They want you to be ignorant of history.
Nima Gholam Ali Pour, a contributor at The Local, makes an attempt to distance the inherent fundamentalist side from Islam, by equating it with other religions, and deserves to be debunked.
Ali Pour takes a sideswipe at the anti-Islamization movement in a piece dealing with the Islamic prayer debate, equating the Counter Jihad with Islamic fundamentalists, for its insistence in pointing out Islam’s intransigent, fundamentalist disposition throughout the centuries. He would have you believe that that opposite is the truth.
Nima Gholam Ali Pour predictably refrains from mentioning the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, Hanafiyya Malikiyya, Shafiyya and Hanbaliyya. These four schools set the pace for understanding what Islam is and isn’t. When funding and preachers from Saudi Arabia/Arabian Gulf Coast states begin to flow into traditionally non-fundamentalist Islamic regions, these regions begin to shake off their moderation, and take on fundamentalist views.
It’s not the anti-Islamization movement’s fault that Islamic texts (koran, hadiths and the sunna of Mohamed) are steeped in intolerance, antisemitism and loathing of the other, with open ended calls for the subjugation of the non-believer. It’s not our fault that the overwhelming majority of the Islamic world utterly rejects the fruits of the Christian Enlightenment, and would refuse a similar enlightenment from ever taking place within Islam.
No, it’s not our fault at all, no, that inherent fault lies within Islam itself.
Nima Gholam Ali Pour, while sounding like the ‘modernist’, is still fooling himself and others into believing that lesser intolerant Islam (that’s really what he’s talking about here) has something to do with Islam. To the contrary, it has everything to do with the surrounding non-Muslim society that Islamic societies found themselves in.
The ”golden rule” of other religions, (treat others as you would be treated) which is diametrically opposed to Islamic thinking, rubbed off on local Islamic leaders, their path to the tolerance of others, has little to do with Islamic texts, than with the value systems of other cultures and societies that Islam failed to take over.
It’s entirely irrelevant that only one in four Muslims in Sweden attend mosque, for Sweden (yet) is not an Islamic state. However, the situation in a predominantly Islamized Sweden would entirely resemble that of formerly Christian countries now deemed Muslim countries in the Levant and elsewhere as history has shown.
The Swedish debate about the call to prayer treats Islam like a static religion that is wholly resistant to change.
It relies on an image of Islam propagated by both the Counter Jihad movement and by fundamentalist Muslims.
Yet Islam and other world religions are constantly evolving and adapting to social norms. A historical example is that early Christians did not eat pork, but when Christianity spread to areas where rearing pigs was common, the traditions changed in order to adapt to new surroundings.
There are about 400,000 Muslims in Sweden. Only about one in four has access to a religious congregation. In others words, three in four Swedish Muslims don’t even go to a mosque.
Bill Warner on the ”golden rule” and Islam: