Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2(pesnta.1.2) 9/5/84; site scc.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcs!lsuc!pesnta!scc!steiny 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 Article-I.D.: scc.544 Posted: Sun Aug 25 00:47:09 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 25-Aug-85 20:22:30 EDT References: <542@scc.UUCP> <755@cvl.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Don Steiny Software Lines: 172 Xref: utcs net.politics:10454 net.religion:7341 > > *** > > 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)