kjkhoo at softhome.net:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Islam is no more timeless than any other cultural-religious order. I'm not sure about the "deep strain of violence and intolerance" -- SE Asian Islam has historically been pretty tolerant and eclectic, now increasingly less so.
--- Yes, it is clear that SZ is using a very limited sample group of Islam. In this part of the world (the fSU), Islam has historically been extremely tolerant and, I would guess from the point of view of a "true believer," lax. E.g., Eurasian Muslims (Dagestanis, Chechens, Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, etc.) have a tendency toward hard drinking and relative sexual egalitarianism. Russian muslim women (BTW about one in five Russian citizens is a Muslim) do not wear veils. In villages, they may wear long dresses that cover their legs, but that's about it. My girlfriend (anecdotal evidence alert!) is from muslim Kazakhstan, and she says that people are much more religious in Russia than there. Actually relations between everyday Orthodox and everyday Muslims are no more strained then relations between run-of-the-mill Catholics and Protestants in the United States.
This is (was) changing. (I say "was" because Chechnya has served to de-radicalize a lot of incipient radical Muslims.) I have been told that, in villages in Dagestan, for instance, you will often have two religious leaders, an older one who is a traditionalist and a younger one, often a foreigner, who preaches "wahhabism" and targets young, unemployed men. The "wahhabis" usually try to impose their will on the rest of the villagers, who then arm themselves, and a rural arms race ensues. I believe there was active proselytism in Muslim regions on the part of the Saudis shortly after 1991, which the Kremlin quickly brought to an end.
I had a long conversation with a (rather revealingly dressed) Tatar muslim woman recently who said that she was starting to get embarassed about her religion because "those freaks in Chechnya are just so craaaaaaaaazy!"
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It's not clear that Islam is inherently hostile to socialist ideas: Iqbal, I think it was, once declared that Islam = Bolshevism+God.
--- Well, until very recently, Dagestan (which is 90% Muslim), consistently voted for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. According to opinion polls, 80% of Dagestanis believe that "Brezhnev-type socialism" is the ideal form of social organization for the republic, with 15% saying "Western liberal democracy" and 5% "Islamic state." I am citing a relatively recent poll by Robert Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev (sp?).