the ethnic conflict in Burma

[Malcolm]

I'm not sure that's a workable analogy, Malcolm. Fascism is a political program. Islam is a religious identity.

When does a religious identity cease being an ideological commitment? What makes it sacred, as opposed other ideological commitments? Certainly, Facism was upheld with religious zeal. Often religion is used for political programs, etc. Where do we want to draw the line, and how do we do so?

M

[Virgo]

Just when do we decide that someone's ideological comittments are toxic, and then what do we do about it?

M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sam4lq2WHos&feature=related

Kevin

[treehuggingoctopus]

The point is, while Islam surely can be tantamount to a destructive ideology, it can also be, and in fact much more often than not is, something completely different. The same with Christianity, Judaism - and perhaps Buddhism.

With fascism it's just not like that. You can't have tolerant and humane (or at least human, if I may put it so) fascism, for the gist of it precisely intolerance, chauvinism and xenophoby - those features which may be part of any ideological identity, but need not necessarily be so.

[Jikan]

I'm not sure that's a workable analogy, Malcolm. Fascism is a political program. Islam is a religious identity.

When does a religious identity cease being an ideological commitment? What makes it sacred, as opposed other ideological commitments? Certainly, Facism was upheld with religious zeal. Often religion is used for political programs, etc. Where do we want to draw the line, and how do we do so?

M

I agree that ideology (defined in the sense of false consciousness) and identification are certainly problematic in either case, but I don't think both Islam and Fascism (or rather being-a-Muslim and being-a-Fascist) are reducible to ideology. It's possible to be born Muslim, for instance, and hence to have an Islamic identity projected onto you; the current American president inherited some of this with his middle name (and hence the conviction among the wingnut-o-sphere that Barry Obama from Hawaii is clearly a Muslim and ipso-facto a "Terrist"). It's not possible to become a Fascist without having made a choice. And unlike a traditional religious identity, which is essentially a social marker, you can choose to stop identifying as a Fascist, to stop doing or promoting Fascism, and you're done. Try no longer being a Muslim or a Jew for that matter; it would mean a change in your life on the magnitude of joining the witness protection program (new name, new family, new hometown, all that).

That's the distinction I'm getting at. I don't disagree with your premise that we really need to stop identifying and taking this stuff at face value as real (that's the "demystification" of ideology as false consciousness, which basically means coming to grips with your situation broadly speaking, not the make-believe world of us as good and them as bad). I disagree there's a significant and important human difference between Islam and Fascism that needs to be recognized, or else one risks minimizing one or the other.

Islam's a religion. Fascism is a political program. Different functions, different conditions, different consequences, some of which may overlap.

[Malcolm]

I'm not sure that's a workable analogy, Malcolm. Fascism is a political program. Islam is a religious identity.

When does a religious identity cease being an ideological commitment? What makes it sacred, as opposed other ideological commitments? Certainly, Facism was upheld with religious zeal. Often religion is used for political programs, etc. Where do we want to draw the line, and how do we do so?

M

I agree that ideology (defined in the sense of false consciousness) and identification are certainly problematic in either case, but I don't think both Islam and Fascism (or rather being-a-Muslim and being-a-Fascist) are reducible to ideology. It's possible to be born Muslim, for instance, and hence to have an Islamic identity projected onto you; the current American president inherited some of this with his middle name (and hence the conviction among the wingnut-o-sphere that Barry Obama from Hawaii is clearly a Muslim and ipso-facto a "Terrist"). It's not possible to become a Fascist without having made a choice. And unlike a traditional religious identity, which is essentially a social marker, you can choose to stop identifying as a Fascist, to stop doing or promoting Fascism, and you're done. Try no longer being a Muslim or a Jew for that matter; it would mean a change in your life on the magnitude of joining the witness protection program (new name, new family, new hometown, all that).

That's the distinction I'm getting at. I don't disagree with your premise that we really need to stop identifying and taking this stuff at face value as real (that's the "demystification" of ideology as false consciousness, which basically means coming to grips with your situation broadly speaking, not the make-believe world of us as good and them as bad). I disagree there's a significant and important human difference between Islam and Fascism that needs to be recognized, or else one risks minimizing one or the other.

Islam's a religion. Fascism is a political program. Different functions, different conditions, different consequences, some of which may overlap.

Are you saying that once born a Muslim, you cannot cease being a Muslim? Are you saying one necessarily chooses to be a republican? Because I certainly know Christians who have become Buddhists, etc. I know many people who are excorciated for changing their political beliefs, and know of some who have even been killed for it.

I think it is glib to propose that political idenities cannot be projected as easily as religious ones -- communist, facist, etc.

