The more you know...

In class, professor Akman has prompted us for Who Speaks For Islam? by saying he wants us to be surprised by what we find. Its not hart to understand where he's coming from, given the disparity between America's perception of Islam and Islam in actuality. To his credit, he is right about the statistics being surprising. I had no idea about a lot of the aspects of Muslim life as described in the book, and for that i'm glad we picked up this book. But, for me, these statistics stopped being particularly surprising when we were shown commercials for the show Sister Wives and news segments about polygamists in Texas, and when in the book it was indicated that the 9/11 hijackers weren't strict Muslims at all, but were really just low-lives. It reminded me of what a friend of mine and I concluded about Christianity not too long ago: That while a lot of them had the capacity to be closed-minded and paranoid, this was certainly not the norm. Priests and other such clergy are often the best of Christians and the same goes for Islam. Muslims are just people. They don't want suicide bombings or holy war any more than anyone in America does.

This book has really just solidified my perception that the United States government has used whatever images or notions - true or contrived -  its needed to in order to continue to invade and take advantage of oil-rich countries without upsetting the public's conscience. Take the United State's alleged mission to bring democracy and human rights to the middle east. Democracy is great in the west, and Majorities in several Muslim nations indicate a desire for some form of democracy. And yet, as many Muslims "disagree that the United States is serious about spreading democracy in their region of the world." (pg.32) These nations may very well desire democracy, but they are young. They will find it when they're ready. Like the Quran teaches, if they were supposed to have democracy by now than they would have. It is not the duty of the United States to bring it to them. We demonize their treatment of women, and yet in our country we have our own polygamy, misogyny, fear and loathing. We're really not that different from the east, only we're the ones meddling where we don't really belong.