Christmas And Eid Thoughts Among The Cane Toads – altmuslim.com

Posted on December 26th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

Christmas And Eid Thoughts Among The Cane Toads – altmuslim.com

Muslims and Christians have a joint responsibility to ensure this message of hope and mercy is not lost. The message should remind us of our shared Abrahamic spiritual roots.
By Irfan Yusuf, December 24, 2006
Distributing Eid and Christmas gifts to Iraqi orphans
A decade of primary and secondary education at an evangelical Anglican school was enough to get me addicted to church music. Each Christmas, I try to join friends at Midnight Mass at Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral. It is an extraordinary experience, with both organs playing simultaneously as the choir roams among the congregation in procession singing carols.

This year, I’m joining my partner and her family for Christmas on the Sunshine Coast. It will be my first Christmas in the land of the cane toad. It will also roughly coincide with Eid al-Adha, the most important feast of the Muslim calendar coinciding with the annual pilgrimage known as the Haj.

This year hasn’t exactly been a bumper year for relations between the nominally Christian and Muslim sections of the planet. Muslims accuse Christians of taking hypocritical stands in the Middle East, and Christians accuse Muslims of behaving like drama queens in response to a dozen Danish cartoons and one papal speech.

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Tolerance and freedom of expression

Posted on December 26th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Some personal considerations.

Dutch queen Beatrix delivered her traditional christmas speech yesterday. At the core of this speech was her message that tolerance and freedom of expression are the cornerstones of democracy. And indeed, there is no democracy without the freedom of expression and without tolerance. At the same time she stated that both are not unlimited: incitement to hatred cannot be tolerated and freedom of speech does not mean that there is a right to insult.
These limits on tolerance and freedom of expression should not be explained as ‘dhimmitude’ or as giving victory to those dreadful Muslims. In some circles (link refers to a website; not the webmaster is meant by my remark but some of the visitors – Dutch) freedom of expression seems to be more and more explained as the duty to insult Muslims or to reveal the ‘truth‘ as loud and as confronting as possible, if you don’t you are politically correct and you don’t fit in. Perhaps if people don’t use the freedom of expression in most blatant way, they are afraid to lose it at all? It is usually used as an attempt to disqualify those (non-)Muslims who do not reject islam by definition, who state you should try to establish a dialogue even with hardline islamists, meaning taking the arguments (and not necessarily their actions) of islamists serious. The argument of dhimmitude results in taking your own stance as self evident, something that does not need any further examination, while the argument of the other is obviously wrong because you hold the monopoly on the truth.

So no, there should be no right to insult. The public debate should be based on ratio, a correct display of facts and opinions and should be accesible to everyone; even those whose arguments we don’t like. Shutting them up by saying that they are dhimmi’s is not a sign of rational debate; only a sign of a shortage or weakness of rational arguments. And no there should be no right not to be insulted. Because sometimes people will be insulted by the mere fact that you exist, let alone when you speak up. Allowing for a right not to be insulted would mean that individuals of whatever religious, ideological or whatever conviction are able to decide for others what can be said or cannot be said only by invoking something that is so vague as feeling offended. If people feel offended by seeing women with headscarves, it’s should be their bad luck not of those women. If people feel offended by others who ridicule their religious or ideological convictions, it is should be their bad luck and not of those ridicule. Of course they do have the right to protest, demonstrate, ridicule back; that is their right as well. And if others feel offended by that, bad luck for you. Freedom of expression and tolerance belong to each other; without tolerance no freedom of expression and without freedom expression tolerance is just another hollow expression.

At the same time what is wrong with trying to be correct and not to generalize too much? What is wrong with being decent and to try not to add insult to injury? What is wrong with trying to take feelings of others into account? In other words: what is wrong with self-censorship?

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