Islam suffuses traditional Muslim society in ways unimaginable to the West
Some American Catholics of a certain age can perhaps understand a tiny bit — maybe 0.05% — of the situation in many Islamic countries today, based on their personal experiences. Those Catholics grew up steeped in religion, with the Latin Mass, ten commandments, six commandments of the church, weekly Confession, the reality of mortal sin, daily saint’s days, the Annunciation, Visitation, the Assumption, Immaculate Conception, Epiphany and the other things that Protestants knew not, novenas or first Fridays, three theological virtues, seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the Infant of Prague, Padre Pio, Our Lady of Lourdes, the prophecies of Fatima, fish on Friday, fasting overnight before Holy Communion, the rosary, partial and plenary indulgences, the stations of the Cross, and the knowledge that the Protestants were going to hell, along with most everyone else, though there were probably a few Jews like Moses who antedated Jesus and who probably were in Limbo or someplace not hell. A world, among other things, where people noticed who didn’t go to Communion on Sunday and wondered why.
Islam suffuses everyday life in Islamic countries in ways far more intrusive than we just described above. We were reminded of this when reading the excellent reporting by Kim Baker of the Chicago Tribune from Kabul on Islamic apostate Abdul Rahman:
In all likelihood, the court will declare Rahman mentally unfit to stand trial and release him, Afghan sources and Western diplomats said. But this is only a temporary fix, and it does not solve what will happen to Rahman next. Many Afghans want to kill him. “He should be hanged in a square,” said Aqa Gul, 40, a baker. “He should be stoned to death,” said Sayed Saber, 32, a construction worker.
Rahman was the major topic of conversation across Kabul on Friday. In a restaurant, influential leaders met with a group of young people from Panjshir province, where Rahman is from. The young men talked about what would happen if Rahman is released. “Anything could happen–whether a big demonstration, even the possibility of killing him,” said Shojah Mostaqel, who organized the meeting. “Everyone knows what Islam says. Bush and his friends are trying to interfere in an Islamic country.”
At Pol-e-Kheshti mosque, Kabul’s largest, more than 10,000 people listened to cleric Maulavi Enayatullah Baligh talk about Rahman. They yelled, “God is great!” after Baligh said Rahman deserved death. “If this Abdul Rahman does not come to Islam and does not repent, even if the government does not sentence him to death, then the people of Afghanistan will kill him,” said Baligh, 50, also a lecturer in Islamic law at Kabul University. Baligh stressed that if the international community intervened on Rahman’s behalf, it could cause civil unrest in Afghanistan because of possible violent protests.
The case highlights the contradictions in Afghanistan’s Constitution, which protects the freedom of religion but also says that Islamic law is the law of the land unless otherwise specified.
Baker is exactly right, except for the last point. The issue is not the contradictions of Afghanistan’s piece of paper called a Constitution. The issue is that for their entire lives these people have been raised from childhood as countless generations of Muslims have been raised thoughout the Islamic world: the “law” they interact with every day is the Koran and Islamic law, much like those American Catholics of old, but far more powerful and intrusive. In the words of the fellow Baker interviewed: “Everyone knows what Islam says” about apostasy — how can the West be so stupid?
If you will take a few minutes, you can get a greater understanding of this. We invite you to visit the website of Grand Ayatollah Sistani, said to be “the most influential man in Iraq” and a “moderate.” Go to the section called “Islamic Law” and spend some time in the voluminous and detailed lists of things commanded and forbidden (unfortunately, the site does not enable direct linking to particular sub-pages, so we will have to illustrate our point the long way.) Take a look at the things that are Najis or “impure.”
The following ten things are essentially najis:
1. Urine
2. Faeces
3. Semen
4. Dead body
5. Blood
6. Dog
7. Pig
8. Kafir
9. Alcoholic liquors
10. The sweat of an animal who persistently eats najasat.
See, for example, what Sistani says about dogs and pigs “106. The dogs and pigs which live on land are najis, and even their hair, bones, paws and nails, and every liquid substance of their body, is najis. However, sea dogs and pigs are Pak.” (Pak is clean, the opposite of Najis.) Take a look at the rules for making Najis things Pak:
149. There are twelve things which make najis objects Pak:
1. Water
2. Earth
3. The Sun
4. Transformation (Istihala)
5. Change (Inqilab)
6. Transfer (Intiqal)
7. Islam
8. Subjection (Taba’iyat)
9. Removal of original najasat
10. Confining (Istibra) of animal which feeds on najasat
11. Disappearance of a Muslim
12. Draining of the usual quantity of blood from the slaughtered body of an animal.
That is a complex list, but that is not all. There is greater detail, much greater, associated with each of the 12 categories of things that make Najis objects Pak. We continue:
150. Water makes najis thing Pak, when the following four conditions are fulfilled:
– 1. The water should be pure. Hence a najis thing cannot be made Pak with mixed water like rose-water, or melon-water etc. (Mudhaaf)
– 2. The water should be Pak.
