Islam vs. Friendship

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Wasn't planning to post just now, but this one's a whopper!

Pardon the figure of speech, but Isaac Schrodinger should be required reading for anyone who has difficulty understanding just how all-encompassing and anti-life the requirements of Islam are. In a short post, "If it's good, it's haraam," [my link] he points to a post at another blog that explores how difficult the religion makes it just to enjoy the company of friends over a meal.

Why is it so difficult to be friends with other Muslims? Simply because there's so much to fight about. This is perhaps why my dh's closest friends are non-Muslim.

Muslims are proud to say that Islam is a way of life. The religion permeates every aspect of a Muslim's day, whether it's something as simple as cleanliness after going to the bathroom or manners when speaking to an elder.

However, this allows for the hyper-judgmental Muslims to jump on every chance they can get to point out that other Muslims are simply "wrong."

Let's take a simple scenario.

Mary and Mo are having Samir and Suhaila over for dinner.
Kaleidomuslima then ticks off no less than a dozen things that "can be fought over (or at least questioned in a person's head and not mentioned out of politeness since it is a dinner invitation ... or it's mentioned anyway ... or gossipped about later behind the guilty party's back ...)". Among them:
Mary is talking about her and Mo's near future plans to go on vacation in Las Vegas. She forgets to say inshallah [i.e., God willing]. Suhaila politely corrects her, while silently wondering why Muslims would bother vacationing in Vegas.
Some of the things on the list strike me as possibly being related to taboos not necessarily Islamic, such as one in which the male guest is disgusted by the lack of a water pot in the bathroom -- which he takes to be a sign that the host couple do not practice proper hygiene.

The comments are also worth perusal. Two in particular stand out. This one, by a Moslem, pretty much makes the point that when one is confronted with a choice between living one's life and abiding by the dictates of Islam, one is called upon to choose the latter.
Islam was revealed 1400+ years ago to our Prophet and that Islam is still the same. We have changed, we have customized Islam and we question people that are on the right path. We choose to get along with non muslims and make friends with them just so we aren't reminded of our duties as a Muslim.

And God forbid, when one Muslim reminds another for a missed Salah or Islamic ettiqutes we just choose to never make contact with them again!

May Allah give you all Hidayah! [bold added]
And Luckyfatima pretty much sums it all up with this:
[I]t doesn't matter how long you've been a Muslim or the extent you go to in interpreting what is haraam, some annoying person will always find something u r doing wrong and then feel it is their duty to correct u
And once again, for more than one reason, I am reminded of the following episode from my own life.
[The] group counseling session ... turned out to be me and a bunch of women who, with only one exception, hated men. I quickly began to note a pattern. These harpies would sit around and listen to the words that left my mouth, ignoring their context and assigning their own politically correct meanings to the individual words. Then, when I said something they deemed sufficiently outrageous (i.e., thought they could get away with as an excuse to attack me), they'd all pounce on me.
How much worse than an hour with a bunch of multiculturalists must an entire lifetime surrounded by sanctimonious, meddlesome Moslems be!

And I'm no psychologist, but surely the motives of both groups of people, each attempting to control the actions and indeed the thoughts of others to the nth degree are essentially the same. This underlying motive, which strikes me as a species of what Ayn Rand called "hatred of the good for being the good" (aimed particularly against the virtue of independence), surely explains very much of the sympathy and support Islamofascist terrorists are getting from so much of the emotionalist left.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Deleted one sentence.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Yo, Gus, you write: "And I'm no psychologist, but surely the motives of both groups of people, each attempting to control the actions and indeed the thoughts of others to the nth degree are essentially the same." This provoked a lot of connected thoughts, I have to say. First, I'm surprised you didn't bring up the issue of conformity in all closed societies, which is similar. (But then you did say you weren't planning on posting just yet...) Think of the distrust of outsiders and eccentrics common in small peasant communities, for example, or on a more literary level one of Thomas Hardy's novels.

The extreme is perhaps the witch-burning craze. If you look at the contemporary court records and other reports, you find that in most cases the person pegged as a witch had frequent run-ins with the neighbors and was often old, alone, and in some way eccentric; a striking regularity is that the accused witch had a history of relying on the charity of others, and was accused after a misfortune, such as the illness or death of livestock or family members (very frequent in 14th-17th century Europe), of witchcraft in retaliation for being refused charity or being treated shabbily. (Quite often the supposed witch was accused several times over several decades, and some of the accused witches played up the earlier accusations as a way of assuring that he or she would not be refused assistance so readily in future.)