I don't think you are making very convincing arguments for privelging religious ideologies over political ones -- they are both equally malleable and susceptible to being cuturally embedded -- for example, Socialism in Tuscany. Try being a Facist in Tuscany!

M

[tobes]

Some more light on the issue:
http://www.zcommunications.org/democrac ... mzy-baroud

Thanks. I am still at a profound loss as to why **supposed** Buddhists on this forum have been engaged in justifying this. It really doesn't say much for contemporary Buddhism....

It is simply evidence that some Buddhists follow the Dharma and others do not -- nothing more, nothing less. "Buddhism" is a sectarian identity, and as such, is suscetible to the flaws of the same.

M

Indeed, that's what I am pointing to.

[tobes]

It's not quite a 'serves them right!' comment yet, at least not explicitly. But it's damn close to being one.

People with differing ideological commitments often cannot live with each other. Facists/communists, etc.

I wonder how tobes would feel however if we replaced "facist" for "muslim"? I am not recommending intolerance towards muslims, but I am curious if tobes' "liberalism" can be extended by him/her to facists as well.

Just when do we decide that someone's ideological comittments are toxic, and then what do we do about it?

M

I am not a liberal, although I do advocate a certain range of negative liberties.

The matter here is particular and contextual: in this case it is the ideological commitment of Burmese-Buddhist-nationalism which is infringing upon the basic liberties of an ethnic minority.

What kind of liberties? The basic freedom to live free of violent persecution.

That is what is toxic in this case.

We need no further predication's here than ahimsa and karuna.

Why is it that instead of speaking out about this you concoct a thought experiment which implicitly assumes that the problem is ideological difference based on competing theological-metaphysical distinctions, rather than flat out ethnic racism?

[Indrajala]

It's not quite a 'serves them right!' comment yet, at least not explicitly. But it's damn close to being one.

Unless Thrasymachus states his support for violence against the aforementioned minorities, you need not equate his words to being "damn close" to a "serves them right!" comment.

As was discussed already there is great historical precedent for ethnic conflict where Muslims and Buddhists live together. This is not only limited to Muslim-Buddhist relations, but it is readily seen elsewhere on the subcontinent with Muslim-Hindu relations.

The historical precedents cannot be dismissed.

Having free open borders with incompatible ideologies mixing together is a recipe for massacres.

[Nemo]

Tobes how do you disregard the last thousand years of genocidal expansion by Islam? Or even the genocidal madness of the last 50 years? You are an apologist for a group more radical than the Nazi party. Millions are dead. Many just overt the border from Burma. I think your appeasement of the intolerant will lead to more murder. A book that actively promotes genocide does not deserve the protection of pretending to be a religion. Eventually you have to say no. Evil is evil and I will not stand for it even if it pretends to be nice today. Muhammad was a murderous monster. A genocidal general of an invading army of mercenaries that exterminated all it's opponents. To call that Holy is nuts. The man was a war criminal by today's standards.

You are the one who has no perspective. Islam is not a religion as it encompasses a legal system, a system of taxation, a political system and geopolitical goals of domination by warfare.

[tobes]

Tobes how do you disregard the last thousand years of genocidal expansion by Islam? Or even the genocidal madness of the last 50 years? You are an apologist for a group more radical than the Nazi party. Millions are dead. Many just overt the border from Burma. I think your appeasement of the intolerant will lead to more murder. A book that actively promotes genocide does not deserve the protection of pretending to be a religion. Eventually you have to say no. Evil is evil and I will not stand for it even if it pretends to be nice today. Muhammad was a murderous monster. A genocidal general of an invading army of mercenaries that exterminated all it's opponents. To call that Holy is nuts. The man was a war criminal by today's standards.

You are the one who has no perspective. Islam is not a religion as it encompasses a legal system, a system of taxation, a political system and geopolitical goals of domination by warfare.

Nemo, this is simply hateful bigotry. It does not warrant a response. If you cannot discern the difference between political history, theology, hermeneutics and religious practice then there is no basis to have reasonable dialogue about these matters.

At the end of the day, what matters here is that you are on a Buddhist board implicitly defending violence and persecution on the basis that those acts are occurring to an 'evil' group.

Perhaps nothing is more evil than attributing one kind of consciousness to over a billion different people. Is that the perspective I ought to have???

[tobes]

It's not quite a 'serves them right!' comment yet, at least not explicitly. But it's damn close to being one.

Unless Thrasymachus states his support for violence against the aforementioned minorities, you need not equate his words to being "damn close" to a "serves them right!" comment.

As was discussed already there is great historical precedent for ethnic conflict where Muslims and Buddhists live together. This is not only limited to Muslim-Buddhist relations, but it is readily seen elsewhere on the subcontinent with Muslim-Hindu relations.

The historical precedents cannot be dismissed.

