Disclaimer - the ravings of a sleep deprived apple addict
Grumpy smug fuddie duddie John Humphrys on friday's Today programme:
"Islam is not compatible with the western democratic ideal, it is an obstacle to real freedom democracy and peace, it violates our notion of human rights - that is the view of many in the west."
Controversial. But for the sake of argument, and you know how I like an argument, lets take it as true. The interview that followed discussed the difference between a rules and ethics based religion. How Islam was too much of the former at the moment and needed to develop into the latter
This got me thinking. In psychology, the moral development of children is generally viewed as happening in stages:
Stage 1: Stealing sweets bad because I get punished for it. "i.e. because daddy spanks me".
Stage 2: Stealing sweets is bad because there's a rule against it "i.e. because daddy says so."
Stage 3: Stealing sweets is bad because it hurts others. "i.e. because Johnny loses the sweets that cost him his pocket money."
Now, the form of Islam that is supposedly the barrier to freedom and democracy, is a rules based religion. Currently at stage 2. Kids are generally expected to get out of that stage before they hit zits and wet-dreams, but lets assume that religions, being beasts made up of billions of people, are harder to steer and slower to change.
Islam is by some distance the youngest of the three Abrahamic faiths. Muhammad died in 632, making Islam about 1400 years old. Wanna know what childish pranks its elder sister Christianity was up to at that difficult age? The Holy Office of the Doctrine of the Faith (popularly known by its nom de guerre the 'Spanish Inquisition'.) was founded in 1478.
You can see where I'm going with this can't you? Those that see Islam as an eternal enemy to western democratic values, view sha'ria law and the like as cruel, archaic and out of touch with modern ethics. In other words, they judge what is expected from a religion based on the mores and behaviours of the time and place its practised in. While we do the same for kids, (a 12 year old girl in england wouldn't be expected to marry now, although she might 700 years ago, or in some other societies in the world), we also make some allowances for their age. What's expected of a child is function of both their age, and environment, and maybe what's expected of a religion should be too.
Does this mean we should put up with the stonings and the suicide bombs? Course not . Any more than we should let a kid bully another kid, but we can at least anticipate that far from being an eternal and implacable foe, with a little more time, The hard line of fundamentalist Islam will change. It's already starting to.
Its another of those Microcosm things.
In other news I cremated my Grandma yesterday. It was very sad, but we had a Rabbi who knew her, and that makes all the difference. If this post makes no sense, it'll be a combination of that and the fact that I got 2.5hrs sleep last night.