What’s Up Down Under ? |
Friday, July 15, 2016 |
Pauline Hanson is a well-known political figure in Australia whose
general anti-immigrant stance has recently become much more focused on
Muslim immigration. After years in the political wilderness, on July 2
Hanson was elected, as a Senator, to the Australian Parliament.
This has
greatly alarmed Muslims and their apologists. The comments on her
unexpected victory were hysterical in tone, deploring her “racism” and
“bigotry” and her “spreading racist and Islamophobic vitriol and abuse
which threatens and marginalizes” and so on and so predictably forth.
Her party, One Nation, includes in its platform a ban on new mosques and
on halal certification, and a policy of zero-net migration (where the
numbers of migrants who are admitted to Australia match the number of
permanent departures each year).
One Nation is not the only party making such proposals; three other
smaller parties, for example, have included a ban on halal certification
in their platforms. But what has been supported only by One Nation, and
deserves respectful attention, is Hanson’s proposal that a Royal
Commission be appointed to study Islam. Royal commissions are ad hoc
formal inquiries into matters of great significance, usually staffed by
retired judges; Hanson wants one set up to determine whether Islam is a
“religion or an ideology” or, in her forthright formulation, “Let’s
determine if it is a religion or a political ideology trying to
undermine our culture.”
By this one assumes Hanson means to have asked, and answered, a
series of questions that the political and media elites have not
addressed. These would likely include: Is Islam akin to other faiths, in
what it asks or demands of its adherents? In Islam is the “church”
separate from or part of the “state”? What claim to worldly power does
Islam make? Is the role of Islam limited in its claims on individual
believers, or does it attempt to supply them with a Complete Regulation
of Life? What does it mean when Believers are to think of themselves as
members of a collective Umma (the Community of Believers), all over the
world, who have not merely the right but the duty to spread the faith
through every possible means, including but not limited to force?
Does
Islam, as some have claimed, view the world as divided between Believers
and Non-Believers, that is, between Dar al-Islam, the territory where
Islam dominates and Muslims rule, and Dar al-Harb, where Islam does not
yet dominate and Infidels, for now, still rule? Does Islam encourage
free and skeptical inquiry or severely limit such inquiry by punishing
any questioning of the faith? Does Islam permit Believers to leave the
faith, or does it, rather, prescribe death as the proper punishment for
apostasy? Does Islam allow for equal treatment of non-Muslims under
Muslim rule? What, according to Islam, are the rights of women?
Read it all here.................. |
posted by D.Swami Gwekanandam @ 5:28 PM   |
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