Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences
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I come from Egypt and am a Muslim and a very observant one at that, and I don’t even know what Purdah means. I never heard of this word. Does it have South Asian origins? My whole family is very observant; almost all of them pray and fast. Yet almost three quarters of the women in my family work, and ALL over age 25 have university degrees. These practices that you mentioned may be common in some countries, but that in no way makes them ‘Islamic’. In fact, come to think of it, which countries are these practices common in? Even in Saudi Arabia women go to universities and do go to work. The Iranian vice president is a woman. Actually, other than the former Taliban government, which was initially supported by the United States, no Islamic society condones the practices you mentioned. The Islamic world does have problems and needs help solving them, but as long as the West takes this missionary, ignorant, holier-than-thou attitude toward these problems, it’s not part of the solution.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,In my home country people are speaking against it, and they are loud and clear. Refer to some of the major online Egyptian dailies (some of them have English versions). The problem is we are not given a chance to speak. FOX and its brethren, it seems is only interested in the crazies.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,In its original form and in most Muslim countries the marriage contract is single. The marriage becomes official when the contract is registered. A civil marriage is an alternative not a requirement. An authentic Muslim marriage contract can contain any conditions mutually agreed upon. For example it can define who has the right to divorce, if alimony will be paid by whoever divorces or only by the man, etc.. In most Muslim countries these options are constrained. And by the way it’s your friend is Muslim not Islamic.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,I am Muslim and I don’t hate Jews. I disagree with the policies of Israel. Some Jews equate that with hating Jews, but that’s not my problem.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,FGM (female genital mutilation) is common in Egypt and the Sudan and many African countries, yet it is not mandatory anywhere in the middle east. Actually there is a law in the Egyptian parliament to ban it. FGM has no strong base in Islam (as opposed to male circumcision) and is actually banned and not practiced at all in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. As far as I know most US Muslims don’t practice it either. FGM has roots in ancient Egyptian culture, and is also widely practiced in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,There is no problem with using prescription drugs, as long as it is done under the supervision of a medical professional. Even if addiction is a risk, Islam teaches that sometimes we have to choose the better of two evils; if the alternative to taking the drug is ugly, then not taking it is almost sinful.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,I can only speak for names in Arabic language, and the answer is no, people don’t write names with a line under them. Some people do, however, put a line under signatures, but then again that’s different from a simple name. As far as the term Middle Eastern, no it’s not a preferred term for many people because this region has many ethnic groups and people want to be recognised as distinct rather than being lumped.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,I think most people in my country recognize some sort of relationship with Southern Europe (especially Greece). But when they go abroad (especially America, less so in western Eruope), both groups see these similarities accentuated by the very alien society around them. I don’t think it’s looks, though; I alwyas used to think I looked distinctly Egyptian until a lot of people in Europe started telling me they don’t know what the hell ‘distinctly Egyptian’ or ‘distinctly Turkish’ is supposed to mean. Anyway, I think it’s more attitude. All Mediterannean people are very sociable, very loud, talk with their hands, have oppressively close-knit families and love to eat.
