Kuwait announced this week that it will print thousands of copies of the Quran in Swedish to be distributed in the Nordic country, calling it an effort to educate the Swedish people on Islamic “values of coexistence.” The plan was announced after the desecration of a Quran during a one-man anti-Islam protest that Swedish police authorized in Stockholm last month.
Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Ahmad Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah said the Public Authority for Public Care would print and distribute 100,000 translated copies of the Muslim holy book in Sweden, to “affirm the tolerance of the Islamic religion and promote values of coexistence among all human beings,” according to the country’s state news agency Kuna.
On June 28, Salwan Momika, a 37-year-old Iraqi Christian who had sought asylum in Sweden on religious grounds, stood outside the Stockholm Central Mosque and threw a copy of the Quran into the air and burned some of its pages.
The stunt came on the first day of Eid-al-Adha, one of the most important festivals on the Islamic calendar, and it triggered anger among Muslims worldwide. Protests were held in many Muslim nations, including Iraq, where hundreds of angry demonstrators stormed the Swedish embassy compound.
CBS News sought comment from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Kuwaiti government’s announcement, but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.
The U.S. State Department condemned the desecration of the Quran in Stockholm, but said Swedish authorities were right to authorize the small protest where it occurred.
“We believe that demonstration creates an environment of fear that will impact the ability of Muslims and members of other religious minority groups from freely exercising their right to freedom of religion or belief in Sweden,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “We also believe that issuing the permit for this demonstration supports freedom of expression and is not an endorsement of the demonstration’s actions.”
The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution Wednesday condemning the burning of the Quran as an act of religious hatred. The U.S. and a handful of European nations voted against the resolution, which was introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), arguing that it contradicts their perspectives on human rights and freedom of expression.
Wonder what would happen if someone burnt a bible in Kuwait.
I guess: Applause. Or nothing at all.
Christians used to behave like this centuries ago. They grew up. Let us hope our Muslim brothers and sisters can do the same at some point.
I highly doubt they will
Every time a muslim country makes progress the US invades them and installs dictators because their biggest nightmare is a middle east that is at peace.
Oh I’m not so sure about that. Look at the Gulf countries. They are rich. Look at their culture. It is changing fast, but still backwards and brutal compared to the modern West.
That just sounds like propaganda.
The US meddles a lot more than it should, agreed, but this is just not true.
Treating people from poorer countries as children or “undeveloped” while not questioning the belief that we westerners are at the center of the world. Also don’t question the inability of other peoples to develop on their own, because we are the only ones who have the brain to do so? Sorry, I’m struggling to wrap my head around western chauvinists.
They are undeveloped, because obviously our culture is superior, everyone should accept it. Ignore the economic part of the “superiority” or the legacy of imperialism.
This is how racism is born, in a nutshell.
Keep in mind, that when Europe was in the dark ages, the Middle East was flourishing, so was China. Northern Europe, now one of the most advanced places on Earth, was once savage compared to the Mediterranean. Today though, the West is far more civilized than the Islamic world.
I did not say that Muslims were incapabable of developing, I made no such racist argument on the basis of genetics or anything else. On the contrary, there are plenty of secular Middle Easterners in the Western world who are very smart and doing just fine.
But sadly, the culture of the Islamic world is by and large savage and medieval by modern, ethical standards. It’s morons like you who would decry when the US executes somebody (very right so) but turn a blind eye to Saudi Arabia beheading people.
The West is the center of the world in 2023. But probably it won’t be forever. In fact, a lot of these places are actually changing quite rapidly, it just seems slow from the perspective of a single lifetime. So who knows where they or we will be in 200 years or so.
Actually you’re both generalizing too much (aka prejudicing), IMHO.
For example the largest muslim country in the World is … Indonesia. They’re pretty moderate.
Further, Islam is split in Xiites and Sunites and it’s the latter (which is the majority one in such “wonderful” places as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) that has the most intolerant types (though Iran is majority Xiite and its government is a pretty shit bunch of theocrats).
