Islamic asylum seekers in Germany threaten to kill Christians

Sharia Law is optional to be applied to very specific circumstances (and it's debated what it even is.)

doesn't take into account- the period of time the Qur'an was written for. These verses have to be contextualised

do you realise the state of the Middle East before the Qur'an was revealed?

Regardless of this, we don't see anyone complaining of the equally horrific verses the bible puts forward

I'm sorry but you are all over the map.

Sharia law is the official legal code of Saudi Arabia. They have no other legal code, it is the basis of every decision by every Saudi judge in every case, with direct reference to the Quran and hadiths.

Other countries have sharia in varying degrees. And you seem to be falling for the No True Scotsman fallacy. Sharia isn't what some Western fellow traveller believes it would be ideally; sharia is what it is practiced as. Saudi judges call it sharia, it is based on Islamic scriptures, therefore it is sharia.

It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of religious law and a definitional and category error to claim "Well, they don't practice it properly according to the 'objective' way it should be practiced". Utter nonsense, the only "objective" way would be what "god" truly wants. Given god doesn't exist, that leaves you to accept that sharia is a manmade system and it consists of its actual practice in the real world.

If you want to see sharia being practiced in the real world, you can either go to Saudi Arabia or the Islamic State. Either way, there are a considerable number of elements of Islamic law that are non-controversial and agreed across the Sunni world (some elements relating to inheritance, zakat etc)

Calm down, dear. You're going into hysterics and lashing out, inaccurately as it happens. I'm a socialist. I'm also an atheist, which means I oppose all religious nutbaggery. If anything, you are the far-right winger given you are defending a murderous system that kills women and gay people.



That assumes that there is some kind of objective truth about the Quran, some "true" interpretation. The fact is that it is filled with violent verses, and like any religion so constructed, there will be adherents who take those verses for violent purposes. That is precisely what you would expect would happen with any manmade religion,



Revealed? You mean made up, right? As to the state of the Middle East, I know that before Mohammed there were native Jewish tribes in Arabia. They had lived there for centuries quite happily.

After Mohammed rose up as a warlord, he executed all the males of a Jewish tribe, including 15 year old boys and 70 year old men. He then enslaved the women and children.

I suppose some people might think that wiping out all the Arabian Jews is an improvement. I don't.



Pure whataboutery. The Bible is indeed filled with heinous nonsense. The rather obvious distinction is that I don't see any gay people being put to death based on Biblical law. I don't see Christian religious police patrolling Western nations demanding women cover up. I don't see the New Testament being cited in the High Court.

Sharia is actually practiced in many Islamic countries in varying degrees, and it is a terrible and regressive legal system. You appear determined to justify and defend it based on a laughable far left PC attempt to seem right-on and Islamo-friendly.

http://www.welt.de/print/wams/politik/article146898391/Verfolgt-in-Deutschland.html (Chrome did an auto-translate for me that came out quite well)

It's a very sad story. In the refugee centres, the Muslim asylum seekers are bullying the Christians, and if they see them not praying during one of the five prayer events of the day, they attack them. They make statements like, "Wherever we go, sharia is in effect".

This situation is just getting worse and worse. The Germans are a tolerant people; given their history in World War 2 and the Third Reich period, they have tried so hard to atone for their crimes, not just in monetary reparations but in consciously changing their social values to more progressive beliefs. They have gone above and beyond to be accepting, open-minded and welcoming to foreigners of all descriptions over the last 50 years.

But the current situation has spun out of control. Some estimates say perhaps 1.5 million "refugees" (in quotations because under the refugee convention one has an obligation to seek asylum in the first safe country, not the most desirable country). A million and a half in one year is a number beyond any imagining, in terms of the practical difficulties of absorbing, housing, feeding these people. It would be a population increase of close to 2% just from a single influx.

Merkel's decision to throw open the gates, and the EU's utter failure to take necessary measures (perhaps a temporary reintroduction of border controls), is deeply irresponsible. Nobody can truly predict the consequences of these decisions, and undoubtedly there will be many unintended consequences.

Leaving aside the awful consequences for innocent Germans who have been thrown out of their homes to make way for asylum seekers, it is also without a doubt a decision that will fan the flames of the far right, and lead to big electoral gains. Is that what we want? No, but EU officials and Merkel appear incapable of taking the situation in hand.

We know a few countries with problems (Saudi, Dubai, Pakistan etc.) and we know many without (Malaysia, Bangladesh, Turkey etc.) How do you argue that Islam is causative of any problems that exist? I don't see any pattern let alone causation.

"I don't see", she says. There are none so blind as they who will not see.

Isn't it interesting that the countries with fewer problems (Turkey, Malaysia, Bangladesh) are the more secular countries, and the countries with more problems, more oppression, more misery (Saudi Arabia, Iran) are the ones who base their entire society on Islamic scripture.

So yes; there is a clear causative element there. The more a country leaves behind Islamic superstition, as did Turkey under Ataturk, the faster it is able to develop and modernise.

You seem to be confused. You claim to abhor the approach of the Saudi courts to women (after first denying there was any problem at all), and then you make statements like "as if it really is a problem".

Of course it is a problem. The Quran is full of violent, regressive verses. This means that any judge who is so inclined will be able to pick out a verse that suits his sadistic personality.

Thankfully, with a modern, rigorous, secular legal system, we in England don't have to face the possibility that a High Court judge will just pick out from caselaw a precedent saying "Cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers".

