Jackson Jambalaya

'Fish writes:
"Keep in mind that under Islam, there is no render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. Under Shariah, there are no crimes, just sins. Islam has never had an Enlightenment, a Reformation, or other movement that brings it into the 21st Century."

Google:

1. Turkish government
2. Nasserism
3. Al-Andalus
4. Ijtihad
5. Tanzimat

And the names...

1. Mirza Malkom Khan
2. Irshad Manji
3. Farid Esacks
4. Muhammad Abduh
5. Muhammad Rashid Rida

While you're at it, read Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God.

Islam has had an Enlightenment, has had a modernist movement, etc. etc. etc., and the vast majority of Muslims you would meet on the street in Jackson are at least as modernist as your average Southern Baptist. The trouble is that most of the Muslim world is dealing with Islamic radicalism, which should not be confused with Islam as a whole, though of course Islamic radicals love it when it is.

When Westerners point to the worst radicals and say "This is TRUE Islam; the rest of you are fakers," they make Osama bin Laden and his ideological comrades smile because this is EXACTLY what Qutbism (Google it) teaches. When you teach that the only true Islam is radical Islam, you are preaching Qutbism by proxy.

Acknowledge that it is the RADICALS who represent false Islam, and you will be on the side of the modernists who make up the majority (not the totality, but the majority) of Muslims in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.

To Tom Head, newest member of the CAIR fan club:

Dude…Karen Armstrong and John Esposito are the two most famous Islam apologists and the white washers in the world. Congratulations…you picked a real winner! Of all the people! Both of them have been so exposed it isn’t even funny. Indeed, Karen Armstrong’s name is evoked all the time as a joke by people making fun of exceedingly gullible “useful idiot” people who don’t know shit about Islam like you. Good…I can now make fun of you…you Karen Armstrong groupie!

Damn…when it comes to picking books to read, you have to be the world’s most gullible loon on the planet! First, you chose a book written by a well known Washington Compost leftwing propaganda hit artist, and then swallowed his garbage like there isn’t any tomorrows. Now you choose a book written by a regular Guardian columnist, the Guardian being the most radical leftist anti America/Israeli tabloid in the UK and one of the biggest Islamic apologists in the world. Not only that, but you swallow every bit of their leftwing garbage lock, stock, and barrel. Indeed, you become unwaveringly convinced!

If you want to learn whether or not Islam has truly undergone a so-called enlightenment, which is virtually impossible, BTW, buy books written by real Muslim apostates living in the West such as Ibn Warrick, Abul Kasem, or Ali Sina. American scholar of Islam Robert Spencer has written several best selling and highly acclaimed books. Dr. Andrew Bostom is probably the most scholarly author in the USA covering Islam. Bat Ye’or is the most highly acclaimed author and scholar in the world period and I highly recommend all her books.

As for as Karen Armstrong goes, Robert Spencer, Hugh Fitzgerald, and Bill Warner frequently challenge her to debates, which, of course, she always flatly refuses, so does that other “useful idiot” John Esposito as well when also challenged. As a matter of fact, the Saudis own Esposito! He’s bought and paid for! Not to mention that they are greasing Armstrong as well!


quote:

When Westerners point to the worst radicals and say "This is TRUE Islam; the rest of you are fakers," they make Osama bin Laden and his ideological comrades smile because this is EXACTLY what Qutbism (Google it) teaches. When you teach that the only true Islam is radical Islam, you are preaching Qutbism by proxy.




Karen Armstrong's Fantasies About Islamic Terror

[…] "It gets worse. Armstrong even goes to bat for the Wahhabis: “even though the narrow, sometimes bigoted vision of Wahhabism makes it a fruitful ground for extremism, the vast majority of Wahhabis do not commit acts of terror.” Obviously not, any more than the vast majority of Nazis actually worked in death camps. But in any case, the idea that Wahhabism is violent and the rest of Islam is peaceful is simply false. The doctrines of violent jihad are found among all Muslim sects. And Armstrong seems at least aware of this: she argues that jihad terrorism should be renamed “Qutbian terrorism,” stating that “Bin Laden was not inspired by Wahhabism but by the writings of the Egyptian ideologue Sayyid Qutb, who was executed by President Nasser in 1966.” It is at least good of Armstrong to acknowledge that Qutb was not a Wahhabi. Other Islamic apologists are not so willing to do so. But what Armstrong has not demonstrated, and cannot demonstrate, is that “Qutbian terrorism” represents in any way a departure from traditional Islamic teaching, or that most Islamic schools of thought reject its key principles."

Karen Armstrong: The Coherence of Her Incoherence

Karen Armstrong: Islam’s Hagiographer

An Apologist for Muslim Rage

Islam Soft and Hard

Karen Armstrong attacks Robert Spencer

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=7158&sec_id=7158

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=202

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17135

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-spencer121902.asp

http://sheikyermami.com/2007/04/29/karen-armstrong-attacks-robert-spencer/

'Fish, if you're not willing to go out and meet some actual real live Muslims in the local Jackson community, it's going to be pretty hard for me to prove to you that Muslims think this or Muslims think that.

