I may have my opinion on what Islam means but as long as there are a great many decent moderate Muslims who follow their own peaceful and moderate version of Islam I am not going to paint the whole of Islam with one brush.
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Yes hassan, but (moderate) is indefinable under the umbrella of Islam..
Many Ex-moderate-Muslims became new Osama BinladenZ, O.B. himself was a
liberal Muslim.
Once this moderate Muslim believes in those nice verses of Quran and/or Hadiths (+ a bit of indoctrination ), I can't feel fully comfortable w\ this Muslim.
It could be different in the west, since I'm in the radical Saudi,...yet I still doubt that it's different.
Almost 100% of those Saudi terrorists you see on TV were orig. average/moderate Muslims, but after all God's words prevailed..!
No Emerald, you are fully correct, I applaud you! UK Muslims by and large import Saudi printed books and Qurans, Saudi mosques, Saudi Imams and therefore they also import Saudi ways! It is inevitable, if you take enough from someone you become just like them.
Also, that's what I was saying before! How many times have we heard of a terrorist or other extremist: "they used to be soooo moderate", it just doesn't work, who wants to take the risk? I don't, rather than try and change Islam into something else and hope for the best, lets help Muslims-all Muslims-see their folly and expose Islam and help them find the same thing we have all found.
I would be echoing Robert Spencer here but I can not ignore the fact Islam is not willing to reform in the same way the other major religion of the world, Christianity has been reformed. Protestants had the audacity to NOT to accept a good part of their holy book as canonical. But there can not be a single Muslim who is willing to shed any part of Quran the holy text of islam.
The Protestant Reformation did not happen because Protestants rejected parts of the Bible, it happened because they differed with the Vatican's interpretation of Christianity - ie, they accused the Vatican of deviating from the Bible.
Furthermore, Christianity did not get defanged because of the Protestant Reformation anyway. The Protestants were just as keen on burning heretics, witches, etc as their Catholic counterparts. It took the secular Enlightenment to divest Christianity of its more disturbing, violent, aspects, and I see no reason why the Islamic world is inherently incapable of the same. If it were incapable of it then there would be no such thing as a secular state with a largely muslim population, which there manifestly is - eg, Turkey, Tunisia.
What the muslim world needs is not a Martin Luther or a Calvin, its another Attaturk.
It became defanged afterwards though, it was a stepping stone on the road to intellectualism, a lot of those who have conceived modern ideas were Protestants originally/in their lifetime. Enlightenment was a step on from these prosesses.
That's not important though, this kind of thing doesn't happen with Islam/
Attaturk was nothing but a cultural reformist, he had nothing to do with religion and he turned religious Muslims into cultural Muslims, while Turkey is a lot better culturally than the rest of the Middle East, it still has similar faults. "Modernisation" only works for so long and actually a lot of Turks right now are going through a process of radicalisation (who can say I told you so?).
What we need is for someone to expose Islam publically to the folks in the Middle East who don't read anything beyond the Quran and their daily newspapers and THEN would be a time for cultural reform.
Topic: Ex-Muslim Liberals, Please Wait a Minute!!