Muslims anger at Popes remarks

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Story here .

I wonder if a Fatwa will be taken out against the Pope who had the temerity to say something about Islam? His comments have been misconstrued and to be honest, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

Both Christianity and Islam have a bloodthirsty history but I think that Muslims are becoming too hypersensitive towards their religion. Why is it that clerics like Abu Hanza can stand on the streets of London, spewing hateful rhetoric about the West but the minute anybody in the West says something about Islam, Muslims around the world get their headscarves and beards in a twist? Chill out for goodness sake. I don't recall the Muslim collective condenming the Iranian President when he called for Israel to be wiped of the planet. I'm certain that there are many Muslims who make disparaging remarks about Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Sikhism etc. Religion is not just about words, it is about living up to what you preach and how you treat others. No wonder so many people in this country are turned off religion.

I personally agreed with everything the Pope said and interestingly, so did my male Muslim friend.

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It's hard to separate defective cultures and people from the system they promote.
Back when there were Socialist countries, you had huge sets of rights. The constitution of the Soviet Union or Poland gave you more rights than any 2 western countries put together.
Except they didn't....
In Britain, you actually have few, if any rights. The so-called human rights act would be laughed at by an American rights lawyer, and in a blind test would be assumed to be of some tinpot African state.

But we have systems and a culture that works.
They don't.
You can't fix a broken culture with good laws, and vice versa.
The US constitution is well designed and has been maintained by some of the smartest people on Earth. Sharia law started off that way when the most educated part of humanity was Moslem. But the culture when titsup.
Sharia is defective, but it's like any other tool, the quality of the output is mostly the skill of the artisan.
Nowhere is Sharia is corruption endorsed, yet Moslem societies make Bush and Haliburton look like Robin Hood.
There is the infamous Sharia doctrine of weighting a woman's evidence as half that of a man, which makes rape trials almost impossible.
But actually that doesn't really matter in most cases, since in Moslem societies they wouldn't prosecute if they had video evidence and the law said you could lock a man up for rape on evidence no stronger than "he looks the type".
And before we get too holier than thou (or less holy to be more precise...)
Look at the case of the head of the Catholic church in England. He has gone on TV to announce that he personally aided and abetted in the rape of many children, and that he and his colleagues active assisted in thses crimes.
Is he in jail ?
No.
Does he get personal interviews with the health mininster so he can explain his ethics to them ?

We're ahead of Moslem countries, but let's not kid ourselves we're knights in shining armnour.
Religion corrupts society, the more religion you allow in the worse it gets.

I see what you are saying and I can't speak for all Muslims worldwide. All I know is that I try to follow the five pillars of Islam and I believe that I will one day have to answer for myself and that this life will be over and the next life eternal. For myself it is very simple.

I really don't think that Muslims want to repress the Western world's freedom to think and speak. The way I see it it is the West that wants to impose its ways on Muslims. And I don't mean democracy and freedom.

I can see that that the Pope perhaps didn't mean to cause offence and that reaction has not taken this into account. And people who are determined to hate Muslims will always find quotes from scriptures taken out of context to confirm to themselves and others that Muslims are ignorant and stupid.

What I sense on this board, and it depresses me, is not only criticism, but hatred of Islam. This is probably partly because many people are duped by the hardline/extremist Muslims who have seized the limelight and who have in a way become the face of Islam.

I just cannot fathom how you can describe Islam as "dangerous and repugnant" - the five compulsory requirements are:

-giving one fortieth of your wealth annually to -charity
-praying five times a day
-fasting during the month of Ramadan
-performing the Hajj pilgrimage once in your life
-accepting that there is one God and the the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is his messenger.

These are the basis of a Muslim's faith, the five things that a Muslim must do. I just cannot see how anyone could object to this.

my post was addressed to bloss

saadia I think the basic pilars and ideals of all religions are good. They are ways forn living and are very similar. The trouble is that people in charge of religious organisations twist and corrupt these precepts for living in order to gain the maximum anmount of power for them. The chrsitins have done it and so have the muslims. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What annoys me is the thoughts being bandied about that the Pope should not have said this because of the sensitive times we live in.
Why should anyone pander to a group of extremists and why should freedom of speech be taken away?
There is little democracy left in this country. I don't think any religious group has the right to go to a country who's founding religion is different and demand religious rights. We have bent over backwards to accommdate the neeeds of other groups at the expense of our own needs.
We would not be afforded such rights in musilm countries. We would be expected to abide by their laws and quite rightly too. The same should happen here.
My view has always been of you dislike where you are go to where you agree with the state of play.

saadia, I know we have had this converstation in the past. There is nothing that is not honorable in the five pillars. But Sharia law is more than these 5 pillars isn't it?

