Islam - What's your view on it?

  • Thread starter SalmanBH
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@TenEightyOne, it all comes down to frequency of occurrence.

It is my observation that a disproportionate number of violent incidents citing religion (or the lack of it) as the justification belong to Islam.

Do you disagree?

EDIT:-

Added this link http://www.webcitation.org/query?ur..._NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf&date=2012-08-04

Notably, this report from 2012 attributes 93% of suicide bombings to Sunni Muslim sources, 56% of all terrorist attacks, and "about 70% of all fatalities".

So it's not just my observation.

If 56% of the world's population were Sunni Muslims, then the attack rate would not be disproportional.

If 93% of the world's population were Sunni Muslims, then the suicide bombing rate would not be disproportional.
 
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GBO Possum
@TenEightyOne, it all comes down to frequency of occurrence.

It is my observation that a disproportionate number of violent incidents citing religion (or the lack of it) as the justification belong to Islam.

Do you disagree?
Click to expand...

I agree that the number of incidents in the name of Islam has clearly increased.

It doesn't explain how many of those incidents were perpetrated by people who might ultimately have undertaken similar incidents in another name or whose causes were attributed to Islam while in fact being completely due to personal insanity.
 
TenEightyOne
He's from an Islaamic background (nothing to suggest any extremism) and has been described as "unstable" by friends. Insane extremism is still looming larger, I think, at the moment Islaam is a very visible cause that's riling some nutters who are unconnected to any concerted extremist organisation. They're just nutters :(
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Those who carried out the attacks on 9/11 were nutjobs too. That doesn't mean it had nothing to do with US foreign policy pre 9/11.

I agree with you in the other discussion you're having. There's a lot of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam lately. That doesn't mean it's an inherent part of being a Muslim. For all we know this guy could have joined a biker gang or become a juggalo in an alternate universe.
 
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Noob616
Those who carried out the attacks on 9/11 were nutjobs too. That doesn't mean it had nothing to do with US foreign policy pre 9/11.
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Also true.

To be clear; extremists are mostly nutjobs. Some organise themselves very well and create new networks of nutters but sometimes there are sleepers until events drive their particular insanity to action.
 
TenEightyOne
Also true.

To be clear; extremists are mostly nutjobs. Some organise themselves very well and create new networks of nutters but sometimes there are sleepers until events drive their particular insanity to action.
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I agree, I don't mean to say that Canada or the US provoked either this attack or 9/11, but the actions of those governments appear to be somewhat related to the motivation behind the attack.

We'll never know for sure in the case of the shooting in Ottawa, but it seems fairly realistic that a targeted attack on a Canadian soldier by a guy who's father may have been fighting against the Canadian military in Libya would be related to the missions in 2011, and the fighter jets en route to Iraq on Tuesday.

It's really tough to say though. To actually go through with this and murder an unarmed soldier in cold blood is the mark of a very insane person. I don't know if there's too much more we can read into it than that. We can look at the rise of Islamist terrorism and be concerned about what the Muslim community's role in terrorism is, but by the same argument there appears to be a social condition in America that leads to white guys going on killing rampages in schools and movie theaters.

I really just can't behind the idea there's anything inherent to Islam that makes these people go off the deep end. I don't think there's anything inherent to American culture that makes people go off the deep end and shoot up a school. There's mentally ill people in any country, and these people just find whatever sick delusion to justify their actions. I guess that's what scares me the most about this anti-Islam sentiment, that it's being implied that there's no other way Islam can exist.
 
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GBO Possum
So I stand by my question which asks what can be changed about Islam to halt the spawning of violence.
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When you have recieved a large radiation dose (e.g. in case of nuclear power station accident), you take iodine pills to displace the radioactive iodine-131 from your thyroid.

The same with Islam. The radical one must be displaced with the one peaceful, not imposive and compatible with the secular society, with the state support.

When the Chechen Wahhabites were invading a Caucasian village in the '90s, their first targets were the mullahs who professed normal Islam.
And nowadays, the Supreme Mufti of Tatarstan has kicked the radicals out of his mosques, that's why they were trying to assassinate him. Moderate Muslim preachers are the biggest enemies of radical Islamism.
 
GBO Possum


It is my observation that a disproportionate number of violent incidents citing religion (or the lack of it) as the justification belong to Islam.

Do you disagree?

EDIT:-

Added this link [url]http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.nctc.gov/docs/2011_NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf&date=2012-08-04[/url]

Notably, this report from 2012 attributes 93% of suicide bombings to Sunni Muslim sources, 56% of all terrorist attacks, and "about 70% of all fatalities".

So it's not just my observation.
Click to expand...




The central moral problem of human existence is that we are torn between higher and lower potentialities. The Islamic world, of which the Sunnis are the great majority, has suffered a series of great disasters from which they feel aggrieved, and brings forth the worst in them:
- Break-up of the Ottoman Empire
- Sykes-Picot treaty drawing crazy national lines across established ethnic and tribal lands
- Discovery of huge oil deposits under lands controlled by Sauds under the sway of Wahhabis
- Creation of the modern state of Israel in the heart of the Levant
- Occupation of land in the Middle East by US and allied forces
- Invasion of lands in the Middle east by US and allied forces
- Dispossession of Sunnis from control of Iraq and Syria.

What can be done to fix the problem? Find men of peace, patience, good will, and above all, realism in addressing the problem of peace. On all sides.
 
