Download 5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam By Jacopo

5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam By Jacopo della Quercia Dec 20,
2010 (Edited by Mrs. Orzoff-Baranyk)
A conservative commentator recently made headlines by claiming 10 percent of all of the world's
Muslims are terrorists. An amazing claim, considering that equals 150 million terrorists and if
each were to pull off an attack killing just 40 people, they could exterminate all non-Muslim life
on earth.
Either they're not all that dedicated to terrorism, or the claim is utter insanity. Therefore, here
are the TOP 5 ridiculous things you might believe about Islam.
#5.
If You're a Muslim Woman, You Have to Wear the Veil
For millions of people in the West, when you say "Islam," the first mental image that pops into
mind is this:
A woman covered head to toe in a
burqa. The truth is, if you could
suddenly gather all of the Muslim
women on the planet into one giant
room and had to throw a football to
someone wearing a burqa, it'd be
next to impossible to complete that
pass.
But the whole hide-them-under-aveil thing must be pretty big among
Muslim communities, otherwise
Europe wouldn't be all in a dither,
pushing for bans and whatnot.
Right?
After all, we all know that Islam hates women -- the fact that Saudi Arabia is the only country in
the world that actually prohibits women from driving, or that only predominantly Muslim
countries still use death by stoning as a
punishment for adultery, proves it, right?
But Actually...
Thinking that all Muslim women have to dress
like this...
...is like thinking that all Christian women have to dress like
this:
That photo is from one of several small Christian sects that
require women to dress like it's Little House on the Prairie.
So for instance, in France they have about 3 million Muslim
women. How many do you think wear the veil? Because they
did a study on it, when French police decided to figure out how
many burqas and/or niqabs were being worn in their country,
they found the number to be ... 367.
Not 367,000, but 367, a number so small that from a statistical point of view, it's barely enough
to register as a margin of error. As for the rest of Europe, the numbers are even more disastrous
for the burqa business (for instance, Belgium has 500,000 Muslims, a couple dozen wear the
burqa).
Yes, there are Middle Eastern countries where the veils are required by law (namely Iran and
Saudi Arabia) and combined those countries have less than 5 percent of the world's Muslims.
There are actually more Muslim countries that outright ban the wearing of the veils than there are
that require them. They can do that because wearing a veil is not required in Islam but is more of
a custom, depending on where you live and who's in charge.
Hey, speaking of which, try this number on for size: Of the five most populous Muslim-majority
nations, four of them have elected female heads of state. (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, and
Turkey)
So when women like Hilary Clinton & Sarah Palin campaign to be elected as the first female
president of the United States, they are campaigning for an achievement that Muslim ladies have
already accomplished in Muslim countries.
#4.
Our Founding Fathers Would Never Have Tolerated This Muslim Nonsense!
It's easy to stand on a soapbox and publicly bluster about what you think the Founding Fathers
would think about the United States today. After all, these were Christian, God-fearing men.
They certainly wouldn't put up with all this tolerance for these foreign religions.
It's a good thing some Americans are standing up for good old-fashioned American values and
passing laws to prohibit Islamic law from taking over the U.S., because that's totally around the
corner! (Oklahoma actually passed a law forbidding Sharia Law).
But actually...
Even if they were staunch Christians, plenty of the Founding Fathers had a healthy admiration
for the Muslim faith. Thomas Jefferson, for example, taught himself Arabic using his own copy
of the Quran and hosted the first White House Iftar during Ramadan.
John Adams hailed the Islamic prophet Muhammad as one of the great "inquirers after truth."
Benjamin Rush, who was so Christian he wanted a Bible in every school, also said he would
rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mohammad "inculcated upon our youth" than see them
grow deprived "of a system of religious principles." Benjamin Franklin once declared: "Even if
the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he
would find a pulpit at his service." Even George Washington personally welcomed Muslims to
come work for him at Mount Vernon.
So, why did the founding fathers have such appreciation for Muslims? Probably because Sultan
Mohammed ben Abdallah of Morocco was the first world figure to recognize the independence
of the United States of America from Great Britain in 1777. Another reason was that the
Founding Fathers were smart enough to distinguish between terrorists and everybody else on the
whole planet, as demonstrated in the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797. It was in this agreement that the
U.S. declared: "The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on
the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or
tranquility of Mussulmen [Moslems]."
#3.