I fully agree with you that 'hardliners' have grabbed the agenda, and that isn't healthy. The asinine comments of the BNF are not healthy either, but neither is the putting to death, under sharia law of women who claim they have been raped. There are aspects of sharia law which, I feel have to under go analysis and reform. I know that there are many muslims who agree with this, and many have had to go into hiding because of death threats from the extreemists.

There are muslims who want debate (and I'd firmly put you in that catagory) and there are muslims who take any form of analysis of Islam as an insult.

We need dialogue, but that has to come from both sides. At the moment the extreemists have such power they have effectivly silenced much of the debate that would help Islam.

The reason you can't have a workable legal ystem based upon faith, is as saadia says, you are answerable to some god for your actions.

That's personal morality, not social engineering.

You are in effect trying to build a motorway flyover with Lego.

To run a society, you have to look at the consequences of your actions, not the actions themselves.
You need to think it through.

No religious book I've read has the hero taken up a mountain by God and told, "yes that action is within the law, but look at what happened when you did it, you fuckwit".

In a large society, the links between cause and effect are murderously hard, and inevitably that means you have to do "wrong" things to achieve the "right".
You need to accept that any justice system is a blanace between locking up innocent people and letting some guilty go free.
All relgions have an obsessive interest in the sex lives of other people, yet to enforce such laws is to impose conditions that can only ever be oppressive even to those who sexuality the men in charge approve of (and yes, they are always men).

The problem with having to do "wrong" things is the effect it has on men of high moral standing and intellect.
(and yes, it's men again).
When you do a wrong thing, hareful in your eyes of God, you are a bad person.
Almost no-one wants to be a bad person, and we observe that what actually happens is that in their hearts they convince themselves that the person they are doing the bad thing to "deserved it".
That's why punsihments in religious societies are invariably more cruel than in civilised ones.

A major factor in any useful justice system is relative deterrents. Thus people who fence stolen goods typically get harsher penalties than the actual thieves. This is because they are critical to the functioning of the criminal economy even though their activities rarely if ever involve violence or even stealing the goods themselves.

But the killer, the real fuckwitted core of what's wrong with faith as a way od making law is that you can't be wrong.
Until a few years ago a British man could not be convicted of raping his wife. That was a bad thing.
It was fixed.
At one point a married woman could not own property in her own right, again fixed.

Until the 19080s confessions were regularly beaten out of suspects by British police with the connivance of the judiciary. Now mostly fixed.

But you can't "fix" religious law. Yes of course you can tinker with the edges, but if the law says "X" and it's the law of god, then you're screwed.
Altough I am not superstitious, I see it as a monstrous and offensive conceit to the God I don't worship that sexually dysfunctional males can scribble a few words on paper, claim it is perfect (perfection in human works of course anathema to Islamic teaching), and then impose misery upon millions.
If you want to be nice to people because your invisible friend tells you so, I have no problem with that. The Islamic traditions of charity and hospitality are fine and wise. It's when you try to impose them on others and use it for managing the affairs of millions, not just the poeple in your tent that it works like a skyscraper made of cheese.

I have started to think recently that it is the idea of life in eternity which is the real trip up in human brains. And i speak as a Christian. It pushes the evangelical christian right to will on Armeggadon and war, it motivates suicide bombers to kill in the hope of paradise. The whole idea of paradise as seen traditionally [christian and muslim] is utterly ridiculous. if there is a kind of consciousness after eternity, it is beyond human comprehension and nothing like anything at all. But i don't think that is the point. JC was more interested in teaching us how to live in this world, to create heaven here, and Islam can also be used to create a good world here. But the delayed gratification/heaven thing is a real flaw and sucks. It was created in a time when people had so much faith in superstitions and old legends and our consciousness, along with out knowledge about science, has changed beyond recognition. The bible can only talk in metaphor, as some ideas are beyond words - the problem is when this is taken literally.

