And why not? Phyllis Chesler is not Catholic, but Jewish; however, her article "How Afghan Captivity Shaped My Feminism," an excerpt from her superb new book The Death of Feminism, shows in riveting detail what happens all too often when non-Muslim women marry Muslim men (observant Muslim women, of course, are forbidden to marry non-Muslim men by Islamic law). It may be that the Italian bishops had this sort of thing in mind when they issued their directive.
From the TimesOnline, with thanks to Interested:
ITALIAN bishops gave warning yesterday against Catholics marrying Muslims, citing cultural differences and fears that children born to mixed marriages would shun Christianity.Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the president of the Italian Bishops Conference, said: “In addition to the problems that any couple encounters when forming a family, Catholics and Muslims have to reckon with the difficulties that inevitably arise from deep cultural differences.”
Cardinal Ruini, one of the right-hand men of Pope Benedict XVI, said that it was often the woman who married a Muslim man and it was she who converted to Islam. In a statement, the bishops said that if an Italian woman married a Muslim immigrant and then settled in his country of origin, her rights were “not guaranteed in the way they are in Italy or in other Western nations”.
In addition the children of mixed marriages tended to be brought up as Muslims and not as Catholics. Such marriages should, therefore, be discouraged. Church officials said that there were 200,000 mixed marriages in Italy, with 20,000 this year alone, an increase of 10 per cent on the previous year.
Deep cultural differences.
Is it not safe to say that most cultures are heavily influenced by the religion that grew along with them?
In which case, those who would compare Christian thought to islamic thought (claiming that the two are heavily related), need to rethink.
One could write a good deal about the Muslim children of such a couple, once the marriage is over and the mother tries, in every conceivable way, while not wishing to alienate her children, to gently, gently, somehow get them to understand they need not forever remain Muslims. The degree of early brainwashing, the appeal of filial piety, the diseased desire for a system that offers the comfort of Total Regulation, the fear of mental or other kinds of freedom, the ease with which all the ills of the Western non-Muslims are detected and despised, but all that is good -- including those products of that West, the art, music, literature, that the particular Muslim chld may enjoy, may appreciate, but may never fully realize are the artifacts that could never have been produced by, nor their creators have arisen within, the world of Islam.
And then there are those children who, born into Islam, knowing very little about it, deliberately will not learn about it for fear of what they might find out. They don't want to know. "Mom, I'm not going to read it." They will not read Ibn Warraq. They will not go to Ali Sina's website (www.faithfreedom.org). They will not study the history of Muslim conquest or the treatment of conquered non-Muslims. They will not read Bat Ye'or. They will not discover for themselves, if non-Arab, the Arab supremacist ideology within Islam. They don't want to find out. That is some.
Then there are the others, who are jettisoning Islam. They are doing so not because they wish to "fit in." In many cases they keep secret their own dismay at what they realize Islam is, out of fear of family members, or simply because the whole thing disturbs them. They shouldn't. They should speak out about Islam. They could tell others born into Islam, and tell that impenetrably stupid group of Infidels who will not understand what is wrong with Islam, a few home truths.
Starting with: This is Islam. And this is your mind on Islam.
Ibn Warraq has managed to make important contributions to the understanding of Western scholarship on early Islam (see, for example, the shortened version ofa longer unpublished essay, that just appeared in Die dunklen Anfange, along with contributions by Christoph Luxenberg, Pierre Larcher, Claude Gilliot, Gerd Puin, and others at that level -- so much for the Fred Donners of this world, plowing their way dutifully through the Muslim furrows, never looking to right or left to consider that just possibly a Western scholar who continues blithely to accept the received Muslim version of Qur'anic history just might not be doing the right thing). Ayaan Hirsi Ali is helping to riase consciousnesses in Holland -- with a little help from Muslim murders and Muslim threats that have concentrated non-Muslim minds -- and is a member of the Dutch Parliament. Ali Sina is a one-man multitude, debating endlessly, putting up articles that day after day chip away at Muslim certaiinties. Azam Kamguian, Irfan Khawaja, and many others, some of whom no doubt do not use their real names, all lead lives in which intelligence has been freed from the mind-forged manacles of Islam. They were their own Houdinis -- they freed themselves.
But not everyone can undo those manacles. Some need to read a bit, to reflect a bit. While the psychically and economically marginal, the prisoners and the Spiritual-Searchers of the John Walker Lindh variant will be the Infidels who convert to Islam, those in Islam who leave it -- for another faith or none at all -- will always be the very best, the most morally and intellectually aware, people born, through no fault of their own, into Islam.