Generalizing either “good” or “bad” over all Muslims would be like claiming that all Christians are like the ones in the Filipines (were some the faithful will do their own version of Christ’s Via Sacra, complete with getting crucified, to show their faith) or the deep south in the US (no explanation needed ;)) or if trying to make the opposite point go all about how the handful of highly educated Lutherans in Northern Europe are so discrete and unimposing in how they practice their faith.
Really, it’s not Islam, it’s some (maybe most, maybe not) Muslims and it’s religious governments in general (plenty of examples of all religions: for example, look at the current Hindu-nationalists in India) who use religion to control the undereducated (religious belief inverselly correlates with formal education).
And @hopelessbyanxiety@lemmy.world absolutelly, people with very little education tend to be far easy to say with any old bollocks. For example, even though I have a Degree and am a city dweller, my grandmother was illiterate from a crushingly poor farmer background and she actually believed soap operas were real and got very confused when she saw the same actor is different ones. It’s nothing to do with race, it’s to do with not even having the tools to be able to understand things beyond your little local bubble (which in the case of peasents, is really small), so much more easy prey for sophisticated types in positions of authority leveraging “tradition”.
I think you’re falling into the very trap you accuse others of falling into and projecting your own life experience on the “undeveloped” and thinking they can be just as knowing as everybody else: they can’t, not because they don’t have the physical capability but because they didn’t have the opportunities you had at school to acquire the necessary tools to find and understand most information out there, so they are reliant on world of mouth to “understand” the broader world and tend to defer to people in positions of authority (like religious leaders). Even the ones who can read and write are often behind a language barrier which is often very local (just one country or even smaller) and thus unable to see beyond what the (often very controlled) local media shows them.
The baseline of knowledge and even of ability to practice strict rationality of people in the absence of a system of Formal Education is very low, and staggeringly so for those who lived their whole lives in the little village were born in, the latter of which is even most people in most countries (even so called “developed” ones) which is probably why you get most suppory for conservative and even ultra-religious politics from the countryside, not the cities (Turkey is a perfect example).
Mind you, there are plenty of other ways in which people are restricted to information bubbles (even in the English speaking world) and are unable to reason with strict logic and do actual analysis of what they hear, and those often boil down to never having been taught the tools to think in a structured, logical way or to at last do a little logic check for everything you hear, even if coming from the “right people”, hence how you end up with the plenty of supporters of moronic destructive policies, even in the “developed” countries.
I have no issues with this. I generally agree. Very well said.
glad to know you’re not generalizing, and correct me if i’m wrong but this is how i interpret your reply: some muslim people are really uneducated. Clearly these governements have no intention of educating their people (btw i can see that in a sense in my western country as well, the education system is collapsing figuratevely and physically).
My own conclusion: what you said is true, and we’ll have to see how the situation will turn out. We have no control over our own governments let alone those abroad; unless nato is going to bring peace and democracy yet again. We saw how that turned out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, and probably others that i don’t remember
Yeah, you got my point perfectly (and summarized it much more succintly than I made it ;))
It’s really not about any specific religion, it’s about access to formal education and how certain kinds of politicians in government (mainly authoritarians, but even in Democracies - like Turkey and Hungary once were) will use religion to take advantage of undereducated people who are “believers” because their parents were and society around them tells them they’re supposed to be.
I agree with you that invading a country to bring “peace and democracy” would not even work if it was done genuinelly for those and those reasons alone (people have to want those things and conquer them themselves) but even less so when “bringing peace and democracy” was just a profoundly hypocrite excuse (very much the same shit as Putin’s “freeing Ukraine of Nazis”) for nothing more than greed and dominance.
The problems of access to education and authoritarianism (anchored on religion or not) are connected and I don’t think there are easy solutions for that.
Thanks for clarifying that you’re not racist, but its curious that you describe the islamic world as savage, again centering yourself in the west as the enlightened and modern person. And who decided we are at the center of the world? Colonialist slave owners?
