Victorious_Fize
I didn't say you were gonna kill me, but i am saying it is you are attempting to silence me and others like me of having an opinion. it is indeed from your camp that goes out calling people kafir's - whether true or not - and even outright having them killed for things such as blasphemy. The fact that the someone like Anjem Choudry in the UK, as a UK citizen, can go around calling the 9/11 hijackers the Magneficient 19 and want to institute Shariah Law across Europe is protected (however unpopular his opinion is) in the UK, should stand for why they have a better way of ruling. and we should strive for that, to strive to have marketplace of ideas, not stifled down in order to not offend anyone and perserve ancient cultures on the sole basis that they're old, and that must mean that they're something right.
when i said to you, i didn't know my tribe, that even as i went to speak to my own father about this. he gave me this blank look on his face, my father the man who has been living in Saudi since the day he was born in 1962, didn't know. that my family didn't care for tribalism, we had religion, nation, and family. that's it. you seem to have found that odd. Even my own grandfather who died at the age of 72, before the modernization of the country, back when there was no electricity, no paved roads, no running water and you lived literally one what the oasis provided, had no strong tribal allegiance.
I don't care where you come from, i don't care that your from Asir, it should have no bearing on the ideas that your presenting to the table. and it certainly should not be used as a tool to sequester and isolate people for whom we don't like.
Pan-Islamism will never happen, just as Pan-Arabism will never happen. The only time we've ever been united under the same roof has been under a monarch or dictator or foreign empire. We have too many different ideas as to what exactly it means to have a Pan-Arab or Islamic state. and you clearly have no working knoweldge when it comes to political philosophy and how institutions are formed and supported. Read the American constitution and compare it to the Iraqi constitution and you'll quickly see what i mean. hell i'll write it right here the second article in the Iraqi constitution:
"Article 2:
First: Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation:
A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.
B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.
C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be established.
Second: This Constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice such as Christians, Yazedis, and Mandi Sabeans."
I have to ask. which one takes precedence? Islam isn't democratic, not in the Western sense - it never has been. When it says full religious rights does it mean in the Western sense where a person on their will and faith can go from Muslim to Christian and they won't be killed? or does Islam take precedence? the Hadiths from Bukhari says "anyone who changes their religion, kill them". This is just one example and its a powderkeg waiting to happen.
Also, you seem to still have this weird hard on that being secular/liberal = in support of dictators..... Don't forget that the ulema, and the majority of religious conservatives are catered to every day in the country. Women can't work at Panda as a cashier, because it'll offend the religious conservatives is just ONE example of literally hundreds. Seriously put your head on straight, and take your blinders off. The only reason liberals appeal to the government, is because the religious conservatives can not only appeal, but sometimes threaten the state and still get their way every.single.time. Not to mention we are LEAD by social religious conservatives in Saudi, whether they're secretly hypocrites or not, they're all towing the same party line. We are dictated to all the time by our dictators, and far more often in support of religious conservatives and perptuating myths about the West and ourselves.
I'm really really sorry man that they sent Saudi girls to the Olympics, good thing that Saudi Equestrian team won the bronze, so we did not have to talk about the disgrace of women playing sports. I'm really sorry that Saudi king Faisel forced women education, the television, ended slavery, began modernizing and building our cities, provided the modernized government branches and the nanny state that every Saudi lives off of. I'm really sorry that the King Abdulaziz introduced the the automobile and the telephone.... I'm really sorry that liberals and 'kufirs' bring modernization and new ideas.
you answered my question about tribalism, but you failed to answer my other questions, what exactly do you have against liberalism? is it just because you think i'm riding dictator c0ck? is it because you think it fits the Saudi favorite past time "find the Kufir"?
and I must ask the question a 4th time again. Why did you feel the need to have to ask "what tribe do you belong to?" when i had an opinion you didn't like. Because it has no bearing on the ideas i'm supporting. I would never ask you the same question. You cannot tell me that you felt the need to ask that, then use it to put me in a box without taking into account my ideas, then say that you don't support tribalism. Because you almost immediately discount my opinion as being Western or something 'other' and outsider, rather then take on the idea itself.
There's a word for that it's called xenophobia. Something sadly with the exception of Jeddah, and the Dammam/Khobar area that Saudi has in spades. Though to be fair, virtually every country has it to some degree, it's just more so in the third world.