About racism, please don’t be judgmental. Most people can’t decide their own race in this part of the world, so they are hardly racist, they are just a bit xenophobic. Yes, Hollywood has left a bad impression of blacks and Hispanics (as it is doing to Arabs now), but most people are open. About whites, most people in my country are infused with the notion that most whites are racist and must be approached carefully until you measure how biased they are. Personally, I like to think that this common ‘wisdom’ is worthless.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,The problem with most Westerners is that they are totally convinced that Islam promotes a view of a physical heaven where people enjoy sensual pleasures. This myth is quite excusable because it is widespread even among some Muslims. But the official view of Islam is not that heaven is sensual; heaven is a whole different plane of existence, one not governed by laws we know or understand. Heaven is having communion (but not becoming one) with God. The distinct property of heaven in the Quran is that it is a place of fulfillment. Each soul has fulfillment the way it desires. The Quran describes how this fulfillment comes to some people in the form of orgasm, like ecstasy, and how to some others it comes by existing in a plane where there is ‘nothing mundane.’ In essence, heaven is what you want it to be. If you want it to be a place where you leave your bodily form and become one with the universe, then so be it. If it is a place filled with fairy-like companions or studs, then so be it. An important point is that Islam does not really shun sex the way Judeo-Christianity does, it embraces sex and sees nothing wrong with using it as a metaphor for heaven. To some Sufis (and to me), orgasm is the state when a human is nearest to God. Heaven in Islam is a place for everyone, not only for men. If a woman wants her heaven to be in the form of a sex machine, so be it! The Quran is very clear about who will end up in the place where there is ‘no mundane’; it uses both masculine and feminine adjectives repeatedly when it describes the faithful to drum this concept in. No Muslim believes that heaven is for men only; it is for men and women equally. The reward is equal and the requirements to receive this reward are equal. This is a central and universally accepted principle of Islam. In fact, most Muslims believe that not only humans will end up in heaven, but also animals, plants and every creature that we know or don’t know. To some mystics, even seemingly lifeless objects like rocks end up communing with God. The myth of a masculine Muslim heaven filled with a fixed number of virgins per faithful is one of the most inane yet most widespread misunderstandings about Islam. When someone dies in my country, people see that person as being ‘with God,’ not as being in bed with virgins. To think otherwise is to grossly underestimate the complex feelings that millions of Muslims have about an issue as convoluted as death and what happens after it.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,I agree with you totally. After 9-11, almost all racial slurs I got were from blacks and Hispanics. I am starting to think that suffering probably hardens people rather than makes them more compassionate.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Given the fact that these are Arabic names, some Arabs (many of whom are white) are already called Malik, Gamal, Tarek, Amir, Latifah, etc.. Actually I think most Arabs find it very weird that African Americans use Arabic names.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,Filipinos look down on who? There are no East Indian immigrants in the Philippines – actually there are no immigrants in the Philippines, so why would anyone like to go there? Actually it’s the other way around: Filipino immigrants to the infinitely wealthier Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei often face discrimination and sometimes serious abuse from locals.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,First, the basics: Even the most fundamentalist Muslim women say they are supposed to cover their body and hair but can leave their face, hands and feet bare. So covering the face is not an Islamic habit even by the most fundamentalist accounts. In fact, covering the face is prohibited when you are doing a pilgrimage to Mecca, so it can’t even be thought of as advised.
Second, the complications: Most Muslims who wear a scarf point to a verse in the Qur’an where God tells women to lower their scarves so that they cover their bosoms. The Qur’an then tells men and women to dress modestly in general. The modesty advisory is for both sexes, but the verse on the scarves is interpreted by most Muslims as a sanction for wearing a scarf and making it long. Some people disagree and say that in pre-Islamic Arabia, women used to wear veils that covered their faces but would walk around with their breasts bare, so they say the verse doesn’t tell women to cover their hair but to cover their breasts. As usual this is highly debatable; most individual Muslim women weigh the options and arguments and make a personal decision about wearing a scarf. This is not possible in some fundamentalist countries like Saudi Arabia, but it is possible in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Morocco, etc.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,The Egyptians were not black, they were definitely (as almost all Egyptologists assert) North Eastern Hamites (very similar to berebers today). This I guess should not be seen as inferiority of blacks because many subsaharan civilisations were also superior. I think African-American fixation with Egypt and inability to appreciate sub-saharan cultures is a very bad indication of the level of your self esteem.
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,No one I know here hates Americans. You can ask Americans living in or visiting Egypt. We actually like you, think you are kind, smart, simple and usually motivated by good stimuli. Do we hate America? Definitely. Why? Because it is nothing it ever claims to be. It claims it’s a democracy and then imprisons people without trial in animal cages on a tropical island. It says it supports democracy and then pours money and /or support on the apartheid of Israel, the autocracy of Saudi Arabia or the right wingers of South Korea. The United States claims it’s secular and then its president stands by and watches Sharon proclaim that Jerusalem was given to his people by God.
We hate the United States because it claims it has no race-related ideology and then employs racial profiling against Arabs at airports or at INS lines. I often hear your ‘free media’ claiming we hate you because you are rich and we envy your democracy. Well no one in Egypt hates Switzerland, or Belgium, or Japan, or France, and believe me, they have much more democracy and money than you!
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Name : Karim, Gender : M, Age : 23, City : Los Angeles, State : CA, Country : United States, Social class : Middle class,
