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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (148082)	11/21/2005 8:47:40 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793782

>>Your private space — home, business and place of worship — is protected by law, allowing you to organize and live your life as an individual in accordance with your beliefs and tastes. The public space, however, belongs to everyone and thus to no one in particular. Everyone can claim a share, and use its facilities to advance his or her ideas, interests and political projects. But no one gets to arbitrarily impose a decision or exclude anyone. All this, to be sure, appears alien to most Muslims who have settled here. They are taught not to recognize a distinctly private space, in which the individual or even a whole community can do much as they please provided they do not trespass on the rights of others. The idea of religion as a private affair is abhorrent to most Muslims, for Islam aims to rule every single aspect of individual and collective life, from the most mundane to the most sublime.<< It is not only Muslims who do not recognize the difference between public space and private space when it comes to religion. There are Christians who do not think that religion is a private matter. This scenario really isn't much different that the situation we have here other than one is a majority religion and the other a minority religion so it plays out differently.

To: LindyBill who wrote (148082)	11/21/2005 7:49:39 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793782

Teheri doesn't say it, but the article makes it clear. A Muslim may live in America. But he/she is not an American who happens to be a Muslim. I don't agree. I think there are many Americans who happen to be Muslim, just as there are many Americans who happen to be Jewish (trust me, traditional Orthodox Judaism is just as big on ethno-religious separation as Islam). The difference is, most American Jews are Reform or Conservative, and if you ask them, "Are you a good Jew?" they will answer, "Not so bad.". But there is no Reform or Conservative Islam. There is only traditional Islam and even worse, nut-case Salafi Islam. If you ask the American Muslims, "Are you a good Muslim?" I think they will all say, "Oh no, I'm a bad Muslim." Because the religion as taught today is literal-minded and leaves no wiggle room for compromise with the Enlightenment. So I think that the Big Pharaoh blogger is right when he says, "Islam must change." At some point, the massive state of cognitive dissonance imposed on all modernizing Muslims by the archaic nature of their faith has to be relieved somehow.