I am not saying abandon your faith, never did i say this once. secularism does not mean atheism. It is clear that the Arab world is going through great turmoil right now, what it doesn't need is more backward looking ideologies. Because before we know it, we'll be poor again, and we'll have developed no society to last beyond it because we valued tradition to such a point that it became a deteremint to our people.
The Arab/Muslim world is hopelessly reliant on technology most of which developed in 'kufir' territory by 'kufir' people to be able to function at all. Without it we starve, without the oil wealth we have virtually nothing. We cannot go back to bedu days when were 25 million Saudi's alone, never mind the 300 Million Arabs in the Arab world. we must move forward.
The west may have invented the idea of democracy, liberalism, and secularism, but they don't own those ideas. It is self-evident that they're governments work, hundreds of thousands of Arab Muslims leave our region for there. So why not provide it here? some of the best minds of our region leave because they're ideas run counter to ancient thinking. I cannot even begin to tell you the number of Saudi's, both men and women, who've gone to do their Bachelor, Master's, PhD in America, to return to Saudi to work, only to return to the West a decade or short later. the BEST minds are leaving Fize! and virtually all of them, men and women, have to play by your archaic cultural rules otherwise they risk being ostracized or worse. Imagine living with you your own beliefs and having to keep everything in because God forbid you might offend the backward and arrogantly ignorant (who go about their lives being unchallenged).
We were once the center of knowledge in the ENTIRE world, we had the best medicine, and standard of living, 2/3rds of the visible stars in the night sky have an Arabic name, this is all true and we should all be proud of this fact. But it didn't come because we had that much more blind faith, it did not come because we valued our tribes to such a xenophobic degree. we had it because we were open and cosmopolitan society. We lost that and since then we value revelation above all things, and we put investigation and being cosmopolitan to the side.
Like it or not we live in a globalized world, a marketplace of economics, religions, ideas, ideologies of all stripes. the days of living like bedu and traveling the desert or living around an oasis (as in my families case) are long gone. and we can sit back and blame the West or the Al Saud's for tainting us all we want. It doesn't change the reality.
the good news though, is that your fear of the 'kufr' spewing people, will only get worse in the Arab world (not just Saudi), if we are to compete with the rest of the world we have to be more open, and with that comes the exchange of ideas. Which is why, and i'll reiterate it again, good luck using silence tactics of calling people kufir's, or stereotyping them into boxes (well he's American... well he's Azdi's.. etc etc). Because it's only going to get worse, if that's all you have in your arsenal to fire back with, your going to ineveitably lose the arguement every.time.
Cultures and tribes no longer live in bubbles of isolation, i'm sorry to burst this news to you.
your fear of the loss of the tribal culture is only going to grow, and not because of me. The environment itself is not designed to keep it sheltered.
that's it i'm done with this. I invite you Fize to travel the world when you can and read Western literature from it's source, not simply whatever your local guy tells you in al Hasa or Asir or wherever you get your ideas from.i strongly recommend Thomas Paine, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbe - don't simply discount them because they're Western that's what you'd called xenophobia and being tribal.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
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To answer Brosepherous Rex, yes i am Saudi, it's a nationality, not a race. i'm half Arab Saudi and half White American. In America, Arab is considered white by the census.
I grew up in Saudi, went through the Saudi education system until just about finishing middle school, and i often travel back and forth between America and Saudi, visiting friends and family, both religious and non (in both).
I wasn't raised to think tribally, i was never taught to discount someone because of their tribe, their religion/lack of, their ethnciity, their sex, but only on their character and the merit of their ideas. When the Saudi kids would scream and yell and cus out the Hindi worker, my mother would never allow me to be that. so blame Western liberal junk thinking for that as well....
I was also never denied untampered-with knowledge of the world from either my Saudi extended family in Al Hasa, my American family in Minnesota, or my immediate family. I used to get encyclopedia's as a gifts for birthdays and Eid's. So i guess that makes even the more religious conservative members of my Saudi family as kufir spewers as well.
I excelled in religious education, at one point i could recite the Quran from front cover to the back, and i have a good knowledge of the Sunnah. so it's always humerous to hear people accuse me of ignorance whenever it suits their arguement.
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EDIT: Fize you may have the final word, and you can call me whatever name you like, but you are very tribalistic just based on your words - even as you say you are not. it's clear when it comes to government and culture we value very different things. But you seem to have this weird conclusion that being liberal/secular means your automatically in cahoots with the dictators, and that only religious hypocrits could side with them as well.
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