– 3. The water should not turn into Mudhaaf while the najis thing is being washed. Furthermore, the smell, colour, or taste of the najasat should not exist after the final washing, but if changes occur during earlier washings, there is no harm in it. For example, if a thing is washed with Kurr-water,or under-Kurr water and, in order to make it Pak, it is necessary to wash it twice, it will become Pak if the changes in the water do not occur in the second washing. Any changes occurring in the first washing would not matter.
– 4. Small particles of Najisul Ayn should not remain behind in a najis thing after it has been washed. Other conditions for making najis thing Pak by water less than Kurr will be mentioned later.151. The interior of a najis vessel, or utensil, must be washed three times if less than Kurr water is used, and as per obligatory precaution, the same will apply if Kurr or running water is used. If a dog drinks water or any other liquid from a utensil, the utensil should be first scrubbed with Pak earth, and after washing off the dust, it should be washed twice with Kurr or lesser water. Similarly, if the dog licks a utensil, and something remains in it, it should be scrubbed with dust before washing. And if the saliva of a dog falls into the utensil, as per obligatory precaution, it should be scrubbed with dust and then washed with water three times.
152. If the mouth of a utensil which a dog has licked, is narrow, dust should be thrown into it and after adding some quantity of water, it should be shaken vigorously, so that the dust may reach all parts of it. Thereafter, the utensil should be wash ed in the manner mentioned above.
153. If a utensil is licked by a pig, or if it drinks any liquid from it, or in which a field-mouse has died, then it should be washed seven times with running water, or Kurr or lesser water. It will not be necessary to scour it with dust.
154. A utensil which becomes najis because of alcoholic beverage, should be washed three times, with no difference between Kurr, lesser, or running water.
155. If an earthenware has been made of najis clay, or najis water has penetrated in it, it should be put into Kurr or running water, so that wherever water reaches, it will be Pak. And if it is intended to make its interior Pak it should be left in Kurr or running water for such time, that the water would penetrate into its entire structure. And if the earthenware is moist, preventing water from reaching its inner parts, then it should be allowed to dry up, before it is put in Kurr or running water.
Do you begin to understand what we are dealing with — not so much people from a different place as people from a different time? A utensil “should be first scrubbed with Pak earth,” before it is rinsed with “lesser water.” And if a dog licks it, the utensil needs to be scrubbed with dust and rinsed three times. These are (a) religious regulations; and (b) a municipal Health Code from 1000 years ago. These are the things of everyday life in certain villages on our planet.
Asking those Muslims in cafes to keep the bit about thrice washing utensils touched by dog saliva, but drop the bit about putting apostates to death, is a little absurd. This is the stuff of their life, the organizing mechanism of a tribal and subsistence society, deciding not just grand moral questions, but what kind of shoes to wear in the morning.
We are not saying that things can’t change; they certainly can. The Catholic Church went from fire and brimstone for Protestants to a playground for paedophile priests in two generations. But change in such matters must come from the top, as it did with Pope John XXIII, and as perhaps it is coming from Hamid Karzai and others. We must insist on our Western values — that is non-negotiable. Indeed, it is more than non-negotiable. The West has to be strict and uncompromising on its insistence on its values to stand up against a thousand years of tradition inculcated from earliest childhood. But we would also do well to temper our expectations of the time required for such changes; it is a multi-generational enterprise.
(Hopefully there will be enough time for change — there won’t be if Ahmadinejad gets his way.)
March 26th, 2006 at 11:28 am
I was “born” a Catholic in the 40′s, nuff said. However, I distinctly remember always asking “dumb questions” of the nuns and priests. I was always told that “faith” was blind. Fine.
When I was thirteen, I had a click moment…feminists will understand this, maybe? others, too?
I stopped being Catholic. Years later I tried again. Lite Catholic aka Episcopalian. That took me a year to get out because the “father” of the parish, left his wife and 5 kids to shack up with a woman who left her three kids and husband. I decided then and there that I would live my life independent of “religion”. For more decades than I like to think about I have done just that and thank every day I did.
