Islam - What do you think?

[ChaCha]

Hello everybody,

I've been posting on MN for years and have met some lovely people on here. I am a practising Muslim, have been for around 6 years and chose this way of life for myself after much soul searching.
I recently met up with some ladies from my PN group here and not an eyelid was batted about my headscarf or the obvious fact that I am a Muslim. We have been chatting online for a year and a half and it has never been an issue.
It shows me that we can live in a tolerant society and that our own beliefs do not need to be forced upon others. I have found the inner peace that I was looking for for so long and this has prompted meto ask the following:

1. What makes you happy/content in life? What/Who do you turn to when you've had a really bad day? Do you often think about death and how does it effect your day to day life?

2. What comes into mind when you see a woman wearing a headscarf and how do you view Islam?

My thoughts for the day. Thank you. Off to change nappy x

DominiConnor:

Israel kills only about a dozen Moslems per week, the camps they force them into typically have enough food and resonably clean water.

'only a dozen Moslems per week'

Have you any idea what hell Muslims go through on a daily basis at the hands of Israel? My friend lives in Gaza and trust me - its hell and the camps are awful!!! An enemy of Islam most certainly does not provide a better place for them to live.

SueBaroo - I like it when people smile at me and no I wouldn't mind if it was men either. I've had Muslim men smile at me when they recognise me as a sister and they are happy to do so and smile at me with respect and say Salaam - I don't mind that at all!!

The men not wearing women's clothes is a bit much given how God makes some men wanting to do exactly that actually but I'm sure more modern liberal Muslims are able to adapt it. I think it's hard also to have your gender altered in Saudi etc than here which is cruel but again one could say it's just being backward.

Actually if he meant women's clothes for that country then people in 2007 in the UK - men who wear traditional male garb which is actually women's clothes great long robes things arguably they breach the Prophet's edicts in 2007 by not wearing business suits.

Nikki, have you any idea what many Palestinian women go through daily at the hands of overzealous, self-rightious Moslem men?

Amnesty International have called on the The Palestinian Authority to do something about the violence against women, sex crimes and honour killings that have increased in the last several years, especially as very few of those responsible have been brought to justice. Orla Guerin wrote a report for the BBC about this a couple of years ago, here .

The Palestinians in Gaza have been given a chance to govern themselves but instead what you see is in-fighting between the main rivals, Hamas and Fatah.

Most people recognise that Israel's role in this whole sorry saga has been monstrous in many respects. However, the Palestinian authority itself is corrupt and violent.

The constant finger pointing at Israel to blame them for everything wrong in the region is too easy imo as it deflects responsibility away from where it belongs. The Palestianians need to start taking responsibility for their own actions and recognise that they too have to change if they want to see their lives improve.

I think it may not be wise to talk about Israel or the thread will altar. Orthodox Jewish women cover up too.

So Albania may be okay (perhaps the communist past will have helped) and Turkey may be better than Saudi but only because Attaturk de mulsimised the law and banned headscarves and gave women a few legal rights. Egpyt? Probably not - is it 70% of women have their clitoris cut off or other forms of FMG there? Morocco may be? Algeria perhaps.

ah well, Nikki, have a from me now anyway.

It is harder to do with niqabis, though. I think smiling at someone makes you quite vulnerable socially, if that makes sense, and if you can't see if someone is responding well, it seems a bit risky. Not sure why.

And given that I haven't answered the OP, usually my faith helps me to be content, I pray when I've had a bad day, and talk to my dh, and yes, death occurs to me quite a bit and does affect how I live my day to day life.

When I see a woman in a headscarf, I usually wonder how she ties it. I view Islam as a very varied group of people with different views, some quite offensive, some quite charming and sensible.

FMG. Now there a horrendous practice.

yeah, but FMG isn't an Islamic practice, as far as I'm aware. I don't think Christianity has managed to completely eradicate it in countries where it's culturally acceptable.

No thats true its a cultural practice, but often done in the name of religion.

My dh, ds, family, friends, health and relative security makes me happy. Plus my mother is a happy and positive person who is curious about life and always helping others, rarely self-seeking or self-serving. A great example imo.

1. I am ambivalent about this.

Where Islam is followed as a spiritual practice I think it is wonderful (I lived in Pakistan once for six months a few years ago so I've experienced what was once a laid back muslim country). It is pro-family and pro-respect for women etc.

BUT! Unfortunately I think that Islam can be taken over by men untempered by their womenfolk. I think this is where Islamic extremism comes from. Extremism seems to come hand in hand with misogyny. This is a huge problem in countries (like Iraq) where women are stoned to death for having a boyfriend. Also the way Iran is now going backwards on women's rights - I don't know if this is positive.

If women could wear the headscarf and still be fully equal politically then that's fine. But there is a question about whether women symbolising respect to men by covering their heads doesn't too often lead to a male abuse of that diffidence. I think the same problem has happened in the RC Church where men rule that world without democratic female input. I think the Church is wrong in that, very wrong and it ends up unable to create justice.

IMO men need to be tempered by women who are by law their equal. Only then can we have peaceful societies.

Islam is a beautiful religion but it doesn't seem to create a beautiful state for people - like Christian societies, it fails where men are solely in charge imo.

