1

This thread is a place for further discussion (if any is warranted) of the tangent that got going in the Fox News thread after a post about middle- or high-school students being asked to copy the calligraphy of an Arabic inscription that translates to “There is no God but Allah” as part of a world-studies curriculum.

2

Copying an Islamic inscription does not make you Muslim.

[edit]

Oops, I forgot. It kind of does, depending on how you look at it.

3

4

Totally new to this news. Did they tell the students what the inscription meant and allow for an opt out?

Edit: My daughter school’s allowed opt out when they made the children practice the Buddhist Mandala art form.

5

Some people in the other thread objected to such a lesson

…I am absolutely opposed to my kids being taught any religion without extreme qualifiers (like its all made up). Islam in particular, given it is the most repressive bigoted & sexist major religion in the world. So yeah, put me with the deplorables on this one.

This started a long digression that was off-topic in that thread, with arguments on one side reminiscent (at least to me) of Bernard Lewis’ “clash-of-civilizations”.

There are also related debates, such as when does the defense of Islamic dissidents and freedom of expression cross over into immigrant bashing (i.e. Flemming Rose)

6

Thanks Antlers. I think after my initial loose post and the follow up discussion I now would modify my comments pretty heavily.

So I would now say something along these lines.

…I am absolutely opposed to my kids being taught any religion without extreme qualifiers (like its all made up). Islam in particular, given some Islamic countries have in place extreme repressive bigoted & sexist laws and policies. So yeah, put me with the deplorables on this one.

I would further say that after discussion with folks who were kind enough to take the time to explain their position to me there are two ways of expressing my support of women’s rights , gay rights and freedom of expression within the Islamic world. One is the approach I took in that thread, of starting with the fact Islam is the common factor. This is probably counter productive and will make folks defensive. Understandably. It also wrong in many places, I think some (most?) Muslims would look at my characterization and point out it bears zero relation to their faith and how they practice it which is also fair.

The other, which on reflection I would now take, is to acknowledge that many Muslims in such countries where these policies are in place also are appalled at the actions of their governments and some of their fellow citizens and we should support their efforts for greater tolerance within those countries.

Finally I would say the problem with the clash of civilizations angle is it implies that there is something inherently bigoted about Islam which is unmutable. Which I do not believe. Atheists and Christians have done worse things in the past, in the case of atheists the recent past. I think one can look even in modern times at the rise and fall of tolerance in Turkey and say Morocco to see that Islamic countries can change as much as any other. However Islamic countries dont get a pass on being bigoted just because right wing groups in the west are bigoted to them. Its more than fair, in fact a duty, to loudly declare that women should be treated equally and that gay people have a right to fall in love without fear of arrest or execution and that atheists like me have the right to say all religion is false without fear of attack as well, equally of course they are entitled to tell me I am full of shit without fear of reprisals :)

7

My daughter was allowed to opt out of an entire class around Christianity here in California. I would assume that is true for the rest of the USA.

8

I am on the side of, students can be taught about the concept of any religion, in general. But any discussion of any particular religion as better than another is wrong. Exposure but not preference. No proselytizing. No force. No guiding. Religion as a general explanation.

An explanation of something that some people believe. But not the real truth. Because that’s bullshit.

9

IMO, having kids copy religious calligraphy is poor pedagogy. It doesn’t teach them much about, well, anything, except maybe penmanship. Having students examine calligraphy and understand that, in Islamic tradition, the art form is linked strongly with the Koran and religious practice is certainly acceptable, as is looking at medieval cathedral stained glass, Buddhist mandalas, Hindu statuary, or Jewish prayer shawls. Making students wear a talit, or create prayer wheel, or participate in the eucharist, etc. would be a no no.

10

In this case, it would appear to be that the “controvesy” is purely made up noise generated by imagined offences.

How much time would it take to spend some quality time discussing about the faith you want to share with him or her as a parent so that the child can understand your own “deeply” held convictions?

All I see is parents who do not even live up to their own “deep” convictions about their claimed faith. And wildly attacking a curriculum predicated on incomplete facts. There are plenty of people like that. Does not help their own cause.

11

This is my main objection to the exercise.

I’m sure a class I was in once involved drawing a boat and filling it with imagined settlers heading to the New World; that didn’t make me an Imperialist.

I had Religious Education classes at school, and we covered Islam, Hinduism, branches of Christianity, and Judaism. All were taught on a strictly factual basis (“this is what people believe and do”). It’s very hard to put one above the other when you lay them all out in a row like that, and I value that education more than most of the things I learned at school.

