FireGarden
23rd July 2003, 04:11 AM
I decided to start a new thread, because it would have got less attention in AtheistWorld.Com's thread since he is not a troll worthy of people's attention.
AW.C has some ligitimate gripes about the way atheists are treated in some parts of the world. But he decides not to attack the behaviour. Instead he attacks a group that seems to be rapidly becoming the 21st century's whipping boy.
You might find this account interesting:
http://waf.gn.apc.org/journal8p16.htm
In the late fifties and early sixties, most of us - my Algerian friends and fellow students colleges activists - were openly secularists, not religiously inclined, and certainly not practising; we were engaged in a liberation struggle in the name of nationalism and socialism, not in the name of religion. In the elder generation, the practising Muslims we knew and did activist work with were generous and humane, drawing from their faith the strength to banish racial hatred from their hearts even under colonisation, even during the liberation war - they were a world apart from todays fundamentalists.
[...]
In other words, my political upbringing was shaped by women and men who - atheists, Muslims, Christians or Jews - stood for principles, drawn from indeed different sources but leading them all to common positions on rights of people to decide for themselves, on anticolonialism, on social justice and human rights.
[...] Visitors of the newly independent Algeria were amazed at the absence of racism or feelings of hatred, revenge and retaliation, after a seven year long war which killed 2 million Algerian people, according to FLN sources.
It is therefore even more surprising to witness the monopolisation of these values by Islamic fundamentalists, slowly but surely within nearly forty years after independence, and to track similar trends in so many other Muslim countries. Intolerance prevails against Algerians who are non Muslims and, worse, non believers, against agnosticists and atheists. Xenophobia against foreigners has led to their recent killing; explosion of violence and murder of intellectuals and of women who have become the main targets of fundamentalism, is justified by their not being 'good Muslims', or not enough, be it in their day to day and private behaviour or in their political stands. While we fought a seven year war to be able to call ourselves 'Algerians' -and no more 'Muslims' or 'indigenous' as the French colonisers did - we have now gone back to colonial labels and fundamentalists have imposed on all the Algerian people a single forced 'Muslim' identity, exclusive of any other.
Moreover, this label is being adopted by many people outside Algeria who, a few decades ago would not have dared call us a Muslim (but respectfully an Algerian), and now feel thoroughly dissatisfied with our sole national identity and insist on labelling us by religion, ethnicity or tribe (it happened to me so many times), and do not even see any problem in insisting on it.
[...]
Is one a Muslim by birth? Is it as unwashable [as] the original sin? Is it a race? a colour? A culture? If it were a culture, does it mean that all Muslims of the world are alike? Those who veil women and those who let them walk around with bare breasts; those who practice female genital mutilation and those who have never heard of this practice; those who seclude women and those who export them as domestic workers in the Gulf countries; those who have women as heads of state and of political parties and those who forbid them to drive a car; those who believe in God and those who are communists and atheists. Can anyone declare against your will that you are or should be a Muslim? Because of your birth place, your family origins, your country?
I should add that I have Muslim parents. Since I was about 12, they have prayed five times a day (or as close to that as they could manage). Some would automatically call me Muslim, but I have never had religious faith - I don't even know how to pray. Two of my sisters have married Christians, one of my uncles married a Jew. My sisters are highly educated, all of them work, one as a doctor.
I have been openly atheist with my family for as long as I can remember. I seem to have gotten less stick than some of the Americans in Christian families on this forum.
Islam is much too broad a "church" to be considered a single culture.
AW.C has some ligitimate gripes about the way atheists are treated in some parts of the world. But he decides not to attack the behaviour. Instead he attacks a group that seems to be rapidly becoming the 21st century's whipping boy.
You might find this account interesting:
http://waf.gn.apc.org/journal8p16.htm
In the late fifties and early sixties, most of us - my Algerian friends and fellow students colleges activists - were openly secularists, not religiously inclined, and certainly not practising; we were engaged in a liberation struggle in the name of nationalism and socialism, not in the name of religion. In the elder generation, the practising Muslims we knew and did activist work with were generous and humane, drawing from their faith the strength to banish racial hatred from their hearts even under colonisation, even during the liberation war - they were a world apart from todays fundamentalists.
[...]
In other words, my political upbringing was shaped by women and men who - atheists, Muslims, Christians or Jews - stood for principles, drawn from indeed different sources but leading them all to common positions on rights of people to decide for themselves, on anticolonialism, on social justice and human rights.
[...] Visitors of the newly independent Algeria were amazed at the absence of racism or feelings of hatred, revenge and retaliation, after a seven year long war which killed 2 million Algerian people, according to FLN sources.
It is therefore even more surprising to witness the monopolisation of these values by Islamic fundamentalists, slowly but surely within nearly forty years after independence, and to track similar trends in so many other Muslim countries. Intolerance prevails against Algerians who are non Muslims and, worse, non believers, against agnosticists and atheists. Xenophobia against foreigners has led to their recent killing; explosion of violence and murder of intellectuals and of women who have become the main targets of fundamentalism, is justified by their not being 'good Muslims', or not enough, be it in their day to day and private behaviour or in their political stands. While we fought a seven year war to be able to call ourselves 'Algerians' -and no more 'Muslims' or 'indigenous' as the French colonisers did - we have now gone back to colonial labels and fundamentalists have imposed on all the Algerian people a single forced 'Muslim' identity, exclusive of any other.
Moreover, this label is being adopted by many people outside Algeria who, a few decades ago would not have dared call us a Muslim (but respectfully an Algerian), and now feel thoroughly dissatisfied with our sole national identity and insist on labelling us by religion, ethnicity or tribe (it happened to me so many times), and do not even see any problem in insisting on it.
[...]
Is one a Muslim by birth? Is it as unwashable [as] the original sin? Is it a race? a colour? A culture? If it were a culture, does it mean that all Muslims of the world are alike? Those who veil women and those who let them walk around with bare breasts; those who practice female genital mutilation and those who have never heard of this practice; those who seclude women and those who export them as domestic workers in the Gulf countries; those who have women as heads of state and of political parties and those who forbid them to drive a car; those who believe in God and those who are communists and atheists. Can anyone declare against your will that you are or should be a Muslim? Because of your birth place, your family origins, your country?
I should add that I have Muslim parents. Since I was about 12, they have prayed five times a day (or as close to that as they could manage). Some would automatically call me Muslim, but I have never had religious faith - I don't even know how to pray. Two of my sisters have married Christians, one of my uncles married a Jew. My sisters are highly educated, all of them work, one as a doctor.
I have been openly atheist with my family for as long as I can remember. I seem to have gotten less stick than some of the Americans in Christian families on this forum.
Islam is much too broad a "church" to be considered a single culture.