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there's no need bloss. Islam is huge vast religion with Shias and Sunnis within which there are four orthodox schools of law and numerous differents other groups ranging from ultra-orthodox Wahhabis to spiritual Sufis.

Many of the laws are open to interpretation and to interpret them a person need to be extremely learned in Islamic history and jurisprudence.

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good point ruty and I have been thinking this recently myself - the whole delayed paradise gratification idea provides carte blanche for extremists of any religion. I , like you, speak as a Christian.

The deputy leader of the ruling party in Turkey has said the Pope will go down in history alongside Hitler and Mussolini. FFS. How offensive is that? Denigrating the holocaust in order to throw a temper tantrum about someone being less than tactful?

yes, another sensible and measured comment there then ( the comment edam just reported). Is the entire world ruled by total thick wankers then???? or just bits of it???

sometimes I wonder how things would be if more or all world leaders were female.

Well, a few Thatchers might slip through...

Trouble is in order to be a powerful leader you need to be a certain personality type, and that is not a very nice one. That is human nature unfortunately.

Yes that Turkish bloke did make me laugh. How you can equate any comment (however offensive, if you choose to interpret it as offensive) with the murder and persecution of literally millions of people, without inviting the rest of the world to conclude that you are a total stranger to reason, is beyond me.

Speaking as a Muslim, the popes speech did not move me to violent acts on an effigy.

I mean looking at it this way, he's the pope, he's not going to say nice validating things about any religion but his own is he really??

The quote was wrong though, the Prophet (pbuh), never spread Islam by the sword, nor was it allowed to be. Early on in his mission, the Prophet (pbuh) was offered kingship over his people if he were to stop propogating Islam, he refused, saying were the tribal leaders to offer him the sun in one hand and the moon in the other, he could never give up the call to Islam.
The Prophet himself was of a noble clan, his first followers were from among the poor, none of whom were coerced into Islam, but those apposed to Islam (who were generally the very wealthy) could and did torture the early followers very badly.
There is a passage in the Quran which begins 'Let their be no compulsion in religion the truth is clear from error...' rough quote.

The Prophet (pbuh), did not allow those who converted from Islam back to their old religion to be persecuted either, a man did do this in the Prophet's (pbuh) time and he was left alone he left Makkah many years later without re-embracing Islam and no Muslim harmed him........

I don't think Muslim's are being over sensitive to the remarks being made here, no other creed has to put up with such a continuous onslaught to every aspect of their lives as Muslims currently do.

But I wish the few who turn up to burn effigy's at the drop of a hat would stop it, it's making us look just like the media want. A bunch of uneducated savages.

fuzzy - good post!

I was reading some quotes by muslims in the Guardian yesterday, a range of views, many just like yours, but the photos were flames and protests. But 'Majority of Muslims fail to react to Popes speech' doesn't really make a headline, does it?

Also, most of us are completely unaware of the content of the Pope's academic sppeeches to academic audiences - and it's interesting that this has made the news largely as 'Muslims call for...' Muslims anger at...' rather than 'Pope makes speech to german academics'. i.e the news was the reaction and response rather than the Pope's action.

Well, yes, Blu, 'Pope makes speech to German academics' is not a headline. Even in the Catholic Herald, I suspect.

Ruty, I think the millenial (afterlife) aspect has changed in the modern world to religious martyrdom.

well he's apologised now

Anyone notice the story about the nun in her seventies who has been murdered in Somalia? The BBC are reporting it as if there's a connection between that and the pope, but I'm not sure if there is.

He's sorry for causing offense, that's not the same as apologising for what he's said.
I would really hate for him to apologise for what he's said.

Fuzzy, I was very interested to read what you said about the Phrophet allowing someone to leave the Islamic faith.

Apostacy can be (and often is) punished under Sharia law with death. An excellent example of how the Phrophet's sayings and laws were used humainly and wisley by the Prophet himself, but not by later leaders in Islamic jurisprudence.

I think that is why I have so many issues about Sharia Law. Taken as they should be, it would be nearly impossible to stone an adultarous woman to death, but they are so often not used in that way, because the laws are applied by flawed men....often very flawed men.