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StrangerThan -> RE: If Islam .......? (8/21/2011 12:48:45 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aneirin
Ok, what percentage of the whole Islamic culture is the extremist nut do you think, could it be similar do you think to the percentage of people in the west that also have supreme influence ?
That is, the most vociferous by whatever means, for example, media, politics or religion
Many of the Islamic culture live in regimes where they are told what to do with laws enforced if they don't comply, compare that with less authoritarian regimes, the Emirates for example and many more besides, hardly ever hear a peep from those countries, supressed, maybe, but tolerance seems to be the rule.
Furthermore money talks, relative poverty as we know creates idealism and those that fight for an ideal as what have they got to lose if ordinary life is shit.
Pakistan is a new country flexing it's muscles on the world stage, there will be more, but of older countries that are wealthy, i.e., they ensure a good standard of living for their populace, they tend to be more laid back
Thus it seems, money is the motivator, as it is anywhere else in the world, enough money and the troubles go away. My suggestion to Rule was to look at the Moorish conquest of Spain and that because what the Muslims became in Spain was culturaly wealthy, a society to perhaps be envied, but it fell because it ignored the warlike whilst concentrating on learning. The militant ruined it all along with another church whose missionaries bore death and destruction all in the name of religion.
Therefore religion is conquest and control and rewards for the minority.
But at the end of the day, people anywhere are just people, remove the religion and we will find other things to fight over, political party allegiance even.
But what do you suppose will happen if Islam came to reign in wealthy countries of the west, would they destroy or chill out when they realise money talks and freedoms are less restricted ?
In Karachi, I watched men and boys sleep next to docks, curled up in rags, blankets and cardboard while rats the size of house cats jumped over them and crawled over them. In Tunisa, a thirty minute taxi ride to the American Embassy turned into a four hour ordeal where three of us were followed by police cars into an alley, stopped, lined up against a dirty and dusty wall, robbed by police and left to walk it out. In Bahrain, I watched a man pouring gold bars in another alley next to beggars who were oddly similar in that most were missing some extremity - hands, feet, legs or arms in some cases. Not far from the Somali border, in a tiny little strip of a country called Djbouti, I watched another man be chased down the street by a mob waving knives and clubs over what he later said was him taking pictures of them. Now I don't know. Maybe he insulted Mohammed or something in the process, I wasn't there for the instigation. I just got to watch the freak show run by.
In one country after another up the Arabian Gulf, the issue was not so much what you could do, as learning what you couldn't do. A good bit of my perspective is colored by traveling through regions of abject poverty under an iron-fisted rule imposed either by religion or some self serving dictator. That didn't mean the people were bad, because overwhelmingly, they were not. What it meant was the system of government sucked. Your question is centered around islam "reigning", which leaves one to assume either a religious state or a state dominated by religious leaders. With that in mind, I'd say your vision of an islamic supremacy would probably suck ass.
History is swept with the crumbling remains of societies dominated by religious control, and the earth full of millions of bones from those who died under it. That lesson leaves the context of your question flawed from the outset, and the look back to the golden age of islamic enlightenment nothing more than an end-around the brutal reality of what life under religious control has so often contained.
As I told one person, the issue isn't the religion you practice, but the freedom to practice it or not.
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