AlexanderCA posted:

I agree, know your enemy.
So how do we defeat Islam OP?

Amorphous Blob posted:

If Islam Christianity and Judaism were all cars, Islam would be the worst car

AlexanderCA posted:

I agree, know your enemy.
So how do we defeat Islam OP?

Indy posted:

Not really trying to be a dick here but can someone name a country from the OPs map that is marked as islamic and not poo poo?

Pudding Huxtable posted:

Being a Muslim in America must be pretty tits right now, you can cry foul on whatever and get free poo poo!



Where do I sign up?

NecroMonster posted:

the "immigrant worker" thing that the uae does renders me less than a fan

Amorphous Blob posted:

If Islam Christianity and Judaism were all cars, Islam would be the worst car

TacticalUrbanHomo posted:

indonesia, malaysia, algeria, albania, brunei, djibouti, egypt, iran, jordan, kuwait, kyrgyzstan, kazakhstan, united arab emirates, uzbekistan, turkmenistan, tajikistan, azerbaijan, the maldives, morocco, guinea

idk what your metric for "not poo poo" is but I used "not a warzone and not ruled by a totalitarian rear end in a top hat government". that's definitely not an exhaustive list.

TacticalUrbanHomo posted:

Many people in what we nebulously refer to as "the west" never learn much about Islam; about the most that many learn about it is that it is the dominant religion in the Middle East. I find people are often surprised to learn that it's also deeply embedded in Africa, the steppes of Asia, and southeast Asia, as well. In regards to Muslim theology, most people in the Christian world seem to realise that Islam is an extant branch of Judaism, which is great. Most are aware of the reverence of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, although some are under the erroneous impression that Muslims worship Muhammad, like an Arab Jesus. Speaking of Jesus, many are also aware that Jesus (or Isa, in the Arabic) is also revered as Prophet in the Quran. And most recognise the Quran, or at least its name, as the Islamic "Bible". If you're an English-speaking non-Muslim and you know more about it than that, I'd say you're ahead of the game. Let's learn more about one of the world's great religions.

First let's talk about demographics. Islam is the second-largest religion in the world, narrowly behind the whole of Christianity, with about 1.8 billion total followers to Christianity's slightly over 2 billion. Breaking the faiths down by individual sects, Sunni Islam is the single largest religious tradition in the world, just ahead of Roman Catholicism by a similar margin.

Courtesy of the Pew Research Center, here is a world map by Muslim population.



Note that the percentages are in terms of the local population of each area, not in terms of the total world population of Muslims. As you can see, Muslims make up the vast majority of the populations in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and southeast Asia are Muslim. Taken together, these regions are home to the vast majority of the world's Muslims, and they're spread fairly evenly throughout; estimates vary, but each region contains roughly 20-25% of the world's Muslims. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and has the distinction of being the most populous Muslim-majority country in the world. This is a political map, so the very large countries can be a little ambiguous; in large countries like the US or Russia where the Muslim population is quite small compared to the total population, the Muslims are usually concentrated in a few areas, and this map obviously doesn't reflect that. This is perhaps most notable in the case of Russia, where you won't find many Muslims in the major population centres, but they dominate the small rural communities in the border regions that are home to many of Russia's ethnic minorities like Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz.

The Muslim world is obviously a very large and varied portion of the earth, and that makes it hard to neatly categorise what "the Muslim world" is like. While Islam is often thought of as "the Arab religion" (Which to a certain extent it is; we'll talk about why later on), as the map would suggest, the world's Muslims hail from a wide array of ethnicities and speak a variety of languages. With America's interests in the Middle East over the past decades and the wars that have mysteriously coincided with them, many in the American public have come to associate Islamic society with strife and conflict. While strife and conflict certainly in exist in places like, ahem, Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Kandahar, the Islamic world is also host to some of the world's fastest-growing urban centres like Jakarta and Abu Dhabi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oQPCldLNco



Now that we know a bit more about where Islam is and who follows it, let's learn a bit about what it teaches.

Although there are various sects and schools of thought, there are some beliefs that are fundamental to all forms of Islam.

• Tawhid (توحيد): God's primacy and oneness. God may be the only object of worship. This is perhaps the single most important belief to Islam, and is what sets all forms of Islamic belief apart from the faiths of other people of the book; while Christians believe in the divinity of Jesus and orthodox Jews may believe in a variety of minor deities (including angels with free will), in Islam there is and can be only one god. Although it is commonly noted said that Allah is simply the Arabic name for God (which is mostly true; even Christians often use the term when speaking Arabic or Farsi), it is important to note that Allah actually literally means the god, emphasising his oneness each time. In Islamic belief, the single most important purpose of all humanity is worship of God.
  
