From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 07:00:08 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Amara Graps
>
> On Monday 01 September 2003 22:06, Terry Donaghe wrote:
> >> Isn't Islam a good bit younger than Hinduism, Christianity
> and Buddhism?
> >> Islam is like the teenager of world religions. It took an
> awful long time
> >> for Christianity to "simmer down." Perhaps, as religions mature, their
> >> followers get a bit more laid back. Now, obviously some Hindus and
> >> Christians can still get rabble roused and incited to violence, but in
> > general their followers seem to be less raucous.
>
> Samantha:
> >I have heard this metaphorical theory before. I don't believe it
> is valid.
> >Mormonism is *much* younger than Islam but not at all violent.
> Many of the
> >world's religions were much more mellow in their beginning than later on.
> >Besides, can the world afford to have a violent teenager over 1.3 billion
> >strong loose?
>
> I don't have an opinion regarding the 'age' of a religion, but I do
> think that religions evolve in time, and the violent aspects do check
> themselves.
> [snip good stuff]
> One example of such a person is Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid. He is an
> Egyptian teacher, and was a professor of Arabic Literature at Cairo
> University, who has written some works that interpret the Koran in
> the context of life at the time that the Koran was written. In his
> book: _Criticism of Religious Discourse_, he writes,
>
> "Since language develops with the development of society and
> culture, providing new ideas and developing its terminology to
> express more developed relations, then it is necessary and only
> natural to re-interpret texts in their original historical and
> social context, replacing them with more contemporary
> interpretations that are more humanistic and developed, while
> keeping the content of the verses stable."
>
> On 5 August 1996, Dr Nasr Hamed Abu-Zeid was ordered to divorce
> from his wife after being branded an apostate by the Court of
> Cassation. The court confirmed a decision by the Cairo Court
> of Appeals in June 1995 where the verdict stated:
>
> "The court announces the separation of the first defendant [Dr
> Abu-Zeid] from his wife, the second defendant, because of the
> former's apostasy and because she is a Muslim. And the court calls
> on the first defendant to repent to God Almighty and to return to
> the Islamic religion which was brought as a light to the people to
> being them happiness in this world and the hereafter."
>
> He is now living in exile with his wife in The Netherlands.
Amara, you were reading my mind (or maybe just some of the same books I've
been reading :-) I was thinking of Nasr's case when I was reading the posts
from last night and this morning over my first cup of coffee this morning.
I pretty much agree with you 100% here. Damien's right that there's
religiously-motivated violence that comes from basically all of the world's
religions, but religious violence isn't equally distributed -- there's just
no question that more of it comes from the Islamic world.
A vignette: My wife's teenage cousing spent a few week with us this summer.
One day he was sitting at my computer in my study at home and he gestured to
the bookshelves around him and said, "You sure have a lot of books in here
about religion. Seems weird for an atheist." I responded: "Don't doctors
have lots of books about disease? It doesn't mean they're sick."
Snapshot: Anyone questioning the virulently reactionary nature of the
Wahhabist brand of Islam motivating the Islamofascists might want to take a
look at this and follow and explore the links it leads to:
http://gregburch.net/burchismo.html#106107434278252559
GB, THHotA
GB, THHotA
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