In extramartial affairs, men go free and the women are conveniently killed.
The Islamic idea of American urban renewal:
from Islam to American: from The Religion of Peace(TM)
Posted on 08/25/2002 5:30:40 AM PDT by scratchgolfer
Sanitizing Islam
In Funtua, Nigeria, last week, a 30-year-old mother named Amina Lawal was sentenced to death by stoning by an Islamic court for "adultery," although in her case this means only having sex out of wedlock. The sentence, which Lawal has accepted as "the will of God," will be applied as soon as she is through breast-feeding. Around the same time, CNN aired an al-Qaida videotape showing a dog, in excruciating pain, succumbing to poison gas.
Meanwhile, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to require this year's 3,500 freshmen to read Approaching the Koran: The Early Revelations, by Haverford College religious studies Prof. Michael Sells. The ruling came after the Virginia-based Family Policy Network, which ordinarily might be expected to encourage the use of religious textbooks in public school curricula, argued that the requirement violates provisions in the Constitution against state-sponsored promotion of religion.
According to Chancellor James Moeser, what gave rise to the assignment of Sells's book in the first place was the need, post-9-11, for America's young to better appreciate Islam. "The whole idea is that this is the first step toward understanding a culture we don't know anything about," he said.
Already, this follows on a trend. Last year, following the attacks, hundreds of students wore Islamic dress for a day "to prove their tolerance toward Islam," according to a report in The New York Times. Islamic-studies courses have become among the most popular on offer, and the university has moved to hire an Islamic-studies expert.
We join in applauding the university for its new focus. American ignorance about Islam paid no small part in leaving the country unprepared for the events of September 11. The CIA, for example, suffers from a serious dearth of Arabic speakers, and there has been little appreciation in the policy-making community of the trends and forces afoot in the Islamic world over the past decade, in part because so few people could so much as read an Arabic-language newspaper.
Yet it may be questioned whether the approach being taken at Chapel Hill and elsewhere in the US is the best one. Nowadays, the liberal desire to "understand" is often confused with the politically correct need to finesse and sanitize. And Sells's book, we fear, goes far toward accomplishing the latter.
"From what I knew from the news," the Times quotes freshman Mary Allison Lee as saying, "I would have perceived [Muslims] to be a violent people. So I see one thing on TV, and another in the book." Now, she says, "I'm not sure what to think." Lee may be forgiven her confusion. "Approaching the Koran," offers translations of, and commentary on, 35 early suras.
But it does not touch on Islamic notions of holy war, or Islamic ideas about the justness of killing "infidels," from which too many of today's Muslims draw inspiration. As a result, students are left with a scant appreciation of Islamic culture, all the while thinking they've had their minds opened.
For our money, if the UNC really had wanted to offer its freshman a sophisticated picture of the forces that have shaped contemporary Islam, they would have done better to assign Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong?, or perhaps Fouad Ajami's Dream Palace of the Arabs. Both works scholarly, engaging and relevant offer masterly overviews of the cultural forces that led directly to September 11.
Today, every military regime in the world but one is in a Muslim country. Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim countries. Eighty percent of executions carried out each year take place in Muslim countries. No Muslim countries save Turkey and Bangladesh are democratic.
There is an urgent need in the West to understand why all this is, and universities could have a vital role to play in achieving it. By assigning Sells's book, all that Chapel Hill has managed to do is whitewash reality in the name of raising awareness. For the likes of an Amina Lawal, this will offer little solace.
But Christians killed "witches" back in the 1600's! <\sarcasm>
The Islamic idea of American urban renewal:
from Islam to American: from The Religion of Peace(TM)
We would have tried to understand why the Japanese bombed us. We would have made sure that Japanese culture classes would be in every school and we would have had classes on the Shinto religion.
In the meantime we would have tried to understand those Nazis in Germany and would have held german appreciation week to try to be more understanding of german culture etc..
The world has gone mad. I can't for the life of me figure out how I have remained sane.
I am reminded of those lines from the great Irish poet Yeats.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
I'm one step ahead of you buddy.
It was too hard keeping up the struggle.
Now I have three squares a day, a nice padded cell, and iron bars on the window, which Dr. al-Zawahiri tells me is to keep the bad men out.
Salaam,
tictoc
For further thoughts, please see:
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit the Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
That's a good start, but they ought to have the girls sit in a seperate classroom, wear burkas, and undergo genital mutilation to get an even better understanding of Islam.
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