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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion
Subject: Re: Re: Islamic Mystics - The Sufi
Message-ID: <544@scc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 25-Aug-85 00:47:09 EDT
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Posted: Sun Aug 25 00:47:09 1985
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> > ***
> 
> For example many people oppose religions other than their own;
> and many people accept Islam { :-) }.
> 
> What I mean to say is that ALL religions have their weak points
> and strong points. But some religions are, on the whole,
> obviously better than others and, from the present day world events,
> it appears that Islam is certainly not one of them.
>              Comments?
>                                                murali.
	
	Well, maybe.  Either Islam or Christianity are particularily
violent religions.   I hope you read my posting about St. Cyril 
chopping Hypatia up in Alexandria.  

	The Jewish people in the Old Testiment seemed to enjoy
having at the Caanites and others.   They certainly were not
pacifists.

	It is kind of strange.  It is a fact of religion in general?
or is it the monotheistic religions that are particularily violent?

	Notice that the Hindu "religion" in India is polytheistic
and they do not have any problem accepting other religions. 

	There are 500 million Muslims in the world.  Many of them
are peaceful.   I most certainly agree that it would be as foolish
to judge Islam by its most enlightened members as it is to 
judge it by its least.  In fact, it is foolish to judge it at
all.  How could it be better or worse?  What can that mean?
Does it mean I like one way of doing things better than
another?   Hey, I was born here in California, I like
the way we do things here.   But that strikes me as
a different issue than whether it is a useful idea to 
advocate wiping Islam off the face of the Earth and 
other such final solutions to the "Islamic Problem."

	The thing people seem to be missing, is that even if
Islam is the most evil vile religion that ever existed or ever 
will exist, what are you  going to do about it?  Kill everyone
that practices Islam?    Convert them to Christianity?
Hey, they won the Crusades last time.

	The same thing can be looked at in more than one way.
Islam has been interpreted many ways.   Instead of looking
the religion in general, a fruitless venture, the situtuation
in the Middle-East is also caused by the particular economic
and social factors that cause people to interpret Islam
in one particular way.  Living religions must constantly
be reintrepreted so that they may apply to contemporary
life.   

	This weeks Time had an article about Iran that said a
couple of things along this line.   They say that the oil
richs of Iran allows them to stay out of touch with the
rest of the world, but the recent busts of people
shipping arms to Iran showed that they were not above
using the devil American bombs.  They said that in
general the middle class listen to American music,
and eat American food.   Their theocracy cannot survive
for too long in the modern world. 

	Remember, the Shah was not goody two shoes either.  
Part of the reason that the Iranians are so pissed off an
the United State and so willing to adopt a fanatical
brand of Islam.    Tens of thousands of people died in
the Shah's torture chambers.    The Shah was widely
precieved as being a puppet of the U.S. (and he probably
was).   

	In short, saying that "Islam is worse than most religions"
or even blaming Islam for the behavior of some of its adherents
obscures the situation.

	The following from "World Challange"
by Jean-Jaques Servan-Schreiber is an alternate explaination:

	No one has  experienced greater humiliation at the
	hands of the West than have the Arabs.  One Iraqui
	technocrat in charge of foreign investments in the
	Ministry of Petroleum at Baghdad expresses it this
	way: "The political dimension of oil--existent
	for a long time, but only recently in the fore--
	is closely bound up with the history of colonialism.
	On account of oil, the OPEC countries, and especially
	the Arab world, have seen and experienced innumerable
	occupations, wars, instances of blackmail and theft.
	Foreign rulers exploited us over a long period, dictated
	our fate to teir advantage, sold our oil resources
	at giveaway prices to themselves, and destroyed or
	neglected our oil fields.  The competition for Arab
	oil , and the securing of the oil routes are  still
	the basic causes of 'cold' and 'hot' wars between the
	superpowers.   That is why the nationalization of oil,
	as carried out in Iraq in 1972, has been the objective
	of all liberation movements in OPEC countries."

	Not only did Westerners pump the oil--the lifeblood--of
	the Arabs at will but they did it at a price that is
	hard to believe.  In 1900, the price of oil was $1.20
	per barrel.  Thirty years later, after the Wall Street
	crash and the Great Depression, the price was down
	to $1.19.  After Pearl Harbor and America's entry into
	World War II, the  price of a barrel fell to $1.14.
	Following the Allied victory, the creation of the
	Bretton Woods international monetary system, the
	launching of the Marshall Plan and the founding of
	the United  Nations, the price was back to $1.20.
	In the 1950s, during the Cold War, the price edged up
	to $1.70 per barrel.  In 1960, at the birth of OPEC,
	it was   $1.80.

	Nothing illustraates better the total domination of the
	powerful oil companies and the Western governments 
	that backed them up with arms than the history of
	oil prices.  In the late nineteenth century, the companies
	discovered oil and took control of it.  In exchange
	for unlimited profits, they exploited the oil for 
	the prodigious economic devleopment of the West.
	For fifty years, from 1920 to 1970, the West based its
	factories, transportation systems, cities, universities,
	laboratories--its  industrial civilization and  growth--*on
	cheap oil*.  And the companies did this without considering
	the possiblity of increasing payments to the producing 
	countries.

	No man represented the arrogance of the West more than
	Monroe Rathbone, chairman of Exxon (then Esso), when in
	August 1960, sitting in his air-conditioned boardromm
	overlooking Rockefeller Center, he actually decided
	to *cut* the posted price of oil in the Middle East.
	For the oil-producing countries this decision had
	grave consequences, for the royalities paid on the
	posted price of oil were the *only* revenue they
	had for their national budgets and for their imports.
	Without any consultation of the  governments involved
	and citing general overproduction and massive sales
	of Russian oil in the  world, Exxon flatly announced
	an immediate reduction of ten cents a  barrel on
	the price it would pay.  In a few days  the other companies,
	British Petroleum, Shell, Mobil, all fell in line.

	From that day on, there was no turning back.  The Western
	oil companies had indicated their contempt for the
	Arabs and the other oil producers, their indifference
	to the people for whom the oil was the only source of life.
	A few men had the foresight to predict the result.
	An American, Howard Page, the Exxon expert on the 
	Middle  East questions at the time,  told his
	fellow board members, "If we do that  all hell will
	break loose.  You can't imagine the scope and
	duration of the consequences."

	An Englishman, Harold Snow, a mathematician for British
	Petroleum, wept openly in front of his colleugues.
	
			World Challange
			pps. 17-19

	So, from another point of view, our intolerance
and lack of respect for the Arab world is just as much a
problem as the other way around.


-- 
scc!steiny
Don Steiny @ Don Steiny Software 
109 Torrey Pine Terrace
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
(408) 425-0382
	(also: hplabs!hpda!hpdsqb!steiny)