My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p 270 Maryam Nazamie “When the Hezbollah Came to My School”
From the title, you can guess this one will not be a fun read. She covers the horrific crimes she has witnessed, but does not overstate or dwell on them. She does not spend much time discussing her own beliefs either. Her main theme is the relationship of the West to the crimes of Islam and how they are often dismissed because someone “offended Muslim sensibilities”.
Maryam delineates between political Islam and the people who actually live and worship in these countries. She points out that these sensibilities are imposed from above and,
“If they were really part of people’s own sensibilities and beliefs, Islamic states wouldn’t need to resort to such indiscriminate violence, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa where political Islamists are often in charge of the state, the educational and legal systems, the army and so on.”
She also quotes Mansoor Hemat, about this phenomenon,
“is not rooted in a revival of Islam as an ideological system. This is not ideological Islam; rather it is political Islam based on specific political equations. Clearly, with the rise of the power of political Islam, pressure to revive religious appearances in society intensifies. This, however, is a political pressure. The people sometimes yield to these pressures. This Islamic ‘renaissance’ is backed by violence and terror, which takes one form in Algeria and another in Iran.”
She concludes with a call to action, saying this must be resisted with criticism and ridicule.
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