Could this be counter productive???

Originally Posted by tater

You really feel the need to defend Islam? Let's see, 50% of their population are in effect slaves. Property. These 50% are called "women."

50% slavery is bad enough for me to not need other reasons, but we can certainly name them.

Regarding Christianity, there were without question many Christian atrocities over the years. Regardless, progressive, western liberalism was born in "Christian" societies. I'm very open to you arguing that this was in SPITE OF Christianity, but none the less, it was allowed to succeed. Such pluralistic liberalism has never—and will never, IMHO—evolve in Muslim lands.

Just like women are treated badly in markedly christian communities.

And BTW, what has enabled the wealth of the various mostly christian western nations? War and subjugation of the rest of the world. So if the muslims were to follow the west's lead they would most certainly try to take over the world through war. Are you saying they shouldn't be as power hungry as the christians?

Presumably, your problem here is a language problem. This is fine, as I don't understand ANY finnish, so I'm at a loss there.

For much of the last few hundred years, the bulk of the world's Muslim population has not actually been able to understand Arabic. The Qur'an is written in arabic. As a result, people practicing Islam were able to be fairly moderate, and even have customs at odds with "real" Islam (as practiced in, say Arabia). The most populous Muslim country, for example is Indonesia, and the fact that the vast majority of Indonesian muslims are fairly moderate I think is directly related to the fact that they can't actually read their holy book.

In places where the large majority CAN read the Qur'an, you'll note that they are MORE "fundamentalist." That's because the really awful bits in Islam are actually in the Qur'an.

My point was that increasing arabic literacy in non-arab muslim countries increases radicalism. This is demonstrable, and why "Islamism" is on the rise. The principal way that the Saudis spread their flavor of Islam is via arabic (and coincident koranic) teaching.

Keeping muslims ignorant of what the koran says is in effect a moderating influence.

So you'd rather keep the people in the developing nations illiterate? The Quran has been translated to English too you know so even if they learned to speak bad English as the Americans they would still have access to it.

Maybe literacy levels aren't the problem here either.