12

Endigim
Actually it’s better to listen to the Quran than read it, as that was the way it was intended to be received. And thanks to Microelectronic Silicon Cogitators it’s much easier to find a copy you can read along with while listening to it being read. Honestly everyone should probably listen to a Sura or two just to get a feel for it as part of your general education.

That said, as a student and product of the western world it’s… tough going. The rambling discourse of the Old Testament reads like the pinnacle of concision and narrative by comparison. As Tom Holland said, the Quran has a “distrust of narrative” and that the sense of linearity is “dissolved” in it. Listening to it also takes a lot longer than reading it. He also said, and i like this comparison, that the Quran doesn’t really compare to the bible and is more like the figure of Jesus himself, in that while the Bible may be “inspired” the Quran is literally the word of God made manifest.

The Quran has all sorts of strangeness that probably grates to western sensibilities; many Suras begin with something called the Muqattaʿāt, which is like three Arabic letters that no one knows what they mean. Imagine each book of the bible starting with a random string of numbers. There’s also almost nothing about Muhammad in the Quran and western scholarship has plausibly conjectured that much of what we “think” of as Muhammad is probably a construct of later centuries. There’s only one mention in the Quran about Mecca and that is completely ambiguous in location - it assumes everyone already knows where this is - and in general it’s very hard to place anything in the Quran for certain in time or space.

I actually like the pure Quran more that way, it amplifies the strangeness and star-and-desert beduin reflective mysticism about it. If you approach the Quran forgetting everything you can taste the dust of late-antiquity traders, educated in the Arabian Jewish diaspora which fled to the desert from Yemen, surrounded by a declining Christian empire.

This.

I’m really suspicious of Western’s spouting off about the Quran. (Ok maybe not Tom with his fancy Harvard Theology degree) As a 12 year old kid who read the bible cover to cover (ok maybe skimming the begats parts) and then stopped going to church, I found reading the Quran extraordinarily tough. I spent two whole afternoons, with computers and cellphones turned off, trying to read two different translations of the Quran.

The main thing I took away is that these 20-something western kids, many of them with ADD, who joined ISIS and have claim to have read the Quran are liars. For most westerns, who smirk at the lyrical flowery translations of modern Arabic, not speaking Arabic is huge handicap in reading the book. I found it like trying to follow somebody on an acid trip.

Last time I mentioned this, somebody on QT3, maybe Enidigm, suggested that listening to it is easier. Since listening to somebody on an acid trip is kinda of entertaining, I believe them. But I seldom have the patience to listen to QT3 podcast so listening to the Quran isn’t happening in this lifetime.

I guess I don’t understand the huge pushback against Rod’s points. ISIS and Al-Queda claim to be inspired by the teaching of the Quran and Islam. I blame Christianity for the Crusades, the Salem Witch trials, the oppression of woman, the moral support of slavery, and host of other historical and current problems. I also acknowledge that Christianity has done a lot of good in the world, and that much of worse excess of Christianity are no longer part of mainstream Christianity.

As folks who know a hell of lot more than I do about Islam, have pointed out Islam is 400-500 years younger the Christianity, and more than thousands of years younger than the other major religions. Maybe religions are like people they take a very long time to mature. I don’t know.

What I do know is today is that there is a very high correlation between fucked up place to live and places where Islam is the dominate religion. Sure there are exception, Guatemala and Nicaragua are Christian. Russia and North Korea, are not very religious and screwed up, Mynmar is Buddist and bad. Sub-Saharan Africa has so many problems that is hard to put the finger on any one religion.

But the fact remains, starting with Morocco, and stretching all the way to Indonesia there is band of countries where Islam is the predominant religion. For the vast majority of countries, they are horrible places for women, religious minorities, atheists and gays to live, and not great places for Islamic men to live either.

Muslims in America,with a few exceptions haven’t been a problem. However, in many European countries this century has seen a rise of predominately Muslim areas. These areas suffer from high crime, poverty, low employment, and have been breeding grounds for terrorist activities.

As @Tomchick said correlation isn’t causation, but it is also foolish to deny that there is a strong possibility that Islam is a major contributing factor to their woes.

13

Thank you for your kind words by the way. I was a little taken aback by the reaction to what I said. Hopefully everyone, including myself, has had some time to reflect on the discussion and come away with some things to ponder.

