“You have shamed the community,” a fellow Muslim in Morgantown, W.Va., said to me as we sat in a Panera Bread in 2004. “Stop writing.”
Then 38, I had just written an essay for The Washington Post’s Outlook section arguing that women should be allowed to pray in the main halls of mosques, rather than in segregated spaces, as most mosques in America are arranged. An American Muslim born in India, I grew up in a tolerant but conservative family. In my hometown mosque, I had disobeyed the rules and prayed in the men’s area, about 20 feet behind the men gathered for Ramadan prayers.
Later, an all-male tribunal tried to ban me. An elder suggested having men surround me at the mosque so that I would be “scared off.” Now the man across the table was telling me to shut up.
January 21, 2015
"Meet the honor brigade, an organized campaign to silence debate on Islam."
A column in The Washington post by Asra Q. Nomani — author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam" — that begins:
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So where are all these moderate Muslims we keep hearing about?
Maybe she's in the wrong religion.
The quote from the article that jumped out:
But in so many Muslim communities now, saving face trumps critical thinking and truth-telling.
This is true of other religions/viewpoints as well, of course. But it seems especially endemic for Middle-eastern flavors of Islam. Saudi Arabia, our "ally", shoulders much of the blame for that, I think.
IMO, any religion/viewpoint that cannot tolerate criticism is a dying religion/viewpoint that clings to relevance by fiat. Not gonna work.
The moderate Muslims are the ones being beheaded, stoned, and whipped by the leadership.
Even if there ARE these fabled Moderate Muslims, (and how can you tell, when the Koran explicitly states it is right and proper to LIE blatantly about everything to non-Muslims). Lets say for the sake of argument only 10% of the 1.6 billion muslims approve of slaughtering people for drawing cartoons, and stoning women for adultery, and throwing gay men off of high buildings, and wanting Sharia law to be the law of Earth....
That is still about 160 MILLION PEOPLE. Or approximately half the total population of the U.S.
What does the Obamessiah propose to do about that? I mean besides sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming "I CAN'T HEAR YOU...I CAN'T HEAR YOU..."
"Now the man across the table was telling me to shut up."
Only extremists would do such a thing. Has nothing to do with Islam.
the leaders of a religion are the ones that claim to follow the teachings most exactly and fully. This pushes them into a position of extremism as they must demonstrate their commitment to the faith and instruct followers to be more strict observers and thus more extreme.
This summer I saw some people harassing anti-Boko Haram protestors (who looked Nigerian to me) on the streets of Chicago.
It was one of the more disturbing things I've seen.
Let's face it. Allah hates women... And Jews... and Christians... and Hindus... and secularists... and other Muslims that favor another prophetic branch than Sunni...and Idols of every form and type other than the black rock meteorite in Mecca named Allah.
But jihad, jihad, jihad is the word to steal the world. Killing those hated others is just the best way to steal their stuff.
So where are all these moderate Muslims we keep hearing about?
What good will it do if all the moderates are women?
Their religion, their mosque, their rules. If they tell her to leave, she should.
A similar case of someone misbehaving in a Christian church would be quite straightforward.
I don't admire Islam, but fair is fair.
Lies about Islam being a tolerant religion will continue as long as we have America hating leftists willing to ally themselves with 7th century barbarians openly at war with the West. Totalitarians think alike. The proof is revealed by seeing who defends Islam, no matter what, all the while complaining about "theocracy" in America when a conservative Christian expresses a non-leftist opinion.
You have shamed the community...Stop writing.
So this guy was using his free speech to peacefully express his religious viewpoint, and she is ( subtly ) telling him to shut up.
Or did I miss something
Ignorance,
Yes - that certainly is his right. But that's not the real issue here.
The real issue is that we keep pretending that the moderate Muslims are the leaders of that religion.
I have no sympathy at all for anyone who argues that women have the right to orgasm.
Now we know why there is not a counter force to the violence from within Muslim communities. Fuck the Saudis who have poured money into this all over the world. And who does Obama and his lefty minions (includes lefty media) listen to? The Saudis. The case in point, Saudis corrupted Pakistanis (with the active participation of Zia Ul Haq) but could not find their way within India. And there is a difference between Muslims from those countries, one lives in a tolerant mixed society and the other could not. Western countries have to go after the Muslim state players here. Obama is so ill equipped to do it. There was so much HOPE that with his middle name and other links he would herald some kind of progress, but nothing, quite the opposite and quite similar to the race issues in this country. He has made it worse.
Sharia sure sounds like fun for nasty little legalistic men afraid of women.
And don't we secretly wish sometimes we could sentence the "other" in culture wars to 10,000 lashes given 1000 a year. All Christians get to do is forgive them and love them.
