This is the kind of accommodation Islam needs to deliver if it is to participate in a multi-cultural society.
If not, I don't see how the experiment of mixing Islam into a free Western society can work. A free society has core shared values which everyone must adopt if they wish to live within it. People are free to believe and rebelieve as they wish and no one should seek to stop them. We vote. The state is largely secular. Law is man-made. We allow religious expression but not religious control. Individuals are free actors and free speakers within the framework of the law. There are no religious taxes. We define folks as equal before the law. etc.
No one agreed to import refugees and immigrants so as to impose sharia on the rest of us or to restrict non-violent speech or to advance the universal spread of Islam or to pay taxes in order to worship differently or not worship at all, or to divide society between believers and infidels.
So we must have an Islam which adopts the modern Western values which make it possible to live together. This isn't seventh century Arabia in which Islam seeks to set different tribes against one another in order to divide and rule, with the end goal of forced conversion.
Islam must bend itself to fit its surroundings. Or the folks who believe in a religiously defined state should migrate to countries which operate along conformist Moslem lines, of which there are plenty.
Not that this means anyone should do harm to individual Moslems in the West. They should not. We should not become the monster that ISIS is. The difficulty of this sort of discussion is the oiks that attack other people just for wearing a head scarf. Of course, many Moslems are perfectly decent. The difficulty is the size of the minority which is not, of whom some are extremely violent and have the controlling religious purpose we abhor.
But we have to get real. This isn't about the rights of Moslems. It's about the compromise deal between people in a free society that allows everyone to breathe the same air, and which is not up for negotiation.
Why is it that wherever Islam is a part of a society, there is violence? There's a problem within Islam. It isn't that Moslems are victimised. It's the problem of an unwillingness to bend, the demand for submission. The wish for control.
| 