Please do. Our secular republics don't need to import authoritarian theocrats. If you stay, sign the contract contained herein: https://ljgolden55.medium.com/an-ill-fitting-suit-islam-vs-secular-government-and-individualism-3dcf0e577468
Here are the clauses in the contract that all theocrats, of whatever religion, will find difficult to swallow. Only a contract can solve the 2015 Collision in Cologne that Daoud wrote about: “People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.”:
1. Groups don’t have rights, only individuals.
2. Secular constitutions supersede all religious law (Sharia, Koranic, Catholic canon law, Mosaic law). All satire of religious belief is protected speech. Religion as an ideology and belief system enjoys no special exemption from satire, ridicule, insult and open debate. Blasphemy is not a valid legal concept.
3. Absolute freedom of conscience in religion. All individuals, including all your family members, have the right to convert to another religion or no religion.
4. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is illegal and criminal.
5. Women have equal rights under the law. Your female children over the state’s age of consent have the right to marry, partner and have sexual relations with whom they choose, of a different religion or of no religion. Your female children have the right not to marry. Coercive arranged marriage is illegal. Child marriage is illegal.
6. Family honor is not a valid legal concept. Muslims in the West must explicitly renounce family honor as a legal concept and acknowledge the illegality of honor killing.
7. Wife-beating is illegal. Wives, and daughters over 18, have absolute freedom of choice in dress. Male relatives have no legal right to limit female family members’ freedom of choice in dress. (Only this taboo-breaker can solve the problem Daoud wrote about: “ Clothing is also given to extremes: At one end is the burqa, the orthodox full-body covering; at the other is the hijab moutabaraj (“the veil that reveals”), which combines a head scarf with slim-fit jeans or tight pants. On the beach, the burqini confronts the bikini.”)
8. Homosexuality and homosexual relations are legal and homosexuals have equal legal rights. If you own a business you have no legal right to refuse employment to a qualified homosexual applicant or service to a homosexual customer because of his or her sexual orientation.
9. Holocaust denial is illegal hate speech.
10. Antisemitic speech is a hate crime punishable by imprisonment.
This last clause would land the manuscript director of the UNESCO-financed Alexandria Library in jail since he included the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the library’s exhibits:
“the manuscript museum director, Dr. Yusuf Zeidan, in the November 17, 2003, edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Usbu’, he “decided immediately to place it next to the Torah. Although it is not a monotheistic holy book, it has become one of the sacred [tenets] of the Jews, next to their first constitution, their religious law, [and] their way of life. In other words, it is not merely an ideological or theoretical book.” For Zionist Jews, he explained, the Protocols is more important than the Torah, as it informs their every action.”
But this contract can’t work unless it’s voluntary and the initiative for it comes from the Muslim citizens of secular western states and recently arrived Muslim refugees. The Syrian and Egyptian refugees I’ve known have all agreed that Islam’s tight prohibitionist governance of patriarchal family hierarchy and girls’ and women’s choices needs more of this therapy than other religions. Assuming all Muslims are snowflakes who can’t take a cartoon’s joke about their BELIEFS is a form of what Bush senior called the “soft bigotry of low expectations”.
