Posted on 12/03/2004 5:34:26 PM PST by 4.1O dana super trac pak
Five days before 9/11, Charles Vincent bought his first Koran. Six weeks later, while smoke was still pouring from the remains of the World Trade Center, he formally converted to Islam in the mosque attached to the Islamic Cultural Center on 96th Street and Third Avenue in New York City. A blonde, blue-eyed 29-year-old from Torrance, California, he readily admits that he chose an unlikely moment to fall in love with the world's most newsworthy religion. But in the three years since, his devotion to Islam has only deepened. Like a growing number of white Americans and Europeans, he has discovered that Islam is not just the religion of those "other" people.
(Excerpt) Read more at laweekly.com ...
What this fatwa you quote shows me is that American Muslims are celebrating Thanksgiving and this retro-Imam doesn't like it.
After all, why bother to issue the fatwa if there is no problem?
In the Middle East, some Imams are always criticizing all the traditional and folk holidays except a couple of really important Muslim days. People have a lot of fun traditions over there, too, that these guys are against.
You know the Puritans in early America didn't want people to celebrate Christmas much either. But even the Puritans were party-people compared to some of these radical Imams.
Basically, these fanatics are mean-spirited grinches. There are a lot of local customs in Islamic countries that they try to stamp out, too. They especially hate Valentine's Day which seems to be celebrated. Of course, this is Western, but young people like it.
In New York I saw one of these converts raving against Thanksgiving as anti-Islam by telling black people it was a white man's holiday. Everyone was telling him to put a sock in it.
The Middle East used to have huge plague outbreaks. The original reason for not having a "pesky" dog in the house may have been an enlightened health practice.
People typically got plague from handing flea-infested livestock and dogs. If the dog is in the home, his fleas get on the people's clothing and bedding.
You can find evidence of plague spreading from livestock and dogs to soldiers in the Iliad. The Greeks used to sacrifice their livestock to the god Apollo (the god who caused place). This was to propitiate Apollo, but burning the livestock DID stop the plague because it killed the fleas and infected animals.
The Black Plague in Europe was a bit different and seems to have spread from person to person contact. It killed at leaste 30% of the population and took hundreds of years to recover from. In the ME, it was usually animals and their fleas that gave people plague. The worst plage is from marmots in Asia.
The prohibition against pork for both Muslims and Jews is similar. There were good health reasons.
In America where we have vetinerians and better sanitation, such a passage might be seen in a more modern light: Muslims should be clean and follow enlightened health and sanitation practices.
This rule about the dogs was a very good rule AT THAT TIME.
Perhaps it could be reinterpreted for our times as showing that Mohammed wants people to follow good health and sanitation practices.
I have a dog. She is a pest and a pig! I keep her as protection from Al Qaeda:)
She eats my food if I turn my back, wrecks my furniture, and pees on the floor. She costs a fortune at the vet, too. She gets skin infections sometimes and has to have surgery because she eats pins off the floor.
Well, I have been stuck with this "pesky" dog for 12 years. And she and her fleas have kept me safe from Al Qaeda so far. However, she was hospitable to the burglars we had once.
Islam is not too off-base about dogs, IMHO!
Correct previous post to read that Apollo was the god who caused plague. (In their religion).
I am not Muslim, but I think that there is a very important role for educated Muslim scholars. They need to help their people reinterprete their scriptures in a contemporary context. There are passages in the Koran about tolerance. Mohammed said, "There is no compulsion in religion."
Many middle-class American Muslim families let their girls make a personal decision about wearing a head scarf or not, and the girls are educated and have good professional careers. Young Muslim teenaged girls I know are very modest and good students.
The way it is now in the ME, anyone can claim to be an expert and repress other Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Christians.
Bin Laden is not a scholar of Islam. Neither are the Taliban.
He was probably attracted to definitive teaching of right and wrong. Something that many Christians and Jews no longer teach.
That's the same reason why some black Americans are attracted to the religion of Islam too. That is what I hear from people when I ask. There's a lot of hypocrisy out there and a lot of christians not living up to their witness.
Well, I'll be! Sho' nuff! I didn't even notice. I'd been wondering for ages when he would put one in here and lo and behold!
Of course had I properly previewed my message before sending it out I would have noticed the typo!!!
My take on it is that so many of them in so many countries are illiterate and/or they take at face value what the mullahs cherry pick out of the koran and force feed them. They're too ignorant or scared to seek another path or possibility.
Congenital jihadosis?
Just another side effect of the 1965 Immigration act and the mentality that sponsored it. Its explicit goal was cultural and physical genocide and that program is proceeding as planned.
One more thing we can thank Ted Kennedy for.
Senate floor manager and Camelot knight-errant Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, assured jittery senators that "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually."
Bump
Or...it may be that they believe the mullah that told them a battalion of giant spiders defeated our guys. How do you go against a group of peolple who will believe that BS?
"I have been reading and hearing about that. Islam is one religion in desperate need of a reformation. The ever-present implicit threat of violence runs like a thread through it's history and practice."
Now that's the whole problem. Take a good look at the way that Islam seems to work. For starters, they use the technology and convenience of the 21st century to enforce a 1400 year old system of rules and say that's OK because it benefits islam. At the same time, these 1400 year old rules are so outdated and so out of place and out of context that they do neither benefit (the majority of) muslims nor islam itself. Every bit of reformation affects the position of those in power. What's left: islam for the sake of islam. And 'islam' meaning 'submission', the islamic state implicates an state of oppression for the good of the people. It appears to me that the harsher the oppression, the more the people embrace it, as they take it for the way of true islam.
Yeah, it sounds weird, because it is. Go and have a look in countries under islamic rule. Not much freedom. Apart from those things that are obligatory, of course.
But what's really interesting [it you read the whole article] is that he did get a lot of dates. And he had a steady job [at the Marriott hotel] where he was a model employee for five years, and where everyone "loved him," and he seemed to have a bright future moving up the ladder.
IOW, this is not some loser/nerd who joined Islam out of a lack of anything else in his life. He was loved by both his employer and by women, and he gave that up for Islam, and says he is happier for it.
If I read the article right, he lost the Marriot job shortly before he jointed TROP. He apparently had other troubles as well (like just getting beaten up and was in danger of losing an eye). In short, he was probably at a low point in his life & questioning his basic assumptions when the Dark Side snagged him.
Yeah, he was at a low point, though his employer, friends, and girlfriends had no problem with him.
He sounds like a lot of people who go on to join Christian fundamentalist or Hari Krishna or New Age groups. He was down on Western materialism/consumerism, and "looking for something." But not because he was a loser or a nerd.
Hmm. I never thought of it that way but I think that you made a very valid point.
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