Re: On proselytism
Reply #79 - August 27, 2011, 10:28 AM
I have been reflecting over this as a wet mirror in a shiny day. It’s either impenetrable and one is repeatedly failing to be understood or a mere disputational reality. From restricting and confining any counter-dawa efforts to those individual Muslims who provoke one, I find that what I said somehow has metamorphosed into ‘leave the happy crowd be and never state your cruel views’. The following meandering responds to many here including Harakaat, Saffire et al.
First: the issue of happiness is a peripheral one; happiness only found its way into this debate when someone thought that what made him happy ( leaving Islam) must or should make others too. This one’s motives might be honourable or he is just being overbearing but this is neither here nor there. I’m professing my ignorance and, perhaps, humility before the truth when I preface sentences with an IF and not a WHEN.
In that, the veracity of what makes every single man happy is presented as unknown and therefore I deposit that people must be free try anything that does not verge on harming others as John Stuart Mill might say. If what they do, not think, causes another ‘harm’ or undue ‘distress’, it is to the law one takes the matter; bullying individual Muslims into one’s version of happiness is not less wrong. If the opposite is true we wouldn’t have Protection from Harassment Act.
This is admittedly mouthing platitudes when looked at without considering that there are many life-enhancing delusions other than Islam which are proven to be far from physically innocuous and are respected as personal choices or, to use Saffair’s inadequate analogy, fit for human consumption. Some comments here, one observes, give away their authors as being personally cheated out of a life and craving revenge but again that’s neither here nor there.
Second: it is rather strange that some people think I’m mixing stating one’s opinion about Islam with forcing that opinion into Muslims. I think that’s laziness. I see seeking out arguments with a much beloved Muslim as an un-welcomed intrusion and farthest from morality. Or call it proselytizing as the thread’s titled. Love is a necessary not sufficient reason to troubling / pestering / bludgeoning (choose the correct verb) another into hearing your godless mirth. Let alone and heeding to it.
There’s a difference between someone’s repeated efforts, moved by his “internal urge to gently wake up Muslims” even when they say they are not slumbering, AND someone stating that Islam is false because of X,Y,Z and leaves it there. Stating your opinion is not proselytising. Proselytising is when you pugnaciously go beyond disagreement into spreading a new ideology with zeal. Those of you who are telling me, as if I didn’t know, that ‘stating an opinion is not forcing’, may care to know that they are talking in the wrong debate.
Third: when we talk about Islam as being destructive and potentially extremely harmful/divisive, we are oversimplifying and talking about Islam as if it were a one unified sect. There are many Islams as many Muslisms. My version of Islam, Whabbism, is not potentially harmful but it is certainly harmful because it, for the purpose of example, does not accept or believe in a peaceful co-existence with other more liberal Muslims, let alone non believers, and viscerally seek to the establishment of Islamic penal code, to make the word of Allah higher than United Nations. I cannot possibly say that about all other pacified Muslims/Islams. Or to be more specific and give an example, about a Mutizili in ideology and Sufi in practice Muslim, like my cousin.
When the aim is to determine who is rational and therefore has the right to be boastful about it, I think a perusal in Mutizilis books would humble one’s rather slightly unjustified self-confidence. “Who could dispute that there is a possibility, however infinitesimal, however unsupported by evidence is, that the aging universe was created by a ‘God’ called Allah?” is a question might be found between some of their books. This is rationality standing tall and taking the side of irrationality. Though they normally reach a wrong conclusion, this is merely an argument a non-absolutist could put forward against those who think religious people are totally irrational but that is neither here nor there.
However, what can safely be called ‘so destructive’ about Islam would be jihad and violating human rights of other people. Unless the debatable ‘destruction’ transcends the self, no one on God’s green land has any business with this or that individual Muslim to intervene and proselytise counter-ideology, to mercifully break a Muslim’s self deprivation censorship and flagellation. Somehow I feel as if I’m defending Islam and religion whilst my objective is absolutely not.
One final note: out of accepting that people have different ways of finding the truth and following it, I normally decline to continue debating as I did more than once on CEMB, not because my breath is short or that I see it as a waste of time, its because I do not believe in proselytising my views and trust that people understand but accept differently and its not for me to verbally browbeat what I think into them- not that I can. These with claims to moral obesity may exercise that.
Topic: On proselytism