Quite a trade. Unfortunately, there are more of the economically and psychically marginal Infidels who are potential converts to Islam than there are those Muslims, in the non-Muslmi world (which is the only place that jettisoning Islam can take place without fear of retribution), sufficiently aware, morally and intellectually, to leave it -- not necessarily for something else, but simply to leave it. And numbers count. More of them have to be appealed to: leave that filial piety. Look steadily at what is in not only the Qur'an but also in the Hadith. Look at Muhammad as a model -- do you want him as a model for yourself, for your children, your grandchildren? Would you, living in Paris or London or New York in exile from the Muslim world, want that world to follow you into that exile? Would you, an Iranian in exile from the Islamic Republic, want to see Los Angeles really become Teheran, Teheran as it is today? Would you want Paris to become Algiers, or Marrakech? Would you, an Egyptian who could not stand Egypt, and read Magdi Allam in the Corriere with understanding and sympathy, want Rome to become Cairo, subject to what the doctors of Al-Azhar have to say? Do you want to live according to a Total Regulation of Life created more than a millennium ago?
Of course you wouldn't. Well, pitch in.
There was a movie on last night, a true story called "Not without my child".....About a woman who married a Muslim, who took her and their daughter to his homeland, and refused to let them leave........A must watch for every women who thinks they'll benefit from marrying one of these goofs.
From the article: "On the other hand, the mixed marriages we have now are a kind of social laboratory, because that is the way our society is going”."
Sigh.
Our society is "going" that way because people (leftists, mostly) are allowing, indeed encouraging, it too. There is, however, nothing at all inevitable about any of this.
That's-the-way-society-is-going attitudes and commentary must be challenged every time they are encountered. Otherwise they become even more entrenched as "common knowledge", and the look of horror on people's faces becomes ever more horrified upon hearing someone dispute them.
Here is a long, sad and disturbing article on Israeli converts to Islam: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1132475618729&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
There is also interesting feedback to it.
Legal action must be considered to counteract predatory breeding.
In a manner in some ways analogous to the cases in which HIV-positive individuals that have unprotected sex with unsuspecting partners are held legally accountable, individuals who breed and place inordinate burden upon social services and social fabric must be held strictly accountable.
This is a tricky question with all sorts of angles, but it needs to be tackled and soon.
We often hear the term, failure of imagination. Indeed, the inability of an American, or really any Westerner, to understand what goes in inside a Mohammedan's mind, is nearly complete. Nor is it enough to confront the naive with cold reality, as in the case of Phyllis Chesler, cited elsewhere on this site today. She had the moral imagination to recognize what was wrong, and to understand what she could (and could not) do to escape. But then consider all the other Western-born women she went to for help, women who had somehow found a way to live in their cages, and then try to imagine the lies they tell themselves, or the wilfull misinterpretations of what they see and feel every day. People have a tremendous capacity to lie to themselves when necessary, and even those with the strength to not lie to themselves may lack the conceptual tools that allow them to understand something as confusing as the alleged "Islamic way of life."
N.B., I'm not recommending any slack be cut for them, because those who lie to themselves in order to relieve themselves of the necessity of understanding Islam, do so at not only their own peril, but at ours as well.
But in the same breath, recognize the limits of our imagination. We, most of the readers of this site, cannot imagine what it is like to be reared as a Muslim in their own world. Many here have pointed out how truly mind-killing such a childhood is, and it is. Even among those who emerge relatively sane, the pressures to never deny Islam are tremendous. To deny Islam is, for most Muslims, to say goodbye to every positive association of their childhood forever, for it means saying goodbye to their parents, their brothers and sisters, their neighbors and schoolmates--to everyone they ever knew. It means saying goodbye to the only holidays they ever knew, the Eids at the end of the Hajj and the end of Ramadan, times of lights and special foods, new clothes--Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas all rolled into one. It means giving up their lifelines, and to someone trained to submit to the tribe and the ummah at all costs, that is no small thing. The independent spirit that animates Americans is admired, respected, worshipped, and above all, feared by Mohammedans. Topping it all off is the threat of violence, a very real threat. In their homelands, they face imprisonment, confiscation of all their property, and possible death. Even in Europe and America, the murtad is not free from risk of assassination.
I have had continuing discussions with Mohammedans whom I have told, quite bluntly, that they are not muslim, and then cited the acts that I know they have done that are considered by sharia sufficient cause for punishment as an apostate. Sometimes there is a silence, and no response; sometimes there is a weeping acknowledgement of the facts, but there is no further discussion; and sometimes there is an angry outburst full of the most ridiculous stuff I've ever heard outside of the Islamic bulletin boards, and I admit, my jaw drops to hear such patent nonsense suddenly emerge, defensively, from otherwise well-spoken, rational people. I'm accused of attempting to convert them to Christianity, which is flatly not true. I'm told the Bible has been systematically falsified by the Christians, and that Islam is still waiting for the Christians to produce the true one. Both charges, of course, were in no way material to the discussion at hand. Oh, much more, not worth retelling, all of it part of the believer's kit for repulsing any infidel who might actually know where all the chinks in the armor are. If you really want to see the desperation weapons, raise the subject of people who have left Islam. "That never happens," they exclaim, and then they get shown something like Ibn Warraq's book, or Ali Sina's website, and watch out!
