Lester Golden
1 min readJan 19, 2024

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Yep, we're not the chosen people and have our authoritarian theocrats too. The difference: ours live in secular democratic states and don't make the rules for the rest of us.

The Muslim version of Unorthodox is the Netflix documentary Undercover Egypt.

It's far easier for non-conformists to escape from Haredi misogynistic collectivism than for Muslim women to escape from the totalitarian closed circle of authoritarian patriarchy that crushes individual aspiration. In the West apostasy is a choice. In the Arab world it's legally defined as a death sentence.

In the Muslim world the disruptive reformers and innovators like Hashem Aghajari in Iran (https://www.memri.org/reports/call-islamic-protestantism-dr-hashem-aghajaris-speech-and-subsequent-death-sentence)

and Ibrahim Muteferrika, who offered the Ottoman sultan a printing press in the 1680s and was rejected, always lose. https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/islam-and-intellectual-infidels-b83b6cdcb7fc

If I could put all the authoritarian theocrats from Islam, Christianity and Judaism on the same island and hand them all AK47s, I would. It would solve a multitude of problems. But it would depopulate large parts of the American South and rural midwest, at least half the Arab world, a smaller % of Turkiye, but more of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sumatra, some of Mindanao and parts of Central Asia and Brooklyn.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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