[dragontamer]

Erm... Islam was what kept most of the world out of the Dark Ages. They didn't need to experience enlightenment when they were busy experiencing Algebra and the number zero.

The Middle-east is such a hellhole because the Ottoman Empire got royally F'''ed up in World War 1. And its iddy-bitty pieces were redrawn by the Allies.

Whereas Germany remained strong and rebelled against the Allied rule by basically starting World War 2... the Ottomans were cut up piece by piece and distributed across the Allied powers. The clusterf'''ed map today was drawn by military commanders with no rhyme or reason to cultural unity, which leads us to how screwed up the Middle East is today.

Granted, the Ottomans were in decline by that point, which contributed to why they lost the Great War. But lets not forget the basis of history here. World War 1 screwed things up, quite severely, in this region.

In fact, the former map of the Ottoman Empire basically reads for where things are screwed up today.

http://www.zonu.com/images/0X0/2010-01-02-11578/The-Ottoman-...

Ignoring the major geo-political changes between 1850 through 1920 seems frankly insane. The current state of the Middle East can be easily explained by WW1 and the collapse of the Ottomans. Furthermore, the history and culture of the region _remembers_ when they were a great world power.

There's probably a bit of jealousy and pride in there, as the Persians / Ottomans were a great empire only ~150 years ago.

[jacquesm]

That certainly didn't help. But Islam still has to see its Erasmus and until then this madness will likely persist.

Religion is a personal thing.

[dragontamer]

Can you name an attack on the Western world in the last 30 years that didn't involve the Wahabist / Salafi extremist sect of Muslim?

There's one sect kinda-sorta preaching violence. And that is the Wahhabi Islam that followed Osama Bin Laden. Beyond that, your mainstream Shiite / Shia Muslims are rather peaceful folk within the Western World.

Frances 7%+ Muslim Population is a testament to that. Its pretty much those who get converted to the extremist violent sect that we have to worry about.

And as I stated in another thread: geo-political issues prevent the US from calling out the sect specifically. Saudi Arabia has a relatively large number of Salafists.

Even then... Wahhabi / Salafi aren't the same. But since they're more closely related (same geo-political area and a shared history)... I'll keep the terms close to each other. But honestly, these sorts of things are important to see.

You can't just paint Islam with a broad brush and make generalizations. At best, I'd say the attacks (Sept. 11, Anwar Al Awalki, Bin Laden, etc. etc.) are all derived from Wahhabi Islam at best.

The most accurate is probably "Violently Motivated Extremist Wahhabi Islam"... which is a rather small subset of Muslims. (Basically just ISIS and Al Qaeda)

[btilly]

Yes, I can. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Alleged_suicide_and_t... for a list of attacks attributed to Hezbollah, which is a Shi'ah organization.

Furthermore support of violence to suppress freedom of religion is by no means limited to a small splinter sect in the islamic world. For example in a Pew survey, 88% of muslims in Egypt support the death penalty for converting away from islam. When you consider that about 95% of Egyptians are muslim, that's a pretty mainstream view.

If you want to know more about muslim views, I highly recommend reading through http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religio... for perspective. Coming from a Western view you might encounter a lot of, "No, you think you are tolerant but what you think of as tolerance really isn't." And it is important to understand that.

The item I pointed to is kind of canonical. A muslim who lets others practice their religion believes that he is tolerant of those religions. And continues believing that even while saying that if a member of one of those religions convinces some other muslim that that religion is correct, then they need to be killed for the attack on the one TRUE religion, islam!

[kbutler]

> Can you name an attack on the Western world in the last 30 years that didn't involve the Wahabist / Salafi extremist sect of Muslim?

The first example that came to mind was the Unabomber - last attack was 1995, and he was explicitly opposing the technology-rich western world.

A simple google search for "terrorist attacks not muslim" brought up: http://www.loonwatch.com/2010/01/terrorism-in-europe/

"only 6% of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1980 to 2005 were carried out by Islamic extremists."

"In fact, a whopping 99.6% of terrorist attacks in Europe were by non-Muslim groups; a good 84.8% of attacks were from separatist groups completely unrelated to Islam. Leftist groups accounted for over sixteen times as much terrorism as radical Islamic groups. Only a measly 0.4% of terrorist attacks from 2006 to 2008 could be attributed to extremist Muslims."

[jacquesm]

I think he meant attacks on the Western world by Islamists not Wahabist/Salafi affiliated.

[jacquesm]

Agreed with all you wrote, however that's the way the debate to date has been framed. Just like the anti-abortionists spoil it for the Christians, the ultra-orthodox Jews spoil it for Israel (and the rest of the Jews) and so on. So fanatics of all sects spoil it for Islam in the aggregate.

> And as I stated in another thread: geo-political issues prevent the US from calling out the sect specifically. Saudi Arabia has a relatively large number of Salafists.

We're in violent agreement here, as long as our dependency on oil continues this likely will not change. That's one of the factors holding back meaningful progress on a quite a large number of stages.