But of course lots of other religions have these problems, or did have one or more of them a century or two ago, or have induvidual members who are nasty (Ooh-Aah2)

Ooh-Aah2's hypocrisy and hatred of Muslims makes him unwilling to see anything bad except that done by Muslims (Carol)

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a constructive point for those people who just don't seem to be able to grasp (Carol)

I grasp your point, Carol, but I do not agree. A very very different thing. You seem to think that someone not agreeing with you cannot have grasped your point and vice versa, if one only had grasped your point one couldn't but agree. You err.

Even if not all members of one group exhibit a behaviour and members of other groups also exhibit this behaviour (I can't think of any real exception and noone in this thread argues that point), if it would be true (and that's the point of this thread) that one behaviour comes relatively more often from one group of people it would be better to be informed about that for protective and helping measures not to be wasted.

Take the honour killings in Germany for instance. By far not all Muslims come even close to consider these crimes and I'm sure that there must have been some non-Muslim German to have committed such a crime during the last decades. But the Berlin police would act unresponsible if they would ignore that these killings (and threats of killings) come nearly exclusively from one particular subgroup of the population. For other crimes, I'd expect them to single out or at least look more closely to non-Muslim men, homosexuals, Russian Germans, Neonazis, Nigerians or whoever if they know that a certain type of crime is relatively more often committed by a member of one group. Also for other measures (safe houses, leaflets telling about female rights, anonymous telephone) it makes sense to know who to address in particular.

The themes I'm exploring (in her book) with the utmost honesty include:

    * the inferior treatment of women in Islam;
    * the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and
    * the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes.

I appreciate that every faith has its share of literalists. Christians have their Evangelicals. Jews have the ultra-Orthodox. For God's sake, even Buddhists have fundamentalists.

But what this book hammers home is that only in Islam is literalism mainstream...

My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam? (Irshad Manji)

Wolfgang