Fundamentalism (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 04, 2008, 17:58 (5659 days ago) @ xris

Xris writes: "We in the west can make mistakes that can be condemned and corrected...Islam can not accept its mistakes because it is written..." - As one of the west's mistakes, I cited the Iraq war. How do you "correct" the loss of civilian life (estimates vary wildly between 90,000 and 650,000 plus), the hundreds of thousands of people injured and orphaned, over 4 million refugees? How do you "correct" the manner in which the west arbitrarily sliced up Africa and Asia (think of the way Pakistan was formed through the partitioning of India) or, as David Turell has pointed out, the Middle East ... massive blunders for which people go on paying, generation after generation? - I share your revulsion at the cruelties of Islam, but the end result is no different from those of non-Islamic regimes. And we must guard against the perils of blanket condemnation. Two articles in yesterday's Guardian embody the extremes: Muslims in Somalia stoned to death a 13-year-old girl for adultery, though her father said she had been raped by three men. The stoning took place in a stadium before a crowd of 1000. This is the horrific side we all condemn. But another article reports on a "centre for deradicalisation" in Saudi Arabia, where "there is a staff of 100 clerics versed in moderate Islam". Despite what you have rightly identified as the textual basis for violence, moderate Islam is not merely possible ... it is a very real force which should be recognized and respected.