• Angels (ملائكة‎ malaʾikah): Often relegated to footnotes or symbolism in Christian theology, Islam cannot be properly described without at least a brief explanation of the meaning and importance of angels. In Islam, angels are not deities in their own right, as they have no free will. They do nothing except carry out the exact will of God. While men were made by God from clay, angels were made from light. They carry out important tasks in the Quran, including bringing messages from God to the earth, testing the will and faith of humans, recording their lives, and retrieving their souls.
  
• Prophets (أنۢبياء‎ anbiya): Certain people have been chosen to reveal God's will to the rest of mankind. This includes many of the prophets familiar to Christians, like Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. Each of these prophets is traditionally held to have received God's will in its entirety, but in each case the message was warped or partially lost, or both, either in its interpretation , or writing, or both. It was not until the revelation to the Prophet Muhammad PBUH that God revealed his will to mankind in a way that he would protect and preserve for the rest of days. With this, Muhammad would be the last Prophet of God.
  
• Revelations: These are the messages brought by the Prophets of God. This is held to include the Torah ( توراة‎) and the Gospel of Jesus (Injil إنجيل), but the former is thought to have been warped with the loss and revival of the Hebrew language, and the latter is thought to have been lost almost completely and largely replaced with either deficient attempts at recreation or deliberate forgeries. The last and most important version of God's will is the Quran (القرآن), which is the Arabic text of God's will revealed by the angel Jibril to the Prophet Muhammad PBUH over several years, beginning at the age of 40 in 610, and ending with his death in 632. The Quran, when not rendered in its complete and original text (which must include being in the original language, Arabic) cannot be truly said to be a Quran, and translations of the Quran are referred to only as translations of the Quran. Instead of the mostly narrative style of the Bible, the Quran is rendered as poetry, and even among secular scholars is widely held to be of the highest order of Arabic literature. The manner of recitation and even the pronunciation of the words are held to be integral parts of the Quran, so even transliterations of the original Arabic are generally held to be deficient copies. The hadith (حديث) are a collection of writings of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Their theological value is a matter of debate among Islamic scholars, but they are, at worst, considered companion and commentary to the Quran.
  
• Day of Resurrection (Yawm al-Qiyamah يوم القيامة‎): This is the end of days, when all mankind will experience a bodily resurrection and judgment by God, which includes sentencing to Heaven and/or Hell. Muslims are not in agreement on the nature of Heaven and Hell or the nature of the sentences; some believe that all but the most righteous must spend at least some time in Hell, atoning for their sins and purifying themselves before joining God. Others believe that consignment to Hell is eternal for the unrepentant, or that sentencing to Hell eventually results in utter annihilation. The Quran is explicit, however, in God's mercy for any who repent. The date and the outcome of this day are preordained by God, but may never be known to man.
  
• Preordainment: God knows all that has or ever will happen, including the actions and thoughts of every man and woman. In Islamic belief, nothing will ever come to pass except that which is willed by God.
  

These are the minimum things a Muslim must believe. Now for the minimum which a Muslim must do. These are known as the Five Pillars of Islam. There may be slight variations in how each is performed between sects, orders, and individuals, and additional duties may be added, but they may not be taken away.

• Shahadah ( الشهادة): This is a recitation of the centre-most creed of a Muslim.
  
  لا إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله
  lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh, muḥammadur rasūlu-llāh
  There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.
  
  There are other versions of the shahadah, but this is the shortest. The word means "testimony", and the recitation of the shahadah is both an announcement of one's faith and a form of worship. It is a central part of prayer for a Muslim, and the first step for a convert.
  
• Prayer (Salah صلاة): A Muslim performs ritual prayer five times each day. These prayers consist of reciting Quranic verses and prostration towards the Kaaba, a sacred site located in the city of Mecca.
  
• Charity (zakat زكاة): Zakat most closely translates to the word "alms"; it is a specific portion of one's wealth (1/40) to be given annually to the needy. The Quran strongly encourages and praises voluntary charity that exceeds this amount, but this is the minimum required of all Muslims who can afford it. The amount given in zakat annually is estimated to be between $200 billion and $1 trillion.
  
