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A Muslim confronts another who denounced the infidels...and the moderate is thrown out of the mosque. "If Muslims, or anyone else, doesn't like living in a land filled with Christians or in a democracy they should get the hell out."
From the Calgary Sun, with thanks to all who sent this in:
Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar recently attended Calgary's largest mosque for a funeral.At one point in the proceedings, a man Kanwar has known for more than three decades led the prayers.
"He was saying in Urdu (the official language of Pakistan): 'Oh, God, protect us from the infidels, who pollute us with their vile ways,'" recalls Kanwar, a professor of sociology at Mount Royal College in Calgary.
"I stood up and grabbed him by the lapels, which was shocking even to me because I have never done anything like that in my life and I said: 'How dare you attack my country.' And then I addressed the crowd and said: 'I have known this man for more than 30 years and he has been on welfare for almost all of those years.' "
Kanwar chuckles at the memory.
"Then I said to this semi-literate man, 'you should thank me and those you call infidels.'
"He asked me why and I said: 'Because the taxes I pay are putting food on your table as are the taxes of the so-called "infidels.' "
Most Canadians and many Muslims would applaud Dr. Kanwar's righteous outburst. But guess which of the two men is no longer welcome at the Sarcee Tr. S.W. mosque?
Not the intolerant, hate-spewing semi-literate. No, it's Dr. Kanwar who's persona non grata.
That, says Kanwar, is just one of numerous instances he has experienced as a result of the culture of ignorance and intolerance that permeates so many mosques in Canada and throughout the world....
Why, I thought the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the West were solidly on our side. Isn't that message dinned into our ears daily? And yet here again, all the evidence we ever actually see lines up against this idea.
In light of the arrests two weeks ago of 17 young Muslim Canadian men who are alleged to have planned terrorist attacks against their fellow Canadians that included attacking Parliament, seizing the CBC and beheading the prime minister, Kanwar says it's vitally important for Canadians to start making more demands of those who immigrate to this country.
Yes, indeed.
Kanwar says we now know one of the 17 accused was allowed to spew hatred and calls to violent jihad at a Toronto-area mosque and he was never once told by the leadership there to stop.Six of the young men who listened to him are also charged in the plot.
Kanwar is pretty certain, if he spoke up at that mosque, however, with his message that Canada's culture is better than the culture found in any Islamic-based country, he'd be kicked out.
"The policy of official multiculturalism is a disaster," says Kanwar, who ironically once headed a government-funded multicultural organization in Calgary in the early '70s....
"Multiculturalism creates nations within a nation and divides the loyalty of people," says the 65-year-old Pakastani-born Kanwar, who immigrated to Canada in 1966.
"It allows people to marginalize themselves. It endangers us all as these recent arrests show."
Because of Kanwar's open and published opposition to Ontario's proposal last year to consider allowing sharia law for arbitration purposes in that province, Kanwar says he has been issued with fatwahs -- not the death-threat versions made famous by the one issued against Salman Rushdie for writing the novel The Satanic Verses -- but more like a shunning.
Kanwar, a devout Muslim, says he has essentially been excommunicated by Calgary's mosques because he is too tolerant of others.
Homa Arjomand, who lives in Toronto and headed Canada's successful campaign of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada (www.nosharia.com), says like Kanwar, she too once embraced the idea of multiculturalism.
Arjomand, who calls herself a "victim" of sharia law -- a strict set of rules based on Islam's holy book, the Qur'an, that subjugates women, as well as allows for the chopping off of hands for theft etc. -- says part of the reason she decided to immigrate to Canada was because she had heard about official multiculturalism.
"I thought how wonderful, but not anymore," she declares.
"I came here for Canadian values, not sharia values. I fled Iran on horseback because the values there threatened my very life. If people want to live under sharia or the way they lived back home, let them go back," she said.
Kanwar agrees. He says the time has come for the Canadian government to tell new immigrants "once you're in Canada we expect you to be totally devoted to Canada -- no divided loyalties."
"This country," added Kanwar, "is a democracy and democracy is founded on Christian principles.
"Canada is -- like it or not, take it or leave it -- a country founded on Christian principles where the vast majority of citizens are Christians," said Kanwar.
"Yes, there's separation of church and state but even that was a principle founded by Christians and Christianity.
