[x]

I'm no great fan of Islam, but there's a lot of variety in a 1400 year old religion and the civilization that inspired great poets and philosophers in an earlier era, so I won't condemn the whole culture of that part of the world.

I'll grant that Muslim cultures have a lot of problems with modernity, but the things you complain about were seen in Western cultures and religions in the pre-modern era. We've overcome some pretty unsavory things in our own past: what reason is there why Muslims can't do the same?

When you say Islam is brutality or savagery or a concentration camp world, you set the terms in such a way that millions of people in the world will choose brutality or savagery in order to be Muslim. I don't think that's either a useful policy or a fair assessment of their religious or cultural heritage and its capabilities.

You force the conflict between cultures to be more ferocious than it need be, and run the risk of creating a situation that's more dangerous than it has to be. A century ago, plenty of Russians attacked Orthodoxy as a backward religion that needed to be replaced or abolished. What they got was much worse. That will also be the case if more moderate and reformist forces in the Muslim world lose out.

[attiladhun2]

We won't call it a "clash of civilizations." We can call it a manifestation of "cultural differences, particularly religious ones." Whatever its name, it does, I fear, raise barriers for lovers of liberty. I seriously doubt that Rahman will be hanged. No decent respect for the opinions of mankind could save the Bamiyan statuary, but now that the "moderates" are in control, there is a good chance that Abdul can in effect be ransomed. The Afghan legal authorities are hinting at a solution of declaring him crazy and "hospitalizing" him. That was the technique perfected by the Soviets to deal with their apostates, after improved communications made it awkward for them simply to shoot them. My conjunction of these two totalitarian mindsets is not factitious. The courageous "Manifesto" recently signed by Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie, Ali Ayaan Hirsi and several other writers and thinkers begins thus: "After having overcome fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism." If Islamophobia is the fear of Islam, these folks earn their place among charter Islamophobes. Each of them is a Muslim born and raised, now threatened with murder for what they have dared to think and say.
--John V. Fleming