Sweden raised its terrorism alert level on Thursday one notch to the second-highest, following a recent string of public desecrations of the Qur'an in the Scandinavian country by a handful of anti-Islam activists, sparking angry demonstrations across Muslim countries.
You’re trying to generalize 2 billion people and tie the actions of a few to the entire community.
Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population with over 300 Million Muslims. It also is home to 300 distinct religions with centuries of coexistence. The majority of the worlds Muslims live in democracies and get along just fine. Places like Senegal and Jordan just don’t have what you’re describing.
Pakistan is a poor country with a literacy rate of less than 50%. There’s a lot of violence there, but their Hindu-majority neighbor India with similar culture and poverty ALSO has massive religious violence problems with current lynch mobs and pogroms. It’s not the fault of a single religion.
And FYI, the reason this book burning got any attention at all is because these countries bombed Iraq and Afghanistan, and the far right in the country is very public about hating Muslims and immigrants, so this was an attempt at trolling people. The Muslim community largely ignored the entire thing, because its very clearly an attempt at trying to insult, and have not tried burning things in response. The media is focusing on the 0.001% of the community that did otherwise, just like how the makers of South Park got death threats from Christians even though almost no Christian’s worldwide joined in.
Never said it was, but I know multiple people who are non-Muslims in Muslim nations. The stories I hear from my friends in Egypt and Bangladesh are horrendous.
There’s monsters in every religion, but prevalence varies. In Indonesia, they still actually flog people for being gay sometimes… And if I said what I really thought about Muhammad in Riyadh and I was a Saudi citizen, I would die for it.
Oh, and no, I guarantee it’s all religious outrage, with the book burning. Stop trying to pretend it’s different. I get that you live in the West and want happy feelings about your religion, but your lived experience pales to that of my atheist and Christian friends who have to live in the Arab and Muslim world.
Prevalence varies BASED ON socioeconomic factors.
I’ve lived in poor Christian countries that still jail people for homosexuality. Jamaica and Uganda lynch suspected gays, but Argentina does not. Wealth and education are the big difference between the two, not religion. And religious fundamentalism is on the rise all over in the developing world, if you ignore that and try to blame a specific religion in general then you’re missing the massive death tolls in places like Central African Republic or the genocides in Myanmar.
Saudi Arabia is a total dictatorship and a tiny one at that (Chinas has 2x as many Muslims as Saudi) ; say what you want in a Muslim-majority Democracy like Albania or Senegal and nobody will stop you.
There were some highly publicized incidents in Bangladesh but they were loudly and widely condemned by the public and the religious leadership, then the government caught and punished those who did it and made examples of them. Violence is a human behavior, but you can’t blame a religion for it when the religion explicitly forbids such behavior AND all the major religious leaders spoke out against it.
I’ve traveled extensively throughout the Muslim world, you’re just going off of hearsay and anecdotes, and you’re being condescending to boot. If you’re going to stubbornly ignore facts then I can’t help you.
No, I’m sorry, but both rich and poor Muslim nations show extremely high rates of fundamentalist extremism. Oh, it’s higher in the poor ones. But it’s present in the UAE, SA, Kuwait, etc. I mean, Saudi citizens are the ones who were mainly finding Al Qaeda, remember.
If you actually have traveled throughout the Muslim world, you’ve done it as a Muslim. I’m glad you haven’t been exposed to the kind of discrimination the people in my life face on a daily basis.
That’s factually inaccurate. Saudi Arabia is a rich monarchy but the income of the non-royalty is somewhat poor. And they’re a DICTATORSHIP, and hardly someone you can use to generalize the literal 2 Billion Muslims when the majority of them live in democracies. There’s a reason the Muslim world condemns Saudi Arabia; even the Taliban allowed women to drive and Saudi didn’t.
You’re overgeneralizing your “people.” There’s atheists all over the Muslim world and they don’t hide it. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Albania, Bosnia, the list goes on. Nobody cares what you believe, honestly.
Convenient how the high rate of dictatorships in the Muslim world lets you ignore their human rights abuses
Who said we should? That’s a total strawman, Muslims have been doing more to condemn and stop these regimes and their abuses than you ever have. How much Arabic, Urdu, Swahili, Malay, Bangla, Albanian, and Bahasa media have you been following? Clearly none because you falsely assume we’re all condoning violence and extremism for some reason.
Blatantly dishonest strawman. I said there was a high rate of fundamentalist extremism in the Muslim world. You are the one trying to claim I said that all Muslims are terrorist monsters or something like that. Obviously, that’s not true. Shit, I have a good friend who is a Muslim immigrant from Saudi Arabia.
…but my ability to judge people on their own merits doesn’t make me ignore the fact that even the nicest Muslim countries are shockingly conservative in terms of public enforcement of morality codes, or the extremely high rate of fundamentalist extremism.
I was replying to someone else in the above thread and then you replied, I’m sorry if I confused you with the other person.
You’re still wrong to claim that extremism is “an extremely high rate.” ISIS had 10,000 people, and were defeated by tens of millions of Muslim soldiers who crushed them as part of a joint effort with every Muslim-majority country in support. That should never define 2,000,000,000 Muslims.
Fundamentalism among Muslims isn’t even high compared to other religions; you have active genocide in progress by Buddhist extremists in Myanmar and Christian fundamentalists in Africa committing pogroms and lynching suspected gays. All religions have extremists and that’s a constant of humanity and can be solved with education.