Thread: Anti-Arab/Muslim sentiment in the United States

Originally Posted by ephekt

Terrorism is obviously political in nature, but what are the non-religious motives for killing apostates and infidels?

What is the specific situation you are referring to? What I'm saying is that Muslims don't just go out and start killing apostates/infidels purely because they read it in the Qu'ran. If they are out there killing people, and claiming it's because they are obeying a Qu'ranic commandment to kill apostates and infidels, then there is something else at work, something underlying this surface-level rationalization.

Originally Posted by ephekt

Or the non-religious basis for Sharia?

I'm not saying that Sharia law isn't religious in character, I'm saying that when Muslims resort to violence in attempts to institute Sharia law (or carry any other putatively religious task), or even just try to push the issue in a strong way, there are underlying non-religious causes at work. There is a very good reason, for instance, that calls for the implementation of Sharia law have been numerous and loud in Europe's population of Islamic immigrants, but practically non-existent in America's population of Islamic immigrants.

Originally Posted by ephekt

Oppression of women?

I think it's fair to say that some of this comes from underlying causes, but it's just as likely that, for example, women are oppressed in Islamic states due to fundamental adherence to scripture.

This is ESPECIALLY wrong, because 99% of the ways women are mistreated in various Muslim societies have absolutely zero basis in the scriptural content of the Qu'ran. Just off the top of my head, the following things are NOT derived from Qu'ranic scripture:

Prohibiting women from driving cars
Prohibiting women from traveling alone
Prohibiting women from going into public alone
Prohibiting women from obtaining education, or from having the same educational access as men, or from becoming scholars
Prohibiting women from activity in the political/public spheres, or from employment in general
Prohibiting women from initiating divorce against their husbands
Forcing women to wear burqas or similar garments
Forcing women to marry against their will
Obliging women to walk behind the man they are with when in public
Honor killings!
Female genital mutilation!

I certainly don't deny that all of these things (and more) go on in some Islamic societies, though they are far from universal, and many of them are not exclusive to Islamic societies either (e.g. honor killings and FGM). I don't disagree with your core assertion that "women are oppressed in Islamic states"; that is certainly true in many cases. Nor do I disagree that many Islamic societies have a long way to go on women's rights in general. BUT, it's important to realize that very little of this mistreatment of women is based on "fundamental adherence to scripture". If Islamic societies adhered fundamentally to scripture when it came to the treatment of women, then the situation of women in most Muslim societies would be far far better than it is today. People look at women being mistreated in the Muslim world and say "oh it's because of Islam's scriptural content regarding women," but it's really not. This mistreatment stems mostly from non-Islamic cultural roots and from the activities of conservatives/extremists pushing ideas that aren't in the Qu'ran.

I don't even disagree that in some respects, the Qu'ran itself does ascribe unequal rights to men and women (like most other things written during the 7th century, it fails to incorporate the ideas of womens rights/equality which largely originated in the 19th century). But again, if Islamic societies/states treated women in accord with whatever is written in the Qu'ran, most of the complaints that people make against Islam's treatment of women wouldn't exist.