Three years in Turkey showed me that it is just about possible for democracy and Islam to co-exist.However there are some dark forces at work there.
We were in the Far East where it is a different world to Istanbul.

Dh works in agricultural development and would often come home very despondent having visited yet another village where the men did nothing but sit around smoking and drinking tea (oh and beating women on a regular basis) whilst the women killed themselves in the home and the fields.

He organised a lot of training and as it was done with EU money,it was of course open to both sexes.There was huge resistance despite it being the women overwhelmingly who were doing the work.

\link{http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2083583,00.html\Observer article

Again

It's dangerous, but then so are almost all religions, as they teach people to dislike/distrust/hate anyone that doesnt follow the same religion.

Nothing will make a person do evil more cheerfully than the belief that their god will look favourably on them for doing it. We're talking entry to heaven, 72 virgins etc

Oh yes,have argues long and hard about the 72 virgins. Like the hiding women away stuff,onoone has ever given me a satisfactory answer.
Perhaps Nikkie or Fuzzy would like to try?

It's a mistranslation from 72 'white raisins'

Similarly the virgin mary was no such thing, it was a mistranslation from the hebrew word for 'young woman'

I have a lot of respect for the Islamic religion but the misogyny in many many Islamic cultures is hard to cope with.

Women in some Islamic countries have the rights that women in the UK had in medieval times when women were barely more than chattels.

This is what I can't reconcile: my respect for the Islamic faith with the use of the veil. For me it is inextricably bound up with the suppression of women's rights. And this is to show no disrespect to all the Muslims in the world who treat women impeccably.

I have yet to hear a convincing theological defence for the veil. It seems cultural to me and inevitably it looks slightly demeaning.

NikkiBFG, I was not taking some care to not paint Israel as a good place for Moslems.
However, nowhere run by Moslems is any better.
Be the "wrong sort of moslem" in Saudi or Kuwait, and it won't be even slightly nice.

The "only a dozen moslems killed per week" was irony. But it's about the right number, and looks almost like mild carelessness compared to other Moslem countries.
Gaza is not a good place, and to be fair there are spots run by Moslems which are far nicer.
If you are the right sort of Moslem.
Dubai is nice to Westerners, but it's record on Palestinians isn't that great is it ?

For every Moslem killed by America or Israel, 50 are killed by other Moslems. Even in Iraq, nearly all the deaths are by things like car bombs which don't even try and kill American or British soldiers.

Yes,Iraq thing predominantly about Shias vs. Sunnis these days.

We haven't really found many Islmaic countries that are acceptable even if Islam is okay. If you went back to most Christian countries at the same development stage... 1500s England? would it be so bad - burning "witches" kind of stuff... no I don't think so. We had lots of women working and running landed estates and writing. I don't think we've really ever had the anti woman traditions every single muslim state on the planet has. So is Islam like communism - okay in a book but a complete disaster in practice?

Islam was at one point a class act, and as such is a scary warning for today's civilised countries.
In the 1th sentury Christians were still burning people for saying the Earth went round the Sun, at at time when Moslems were using it in their calculations.
Human rights in England at this time were about the best in the world, so it's not quite fair to compare them, but Moslems weren't notably worse than central Europe or China.
Socially they were ahead, in that they were much more diverse and tolerant. Scientifically they crapped on us from a great height.

I've never quite understood exactly how they lost the plot. In this timescale China turned inwards due to a nasty mix of grotesque overspend by government and internal palace intrigue.
But Moslem countries didn't have that, Moslems for the previous few centuries were superb navigators and merchants, and for some time after.
Such was their prowess in naval warfare that the US Navy was basically formed to fight Moslems.
Unlike Christians, learning has always been very important, even now one may gain political power by scholarship. No Christian leader has done that ever to my knowledge.

My only idea is that their attitudes to females has screwed them. It's well documented that the education level of the mother is pretty much the best predictor of the outcome for the child, male or female.

Also the competition for women is less intense. Thus crap men are more likely to pass on their genes. Multiple wives accelerate that, and also have more subtle, but bad effects on the gene pool.
It's notable that Moslems in civilised countries do far better than at home. Presumably because their genetic and cultural defects get diluted.

Mostly we progress in terms of civilising yet here lots of Muslim states are going backwards, stripping women of rights they have under law. It's dreadful. It's the resurgence of fundamentalist conservatism, not Islam. In fact it's often counter to what Islam should be.

One of my daughters called from university the other day to talk about a topic which included where outsiders emigrate, move in - for some reason they were doing Canada and then leave or something and I mentioned the Romans, They came here, introduced some civilised stuff like vineyards and central heating and then as soon as they left we didn't adopt any of that and went backwards to how we had been. ACtualyl may be that's in part what has happened in parts of Africa the British left. Zimbabwe coming to mind. india has done prety well but it does kill more female babies than any nation on earth except China so I'm not sure it's going to get very high up on my international list for protection of women.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "what Islam should be". Islam is what it is. It's like saying an AIDS virus "should" not kill it's host.
Religions behave exactly like illnesses, they mutate to exploit local conditions or they go extinct.
A virus is merely a packet of information it behaves just like an idea.