Having free open borders with incompatible ideologies mixing together is a recipe for massacres.

And what exactly are those historical precedents Huseng? Are you referring to the colonial power in India which had a policy - an instituted and practiced policy - of breeding division between Hindu's and Muslim's in order to consolidate its power?

Or do you mean the great period of Mughal imperial unification - Akbar as the pluralist cosmopolitan a good two centuries before Kant??

Maybe you could spell out precisely how you have read Indian history to arrive at this conclusion.

[Indrajala]

Maybe you could spell out precisely how you have read Indian history to arrive at this conclusion.

Have you ever been to India? There is a lot of ill sentiment between Muslims and Hindus. Generally things okay for now, but there are clear divisions between people. In living memory there was the partition between Pakistan and India which was largely based on religious grounds. Countless people were killed in the mass migrations that followed. Both sides butchered each other, but then it might demonstrate that the two groups are incompatible. Jains, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs generally get along with each other.

You should also understand the early Muslim invasions into India, which pillaged countless Buddhist and Hindu temples coupled with massacres and mass enslavement.

The cultural memory of that still lingers on.

In fact you can see the damage done around Northern India in the various ruins of places:



This is at Nalanda where most of the images have their heads missing.

[Norwegian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_war

Speaking of India: "The Bahmani sultans (1347–1480) in central India made it a rule to kill 100,000 Hindus (kafir - non-believers) every year. In 1399, Teimur killed 100,000 captives in a single day.[105][106] Historian asserts that "These wars were fought in the true spirit of Jihad — the total annihilation or conversion of the non-Muslims."[107][108]"

[tobes]

Maybe you could spell out precisely how you have read Indian history to arrive at this conclusion.

Have you ever been to India? There is a lot of ill sentiment between Muslims and Hindus. Generally things okay for now, but there are clear divisions between people. In living memory there was the partition between Pakistan and India which was largely based on religious grounds. Countless people were killed in the mass migrations that followed. Both sides butchered each other, but then it might demonstrate that the two groups are incompatible. Jains, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs generally get along with each other.

You should also understand the early Muslim invasions into India, which pillaged countless Buddhist and Hindu temples coupled with massacres and mass enslavement.

The cultural memory of that still lingers on.

In fact you can see the damage done around Northern India in the various ruins of places:



This is at Nalanda where most of the images have their heads missing.

This just highlights an intense historical ignorance.

You speak of the partition as if its cause lay in religious doctrine ~ it doesn't even cross your mind to ask who was in power when the partition occurred, and why they thought it might be a good idea (and why that might be an important thing to ask if you looking for historical causes).

Everyone knows that there were periods where pluralism degenerated under the Mughals, particularly between 1650-1700. But there were just as many periods of great tolerance and religious harmony. Either you know this complex history or you don't, and it seems to me that you clearly don't.

[treehuggingoctopus]

It's not quite a 'serves them right!' comment yet, at least not explicitly. But it's damn close to being one.

Unless Thrasymachus states his support for violence against the aforementioned minorities, you need not equate his words to being "damn close" to a "serves them right!" comment.

Oh come on. In a thread about a Buddhist society bashing its Muslim minority, a guy pops in just to villify Islam - how is one supposed to construe it?

The whole history argument (i.e., Islam-is-the-ultimate-horror-as-the-history-so-clearly-evinces) could be used to support a critique of any religious institution with sufficiently long history, and happens to neatly parallel the Chinese goverments' villification of Tibetan culture as a reactionary and intrinsically oppressive artefact from the past. There are some significant differences, of course, and curiously one of them is that the Maoists and their current heirs might appear to the naive to know slightly better and attack (yes, only in theory, goes without saying) an ideology they deem pernicious and not the people involved in it. Western Islamophobes don't even pretend to make such a distinction - it's Muslims they fear, every Muslim obviously being a convinced and unrepenant Islamofascist.

I've alreay said it, and will say it again: most of Westerners interested in the issue, and certainly most posters at DW, fail to understand what being a Muslim means to most Muslims. They fail to see that Islam, just like every religion, is an ethnic identity first, an ideology second - that most Muslims don't know pretty much anything about the creed, many just parrot the words their parents told them without any understanding, some construe the creed fairly personally, some don't know how or why to construe it at all and many don't really care either way, turning devout only on their deathbed. A story as old as humanity.

Our cultural failure to understand that the actual, real-life Muslim identity is just like the Christian or the Buddhist one - an umbrella which may shade pretty much anything but usually hides pretty much nothing - is absolutely terrifying, and speaks volumes about our xenophobia: after all, most of us don't make that mistake when they see our Christian neighbours.