You're a smart guy. You should be able to realize that a war between Islam and the West is exactly what the radicals want, while the concern of the average person, regardless of their ideology, tends to be more or less the same--get a job, fall in love, feed the kids, play with the grandkids, grow old, and confront death. That's the stuff of life for the vast majority of people in this world, regardless of the labels we stick on ourselves.

If you want to see Islam modernized, support the modernizers. Don't deny that they exist. Stand up for them. Become their advocates, because lord knows that with all the radicals out there in the word, modern Muslims need advocates.

oh really? You really are a dupe. The George Bernard Shaw of the jihadists.

You dumbass, I've DATED several muslim women over the years and knwo a HELLUVA lot more about them than you damn sure do. Had SEVERAL Iranian and LEbanese g/fs, including long term relationships so don't even think of lecturing me on if I only knew them because i know them A LOT better than you damn sure do. Do you even know what raw kibbe tastes like?

not to mention your argument is very weak because I am argueing in the general and you are trying to argue in the specific. I could use your exmaples to justify ANY religion or creed. There were nice nazis, nice communists, nice fascists, if you only knew them, you would see you were wrong. Its the friggin creed of Islam that is wrong, what you mistake as peaceful Muslims are in fact what I call non-practicing Muslims.

if its just the radicals then how come in every country that is majority muslim religious persecution is the norm? Even Turkey is now starting to slide back into fundamentalism. In case you haven't noticed, the Wahaabists are funded by the Saudis and are capturing a whole generation of young people in the west by getting a monopoly on the Islamic schools while you prattle about how if we only knew them. Read the NYPD's report on home grown terrorists.

Why don't you read what some of the arab dissidents who have fled the West have written. They radicals and moderate muslims don't disagree on Islam itself, just on the methods used. They ALL consider apostasy punishable by death to be fine for example.

Please. You've been drinking too much CAIR koolaid, which is a terrorist front group.

'Fish, when I think of ways to improve the future of Western civilization, "go to war with a billion people" doesn't really top my list. Just because a small percentage of Muslims want to declare jihad doesn't mean that non-Muslims have to declare jihad, too. Let's leave holy war to the lunatics.

Oh really? There were over a billion people in the Communist world at its height and we didn't mince words and called it for what it was. We knew there was a differencce between the hard core commies and the population but that didn't affect how we treated their governments nor our criticism of communism itself.

and no one said go to war with a billion people.

Communism is a great analogy, actually, because even there folks recognized that not all communists were bad. Note the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, or the praise Western leaders extended to Alexander Dubćek.

Yeah, well, I read a thread like this and I think of Gregg Harper's comments about Iran and Syria. It's the same sort of thing, isn't it, when we focus entirely on the nastiest parts of the Muslim world?

Personally, I think our government is way too cozy with the Saudi regime--not because it's Muslim, but because it's a totalitarian state. Likewise, I wish the Olympic games were not being held in Beijing--not because China is communist, but because it's a totalitarian state. But why should I be PO'd at nations like Turkey, which is Muslim in the same way that the United States is Christian?

Of all the nice muslim people I've known, all that were truly nice people were non-practicing.

Reagan still called the Soviet Union an evil empire and still criticized communism and its immoral features even while dealing with Gorbachev. To equate pointing out what Islam really is with declaring war on a billion people is true only in the ivory tower.

What Islam "really is" is whatever Muslims say it is. Culture determines religion, not vice versa. A literalistic interpretation of the Bible, for example, would leave plenty of room for stoning apostates--but because we happen to live in cultures where stoning people seems weird, we use a more sensible and humane interpretation.

Many Muslims do the same with the Qur'an. Let's do them the honor of seeing them as the true representatives of Islam in the modern world, and not the fanatics who want their (and our) blood.

Then why is Mein Kampf banned in some countries? Why did Communist countries ban the Bible?

Think they were just afraid of the "culture" or the actual creed itself, not how it was practiced?

They were afraid of the culture. Mein Kampf is banned in Germany and Austria, for example, because the culture of white nationalism is a real danger there; it's not banned anywhere in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa (with the possible exception of South Africa), as far as I know, because the culture of white nationalism is no real danger there.

Likewise, Communist countries banned the Bible but did not ban the Code of Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, etc. Why? Because Western culture, as symbolized by the Bible, was the perceived enemy.

From a cultural perspective that emphasizes such things, the Bible preaches (inter alia) genocide, infanticide, rape, holy war, death by stoning, and oceans of blood. From a cultural perspective that emphasizes such things, the Bible preaches (inter alia) nonviolence, universal love, gender equality, world peace, mercy, and a culture of life. The Qur'an is no different. You can find verses in it that horrify you and verses in it that are indescribably beautiful, and they will find their concretization in people whose values horrify you and people whose values are indescribably beautiful.