I didn’t mean to come across as someone who would turn a blind eye on any atrocities. Its just that the instability, and therefore violence that ravages the Middle East (maybe that’s what you mena by savage?), more often than not comes from coups or the imf restructuring those economies on behalf of the US and the EU. I have no explanation for the Saudis, not sure how they’ve got to that point. I don’t turn a blind eye on this violence, I just try my best to not put such a big group of people in the “bad” box. (at least thats how i make sense of this)
Also i’m 100% sure, at least most of the poor nations have the capacity to develop, and we can see that recently with at least some diplomatic ties being reinstated or made stronger (Iran - Saudi Arabia - Syria - …), and trade routes that escape the sanctions, which affect a really long list of poor countries. For a problem that is out of our control, its weird to expect that everything gets solved in 2 seconds, with rationality and friendship. Does this make sense or should i back this with some sources?
I mostly agree.
As for the backwardness of certain areas, I think that some of it is the result of Europe and North America meddling with them. But also, Europe and it’s offshoots had a lot of geographical advantages, like fetike arable land, that the Middle East (outside if the Fertile Crescent) never did.
Geography is not destiny, but it has a big influence. That might have been why Europe was able to industrialize and rule the world for a while. But the rest of the world is catching up.
I’ve heard something like this, but imo it’s only partly true. Why would anyone want to “rule the world” as you said? To me it seems like the feudal system, from wich colonialism was born, concentrated so many resources in the hands of very few people. It’s not just that europe was regularly ravaged by famines. It was the system on top of the disasters that worsened the scarcity situation, also with kings going to war on a yearly basis. This is the kind of trauma that lasted for centuries, and got embedded in our culture. I mean, to this day the relations of unequal exchange are still standing, as if that was just how trade works.
I don’t see anyone else in history trying to do imperialism, not even china or india in their golden period. And although even them had their own feudal periods, i struggle to believe it was as disastrous as in europe. Their rulers didn’t feel the need to conquer the world
You’re joking right? Let’s look at your examples. China has invaded Southeast Asia something like 17 times throughout its history. It dominated Manchuria and Mongolia for much of its history as well as the Tarim Basin area. The Aryans invaded ancient India and gave its current Indo-European religion as well as many of its current languages. Later, Buddhism was essentially driven out of the Indian Subcontinent, it’s place of origin, entirely as a result of holy wars.
Europe and its offshoots have run the world for the past couple hundred years mainly because for the first time in human history, technology has permitted globally spanning empires, not because their culture was any less expansionist or more ethnocentric than anybody else.
You’re naive, have an extremely limited knowledge of history.
The rest of what you have said seems like disjointed thoughts about how it isn’t fair that the material wealth isn’t evenly distributed on earth. I guess. I don’t really know what point you’re trying to make to me about it though. It’s an objectively true observation.
Pretty strong western bias in this thread
Those poor trees.
Swedes pilling up Qurans for the winter to save on wood in 1, 2…
Meh. Who cares. Doubt they’ll find a lot of willing takers. Sweden should have encouraged the raging idiots to burn bibles. Nobody would have fucking cared. It’s all fake outrage and the Qur’an burners all have ties to Russian money. Wonder why…
So they can burn some more? 🤷♂️
How about we send 100.000 copies of The God Delusion to Kuwait?
Better send Russel’s teapot.
lol, thanks for the chuckle.
Russell's teapot is ...
…an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. (wikipedia)
yes, good one, thanks 😄
The Saudis already read it, and apparently didn’t care.
You mistake the religion to be a problem when it’s the most powerful and wealthiest countries that back theocracies like the Saudis and Isreel that actually fund wahabhism and induce acts of terror.
The man who burned the quran literally had his family tortured to death by muslims in Iraq
He’s free to burn the garbage as many times as he wises
Weird how all you people don’t even care about that part of this story
I wish there’s a similar reaction if one woman is raped or degraded, one gay person beaten or oppressed, one child molested, one dictator suppresses a population or one politician decides against environment, reason and humanity and for greed. But no, a fkn book was burnt. What would Mohammed say about that if he’d live today, hm?