Dotini
What can be done to fix the problem? Find men of peace, patience, good will, and above all, realism in addressing the problem of peace. On all sides.
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But it's so much easier to stand back and convince ourselves that all Muslims are wicked, and so anybody diametrically opposed to them is righteous by default. Why would I want to waste all that time and effort actually trying to solve a problem when I can criticise anyone who isn't me for not thinking like me and feel better about myself for it?

There might be a correlation between Muslims and terror attacks, but there's also a correlation between conservatism and narrow-mindedness.
 
prisonermonkeys
But it's so much easier to stand back and convince ourselves that all Muslims are wicked, and so anybody diametrically opposed to them is righteous by default. Why would I want to waste all that time and effort actually trying to solve a problem when I can criticise anyone who isn't me for not thinking like me and feel better about myself for it?

There might be a correlation between Muslims and terror attacks, but there's also a correlation between conservatism and narrow-mindedness.
Click to expand...

Surely you don't think there are many people contributing to this thread who actually have convinced themselves that "all Muslims are wicked"?!!

I see little or no evidence for this assertion.
 
Rage Racer
Moderate Muslim preachers are the biggest enemies of radical Islamism.
Click to expand...

That's a core point; my fear in the UK is that the population who read certain private newspapers (they still exist in huge numbers) are constantly told that all Islam is bad. That's leading to an unwillingness to interact with the moderate-99% to solve issues of radicalisation amongst the vulnerable parts of the community... and youth, the easiest demographic to radicalise in any way, whether it's with Jihad, contrails or Bieber.
 
Intermission: Happy Islamic New Year!

And yeah, Moslems are people with feelings too. So dont assume Moslems are all warmongers, you know, just like other religions even atheism.
 
“The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That is intellectually ridiculous.”

(Spoken by Sam Harris on Bill Maher's Real Time show, the one in which Maher and Affleck had a spat.)

I could not agree more with Harris. Asserting that Islamophobia actually means Muslimophobia (a diversionary technique which is popular in this thread), is quite ridiculous, and is in no way useful in discussing Islam. It is changing the subject, and avoiding the issue.
 
GBO Possum
“The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of Islamophobia where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That is intellectually ridiculous.”

(Spoken by Sam Harris on Bill Maher's Real Time show, the one in which Maher and Affleck had a spat.)

I could not agree more with Harris. Asserting that Islamophobia actually means Muslimophobia (a diversionary technique which is popular in this thread), is quite ridiculous, and is in no way useful in discussing Islam. It is changing the subject, and avoiding the issue.
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You're forgetting it's perfectly ok to falsely call people racist bigots for criticising or questioning Islam :sly:
 
It's a religion. Like many religions, anyone who digs deep enough into the texts will be able to find something they can use as an excuse to kill people who are different than them. The *actual* reasons for wanting to kill people, however, usually lies outside of their religion.

I hope I don't have to remind anyone of the horrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity. The biggest difference is that actions that can be linked to muslim people have happened more recently. It's hard to get really angry about things that happened 800+ years ago, right?
 
Pseudopod
It's a religion. Like many religions, anyone who digs deep enough into the texts will be able to find something they can use as an excuse to kill people who are different than them. The *actual* reasons for wanting to kill people, however, usually lies outside of their religion.

I hope I don't have to remind anyone of the horrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity. The biggest difference is that actions that can be linked to muslim people have happened more recently. It's hard to get really angry about things that happened 800+ years ago, right?
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Doesnt need to be that far though.

Remember Jamestown? IRA? That was 30 years ago.

While Islamophobia do exist years earlier, its no secret that it became booming when 9/11 arrived.
 
I'm not even 30 years old myself, so I don't really remember those :P. I probably should have known about them, but I'm also not very big on history, not even recent history :(.
But yeah, you're right
 
Pseudopod
It's a religion. Like many religions, anyone who digs deep enough into the texts will be able to find something they can use as an excuse to kill people who are different than them. The *actual* reasons for wanting to kill people, however, usually lies outside of their religion.

I hope I don't have to remind anyone of the horrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity. The biggest difference is that actions that can be linked to muslim people have happened more recently. It's hard to get really angry about things that happened 800+ years ago, right?
Click to expand...

Actually, the biggest difference is not the recency of Muslim religious conflict. That conflict goes back at least to 657 C.E. with the Battle of Siffin, which was the first battle between Sunni and Shia Muslims. That conflict has continued to this day, possibly taking more lives than conflicts between Islam and other religions.

Prior to that battle, we saw the battles with non-Muslim people essentially over control of land. Religion was a factor, but not the only one.

Certainly we can remember the IRA and the Jamestown incidents, however, neither of these conflicts lasted for over 13 centuries, neither resulted in the deaths of millions, neither involved a large number of countries, neither displaced millions of people from their homes and both conflicts are in the past.

That is not to say that terrible things haven't been done in the name of Christianity. However, the scale is quite different.
 
EF12345678
That was interesting, and I do agree with her that we, here in the west, identify muslims as terrorists or people with a violent nature. It's those few people who do those unspeakable things that ruin their image. The five pillars do not come anywhere near telling people to enact violence.
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Some further research yielded this:
And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And al-fitnah [disbelief] is worse than killing...
Click to expand...
I think the crazy one's forget to read the last part. :P
but if they desist, then lo! allah is forgiving and merciful.
Click to expand...
 
EF12345678
Some further research yielded this:
And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And al-fitnah [disbelief] is worse than killing...
Click to expand...

I think the crazy one's forget to read the last part. :P
but if they desist, then lo! allah is forgiving and merciful.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Translation: Convert or be killed.
 

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