"Muslim" Equals "Arab"
During the 2008 elections, a woman in a town hall style meeting stood up and asked John
McCain if Barack Obama was an Arab.
We're willing to bet there's more than a 20 percent chance this woman meant to say "Muslim"
but accidentally said "Arab" because same thing, right? Many people operate under a similar
assumption: that non-Jewish Middle Eastern people are Muslim and that most Muslims live in
the Middle East.
But actually...
Only about 20 percent of the entire world's Muslim population is Arab or North African. For
comparison, about 22 percent of the global Christian population is African, yet when somebody
says "Christian," you don't immediately picture a dude from Africa. Equating "Muslim" with
"Arab" makes just as much sense.
While we in the West have been conditioned to associate Islam with the Middle East, a
whopping 61.9 percent of all Muslims -- aka a supermajority -- don't live in the Middle East at
all; most Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region. Indonesia alone is home to more than 200
million Muslims, and India and Bangladesh together have roughly a half-billion Muslims.
It works the other way, too. For example, if you think being Arab guarantees you being Muslim
these days, well, we are sorry to disappoint. As much as 10 percent of the world's Arab
population is Christian (that's more than 14 million people). That means there are 1 million more
Arab Christians than, oh, we don't know ... the world's entire Jewish population (13.2 million).
#2.
Western Cultures Are Far More Humane Than the Bloodthirsty Muslims
Even before the whole terrorism thing, Islam had a reputation in the West for violence. Part of it
has to do with how abruptly Islam was all up in everyone's face. For instance, while Hinduism
took about 1,000 years to spread through India, and Christianity took about 400 years to go from
persecuted cult to the state religion of the Roman Empire, Islam went from one guy's epiphany to
the dominant political and religious force in the Middle East and North Africa in about 100
years.
So a lot of people have reached the conclusion that
the religion spread like holy wildfire for one reason:
the sword. The next logical leap from this viewpoint
is that as a people, Muslims must be violent and
barbaric conquerors. Even before 9/11, you saw this
portrayal in popular culture all the time:
But actually...
Muhammad laid out some pretty progressive rules
of warfare, and medieval Muslims out-niced the
Christians in battle by a landslide. Especially
since Muhammad personally issued "a distinct code
of conduct among Islamic warriors" that included:
No killing of women, children or innocents -- these might include hermits, monks or other
religious leaders who were deemed noncombatants;
No wanton killing of livestock or other animals;
No burning or destruction of trees and orchards; and
No destruction of wells.
In short, Muhammad wanted his armies to fight a kinder, gentler war during the Dark Ages, and
they did.
But the biggest territorial gains were made after Muhammad's death, right? Maybe that was
when Islam earned its bloodthirsty reputation? Not exactly. His successor codified the existing
rules and made them the standard for his army. Which probably explains why the Muslim
army conquering Europe "exhibited a degree of toleration which puts many Christian nations to
shame," in the words of Muslim scholar.
#1. Islam is stuck in the Dark Ages
There are really three big negative stereotypes about Islam -- that it hates women, that it's violent
and that it hates any kind of scientific progress. We've covered the first two already, but how can
you argue against the third? Their governments are based on ancient religious texts! And what
diseases has Iran cured?
But actually...
In the same way that not all Christians believe the world is only a few thousand years old and
that dinosaur bones were planted by scientists to prove theories of evolution, plenty of modern
Muslims see room for interpretation in the Quran. In fact, 45 percent of American Muslims in
one poll said they see evolution as "the best explanation for the origin of human life on Earth,"
which isn't so shabby, considering only 24 percent of evangelical Christians believed the same.
The percentage of Muslims embracing the scientific explanation for the origin of life was about
the same as Americans as a whole (48 percent).
And historically, they have a heck of a track record. Science and math as we know it wouldn't
even exist without Islam. The Islamic Golden Age caused a revolution in virtually every field of
human thought, during which they invented algebra -- and advanced everything from geography
and exploration to the arts, architecture, philosophy, urban development, medicine and health.
The Muslims actually came pretty close to sharing all this brilliance with the kingdoms of
Christian Europe, since the Islamic caliphates
blanketed every country they conquered with
schools, libraries, public works and the most
comprehensive system of social welfare on the
planet. In fact, the case has been made that if
the caliphates succeeded in conquering all of
Europe an Italian Renaissance would have
been unnecessary.