"If Muslims, or anyone else, doesn't like living in a land filled with Christians or in a democracy they should get the hell out."
Posted by Robert at June 19, 2006 7:26 AM
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"Kanwar, a devout Muslim,....."Posted by: Shy GuyNo. He's a devout human being. He's an apostate Muslim, praise Allah.
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at June 19, 2006 7:56 AM
This discussion of what sharia means to non-muslims should be sent to EVERYONE.
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/21475
Posted by: Borg at June 19, 2006 8:28 AM
I agree with Kanwar, that, if they don't like living in a sharia free land, they should go back to the "land of the setting sun in a puddle", and get out as quickly as possible. Don't let the door hit them on the butt!
Posted by: freewoman at June 19, 2006 8:39 AM
"I stood up and grabbed him by the lapels, which was shocking even to me because I have never done anything like that in my life and I said: 'How dare you attack my country.' And then I addressed the crowd and said: 'I have known this man for more than 30 years and he has been on welfare for almost all of those years.' "
Note to non-Moslem countries: How to get rid of a bunch of jihadis - no welfare to immigrants for 10 or 20 years after they arrive.
at June 19, 2006 9:04 AM
"'I came here for Canadian values, not sharia values. I fled Iran on horseback because the values there threatened my very life. If people want to live under sharia or the way they lived back home, let them go back,'" she [Hoja Arjomand] said.
[Mahfooz] Kanwar [of Pakistan] agrees. He says the time has come for the Canadian government to tell new immigrants "once you're in Canada we expect you to be totally devoted to Canada -- no divided loyalties."
"'This country,'" added Kanwar, "'is a democracy and democracy is founded on Christian principles.'"
--- from the article above
Any would-be or present Muslim immigrant who cannot support the statements of Mahfooz Kanwar or Hoja Arjomand should not be entitled either to citizenship, or if the citizenship has been granted, to retain it. The minimum Infidels have a right to demand, given what they are now learning about the contents of the Qur'an and Hadith and Sira (the biography of Muhammad), and what they understand of inculcated hostility toward non-Muslims and loyalty only to the umma al-islamiyya, is what Arjomand and Kanwar have stated above.
If members of CAIR cannot endorse those views, that will be telling.
So tell us, members of CAIR. We are all ears.
Posted by: Hugh at June 19, 2006 9:12 AM
Kanwar's stance should be commended, but this incident demonstrates that moderate Muslims are the exception rather than the rule.
at June 19, 2006 9:19 AM
This discussion of what sharia means to non-muslims should be sent to EVERYONE.http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/21475
Posted by: Borg at June 19, 2006 08:28 AM
at June 19, 2006 9:20 AM
So we found the needle in the hay stack? Bravo Kanwar, nice to know there's one out there.
Posted by: eloivsdiablo at June 19, 2006 9:27 AM
""Yes, there's separation of church and state but even that was a principle founded by Christians and Christianity."
This very intelligent and cogent observation by Dr. Kanwar is often incomprehensible to Muslims as well as to many Western Leftists (and, proportionately, fewer right-wing evangelical types). Dr. Kanwar's single sentence packs a lot of history and paradoxical complexity, which can be paraphrased to illuminate the fecund paradox:
Christianitas essentially dismantled itself, in great part using (not without some resistance to the birthing process) its own principles, in order to further Mankind on its wonderful mysterious journey toward the eschaton it leaves in God's hands, rather than, as with Islam, putting it in the hands of its followers as an immanent military project fighting against all who resist that same project.
Posted by: Television at June 19, 2006 10:43 AM
Good story. Homa Arjomand is great. Kanwar is a brave man, and to be commended for this outburst in defence of western values.
However, although Christian principles have played a role in Canadian (and western) values, Kanwar overstates its influence. Democracy, as well as the reliance on logic and reasoning necessary for it, was developed most by the Greeks, long before Christ.
Posted by: Archimedes at June 19, 2006 1:51 PM
@Archimedes
intelectual nitpicking does not help, no doubt you´re good at it, but generally do not seem to get the drift...
Posted by: cosmicAvenger at June 19, 2006 2:26 PM
Archimedes,
Actually Kanwar is right on the money historically. Ancient Greek Democracy (actually only Athenian Democracy, since the other Greek states like Sparta and Macedonia were dictatorships) was definitely not democratic by our standards. Only the property-owning elite could vote and the vast majority of the population were slaves.
