Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I'm open to an argument that Islam has characteristics that promote violence, relative to other religions. But I'm with wonk when he points out that other religions have been violent, too. Ten years or so of suicide bombings doesn't seem to me to make the case.
eta: I see something in the suggestion that the problem is not Islam per se, but in the Islamic world's encounter with modernity. Fundamentalism is, perversely, a modern phenomenom.
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Your eta is on the mark. Personally, if you try to blame the problem on "Islam" -- defined as the religion going back to its roots -- and then you try to prove your point by arguing about Islam's long history of violence, then you immediately must confront Christianity's similarly long (and longer) history of violence.
To me, that's a pointless endeavor.
The violence is rooted in how Islam is taught, how it is preached, what young Muslims are told is the way to promote Islam. Call that fundamentalism, Wahhabism, whatever. It is the religion as it appears to exist today.
And the reason I keep harping on the lack of dissenting voices is that the absence of those makes it a lot easier to say "Islam" is to blame, and not "a few crazy Muslims."