In many of the records you can see a strong tension between community standards (including the demands of charity for the penniless) and a streak of individuality or eccentricity (more often the latter). (As for sources, I'm relying on my memory of Keith Thomas's superb Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England and Robin Briggs' excellent Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft.)

But, and a big one, that's just a passive acquiescence in conformity common in traditional societies with little surplus or chance of advancement in which famine and epidemic are mysterious forces lurking all the time around the edges of daily life, and it rarely results in the judicial murder of 200,000 to 300,000 people over two centuries. (That's what I remember the best current estimate to be of the death toll of the witch craze.) That happens when there's a conscious insistence on conformity to a creed, usually one backed by putative divine sanction. Witches were reported throughout antiquity in many societies (in ancient China, for example, those forecasting the future were often put to death as a threat to the state--forecasting a change of dynasty in times of trouble could easily lead to rebellion aimed at precisely that, thanks to the ancient Chinese belief that the ruler ruled by a mandate of heaven that could be withdrawn if he failed to succor the masses), and throughout the European Middle Ages, but it was only after the development of Catholic thought under Aquinas that witch trials infested the landscape. (Aquinas made a space in theology for witches as satanic henchmen, which gave a sanction to punishing them as a supernatural threat.)

That doesn't mean that the Church stood as one behind witch trials--generally the higher levels of the hierarchy (bishops and so on) tried to keep a tight control over the witch hunters, while specialists in witch hunting were often lower in the Church. The witch hunters pursued witches partly for advancement, partly from living in the midst of the communities in which the witches lived. And there were some witch trials that had nothing to do with tensions in close-knit local societies--witchcraft was at times a charge used in the midst of theological battles, such as strife between Neo-Aristotelians and Neo-platonists in Paris that caused a number of leading university scholars to be put to death. (Which is one reason the higher orders of the Church had to step lightly around the witch hunters; even if they thought them frequently unjust, too much interference in their work could get them themselves accused of being witches.) An interesting source on this is Hugh Trevor-Roper's The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In fact, it's about the only part of that essay that has stood the test of time, sad to say; Trevor-Roper was generally a very fine historian, but not here.

This is the common thread to the Muslim religious intolerance and the feminist ideological intolerance you point to, which reminds me as well of Puritan New England in certain respects. More precisely, of the late 17th and early 18th century. Earlier the Puritans were not so strident--they didn't have all those fractious non-divines infesting their City on the Hill, but by the time of Cotton Mather their writings were full of fear of the loss of godliness and the subversion of their closed community by economic change, such as the spread of the money economy into the interior, and the continued immigration of non-Puritan Englishmen. This factor seems to have been at play in the Salem witch trials, for example.

The modernizing world was a threat to the Puritan divines, and the modern world is a major threat to the Islamic traditionalists; the radical feminists see an equal threat to their values in modern industrial society, which thrives on the values of independence, social mobility, social anonymity, and a bundle of "masculine" values like competitiveness that they reject along with much of capitalism--and, often, modern "masculinist" science. A sad irony of this whole mess of pottage is the typical radical feminist interpretation of the witch craze as an ideological war on uppity women and vestiges of paganism by the Catholic Church and the state in collaboration with modern science and early capitalism.

For example, in her profoundly silly The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone put the death toll of the witch craze at something like 10 million and added that it "must" be seen as an explicitly political act directed at women. (In fact, the proportion of women accused of being witches varied greatly from region to region; in Iceland, for example, 90% of the witches were men.) But in fact, on the local social level the witch craze merely continued age-old customs; on the theological level the battle against witchcraft was frequently associated with neo-Aristotelians and attacked by neo-Platonists; historically, the founders of modern science (such as Galileo) were closely associated with neo-Platonism, since neo-Platonism tended to hold that the Platonic forms were imminent in nature and subsisted throughout the transformations of things, and thus provided a concept of universal physical laws that could be discovered by experiment.

