by Majid Rafizadeh
• March 25, 2017 at 5:00 am
- It is the fear of
this violence, torture and death, wielded by extremist
Muslims, that keeps every person desperate to obey.
- If liberals are in
favor of freedom of speech, why do they turn a blind eye to
Islamist governments such as Iran, which execute people for
expressing their opinion? And why do they not let people in
the West express their opinion without attacking them or even
giving them the respect of hearing what they have to say? They
seem, in fact, like the autocratic people from whom I was
fleeing, who also did not want their simplistic, binary way of
thinking to be threatened by logic or fact.
- As, in Islam, one is
not allowed to attack except to defend the prophet or Islam,
extremist Muslims need to keep finding or creating supposed
attacks to make themselves appear as victims.
- Finally, a short
message to liberals might go: Dear Liberal, If you truly stand
for values such as peace, social justice, liberty and
freedoms, your apologetic view of radical Islam is in total
contradiction with all of those values. Your view even hinders
the efforts of many Muslims to make a peaceful reformation in
Islam precisely to advance the those values.
Anjem Choudary, a radical British Muslim cleric, was
sentenced late last year by a British judge to five and a half
years in prison for encouraging people to join the Islamic State.
(Image source: Dan H/Flickr)
If you had
grown up, as I did, between two authoritarian governments -- the
Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria -- under the leadership of
people such as Hafez al Assad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, you would have seen your youth influenced by two major
denominations of Islam in the Muslim world: the Shia and the Sunni.
I studied both, and at one point was even a devout Muslim. My
parents, who still live in Iran and Syria, come from two different
ethnic Muslim groups: Arab and Persian.
You also
would have seen how the religion of Islam intertwines with
politics, and how radical Islam rules a society through its
religious laws, sharia. You would have witnessed how radical Islam
can dominate and scrutinize people's day-to-day choices: in eating,
clothing, socializing, entertainment, everything.
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