ah well said indeed my friend!...sad for the ones born into it..there is no escape.............
"There are many Muslims who want a modernized and democratic Islam"
Many? I don't think so.
They hate the extremism as much as "any one of us"?
Hmmm... I find that hard to digest also. I'll put my hatred of extreme Islam up against theirs anytime. Those "born into it" have the same option for objection and departure as the rest of us. The stakes are just immediately higher, but our sense of 'time before the stakes rise' is very much a smoky specter.
There's my pessimistic contribution for the day.
Mustafa Akyol is your big reformer? Give me a break.
The man is the spokesperson for Bilim Arastirma Vakfi, a Turkish cult which has been implicated in a sex and blackmail ring which landed its leader, Adnan Okhtar (a.k.a. Harun Yahya) in prison for two years.
Congratulations on being the biggest dupes on the planet, guys.
I don't even know who Mustafa Akyol is, but wiki seems to disagree with you, Nillifidian. He sounds like a muslim who abhors extremism. That's my kind of muslim!
Actually, Wikipedia doesn't have anything to say one way or the other about Bilim Arastirma Vakfi's activities (and doesn't even have a wiki article for them—that's what the link in red indicates), which is unsurprising, because it's an English-language website run primarily by and for Americans. The only encounters people have had with Akyol is as a supporter of intelligent design (for which my former home state, Kansas, paid his way to Topeka to testify at their kangaroo court).
If you were reading the Turkish press, a whole other side of Bilim Arastirma Vakfi would emerge. But you don't have to go that far. You could always just read Edip Yuksel. Okhtar was Yuksel's former protegé. I don't know how old this article is, although I am assuming based on his many references to Okhtar being "criminally teflon" that it is prior to his two-year stint in prison for blackmail and therefore may be from the late nineties.
I wouldn't consider a self-proclaimed spokesman for a two-faced cult leader who believes he is the promised Mahdi and whose practices run to bilking people, orgies, and blackmail scams someone I could confidently claim was a moderate Muslim. Your mileage, evidently, varies.
I find this tremendously funny, because you right-wingers deserve to be taken in, and you will indeed always be played for suckers.
Why?
Because your (collective) standard for a "moderate Muslim" is the mold of the self-proclaimed "refuseniks", atheists, and Christian converts. When you refuse to acknowledge and interact with the Islamic tradition (nota bene to the paranoid: this does not mean you have to convert!), you alienate yourself from any genuine Muslim reformers, but you leave yourself wide open to being taken in by con artists like Okhtar (through Akyol) who are entirely willing to sell out their ostensible religion for the sake of power and noteriety.
I know my words will fall on deaf ears here, but I would advise coming to grips Islamic thought in reality (not some Hall of Mirrors where you can have so-called "moderate Muslims reflect your prejudices back at you) and reading something on the subject. If you're still afraid of Muslims, Karen Armstrong makes a fairly decent mediator in her laymans' books on Muhammad and Islam.
Again, I'm not taken in by anyone. I never even heard of the guy before you mentioned him. Didn't even notice his name in the article until you pointed it out. I neither support him nor oppose him.
I do know quite a bit about Karen Armstrong, and she is an apologist for islamic extremism. She even went as far as saying mohammed was a fan of peace himself! Heh. So while I find her fascinating, she clearly cannot be considered a valid source of information.
You may be correct about "Bilim Arastirma Vakfi" being a group of bad guys, or "Mustafa Akyol" being equally unfit to reform islam as Karen Armstrong is to discuss it. That's not really why I said it was an 'interesting read'.
What made it interesting was the man's direct comparison of militant islam to Nazism, because it brings up interesting questions. Can we blame the Germans in 1938 who became Nazis just because the alternative was harassment and death at the hands of the true Nazis in power? They didn't want to be a part of it, but they were...
Fast-forwarding to today, only 40% of muslim youth in Britain want to impose fascist islamic law on the rest of the country. Are the other 60% partially to blame for this as well, since they are choosing to support the same doctrine (islam)? Or are they merely scared pawns much like a large percentage of Germans were in the 1930s/1940s?
The same goes for Palestine. How many of them would just like to get on with their lives in peace and leave Israel alone, but are afraid to say so out loud? How many would renounce violence - even renounce islam if they could? How many can't be helped because they are too full of nazi-style hatred?
And even more questions. How could we help those who want to reform islam into a religion that actually promotes peace, or even leave the religion entirely? Can we do anything from the outside? We gave them a shot at democracy in Iraq, and many of them chose to use that freedom to become members of JAM and keep on fighting for their God. So clearly that didn't work well. Is that typical of what we should expect?
This article raises so many more questions than that. I'm sorry you did not find it as interesting as I did.
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