• Fasting (sawm صوم): During the month of Ramazan, the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, Muslims fast from dawn until dusk, refraining from eating, drinking, smoking, and sex. Muslims are encouraged to use this time to reflect on their virtue, to repent for their sins, to thank God for what they have, and to remind themselves of those less fortunate. Only after the sighting of the next crescent moon (or, in the event of inclimate weather, thirty full days of fasting) may Muslims again return to eating, drinking, and having sex during light hours (unless you are a goon, in which case you obviously won't be having sex period, inshallah).
  
• Hajj ( حج): The Hajj is a pilgrimage to the Kaaba in Mecca, which each Muslim (except the infirm, the lame, and the impoverished) must perform at least once in their lifetime. Although how the Muslim reaches Mecca is inconsequential, once they are there they must walk a series of specific paths and perform a series of specific rituals, each with a symbolic connection to the revelations, and spend at least one day and night sleeping in the desert plain of Mina with at most a tent for shelter, and one day and night sleeping in the desert plain of Muzdalifah.
  

Broadly speaking, Islam is categorised (as opposed to divided) into two denominations: the Shia, and the Sunni. One of the most common questions about Islam is what distinguishes the two denominations? Or, as it is more commonly phrased, which are the bad ones? Well, neither Shia nor Sunni Islam is "bad", nor is either group composed of "bad" Muslims. They differ primarily on one theological point: the proper successor to Muhammad. Shia believe the second Caliph was Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Sunni Muslims believe the second Caliph was Muhammad's father-in-law, Abu Bakr. Beyond this, there are a few practical and theological points that most Shia have in common that would distinguish them from most Sunni Muslims, such as the exact role and importance of Imams, but since each denomination is further categorised into a number of orders and sects, two Sunni Muslims may be as different from one another in practice as they are from a Shia. But the short answer is, usually it's the Sunni Muslims who are the bad ones.

Feel free to ask questions or contribute your own facts about Islam. And please do not denigrate the Muslim faith or slander its prophets, tia.

Saki posted:

Ah yes, that non-poo poo country of Egypt, where something like 50% of girls have had fgm practiced on them. A lot of these countries are awful.

tumblr.txt posted:

OP, in a just world, what punishment, if any, would face the participants of this thread?

Prokhor Zakharov posted:

op what's the name of that one dish that's like a big mound of rice/meat/spices that's cooked all together then served upside down on a big platter?

I had it at a ramadan related feast with a palestinian family and it was incredibly good but I don't know what it was called to look up the recipe

TacticalUrbanHomo posted:

idk. in afghanistan there was this one street food I really liked that was basically diced potatoes spiced and covered in some kind of sauce made from tomatoes and onions and maybe other stuff, served in a bowl of naan. sometimes there'd be little bits of goat added. it loving owned and I asked an interpreter a few times but I can't remember for the life of me what it was called, so I feel you.

TacticalUrbanHomo posted:

Zahki posted:

Huh. It looks like predominantly Muslim countries are all ones that have appalling human rights records and are hideously regressive, that's weird.

NecroMonster posted:

do muslims think god makes any drat sense or do they rely on that "god works in mysterious ways" poo poo to excuse the random insanity and cruelty of life just like christians do

NecroMonster posted:

actually i think you will find that a lot of countries will appalling human rights records, and hideous regressive policies are in fact not muslim at all

NecroMonster posted:

honestly it's because gods not real at all in any form

quote:

All I need to know from that map on the first page is that the shitter a country is to live in, especially for women, the greater the population that is Muslim.

Allah Ackbah and poo poo.

TacticalUrbanHomo posted:

women in kabul walk the streets unaccompanied, wear jeans, and attend university, hth

Neurosis posted:

hmm http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2015/06/afghanistan-country-women-150630115111987.html

quote:

Under the Taliban women were banned from going to school and working. They were not allowed to leave their homes without a male relative or be seen in public without a burqa. For defying the regime's repressive laws, women were openly flogged and executed.

TacticalUrbanHomo posted:

yeah, that's why I specified Kabul. you know, the capital of the new government that has been continuously engaged in a counter-insurgency operation for the last 14 years which still is ongoing. obviously there are still places where the taliban holds power, otherwise the counter-insurgency would be over.


note the past tense. this is no longer de jure the status of women in afghanistan, nor was it before the rise of the taliban. when the taliban is eradicated all remnants of these policies will be gone with them.