Response to Harrak

Submitted by Earlybird (United States), Mar 15, 2006 at 19:49

Harrak, one of the aspects of Islam that the West can learn from, as I mentioned, is keeping a close-knit family. Probably the most worrisome trend in the West, especially America, is the dissolution of the family. Everything stems from that, and if families aren't together, society can't stay together.

But you dodged my entire point about the treatment of women. Sure, it is a great thing for mom to keep the home fires burning, be there for the children and so on. But Islam, as practiced in Islam dominated societies, as you know, goes far, far beyond that. Women are little more than men's property. They don't get educated because they don't have the right to be educated. They don't study and work and produce in society because they don't have the right to do these things.

My point is that if the Islamic world could build a bubble around itself, with absolutely zero interaction with the rest of the world, as it seems to want to do, they would still have poverty, ignorance, brutality towards one another.. still be in a lot of the mess we see right now. All that until and unless Islam reforms itself and has it's long overdue Enlightenment.

During the golden years of Islam, when Muslims were building their empire and becoming the world's center of trade, science, astronomy, mathematics and the like, Europe was in the Dark Ages. They were in the Dark Ages because of bad, hardened, institutionalized religious ideas, and all of the misery that comes from it. Religion was a spiritual, economic and political prison run by the religious overlords. Only when Europe reformed itself and finally entered the Rennaissance, did they start to lay the seeds for later progress that they enjoy now.

Islam desperately needs to reform itself. The first step is to look at themselves and stop blaming the world for its failures. I am hoping that all of the upheaval we're seeing now is the beginning of an Islamic reformation.

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