Islam, Rape, and Norway

A quote from a newspaper article:

"When a lightly dressed, intoxicated woman gets in alone into a taxi, the starting point is that she's already sinned. A Muslim woman can't do that. Those who attacked and raped women in the street thought that they were within their rights. They saw an intoxicated woman without an escort. She's then considered fair game in some Muslim communities. And by their own perception, the men think that women have no value as witnesses in a criminal case," says Thorsen.

Well, Norway, you asked for it.

From here.

And also this, on rape in Oslo:

Q: You're saying that Norwegian girls are asking to be raped?

A: Not exactly asking, but when then go out almost completely naked and get completelydrunk in Frogner park or go to a party together with some friend, and then they complain about being raped? It's their fault, says the 26 year old from Somalia.

Q: But even if they go around lightly dressed and get drunk then they're certainly not asking to be raped?

A: No, but many of the foreigners aren't used to this where they come from. They're not accustomed that girls go dressed as they want, then maybe they interpret this a bit wrong, you understand?

From here.

Viorst on despotism, "the Arabs' most pervasive political instituion"

“In fact, a strong argument can be made that Islam, the heart of Arab culture, sets the limit of personal and social development in the Arab world. Despotism, the Arabs' most pervasive political institution, is surely its offshoot, even though Islam has sometimes been at odds with its despots.”

Milton Viorst. 1994. Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World. New York: Knopf. pp 357-8.

Hmm, what do you think? Fair or unfair?

Louay Safi on the legal core of Islam

The importance of the Islamic legal code for the Arab, and Muslim society in general, may be appreciated by realizing that, historically, the most influential intellectual figures were not theologians, as was the case in Christian Europe, but jurists and doctors of law.

Louay Safi. 1994. The Challenge of Modernity: The Quest for Authenticity in the Arab World. New York, London: University Press of America. p 141.

Temple Gairdner on the Church as home for Muslim converts

If any church desires to be a spiritual home for those who come to Christ from Islam, a brotherhood, a spiritual garden, then it must have a very definite and well thought-out plan for teaching and training them in the Christian faith; and it must also, having determined its responsibility with regard to their human needs, be ready to shoulder the same. A church that makes this preparation in a spirit of thoughtful love, is already more than half-way to the ideal of being a home. A church that makes no such preparation, or whose preparation is ill thought-out, is making it that much harder for itself to be a home, indeed has not declared unmistakably that it thinks of itself as such.

WHT Gairdner, "The Christian Church as a Home for Christ's Converts from Islam", The Muslim World Vol. 14, p. 241.

Europeans too selfish to have children, says Rabi

This is according to the Lord Chief Rabi of London. He is quite right, IMHO.

Lord Sacks said: “Parenthood involves massive sacrifice of money, attention, time and emotional energy.

“Where today in European culture with its consumerism and instant gratification – because you’re worth it – where will you find space for the concept of sacrifice for the sake of generations not yet born?

“Europe, at least the indigenous population of Europe, is dying.”

“That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.

“Albert Camus once said, 'The only serious philosophical question is why should I not commit suicide?’.

“I think he was wrong. The only serious philosophical question is, why should I have a child? Our culture is not giving an easy answer to that question.”

He added: “Wherever you turn today - Jewish, Christian or Muslim - the more religious the community, the larger on average are their families.

“The major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians.’’

Discussing the popular secular idea that there are no absolute moral values, he said: “You cannot defend a civilisation on the basis of moral relativism.

The whole thing is HERE.

Temple Gairdner on obedience and rebirth

Oh my God,--
Obedience restores the golden, free days of childhood, for the twice-born are children always.

Gairdner, W.H.T. 1930? W.H.T.G. To His Friends. London: SPCK. p. 49.

Root Causes of Muslim Persecution of Christians

Root Causes of Persecution
The first generation of Muslims was a minority in the non-Muslim world it set out to conquer. For the Muslims, this created a sense of defensiveness and a fear of being overwhelmed by the conquered communities that persist today in spite of centuries of Muslim dominance. Even in modern secular Muslim-majority states, Islam and shari’a have such a hold on public perceptions that attitudes of contempt and practices of discrimination against non-Muslims are accepted as normal.

From this article by Patrick Sookhdeo.

Pray for Yemen: Qat and Water

Yemen is running out of water, and farmers there are using what they have to cultivate a crop that is not even a food--qat.

JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.

Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.

Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.

Pray for Yemen. Without the power of the Gospel true freedom and wisdom will never come to this country.

Read it all here.

Islam and Religious Imperialism

“Islam in its cradle was already a specimen of religious imperialism, which is another name for secularized theocracy.”

Hendrik Kraemer, The Christian Message in a non-Christian World

A Missions-minded Orthodox Church?

You can find them every now and then: the Antiochians in the USA are one example--though mostly they are converting Christians to Christianity (something I don't find terribly impressive). But there is also the Orthodox Church in Indonesia, whose senior priest is himself a former Muslim. (Who converted to evangelical Christianity and only later became Orthodox.) Here is their website, I recommend their newsletter which has some nice pictures. It makes me glad to see that there are places where Orthodoxy is still out planting churches and catechizing and evangelizing non-Christians.

Friends of Indonesia

Douthat on Islam: a Roman leader or Cantuar the appeaser?

I told you, great article here by Ross Douthat:

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.

Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan.

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

By contrast, the Church of England’s leadership has opted for conciliation (some would say appeasement), with the Archbishop of Canterbury going so far as to speculate about the inevitability of some kind of sharia law in Britain.

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

Douthat on Anglicans, Catholics, and Ecumenism

Great stuff on Anglicanism and Catholicism and ecumenicity. This is a brilliant article. Perhaps the best I've read on the whole Anglican-Catholic ordinariate development so far:

At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.

Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.

Along the way, he’s courting both ends of the theological spectrum. In his encyclicals, Benedict has addressed a range of issues — social justice, environmental protection, even erotic love — that are close to the hearts of secular liberals and lukewarm, progressive-minded Christians. But instead of stopping at a place of broad agreement, he has pushed further, trying to persuade his more liberal readers that many of their beliefs actually depend on the West’s Catholic heritage, and make sense only when grounded in a serious religious faith.

Jerusalem, the third most holy site of Islam?

So fractured was the Muslim Ummah in the late 7th century that the
Damascus Umayyads started discouraging their subjects from going on the
hajj pilgrimage. It is said that while in Mecca, the Syrian pilgrims would be
infl uenced by the oratory of Caliph Ibn al-Zubayr and give their oath of
allegiance to the Meccan caliph. Abd al-Malik feared that returning pilgrims
would challenge his political as well as religious authority. Many historians
report that Abd al-Malik was so frustrated by his inability to capture Mecca
and to lead the hajj that he built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as an
alternative to the Ka’aba in Mecca. Before Abd al-Malik, there is no record
of Muslims going to pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but after he built the Dome
of the Rock, this site became a venue for Syrians to visit instead of Mecca
and Medina.

Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, by Tarek Fatah (2008, Wiley, p 169)