March 26th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
>>Some American Catholics of a certain age can perhaps understand a tiny bit — maybe 0.05% — of the situation in many Islamic countries today
What!?!?! Many older Catholics who I know think the Church has gotten too liberal and long for the old days and the old ways.
So now you guys are anti Catholic? What of the many Protestants and Evangelicals who rest easy “knowing” that all Catholics are going to Hell? What a joke. I wonder why you failed to mention the PRESENT DAY Evangelical who is waiting for the Rapture and praying for the building of the Temple to usher it in? Huh? They sit there buying up the “Left Behind” book and video series. You want to talk about crazy religious people you talk about Protestant Fundies, not Catholics. Why not mention that?? That is FAR MORE synonymous with what is going on in the muslim world than ANYTHING modern Catholicism has EVER done or preached.
The “problem” with most Catholics today are that they are not practicing and they don’t bother to learn about their own religion before fleeing to Evangelical Born Again-ism or atheism. Read Karl Keating and you will learn all about it.
The RC Church has changed a lot, liberalized, and they still have work to do. As with anything run by men it’s not a perfect organization. The problem today is that the Catholic Church has, in some ways, liberalized too much. Hopefully Pope Benedict will do his part to make it even more Conservative as it should be. We really don’t need lukewarm twice a year Catholics who are too lazy to learn about their own Faith. People like “Sue” end up blaming Jesus Christ and leaving the Church to “live life independent” of religion for what? That makes a lot of sense. (rolling eyes) Uh, Sue, read some Karl Keating…… Don’t blame Jesus or God for your or others’ shortcomings.
To even mention old line Catholicism in the same sentence with radical Islam, for ANY comparison, is an insult second to none. I almost couldn’t believe what I was reading!
I’m waiting for an apology to the Conservative Catholics (Republican voters most) who read this board.
March 26th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
Did you know that there is actually a pig farm in Israel? They get around the problem by having the surfaces on which the pigs live made of fine wire mesh raised up off the ground. Thus, not of the ground.
No kidding, who could make it up?
Also the capybara, a giant south American muskrat, was considered “fish” for Catholic purposes. I figure the local capybara rancher made a deal with the cardinal, a few pesos changed hands, a cut for Rome, and voila!
March 27th, 2006 at 5:50 am
I do wish to comment on the Catholic thing. There is a disturbing parallel between Islam and some Christian denominations (though I would agree that evangelicals are far worse on this than the Catholics), and I think this is an important driving force for what’s wrong with them:
When your worth as a human being, your virtue, your goodness is separated from your actions, when you are judged by your peers solely on whether or not you are a member of the group, then the religion ceases to be a personal matter, and instead becomes a powerful social imperitive. If you are good or evil, not because you DO good or evil, but because you are loyal to a church or not, and if this in-group/out-group mentality informs social action, [i]then almost anything can be justified in terms of the faith.[/i]
If apostates are evil, nonbelievers are damned, and all outside the church are living worthless and doomed lives; if all their knowledge and achievement is seen as irrelevant (and foolish, regardless of it’s truth and utility), if all their virtue and benevolence is irrelevant, then there is only one value, only one thing that is important in the world: the propogation of the church and submission of all to your beliefs.
It ultimately doesn’t matter whether this doctrine or theology is employed by Christians or Muslims – I think it creates similar motives and similar problems if faithfully applied.
I think, perhaps, that some of these parallels are why certain Republicans get mealy mouthed when dealing with sharia. They are tripping over how to condemn the barbaric behavior of the muslims, without condemning in principle the doctrines behind some of their own beliefs.
March 27th, 2006 at 9:15 am
It is very unfortunate that you found it necessary to compare Catholism and Islam in this way. And your final comment on the church’s movement “from fire and brimstone for Protestants to a playground for pedophile priests in two generations” is particularly disturbing. And painful.
But you are forgetting one very important point in the comparison. When Catholics have sinned against their Church, or fellow memebers, or society at-large, they have strayed from the teachings of Jesus and sinned against him as well. They must seek forgiveness and correct what is wrong.
Whereas with Islam, when the followers commit these acts, they are not straying from the teachings of their prophet, but rather they are following his teachings to the word. For me this distinction is noteworthy and frightening.
I’m sorry that you made this comparison. It makes me feel differently about your site.
