Constance963 wrote:I was not trying to downplay anything.
No, I didn't think you were. But I do think it's important to note that the action being taken here has serious political entanglements, and that might go some way towards explaining the macabre contrast between coming from prayer and going to denounce.
Mr. P wrote:It may be a governing body that has held up this law, but the law is steeped in the religion of the area and the extreme adherence to that religion.
What do you mean by "steeped"? It would be really easy to assume that the government demands religious uniformity because it's full of zealous believers, but again, I'd be willing to bet that a historical inquiry into the development of the government would reveal that, at some crucial historical juncture, a more liberal, secular system was rejected for political reasons. (And a likely bet for when that juncture occurred would be the post-WWI period, or even before, during the Anglo-Sudanese conflict, when imperial Britain was making a colonial state of the Sudan. If either of those is the case, the Sudan wouldn't be the first territory to have stifled a liberalizing impulse in order to consolidate local support against the encroachment of some external political body.) There have, after all, been very tolerant Islamic governments. Something distinguishes the tolerant Islamic nations from those that are not, and it doesn't seem to me to be anything in the religion itself.
The reason is because many people believe in the myth of Muhammad and have raised that one name above any sense of human decency in situations like this. It is an arbitrary law based on make believe.
Think whatever you want about the foundation of the religion, the law in question is
not arbitrary. Someone benefits from it. It serves a particular function in that society, and that's what I mean when I say that there is a political motivation at work here. The government in question has a vested political interest in maintaining a state religion. Demanding uniformity probably serves to prevent critiques of the status quo, or something along those lines. And because they live in a context where religion is highly politicized, it's difficult to say in which spirit the protesters from your second article were acting.
If it were simply a matter of the members of a religious institution in an otherwise secular state calling for this woman's execution, I'd certainly have a different opinion on the matter. In that case, I'd be more than willing to cite it as an example of religion spontaneously going very wrong. But the moment a government starts legislating religious values, that complicates how you ought to interpret the facts, just as it would complicate your interpretation of a charitable organization when a known thief is made chief director.
When the politics of a nation are so intertwined with religious ideals and beliefs, you cannot separate the two just because you feel religion is such a wonderful thing. This is all about religious belief gone haywire.
You do see the contradiction in those two sentences, don't you?
I'm not saying that religion doesn't play a part here. But I doubt you'd be seeing this particular scenario if a political body wasn't involved. The fact that they've latched onto this particular instance would probably be telling if we knew more about the situation. Think about all of the time that
our government and press have made a total non-issue into three weeks worth of coverage and scrutiny. Little hint here, it's usually when the administration doesn't want you to pay attention to some other, more important issue.
And the fact is, we probably wouldn't have heard this story at all if it didn't have a religious element to it. We're getting this story divorced from its larger context, so it's easy to see how you might take religion as its
sole context. The American press loves to print stories about how backwards and totalitarian people are in the Middle East, and we know so little about the political situation in Sudan that the only explanation that immediately occurs to us is the one fact we think we know about it: they're fanatics. Seriously, tell me one thing you knew about Sudanese culture or politics that doesn't involve Islam.