When television host Bill Maher declares on his weekly show that “the Muslim world .?.?. has too much in common with ISIS ” and guest Sam Harris says that Islam is “the mother lode of bad ideas,” I understand why people are upset. Maher and Harris, an author, made crude simplifications and exaggerations. And yet, they were also talking about something real.
I know the arguments against speaking of Islam as violent and reactionary. It has a following of 1.6 billion people. Places such as Indonesia and India have hundreds of millions of Muslims who don’t fit these caricatures. That’s why Maher and Harris are guilty of gross generalizations. But let’s be honest. Islam has a problem today. The places that have trouble accommodating themselves to the modern world are disproportionately Muslim.
[TOP RATED COMMENT] "A small minority of Muslims celebrates violence and intolerance and harbors deeply reactionary attitudes toward women and minorities."
No. A small minority of Muslims PERPETRATES violence, but unfortunately a far larger subset - perhaps a majority - permit it, enable it, and harbor it.
[ANOTHER] "So, the strategy to reform Islam is to tell 1.6 billion Muslims, most of whom are pious and devout, that their religion is evil and they should stop taking it seriously? That is not how Christianity moved from its centuries-long embrace of violence, crusades, inquisitions, witch-burning and intolerance to its modern state."
Sorry Fareed, but that is exactly what happened. The West started to take our holy book less seriously. The Old Testament is just as warlike, intolerant, sexist, and homophobic as the Koran. But we started to take things like constitutions and democracy and science and human rights more seriously than religion. And until Islam does the same we will have problems. [The Washington Post] Read more