It was under Judeo-Christian influence that slavery was abolished and individual rights were extended to the whole population. This is because Judaism and Christianity teaches that every human person is in the image of God and therefore has inate value and inalienable rights. Judeo-Christian (i.e. Western) values are now seen as basic to the values of Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Shinto civilizations as well as by many secularists and non-believers.
The big exception is Islam, which like Communism and Nazism, rejects any basic understanding of human nature and individual rights. Mr. Kanwar may be a "devout Muslim" from a religious point of view (keeping Halal and praying five times daily) but he is clearly not an ideological Muslim.
Posted by: Provoslavni at June 19, 2006 2:31 PM
Ultimately we must do everything in our power to create the conditions for Muslims to leave Islam -- Persons such as Kanwar, Irshad Manji, and others who fervently want their religion not to be the way it clearly is should stop their futile efforts and become apostates. They must jettison Islam, recognizing the nightmare truth about their "religion". They must become the most vocal and credible fighters against Islamic Jihad -- they must help us stop the scourge of Islam --
Those who continue to peddle the notion that Islam is redeemable, or that elusive "moderates" withing Islam will ever carry the day against the tidal wave that opposes them are part of the problem, not the solution. Every effort must be made to convince them to stop shilling for Islam, or more accurately, a fairy tale version of Islam which only exists in their imaginations. The truth about Islam is that the way it's practiced by the vast majority of Muslims on earth -- is the REAL Islam. The genuine thing. The Islam that has made every country where it reigns supreme into a veritable hell hole of human degradation, corruption, and lies.
at June 19, 2006 3:23 PM
I'd have to agree with Provoslavni, and I'd add that the implicit view of Western history of Archimedes -- that the Christian chunk of it -- roughly over a millennium (from the 4th century when a Roman Emperor converted to Christianity to the 14th century when the Renaissance in rediscovering pre-Christian Classical wisdom began to "wake up" the West from the "darkness" of its Middle Ages) -- was some sort of giant black hole that interrupted Western progress, is an increasingly disputed view among historians, one which perpetuates certain old currents of thought which, in fact, share some of the same polluted waters that gave rise to the arc of anti-Western pathology, erupting in various bouts of mutations in the 20th century, under which we continue to suffer in certain ways today (chiefly through its latest permutation, PC multiculturalism).
I would argue that far from representing a gulf or interruption in the progress of the West, its era of Christendom helped to further unfold the genius of Classical Greece and Rome and prepare it for the stupendous ability it now has to organize, order, nourish and inspire vast amounts of territory and materiel and unprecedented numbers of peoples of various societies & cultures in the context of the freest, most beneficent, talented, inventive and productive civilization in all history.
at June 19, 2006 3:45 PM
My point is that the statement that Canadian (or even western) society was founded on Christian principles is an overstatement. Let's also keep in mind that Christianity itself did not spring forth out of nothing.
Provoslavni,
Re: Slavery. You are only half correct. It depends on which Christians you are talking about. Many held to maintain it, and used the Bible to justify it. In any case, slavery is not abolished in the New Testament, even though there was the opportunity to do so. Had Christ abolished slavery in the New Testament, we could say that the abolition of slavery was due to Christianity (but Christ didn't abolish it).
Television,
I certainly agree that it was a combination of Christian and Greek influences (along with much later developments during the enlightenment), and other lesser influences, that gives us the foundation of our societies today. That's why I said Kanwar had overstated his point.
CosmicAvenger [TypeKey Profile Page] at June 19, 2006 02:26 PM
I do get Kanwar's drift, as was clear in my initial post. I've defended Christianity many times on this site, but I won't defend false or misleading statements. You can read more examples of my "nitpicking" (about Islam) here
http://www.islam-watch.org/
at June 19, 2006 4:11 PM
Television,
I don't view those 1000 years as a black hole. My point was that Kanwar has overstated his point. That's it.
Posted by: Archimedes at June 19, 2006 4:12 PM
Archimedes,
Yes, on second reading, Dr. Kanwar seems to be one of those over-enthusiastic Christians who simplify history as egregiously as I was accusing you (wrongly, I think) of doing, only in the opposite direction.
at June 19, 2006 7:13 PM
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