hangs a painting of a woman wearing the most inarguably oppressive symbol of Islam, the chador, on his condo wall.
Dude, I’m sorry, you’re never going to sell Islam if you don’t ditch the chador.
Islam cannot demand to be accepted by a predominantly Christian society such as the US, when Islam itself is so full of inconsistencies, isn’t organized, tolerant, or even regionally relevant.
Reza Aslan is surprised at the US (and Europe) for being intolerant to a new religion? Are you serious? Did you not read the history of this country? Not only have Jews been intolerated, but the same goes for Catholics too! JFK was the first Catholic president, and people thought he would never get elected! Mitt Romney lost the presidency because he was Mormon!
Now you think bringing in a bizarre prayer ritual accompanied by loud bellowing droning wails of guttoral phlegm-tastic sounds coming from public loudspeakers six times a day is a right?
You simply can’t do that, even in today’s America! You especially can’t do that in Tennessee! And the reason you can’t do that in the US is not because the US is intolerant. The reason you can’t do that in the US today, is because a lot of Islam is intolerant, AND Islam as practiced even commonly, makes absolutely no sense to Americans and the American way of life. And Americans like their way of life and if Islam wants to change it, they kind of don’t want to.
Today’s Islam in comparison to the sheer organization and logical formality of Christianity is like a child throwing a tantrum demanding to be given a PhD when it can’t even speak properly yet, never mind read.
Islam needs reformation. Desperately. It needs to correct all the wrong things with it. It is not a perfect religion (as it continually claims) and has many obvious flaws and broken and counter intuitive logic points that it isn’t even possible for it to be taken seriously by Western Christianity, never mind Joe-SixPack or the Plumber.
Need examples?
Besides bacon and shellfish being haram when in fact they are completely halal technically and logically speaking? Why is pork and shellfish halal? Because I actually won’t die if I eat them.
Too hard to get your head around pork logic?
OK then, look no further than women’s rights. According to Islam, or actually depending on which hadith you buy into, which favorite mullah you follow blindly and unquestioningly, or which surah you choose to reference, the primary defense of a condemned, fallen, or adulterous woman who can be falsely accused by her husband and a friend who merely have to testify her sin against her, is for her to simply deny the charges. She can totally walk away without proving her innocence. That’s what the good book says she can do to get out of it.
So explain how the same women in today’s supposedly enlightened Islam, accused the same way are utterly denied what the Koran prescribes? And how they are not only frequently stoned, but often executed simply by the decree of an unauthorized mullah, and worse, not given even a civil trial in which to prove innocence. And what about being innocent until proven guilty? This is the kind of outrage that an Islam that conveniently chooses to not explain itself, inspires today.
In the 21st century, are we to abide by Islamic or sharia laws simply and blindly? Especially if they are completely counter to the evolution of civil laws we have enacted in the West?
If Islam is completely wrong, as the numerous cases of stoned, killed, and imprisoned women attest to, should we accept abidance to Islam or even sharia law? All because an undemocratic, unrealistic, un-free, unlicensed and unauthorized mullah says we should?
In the West today, after 2000 years of solid Christendom, I can believe in Jesus and the Pope, I can be Catholic, I can go to church every Sunday, I can eat pork on Friday, wash it down with a tasty alcoholic beverage of my choice, and go and sleep with my neighbor’s wife, causing her to become pregnant and have an abortion and never once worry about being arrested, tried or killed for it.
Is doing that a good thing? Of course not. Is it a mortal sin? Debatably. Does the Church have the right to impose ANY kind of sentence on me? NO. And if in my drunken stupor I tell Father O’Flaherty to f**k off, I don’t have to worry one bit that his “choirboys” will slit my throat on my way home from the parish.
The fear that Islam needs to assure everyone of, is that it will be content with being merely a mortal, moral, option. That when a mullah is told to f**k off, he will be content to just take it. Nothing more, not a dominant, required, brutally judgmental overseer on all parts of daily life. Because that is exactly what Islam embodies today.
Until women choose to wear the hejab occasionally to the mosque on Friday prayer (which will have to be moved to Saturdays or Sundays by the way) as a symbolic “veil of purity”, rather than because it’s the common law, Islam will be just another example of the brutal, intolerant, racist, sexist, unfair, dictatorial, Spanish Inquisition that ruled the world for 900 years until it went out of fashion and collapsed under it’s own crimes.
Like Islam is unfortunately now, then too, various factions of Christianity took it upon themselves to determine what “Believer” meant, doling out wildly differing tests of faith and the all too often brutal and fatal punishments accordingly.
The question that needs to be asked (and actually answered by Islam once) is, if Islam wants to be valid in the West, why is it that the (many) brutally oppressive nations who deny their citizens the most basic freedoms, human, and civil rights, proudly call themselves Moslem, and would immediately and violently deny this very same request for a church or (god forbid!) synagogue to be placed at or near Mecca.
For the ultimate inconsistent message of Islam, look no further than the the charlatan posing as the US administration’s enlightened foil for Islamic tolerance, Raouf. A Sufi Imam? Sufis are traditionally looked upon with disdain and incredulity in Islam. Are we to now believe that there is a new official sect in Islam called Sufi Islam? Is it sanctioned by Islam proper? Because I did not get the memo. Because there isn’t one. Claiming to be a Sufi Imam is like claiming to be a Jewish Gestapo Officer. Technically it’s possible, but realistically it’s highly irregular.
In the end (is there an end to this debate?), the onus is not upon the West to allow what is proving itself more and more and more than often to be a very very very “crazy radical Islam”, into the Cool Club. But for Islam to clean its act up, stop being so weird and brutal on the simplest things like equal rights, prayer technique, food, and the whole what-to-do-about-the-infidel thing.
But proof of just how blind Islam is to it’s own indiscreet oppressions, would be for some Christian or Jewish group to apply to set up a YMCA in Mecca.
But that will never happen will it? Even though the bones that the seas of haji-wannabes circle around, desperate for the prestige, braggart, and show-off points you get for completing the haj, even though those are the very bones of Abraham, the original founder and basis of the Jewish and Christian religions, as a Jew or a Christian, or as a non-Moslem, you are merely forbidden to attend.
And that is the definition of intolerance.
