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by Bill Day. Memphian Bill Day is two-time winner of the RFK Journalism Award in Cartooning. His cartoons are syndicated internationally by Cagle Cartoons. Cartoons Archive →
With all due respect, concern about a population that idealizes Sharia Law is not necessarily a phobic response, it could indeed be quite rational.
So Chatul, can you say the same thing about a population that idealizes Old and/or New Testament law? Should a phobic response to that be considered rational?
Civilizations that revere the Old Testament/Tanakh and/or New Testament have yielded liberal, democratic civilizations, e.g. USA, Western Europe, Israel. I have yet to see a liberal, democratic, egalitarian society in Muslim majority nations. This is not meant to slander Muslims as individuals. But we should ask tough questions regarding world views based on the Koran and the Hadiths, and the willingness of those individuals to integrate into a plural republic.
It’s not as if Christianity has a shining history either – no religion does. There’s the Inquisition, the Crusades, Ku Klux Klan, 30 Years War, Holocaust, wars in Ireland, witch burning, anti-Semitism in Rome while Jews were dying, and countries where women were not allowed to vote and people were slaves. We should be careful about patting ourselves on the back, particularly as we flirt with totalitarian language and proposals that are contrary to the founding principles of this country. At this point in time, Islamophobia is a huge threat to this country and Western civilization if we abandon our core beliefs.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations: “Most experts cite Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mali, and Senegal as democracies. (Indonesia, with 196 million people, is the world’s largest Muslim nation).”
Muslim countries have had more women elected to their highest offices while we still wait. Thomas Jefferson referred to the Koran when writing this country’s founding documents. Etc.
We demonize and dehumanize other religions and cultures at our own peril.
Here’s the thing: I have attended Muslim services, including Ramadan. The religion isn’t for me – but then again, many forms of Christianity aren’t either. reject many of its central tenets…as I do every other great religion in the world. We strengthen the world by reaching out and talking to, rather than at, each other. That’s why the anti-Islam fervor stoked by people like Donald Trump is such risky behavior for our own liberal, democratic, egalitarian country. We stand at risk of remembering who we are and when that happens, history has proven the consequences.
Chatul: Thanks for the comment and the conversation. That’s precisely what we are wanting to encourage here.
You do bring up good points; the history of Western Christianity is clearly not without its faults, being practiced by corruptible man. And I’m certainly not advocating for totalitarian practices or religious tests on citizens. My main concern is that American liberalism in particular has a significant blind spot as concerns Islam. There is such a fear of being deemed a cultural chauvinist or cultural Imperialist that we are unable to name the specific dangers of certain Islamic worldviews, notably Apocalyptic Islam driven by Islamic eschatology and the incompatibility of Sharia Law and our plural republic. We should take their prophecies seriously especially as regards End Times warfare; interestingly in the NYT yesterday there was a piece precisely on this topic:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/world/middleeast/us-strategy-seeks-to-avoid-isis-prophecy.html
I would argue with your contention that Islamophobia is a threat; the true threat lies in Apocalyptic Islam and attempts to bring about al-Mahdi.
Thanks for the erudite conversation. There’s no question that Isis is driven an apocalyptic view of the future. Fareed Zakaria did an illuminating piece on this a few weeks ago, but as he pointed out, it doesn’t fundamentally characterize Islam. Speaking of End Times, some right wing Christian politicians do not believe in issues like climate change because they believe that it speeds up the end of times, and they want to do that because that is when Christ comes again. So, the point for us is that in large religions, whether Islam or Christianity, we can find examples of any behaviors or many interpretations that (in our opinion at least) subvert the original text.