(This, incidentally, was the context for Francis Bacon's statement that in true science nature needed to be put to the rack. In the Neo-Aristotelian view, nature could only be understood by observing it without any interference (artifice); in the Neo-Platonic view, nature could be "forced" by experiment, which to a Lord Chancellor like Bacon immediately suggested the difference between unsolicited testimony and questioning someone on the rack. But of course, since he also used the age-old trope of Nature as a woman, he's denounced for his masculinist attack on feminine nature by any number of feminist thinkers.)

And historically the decline of witchcraft trials (starting in the middle of Elizabeth I's reign in England; witchcraft was steadily decriminalized starting in the later 17th century and I believe finally struck from the lawbooks in 1714 or so) went hand in hand with the rise of modern science, whose mechanical worldview (anathema to many radical feminists) had no room for God or Satan, and certainly none for angels and witches. (It's worth adding that many of the founders of modern science simply ignored witchcraft in their books. Partly, no doubt, many of them considered it a subject unworthy of discussion, but more important, even simply saying that there were no witches could have by that fact earned you trial as a witch.) Similarly, the spread of a market economy and the breakdown of the traditional closed society shattered the age-old matrix of social conformity and abiding misfortune that fed witch trials on the local level; it's the rise of modern anonymous mass industrial society and a mechanical world bereft of mystical forces and evil spirits that ended the supposed war on women of the witch trials--and which threatens to end the ongoing war on women in the Islamic world.

Admin said...

Peace,

This post of yours shows how much you actually understand the true teachings of Islam. I don't where on earth you get your information from because most of the things you mentioned here (such as backbiting) is forbidden in Islam UNLESS there is a great reason for doing it such as warning people of a harmful person!

If Islam is as you described it to be, then it wouldn't have a lot of people converting to it! Millions of non-Muslims are entering Islam daily all over the world. Indeed Islam is the fastest growing religion in the entire world!!!!

If you would like to get a better understanding of Islam, please feel free to visit my blog!!!

Peace

Toiler said...

Gus,

Reason.

Dare I venture any more than a peep after Adrian's excellent overview of history? Well, here goes anyway...

I think fundamentalist/traditionalist Muslims and Christians as well as multiculturalists use their morality the way it ought be used: to support their metaphysics. Of course, their metaphysics are disastrously flawed, but more than that, note that their metaphysics are all essentially the same in one key respect: tribalism.

It would follow that tribal ethics would require social pressures, like those you describe in your post. Tribalism can't work any other way.

Reason.

-- Toiler

Gus Van Horn said...

Adrian,

You are too kind to imply that ANY of that was even close to being on the tip of my tongue! Thanks for lending your far better historical knowledge to my post.

Incidentally, when I read this yesterday (I was in a hurry.), I mentioned to my wife that Adrian Hester had left a comment "about twice as long as my actual post. Of course it was very good." She laughed and said, "That's Adrian for you."

And as to you, Mis Understanding Islam, you are proposing that I ignore the word of two people -- whom I cite -- who have the misfortune of being intimately familiar with your barbaric creed, not to mention the numerous acts of murder and pillage conducted on a near-daily basis by your fellow travellers, which include the summary executions of nearly 3,000 of my countrymen nearly five years ago -- in favor of your blog and the "argument" that Islam is growing. Millions of people choosing a religion has nothing to do with the truth of its teachings or with whether the teachings of said religion will lead, in fact, to peace or to anything else worthwhile. Your blog is little more than one appeal to authority after another. There may be more rational interpretations of Islam out there, but yours is not one of them.

I have no use for your medieval superstitions. Take solace in the "knowledge" that I will rot in Hell.

Toiler,

I wouldn't say of the tribalists "ought", but your point about tribalism relying on social pressure to maintain their belief system is well-taken. (Think: liberal echo chamber.)

And I love your salutation and sign-off. Nice answer to the "peaceful Moslem", that! (And I revised my comment about when you made yours, hence yours appears first.

Gus

Unknown said...

Yo, Gus, I should add for the chuckling value that my first thought when I read your posting was, "Yeah, there are Church Ladies everywhere."

Toiler said...

Gus, you wrote: "I wouldn't say of the tribalists 'ought'".

Okay, point taken. It would be better for my life if someone who holds bad metaphysical premises were to glom on to the right ethics by accident. I guess that happens fairly often.

I meant to say that it's not surprising when a man's ethics follow from his metaphysical premises. Call me a stickler for philosophic consistency. :-)