I find it also still quite shocking that we let ourselves so easily be manipulated. I mean, with recent developments in Egypt and Syria, the anti-Islam propaganda should be really easy to see through. The American government is busy toppling the tyrants who, incidentally, represented the liberal and secular wing of Islam (and whom the US wholeheartedly supported a few years ago) - paving thus the way for the likes of Muslim Brotherhood. The future could hardly be clearer.

[tobes]

I agree with treehuggingoctopus, even if I do not fully understand his or her name.

But to that I would add: if anyone is interested in waging some kind of doctrinal argument about the inherent evil or violence of Islam, then for Allah's sake could you please do some bloody research.

And no glib quotations - I mean look into the mechanics of Islamic theology, its deep relation to Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, how this is connected to jurisprudence and produces a particular social theory, and especially what contemporary Islamic thought says about some of the matters that have arisen in this thread.

Start here and here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabi ... taphysics/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempora ... philosophy

And if you can't make the basic effort to do that, and actually engage in the issues at play (because there are interesting ones with respect to western secular liberalism, Buddhism etc), then please shut up and spare us of your slanderous and destructive opinions.

[treehuggingoctopus]

But to that I would add: if anyone is interested in waging some kind of doctrinal argument about the inherent evil or violence of Islam, then for Allah's sake could you please do some bloody research.

And no glib quotations - I mean look into the mechanics of Islamic theology, its deep relation to Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, how this is connected to jurisprudence and produces a particular social theory, and especially what contemporary Islamic thought says about some of the matters that have arisen in this thread.

Start here and here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabi ... taphysics/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempora ... philosophy

You're absolutely right, of course.
The fact that that kind of requirement must be spelled out here is deeply frightening.

[catmoon]

I agree with treehuggingoctopus, even if I do not fully understand his or her name.

But to that I would add: if anyone is interested in waging some kind of doctrinal argument about the inherent evil or violence of Islam, then for Allah's sake could you please do some bloody research.

And no glib quotations - I mean look into the mechanics of Islamic theology, its deep relation to Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, how this is connected to jurisprudence and produces a particular social theory, and especially what contemporary Islamic thought says about some of the matters that have arisen in this thread.

Start here and here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabi ... taphysics/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempora ... philosophy

And if you can't make the basic effort to do that, and actually engage in the issues at play (because there are interesting ones with respect to western secular liberalism, Buddhism etc), then please shut up and spare us of your slanderous and destructive opinions.

I assume you are aware that this skates close to the edge of the ToS. On the other hand, so long as you are targetting opinions rather than the author I have no complaint. Rest assured that if anyone squawks about this post in the moderator forum, you will have at least one staunch defender. I am not fond of bigotry.

[tobes]

I agree with treehuggingoctopus, even if I do not fully understand his or her name.

But to that I would add: if anyone is interested in waging some kind of doctrinal argument about the inherent evil or violence of Islam, then for Allah's sake could you please do some bloody research.

And no glib quotations - I mean look into the mechanics of Islamic theology, its deep relation to Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, how this is connected to jurisprudence and produces a particular social theory, and especially what contemporary Islamic thought says about some of the matters that have arisen in this thread.

Start here and here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabi ... taphysics/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempora ... philosophy

And if you can't make the basic effort to do that, and actually engage in the issues at play (because there are interesting ones with respect to western secular liberalism, Buddhism etc), then please shut up and spare us of your slanderous and destructive opinions.

I assume you are aware that this skates close to the edge of the ToS. On the other hand, so long as you are targetting opinions rather than the author I have no complaint. Rest assured that if anyone squawks about this post in the moderator forum, you will have at least one staunch defender. I am not fond of bigotry.

Yes, I am attacking bigotry in general - my intention is to challenge anyone (from this point forth) who wants to make claims about Islam being inherently x, y or z to justify their claims with some decent evidence.

Incidentally, I have not studied the ToS very deeply - I wonder if, for example, blatant antisemitism violates it, then why this does not apply to Islam?? (I am also aware that the signifier Semitic may apply in both cases, but I think everyone gets the drift).

This not to say we can't have deep disagreements about Judaism, Islam, Buddhism + history, politics or whatever - but for me, the line would be crossed if someone made a statement like "Jews are greedy and only interested in money." It seems to me that the line has been crossed with respect to Muslims numerous times on this thread.

I'm not quite sure how this has remained acceptable, which is why I have spoken up.

[zangskar]

I would like to suggest to moderators that all the posts in this topic that are not directly related to the events in Burma be split into a new thread. I think it is not cool that people searching google for this topic might end up here and see the deaths of innocent people in Burma linked to a kind of "Well isn't Islam a genocidal religion anyway?" discussion. No matter whether anyone intentionally wanted to make this association, it's what is in fact communicated in this thread, and even if Islam was a genocidal religion it's still not a very cool 'message'.
Best wishes
Lars