You can call it their culture or whatever, and say we have no right to judge. I disagree, of course, but that’s fine. My problem is the people who want to make that culture our culture.
And the irony is, the wingnuts wet their pants every time they think about their culture.
I’ll judge. They trample each other to throw rocks at pillars. bunch of whack-a-loons in my book.
and we trample each other to save a couple bucks at Walmart. Who’s the loon?
Who wants to make that culture our culture? The anti-abortionists in the US are part of our culture, like it or not. No Egyptian or whatever foreign Muslim is involved. The pope just made a miraculous royal progress through three major cities, including the capital. And everyone knows he’s against abortion, even if he doesn’t say it in so many words. Roman Catholics against abortion abound. Officially the RC Church is against everything sexual that is not between a man and a woman and meant to induce pregnancy. A bit primitive in my book.
Christian culture in Spain
Jewish culture in Jerusalem or the Kahanist settlers
Hindu culture in Myanmar
African culture in Kenya
American culture in national politics
Did I cover the Evangelicals in Georgia or the Dutch reformed in the Bible Belt of the Netherlands?
The Syrian refugee crisis is forcing European nations to show what color they are made off. Liitle has changed since the days of the Nazi pogroms of the Jewish people in the 1930s :: Britain or Hungary as a small sample of fascists in freedom loving democracies.
Europe is historically white with Judeo-Christian heritage… signed by Geert Wilders, Pegida offshoots, and followers.
France is “white race” says French MEP Nadine Morano – immigrants should adapt or leave.
As a Muslim convert, I feel I have some insight into these cultural differences. Islam advocates a view of sex as something sacred, to ideally be shared only with the person one marries. This is seen as very beautiful. At the same time, there’s tremendous mercy (in the religion itself, not always in the cultures in which it thrives) for people who go off track. I once heard a shaykh describe a man who rejected his fiance when he found out she wasn’t a virgin as “a donkey” because he had no appreciation for her as a person and no understanding that we all make mistakes and God forgives if only we ask. The idea is, “If she’s sincerely repented, who is this guy to tell her that’s not good enough?” That’s actually the sin of “lordship;” to act as if one is God and knows whether God accepts another person’s repentance. In other words, he was saying the guy was being an arrogant jerk.
I’ve known Western women who never experienced sex as something sacred. Those who convert to Islam see the possibility and then often want that kind of experience. My wife is an example. Both of us were westerners who came to Islam later in life. Neither of us were sexually inexperienced. Yet we chose freely to abstain from anything but holding hands until we were married. When we married, our first kiss was right in front of everyone. We didn’t tell anyone this would be our first kiss but they felt it. Everyone gasped and then exhaled like they were witnessing something beautiful. Our entire relationship has unfolded in a way that’s deeply respectful and beautiful. When we argue, we find our way back to love very easily. One might say the door to heaven is always close by. All but one of my prior relationships were very passionate and very firey. Like riding a romantic roller coaster. One might say the door to hell was always close by.
There’s much beauty in this way of doing things. Neither my wife nor I would go back to a Western liberal view of sexuality. The other side of the coin, however, are the problems that go with such a worldview when viewed through a narrow filter that disempowers women. Such disempowerment is not a part of Islam but rather many of the cultures in which it thrives.
When I first converted to Islam, I was dating another woman who was also a convert. She would talk openly about her exes and, on one occasion, I mentioned to my shaykh that I was feeling jealousy over men in her past. His response was, “Ah, this is from shaytan. Do tawba.” Tawba is essentially repentance. He was telling me to repent for thinking about her sexual past for the very same reasons a westerner would say that what she did before we met was none of my business. He would have said such things are between her and God.
The problem is, no matter what social norms a society chooses, they can get all too easily twisted. In traditional Islamic culture that looks upon virginity until marriage as the ideal, people who do not remain virgins can get judge harshly by those who don’t really understand the religion. In our culture, those prohibitions and judgments have fallen away but we pay a different price. For many, it’s only that sex has lost its meaning or become something merely biological. I’ve heard friends say, “It’s only sex.” One woman told me her boyfriend wouldn’t even do straight-up sex anymore; that it’s not interesting enough. Another place where things go off is that women (and some men too) feel pressure to have sex as if there were something wrong with abstinence. The Muslim view is that shaytan can get into anything. I think that’s true. There’s no magic formula of right social norms. It’s our ability to live from an open heart that informs our relationship to our norms, to others and to life itself.