Their religion, their mosque, their rules. If they tell her to leave, she should.
A similar case of someone misbehaving in a Christian church would be quite straightforward.
In a christian church, she would have another church to go to - I suspect with Islam all the mosques are like this and so she would effectively have to give up her faith or at least give up attendance at a mosque. That's a harder thing to do.
From the article, it sounds like she wants to push a reformationesque change on them and doesn't have the support to do so. So she writes.
And she's not even Jewish.
traditionalguy said...
Sharia sure sounds like fun for nasty little legalistic men afraid of women.
This isn't happening in far-off Carjackistan, it's happening here in America, to American women. The silence of the feminists is deafening.
Then she could get together with a few of the like minded and start her own mosque. Thats why there are so many Christian sects. And for that matter, there are plenty of Muslim sects too, many of them quite liberal.
This is not dissimilar to the case of the Catholic nuns demanding a liberal church that lets them be priests. They could and should just walk over to the Episcopalians and have their wish.
"the leaders of a religion are the ones that claim to follow the teachings most exactly and fully"
Sometimes. Check out the Episcopalians and some other Christian denominations. Lots of their leaders don't seem to have a whole lot of belief in their teachings. It's more of a social club.
As Buwaya Puti said, nor do I have any desire to interfere with any of Islam's business insofar as it is to do with religious life inside its mosques and prayer houses, any more than I appreciate non-believers in the media telling the leaders of the church I belong to that we Catholics need to do this and change that. But one distinguishes those elements of Islam that affect Muslims' lives as citizens in the sort of republic that the US is from that; the WaPo writer seems to be concerned with reform both ad intra and ad extra-- I wish her well at least in what has do with the latter. But until the effects of moderation extend beyond the ladies of a certain position in DC and LA, I'm not very reassured.
Kevin said...
Lets say for the sake of argument only 10% of the 1.6 billion muslims approve of slaughtering people for drawing cartoons,
In Europe, crime, especially violent crime, is a bigger issue with islam than is terrorism.
"The facts speak for themselves. In France, Muslims make up 60% of all prison inmates, while being only 12% of the total population (Leclerc, 2014).
Similarly, 7 out of 10 burglaries, assaults, and violent thefts are committed by first- or second-generation immigrants (Chevrier and Raufer, 2014). Most of these perps seem to be Muslim, although a third of them may be West Indians, Africans, and Roma of nominally Christian background. Muslims seem to be especially overrepresented in serious violent crimes that lead to prison sentences.
Similar trends are developing elsewhere.
Muslims make up 70% all prison inmates in Spain and 45% in Belgium (WikiIslam, 2013; Sudinfo.be, 2013). In England and Wales, the figure is only 14%, versus 4.7% of the total population, apparently because certain other communities are likewise overrepresented (Morris, 2014, see Note).
A Danish researcher has studied the relationship between criminality and immigrant origin in Denmark, Norway, and Finland (Kirkegaard, 2014a; Kirkegaard, 2014b; Kirkegaard, 2014c; Kirkegaard and Fuerst, 2014). He found that the prevalence of Islam in the immigrants’ home country was the single best predictor of criminality both for “all crime” and for “violent crime,” being better than the home country’s mean IQ or GDP per capita and much better than its murder rate."
Later, an all-male tribunal tried to ban me. An elder suggested having men surround me at the mosque so that I would be “scared off.” Now the man across the table was telling me to shut up."
Lady, when in doubt ask the Imam.
I did think her reference to her 'threatening meeting at Panera' was kind of amusing.
Then she could get together with a few of the like minded and start her own mosque
I don't know enough about the religion to know if you can do that, and I don't know how many muslims there are in West Va for that to work for her specifically, although I think that creation of moderate mosques that denounce the actions of the more extreme variety would be ideal. Would they be targeted by violence if they did so? In the US, maybe not. In the ME, probably (perhaps depending on the country).
"the leaders of a religion are the ones that claim to follow the teachings most exactly and fully"
Picturing the Pharisees in Jesus' time.
Maybe she could start a Unitarian version of Islam. They could have mosques, prayers, readings from somebody somewhere who said something uplifting, and get together for coffee. None of that Koran or Mohammad stuff of course. Especially not about how Allah approves of a man having sex with his slaves and lying to his official wives about it.
She did't identify the other person. Was it DeWayne Hickman?
If you look at the hadiths and then compares the honorable prophets behavior then to ISIL or to the moderate muslims of today, which do you think is more reflective of true Islam?
I recognize that there is a perversion of Islam, but it's actually the moderation of Islam that is the perversion.
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