I should add that I, too, am murtad, and have been so accused, in hopes of being silenced. I have no illusions about what that means for my personal safety should I end up alone and unarmed on Mohammedan turf, but it won't silence me here.
All of this is by way of agreeing with the appeals Hugh posts above, but with the clear caution that born Mohammedans will resist the painfully true with all their mental might for many, many reasons, some of them connected with that "painfully" part, some of them connected to wealth and standing, some of them deep and emotional. The appeal seems to clear, so logical, so irresistable to us, and it is anything but to the Mohammedan.
Once again, we have a belated and lame response coming out of Rome to yet another muslim onslaught.
Why not simply state that marriages by believing/practicing Christians to non-Christians is not biblically acceptable (1 Corinthians 7:39)? Rome can actually adhere to Scripture and not offend other Christian denominations in the process.
Western woman who marry Muslim men deserve what they get; if they are so blind to what is taking place in Islamic countries especially to women.
They are not even second class citizens!
Why not simply state that marriages by believing/practicing Christians to non-Christians is not biblically acceptable (1 Corinthians 7:39)? Rome can actually adhere to Scripture and not offend other Christian denominations in the process.
It is important to make the point that marriage to a Muslim is uniquely dangerous. If a Christian marries a Jew/Hindu/Atheist and it all goes wrong, generally she can get out of it. But if a Christian marries a Muslim and it all goes wrong, particularly, but not only, if she goes with him to live in a Muslim country, the consequences can be disastrous. Read 'Not Without My Daughter', if you are in any doubt about this.
Well, DUH!
I married a Muslim. She is a Christian now, and both our kids are Christians too.
Rocky, you are an extreme exception. Good for you. I make the assumption you reside in the United States?
Rocky, may I also ask her nationality?
Nobody should marry Muslims.
If you see one walking down the street--RUN AWAY!
Rocky: "I married a Muslim-She is a Christian now". Well Rocky, I am sure you never forced her to embrace your religion,as the Islamists do. We Chritians dont have that much averish evil greed to bring others to our fold at any cost. I have known some young Arabs,comming to States for education,courting white christian girls, taking them out for dancing(or learn through them), eating Pork,even promising them that they are prepared to switch over to the girl's religion,if her parents object to their wedding..Once the wedding is over,and a trip to his parents place in Arabia, -that girl will be sitting in a parda!. Mrs.Rocky would have experienced the tolerant peaceful nature of her husband's religion,compared to her own,and volenterily accepted his faith. God Bless to Rocky and his family.
No, I'm not residing in the US.
But we'll go there for furlough next year.
It would not be safe for her to tell you guys her nationality.
We are now in the field, working with her people.
Sorry for being cryptic. We know well the monster we ahve to deal with.
I come to this site to release some steam.
We live among muslims, in Asia. Maybe 12 time zones away from you guys.
My wife was not forced to convert. She just began using her own God-given brain and began to think analytically and critically.
God gave her the strength. I don't think muslims would be able to get out of their bondage on their own.
It takes a great amount of anointing to shake a yoke the size muslims have to bear. When a Muslim leaves islam and embraces Christianity, it is a real miracle.
Muslims live in mental slavery and in spiritual degradation.
Their state is similar to the state the Jews were in when they were living in Egypt under Pharaoh's tyranny. They didn't even realize that they needed to be free.
They are people that have no options in life.
Kant said that in order to do a moral action a person needs freedom of the will. But Muslims have no freedom of the will. They make no moral choices.
They are taught to show religious zeal and to admire imams (religious leaders) and to swallow whole the garbage that is dumped into their brains by them.
That is why they act so weird. Because they never question. If the imam tells a Muslim to throw himself (or herself) out of the window, the Muslim will ask "from which floor?"
Well Rocky,you are not alone. just go to 'faithfreedom.org' of Dr.Ali Sina and look at the articles 'Why we left Islam?'. Hundreds of educated muslims are leaving Islam- but it is kept as s hush hush , for the reasons best known to every one. If these islamists convert non-muslims by telling lies,bribing them,and threatening them , they publish this papers, tv programmes etc. BUT- if any MUSLIM converts to other religions,their ALLAH tell them to KILL those erring muslims!. They spread the false statement that Islam is a fastest growing religion in the world. The truth of the growth is : (1)They make babies like pigs.(2) They immigrate to western countries by leaps and bounds-by means of leagal,illegal,bogus refugee claims,night boats on high seas etc. and added to this,the western governments give incentives for each additional child!. (3) They convert the criminals in jails by promising them money and better life after their release.(but use them for sui-cide bombing) (4) By falsy interpriting to a innocent man ,that Islam is a very 'Peaceful' religion (5) the muslim students are encouraged to hook vulnerable christian and jewish girls and marry them to produce blue eyed ,blond haired muslims.!.
"When a Muslim leaves Islam and embraces Christianity, it is a real miracle."
Rocky, that's one of the great things about Chrisitanity. Lots and lots of miracles!!