14

I think the middle ground position is to defend principles wherever they are being violated, rather than single out a particular religion, region, ethnicity or nation. So wherever women’s rights are being violated, these infractions need to be called out, but resist the temptation to pull the thread and attempt to unravel the tapestry of socio-economic-religious-political reasons a particular place is the way it is.

In the end those areas are going to have to modernize one way or the other and we certainly can’t hit them until they do - the rise of ISIS, the tragedy of Yemen (and entirely preventable disaster by all major powers), the tragedy of Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea (and the Crimean Tatar population), the Rohinga tragedy, the exodus of Syrian refugees as their country collapsed, the reversion of Turkey and Russian into semi-monarchial states… how do all these things effect the lives of women, in different and different ways?

What about, for example, the almost all-too-common murder-suicide in the United States of estranged men murdering the women that left them? Sometimes hunting them down for months or years until they do? What is the “cost” to women’s health overall here? Isn’t the “right” to own guns in a sense oppressing women since it is women who by a magnitude are victims rather than perpetrators of gun crimes?

What about the statistic that African-American women have 3x higher childbirth deaths than white women, with more educated women having higher death rates than less educated? How do we measure the “demerits” we need to assign?

I think defending women’s health and rights is a human rights issue for everyone, not just educated, white women, but men and women everywhere. And i don’t have a problem calling out repressive, backward practices in Islamic countries for what they are.

But when you start trying to measure harm, how does that work? And where do start fixing things - at home, or halfway round the world?

I’ll never forget visiting France thinking that i would so much prefer to be of African descent in France than the US, just the atmosphere and culture were so much different. (OTOH the tension with Muslims, many of whom dressed in half-traditional or fully traditional clothing, was palpable and magnitudes greater than in the US, to the point i was uncomfortable just watching it.)

Are women in Iran better off than women in the US? What about African-American women in the US? What about Latino women in the US? What’s the cost of stress, racism, misogyny and denial of basic health care?

There was a very interesting few articles months ago that pointed out, thanks quite possibly to Inessa Armand’s influence over the Communist party’s development of women’s politics - it seems that essentially women’s politics was secondary to Big Things that men cared about, and they were able to kind of make big progressive strides on behalf of women in the cracks of making a socialist dictatorship - that for many women in Eastern Europe Communism was a significantly higher quality of life than the subsequent reversion to market based economics, with greater access to education, health care, work and equality before the “law” (insofar as there was law).

The only thing to do is just stick by the principles, but apply them equally to everything and everyone. Defend women against Islamic backwardness while defending women against western/US injustices as well.

Not saying you don’t feel this way already! Conveying that distinction in text is the tricky part.

15

I’m really hoping we can get to an energy economy where oil production isn’t valued at all. I think that would be a major, major factor in reducing Islamic extremism and lessening the governments in the Middle East need to control their peoples through religion for profit.

16

One of the problems is that both secularism and Zionism are totally associated with Western imperialism and corruption in the eyes of the public in majority-muslim nations. This has nothing to do with any aspects of Islam, and everything to do with western foreign-policy follies from WWI on. The Viet Cong didn’t fight us because they were communist and we were capitalist; they fought us because we were perceived as an occupying power-- details of ideology didn’t matter.

17

You are confusing religion with political ideology. Christianity shouldn’t be blamed for the Crusades or the Inquisition because the real culprits were the political ideologies, their followers and their leaders, not religion itself. Where in the King James Bible does it say ‘Support and vote for the billionaire village idiot!’? Evangelicals love him because they vote according to their political ideology, not their religion.

The same goes with Islam. Islamism, the political ideology, is the problem, not the religion and anyone who attacks it does so due ignorance, often sprinkled with xenophobia and/or racism.

18

You can’t separate political and legal Islam from Islam, Islam is a complete system, a political system, a legal system and legal code, a cultural guide and yes, a religion too. Islam defines how to treat a rapist, the penalties for murderer, how to war on your neighbours, how to treat your women, right down to day to day activities how to brush your teeth, the length of your moustache and what you should do with your pubes. (this bit is about ""good Muslims emulating the prophets “perfect” life exactly, right down to groin grooming and the correct way to beat your slaves or engaging in “thighing” with your child bride)

19

“Everything to do with”? I thought in the other thread there was consensus that actually the most important factor was the corrupt power structures in islamic nations. But clearly you have no trouble with brutal dictators corrupting religion for their own purposes - it’s all the West’s fault!

A very similar argument could be used to blame the UK, US and France for the fucking Nazis. Listen to yourself.

20

You’ve never heard discussed the Treaty of Versailles in relation to WW2?