He’d say “don’t care, I have 9 year olds to rape”.
This is 1000% better as a response than I’ve seen recently from other Islamic countries and I’m a little sad it’s getting dunked on so much. Others are calling for speech to be silenced in response to Quran burnings and they’re literally just saying “hey, could you just read it instead?” It’s a low bar compared to Western Values ™️ I guess but this kind of response should be what we strive for even if you don’t agree with them on anything else.
I would add that nonetheless, every sovereign country can and should stand up for itself. Also this is not just a couple Qurans burned, its racism more in general on the rise here in europe.
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i’m glad you know that. Apparently poland isn’t on the same page. I doubt he’s the only one thinking like that https://youtu.be/asGHu2NzvbI Sorry i don’t have any more sources, but if you’ve followed european immigration policies in the slightest, you might have noticed that most middle eastern are rejected at the borders. Many times the skin color is no different from southern europeans, yet they die by the hundreds in the mediterranean.
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That’s no justification for showing any kind of support for a violent, regressive religion that idolizes a pedo prophet.
I’m assuming you’re either western or liberal, both?
Aside from the fact that the prophet arguably isn’t worshipped because of his child abuse and it happend centuries ago (maybe you found instances of more recent child abuse), you don’t need to look far away from home to find violent and regressive people that act in the name of religion. I’m talking about misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism etc. I get it, maybe its too difficult and these problems can’t be solved. Still, its unnecessary to put your self on the high ground of moral righteusness. Muslim people have problems to solve, I’m sure you do too.
I’m assuming you’re either western or liberal, both?
Seems like having the common sense to not support violence is considered liberal? And no, I’m in a muslim-majority country and tired of the hate some of my family support because their religion tells them to.
(maybe you found instances of more recent child abuse)
I see you agree many people use muhammad and the quran and hadith as a way to to justify child abuse, which they do.
you don’t need to look far away from home to find violent and regressive people that act in the name of religion
I suppose you wrote this assuming I’m western? But yes, alot of people I know do discriminate against people simply because islam tells them to. In my experience, islam tends to bring out the worst in people, even more so than most other major religions.
Muslim people have problems to solve
Odd way of putting it. The vast majority of ‘religious’ people have the common sense to not follow their violent religions to a T. The problem isn’t the people, it’s the religion. I’d hate if people disliked me when I was muslim just because I was one.
Barbaric religions like islam are fundamentally incompatible with modern society.
Well at least Sweden will be warm this winter.
My wife hates it but I LOVE antagonizing the religious snakes who try to tell you about their bullshit in public. I grew up in the Bible Belt and I fucking HATE that fake “oh I’m just trying to save your immortal soul because you’re a sinner” bullshit. Fuck these people, they’re predators preying on people at their weakest and they don’t pay taxes while pissing their influence all over our politics.
Fuck. These. People. All of them.
I don’t stop walking but I always interrupt them or put words in their mouths or ask why their all powerful god won’t do anything about pedos when they’re screeching about that etc. Especially the ones that try to hand you things, love them! They’re always carrying a bunch of papers that you can knock out of their hands.
I hope these fuckwits meet lots of friendly people like me as they go to SOMEONE ELSE’S FUCKING COUNTRY to force their mythology on 😁
The problem is mate, your country funds the worst Muslim countries and other theocracies like the Saudis and Isreel. So when you advocate for going all militant atheist, you have to consider that you’re not harrassing or kicking down an already impoverished, powerless people whether they’re refugees or victims of US bombs in Yemen or Palestine.
I obviously understand your disdain for your local Christian fundamentalists.
Who said anything about militant atheism? I’m not the guy harassing strangers with my religious beliefs in public, but I am the guy mocking and embarrassing them (if they’re even capable of shame)
I don’t give a fuck what country someone is from. You don’t deserve respect when you go out and harass and insult strangers. Being a refugee and insulting your host country is even worse in my opinion. Deport those snakes, they obviously miss home. How dare they come up another country claiming to be seeking help and then spit on them like that.
