Free will has shaped our democracies and advanced our civilization, yet its assets remain an aberration to many of the world’s Muslims, judging from a new global study that blurs the line between moderates and extremists.
“Solid majorities” favor sharia law, death for apostates, and female subjugation, while “substantial minorities” justify suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, according to the Pew Research Center which interviewed 38,000 Muslims in 39 countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East for its enlightening report, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society.”
Contradictions and barbaric tendencies pepper the survey.
Muslims apparently welcome democracy and religious freedom, but want Islam to mold their politics. And too many support punishments such as whippings, or amputating the limbs of thieves and robbers.
The unnerving findings also confirm the intolerance and hostilities of the adherents of the world’s second largest religion, while exposing their double standards.
Most devout Muslims say Western music, movies, and television threaten their morality, but they enjoy them all the same, and that prostitution, homosexuality, and alcohol are for degenerates.
The beliefs don’t jive with the reality.
Prostitution is too benign a term for the fake “pleasure marriages” that abound semi-secretly in Saudi Arabia — the birthplace of Islam — and other Muslim nations, stripping a woman of any matrimonial rights and making her a sex slave for a man’s enjoyment.
Homosexuality, too, is a hush-hush fact of existence in the Muslim world, with websites such as GayMuslim.org, and documentaries including “Jihad for Love” repudiating Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dotty claim at a 2007 Columbia University appearance that “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”
Alcohol is another well-fulfilled taboo, its consumption so thinly veiled in Pakistan — where children are taught to chant “Death to America” — that rehab clinics advertise in newspapers, waiters sneak scotch to guests at weddings and corporate functions, officials imbibe openly at events yet hide their glasses from shutterbugs, and bootleggers deliver to your door.
The study further states that most Muslims report all or most of their friends are Muslim, too. A troubling indicator for sure, given Pew’s projection that the world’s Muslim population will rise to 2.2 billion by 2030 — if indeed its exponentially-rising terrorist element hasn’t bombed the planet into oblivion by then.
Islamo-morality and its relentless onslaught on Western values, which surpass Muslim ones even on a bad day, is a myth bucked by militant icons like Osama bin Laden, whose vast stash of porn was an alert that devout Muslims aren’t as religious about practicing what they preach.
The Pew report is just another reminder exploding the hype.
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Read Shavana Abruzzo's column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail here at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.