In any case, it is clear that your religious delusion viz. Islam means that you are too emotionally invested to think clearly about this subject. And this isn't singling out Islam; if I were speaking to a Christian who was defending some Christian biblical court (not that they exist, but if they did), I would say the same thing. That he was too emotionally invested and clearly cannot argue rationally.

The golden age of Islam had the entire Islamic world based entirely from Islamic scripture, and was secular.

What on earth are you talking about it being secular? The Islamic golden age was during the time of the caliphs (i.e. no separation of mosque and state; the caliph is the head of the religious and temporal power structures, and the legal system is based on religious scripture).

I'm sorry but your historical knowledge appears to be lacking. If you speak to any well-read Muslim they will tell you that Islam does not really conceptualise the separation of mosque and state in the traditional Western sense.

In any case, your reasoning is flawed. To claim that because Islam was consistent with various forms of progress in the 8th century therefore means it is not a hindrance to progress in the 21st century is incoherent. It doesn't logically follow.

As for causative factors, they are self-evident. If you look at Islamic State, everything they do is based on a Quranic citation. The various unusual punishments and executions they inflict aren't just random (for example, throwing homosexuals off tall buildings). They are directly taken from the Quran.

As a matter of causation, but for the Quran would Islamic State have hurled the homosexual from the tall building? The answer can only be no, therefore my case is proved. Game, set and match.

The only thing theoretically separating the two items in your comparison is that one has a secular system (the non violent) and the other has a non-secular system. Both however, have equally regressive religious texts.

Also, your last point would mean that nobody of a particular faith can defend that faith because they're "too emotionally invested". Sorry but that is preposterous

Except that the Quran itself self-referentially prescribes its own doctrines as a system of law. The more you adhere to what the Quran requires, the worse things are.



What separates the two is that the secular society is willing to ignore the violent verses, whereas the non-secular society does not and it follows the Qurans instructions to treat its decrees as law. Therefore, the more you follow the actual underlying text, the worse things are. The less you follow the underlying text, the better things are. Seems pretty simple.

If things are better when you don't follow the text, and worse when you do follow the text, what does that say about the underlying text?



What religion are you, out of interest?

(I'm not a woman and I'm not a Muslim.)

Ok, let's take a look at what you've just replied. First, an article of one incident that occurred in Dubai, and suddenly this is representative of the wider Muslim world. No, that is representative of one incident that occurred in Dubai, nothing more nothing less. Same story for Saudi Arabia. Why does nobody mention Turkey, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Cyprus- just off the top of my head. Oh, it's because nothing has gone wrong in those countries. Moving on...

Second, you seem to have forgotten the name of the charity you're talking about, and have no statistics to hand to back up your illogical argument. Pretty standard for this forum anyway. And I'm the one who doesn't read the news?

Third, nobody is listening to my leftie "claptrap" apparently. You make out that half of Europe is sick of common sense, and then cite an article that proves immigrants to be attacked and abused in Germany. That backfired a bit...

No religion.

But you are ignoring that there can and are different interpretations of all religious texts, which as an alternative yet equally valid explanation why not every Muslim is an extremist/ why there is such variation of the degree of problems faced by Muslim countries.

What exactly is Islamic law?

If you're talking about Sharia Law, then maybe you can show me where exactly it says that. Sharia Law is a concept that is constantly debated in the Muslim world, and there is no concrete book of it- so to make a claim as to what it entails is pointless as it is not agreed by Muslims what it entails. However, I do happen to have a copy of the most widely agreed "Sharia Law" (which doesn't say anything of that sort)- I can send it to you if you'd like to read it for the first time. So no, that is a single incident.

I don't know where you got it from that I'm denying the lack of women's rights in the Middle East- because I don't. There is no doubt that there is serious work to be done there. But the problem presents itself when you try to link this to Islam. This isn't an Islamic problem, it's a Saudi Arabian problem etc. There are many Muslim countries (in fact most) which do not exhibit this behaviour. Many of them have had more female head of states that the US.

If you can't make sense of basic English, I'll help you along a bit. There is no denying the issues present in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. However, those issues are problems for Saudi Arabia and Dubai- not Islam.

Sharia Law (as I said to the other person) is a concept that it being debated in the Muslim world (not that you know what that is). It seems that you seem to assume there are problems in other countries because of it.

Sharia Law is optional to be applied to very specific circumstances (and it's debated what it even is.) You really have no argument.

I think you need to clarify your position here. You appear to be saying that the problems facing people, that are caused by implementation of sharia based on a strict and literal interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah, has nothing to do with Islam, but is merely caused by the state itself.

Are you aware of the source of all legal pronouncements in KSA? Article 1 of the Basic Law states - "God's Book and the Sunnah of His Prophet are its constitution".
Any legal issue is referred primarily to these two sources.
Therefore, any issue with criminality and punishment is fundamentally and inextricably tied to Islam.
You may as well say "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." The people who run KSA may well be brutal, sociopathic tyrants under any system - but the system that they actually use is Islam. And it is no coincidence, when considering other countries of the traditional ME/NA Islamic bloc, that the ones who favour the more dogmatic, theocratic approach are the ones that have the worst human rights records.

Simply put, once you abrogate your innate human empathy to the objective morality of a higher power, there is nothing that man will do to his fellow. History has shown us this time and again.

Indeed. Politicians in more liberal, secular Muslim countries are often at odds with clerics over how fully, if at all, sharia should be incorporated into the legal system.

Depend in which country you are. If you are in one of the 14 countries where sharia fully covers both personal and criminal procedings, it is not optional at all.