What do you mean by that? Free speech is a fundamental right in most of the wealthiest democracies.
Free speech is a fundamental right
My saying your religion is stupid is just as protected as someone else talking about their imaginary friend.
You don’t deserve respect when you go out and harass and insult strangers. Being a refugee and insulting your host country is even worse in my opinion. Deport those snakes, they obviously miss home.
To which my point was the threat of deportation discourages them from speaking out about any abuses, or criticising wrongdoing as a normal citizen of the country ought to.
And: I’m concerned at what I see as an over-focus on social liberalism; it muddies the waters for the actual problem of poverty and marginalisation. It’s proven that people become less open to newcomers and ideas when their economic circumstances take a hit - and Europe has a racist tendency of shoving immigrants in poor neighbourhoods to keep them out of sight and poor. So in many cases we’re blaming the victims.
Who the fuck said anything about restricting free speech? You keep trying to put words in my mouth.
I said fuck em and I don’t respect them and I like to harass them while they’re harassing others. Not “the government should do blank because my feelings are hurt by speech”. I said I’d be fine with deporting refugees that use asylum deceitfully to push their agenda, but that’s probably unrealistic and would probably be used to hurt innocents.
Ancient mythology doesn’t suddenly deserve respect just because large groups of people decide they’re gonna take it literally and force it on everyone else every chance they get.
I said I’d be fine with deporting refugees that use asylum deceitfully to push their agenda, but that’s probably unrealistic and would probably be used to hurt innocents.
Yeah. I hope you see the threat of deportation discourages them from speaking out about any abuses, or criticising wrongdoing as a normal citizen of the country ought to.
I’ve already said I understand your wariness of Christian fundamentalists.
I’m simply concerned at what I see as an over-focus on social liberalism; it muddies the waters for the actual problem of poverty and marginalisation. It’s proven that people become less open to newcomers and ideas when their economic circumstances take a hit - and Europe has a racist tendency of shoving immigrants in poor neighbourhoods to keep them out of sight and poor. So in many cases we’re blaming the victims.
In the UK Christianity has massively declined, and yet they have a decade of no growth, stagnation, a third of children missing meals and Victorian diseases are back.
Delusional that they think distributing that book in that country will promote tolerance. “So, tell me more about your ‘Prophet’ that marries 9 year old girls…”.
Religion is more than a book mate. It’s also a culture. The Ottoman and other empires did tolerate other ethnic groups, and Jews and Christians - the assertion that they were made to pay unfair taxes as a disincentive is false, those states actually liked the money coming in and were incentivised to treat non-Muslims fairly.
I attempted to find a point in your statement but I failed. You seem to be trying to draw a parallel of some sort between empires from hundreds of years ago and a modern day nation.
You should brush up on the history of the Middle East and colonialism, if you’re going to say something like that.
The Ottoman Empire was founded in 1299 according to google, and formally ended in 1922. We’re only a hundred and one years away, about a single lifetime, from this empire, dimwit. And Turkey survives today as a regional power and a useful US ally.
edit: people downvoting me are ineffectual cucks.
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Yeah, more people should know about their great prophet, who also happens to be a pedophile.
I bet a million shmeckles that u heard this from someone else and you didn’t actually bother to check for wether its true or not.
The source is Sahíh al-Buchárí, one of the canonical books (or whatever, not sure how it’s called in English) in islam. They “married” when she was 6 and the pedophile prophet himself raped her when she was 9. But hey, at least she was 18 when she finally became a widow!
And thus you owe me a million shmeckles.
I mean that’s trivial to Google.
Yes, that’s generally one of the ways I learn new stuff, by Googling it.
The point is you heard it from someone else and didn’t bother to verify until the other guy called you out for it.
And you know that exactly how? Don’t project your lack of sources for your claims on others, please.