Annette
March 28th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
……still waiting for an apology to the Catholics who read this site, for disrespecting our Faith, for insulting us, for unfairly zeroing in on very convenient subjects while giving Fundamentalist Protestants (Bob Jones University – “Catholics are Satanic”, Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson “we deserved 9-11″ anyone????) a free pass, and for just being stupid.
If you did the same to muslims you would have to sleep with one eye open because a death fatwa would be issued, and that alone proves that your comparison was at the least ill informed and at the worst part of a wider anti Catholic agenda.
BTW, we don’t kill ex-Catholic Apostates or carry out “Honor Killings” either…. (rolling eyes)
We’re STILL waiting.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:42 pm
Keep waiting. I think the comparison is apt: It’s about rules, regulations, and religious teaching running one’s life. If you don’t like the pre-Vatican II Catholic comparison, substitute orthodox Judaism.
Reading the post I was reminded of Leviticus – a 4000 year old health code. It is amusing and its only value is historical.
Many pre-Vatican II Catholic rules are the same: Amusing and of no practical value. Go back further and it gets even better: Indulgences! I remember learning about them in Catholic school. Talk about the rich buying off the power structure! The Vatican could teach Congress and K Street a lot of lessons.
The snide remark about pedophiles was a bit off-topic, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
BTW: We _DID_ kill apostates: Remember the Inquisition? We (“we” being the Catholic Church and Western civilization) got over it, but it took a long time (“multigenerational” is the topic of the post, I believe) and a LOT of blood.
All Monty Python hilarity aside: Why did were witches burned? To stamp out the pagans. How is Islam killing converts to Christianity any different than the Catholic church killing pagans?
We don’t do it NOW, but we did. The comparison is historically apt. This site is littered with posts talking about the difficulty of an Islamic Reformation. The Catholic Reformation wasn’t exactly a piece of cake.
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:26 am
First of all, they picked on Catholics. Not Jews or Protestants, but Catholics. Modern Catholicism, especially in the US, is pretty tame compared to Protestant Evangelicalism, Islam, Amish, Hasidic Judaism, or cults.
WE didn’t do anything. Just as I wouldn’t blame a modern German born after WW2 for the Holocaust, it’s a bit silly to lay millenia old happenings on modern Catholics. It’s very convenient to bash the modern incarnation of a religion by zeroing in on what happened a millenia ago. It’s also disingenuous. I said that we “don’t” kill apostates, not that the Catholic religion didn’t “ever” do it. I would think that a reformation or evolution counted for something but not for Catholic haters or even some self loathing Catholics. Bringing out the Inquisition!?! Are you mad?!!?
This stuff is all pretty obvious but I guess not so for those who are incapable of seeing the obvious.
As for pedophelia, I would never defend what some priests have done or the horrible way the Church has managed it, but if you look at the data you get this with rabbis, Protestant priests and preachers, muslims, and even public school teachers in a totally non religious setting. To conveniently pull that out when trying to bash Catholicism or equate it with Catholicism (as many have done) is also sleazy.
I guess that I have to start alerting people that Dinocrat is an anti Catholic site…. Sad.
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:33 am
Furthermore, I wouldn’t be so opposed to it if they mentioned it along with others, instead of focusing on a comparison between Catholicism and radical Islam. I am outraged about the exclusive Catholic bashing, not merely mentioning historical Catholic wrongdoings, again, if it is mentioned within an inclusive framework which also mentions, I dunno, Protestants burning “witches” at the stake in Salem, Mass.?? Perhaps female circumcision carried out by other peoples as part of religious or cultural “rules”? Maybe a quick mention of Hindu arranged marriages? Again, they failed to even mention the nuttiness espoused daily by Protestant Fundamentalists who are anxiously awaiting the fictional “Rapture” which was invented in the 1800′s by some lunatic.
There is a lot out there, but they chose to compare Catholicism (in the 20th Century, no doubt!) with radical Islam.
January 20th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Coming from the perspective of an evangelical who is married to a devout Roman Catholic, the central issue has not been mentioned. When comparing any religion with Christianity (evang AND Catholism) all must be filtered through what Christians call “absolute truth”. Evangelicals and Catholics share this view. This truth is the person of Jesus Christ, His work on the cross,the grace of God and SIN. “The Evidence that Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell would shed some light on the truth. All redeemed people have the ability to know the truth. According to scripture, they are set free by it. Free from many paralyzing fears such as the fear of Islam.