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We Should Reach out to Muslims Essay

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Do we, the United States, the West, have an argument with Islam? We surely have an argument with a lot of Muslims. The media in Muslim countries are full of anti-Americanism. Furthermore, most Muslim countries practice forms of government completely at odds with the political ideas cherished by Americans. They are despotic and intolerant. Muslim countries seem to conform to the pattern of so-called "shame" cultures, in which the rightness and wrongness of deeds are judged not by some moral compass, but by the reactions of onlookers.

And then there is the dreadful antisemitism with which Islam seems to be riddled. From professors of theology at Saudi universities to New York City cab drivers, it sometimes seems you only have to scratch …show more content…

If so, why are all those Muslims being so nice to some people? Seeking enlightenment, I tried reading the Koran. This didn't get me very far. Frankly, I found the thing unreadable. It seems to have no narrative thread, like the Gospels or the historical books of the Old Testament. It reads, in fact, like the boring bits of the Bible: Deuteronomy, or Revelations, or one of the more tiresome prophets.

I don't know that this really signifies, though. Other people's scriptures are always a tough read. I had a go at some Buddhist scriptures once; they were pretty darn boring, too. The Analects of Confucius is in my opinion a seriously dull book.(Analects) The thing about scriptures is that they are not to be taken like any other book. You have to soak yourself in them, preferably from early childhood. For best results, you have to memorize them - as devout Muslims do the Koran, and as gentlemen in Imperial China used to do with the Analects. One of those latter, the 11th-century scholar Cheng Yi, reported that when he read the Analects his hands unconsciously began to dance and his feet to stamp.

Reading the scriptures of your religion is not like reading a novel or a poem. It is another kind of experience, one not available to outsiders.

Lacking the will to do a full textual analysis of Muslim scripture, can I perhaps argue from its well-known tenets that Islam is a nutso religion, that requires its

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