In the first majority-Muslim U.S. city, residents tense about its future
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Imagine how this article would read if for "muslim" you substituted "hispanic" or "jew" or "african-american". Alarmist? Racist? Hostile? Got it in one. Now how is structuring the narrative around muslims any different?
(There's a classic saying in newsroom culture: "if it bleeds, it leads" -- which is why for the past week our news has been saturated with the muslims are coming! Be afraid! rhetoric. It doesn't sell newspapers to point out that there are around 2 billion muslims world-wide, of whom maybe 20,000 are active jihadis in AQ and Da'esh; the rest are just ordinary folks who are happy to get along, and overall they've killed vastly fewer people on American or European soil than home-grown terrorists over the past five decades.)
NB: expecting downvotes, because nothing triggers a witch-hunt like a media panic over [insert terrifying incomprehensible foreign threat here].
First and perhaps most common is just a fear of changing culture. It happens, and all is fluid, but it's not uncommon. Many people fear change, and I'm not saying it's good to restrict change because of that fear, but I understand the human nature behind it.
That said, I'd be upset if I had to hear a call to prayer 5 times a day. I am pretty anti-religion as it goes, which is my own personal bias, but I don't appreciate being forced to tolerate annoyance for someone else's religion. It's the same as people blasting music in the park 5x a day - the idea of noise pollution and disturbing the peace exists for this very reason. Allowing it to continue for what I assume are politically correct reasons is frustrating.
I also do not understand why I should be expected to tolerate Islam when it stands against many things I'm for - most egregiously is equal rights for women (not to mention other common religious touch-points like homosexuality, premarital sex, and huge swaths of science education). Islam is most oppressive to women. I hear the argument "Well what if a woman wants to be Muslim?" to which I answer that I'm sure there were conservative women against Suffrage or equal pay or any number of progressive issues for women.
Living in peace with our neighbors is fine and expected, and living in a major city as I do, there are people of all creeds and religions - but I'm still going to be annoyed when the National Guard take over the city and lock it down for the Pope (who, as progressive as he is, is still rather homophobic), or when the Nation of Islam is shouting through speakers on the streets, or when some born-again nut is shouting at me through a loud speaker/bull horn about how my whole family is going to burn in Hell.
Tolerance for Islam is the new politically correct darling. It's still oppressive to women, it's still an organized religion, and like absolutely everything and everybody in this world, it will take full advantage of the leeway given to it.
And so I understand the frustration with certain aspects of what this article touches on.
You're expected to tolerate it for the same reason they are expected to tolerate your beliefs. (Or those of Christian dominionists, for that matter.) Separation of Church and State is one of the best ideas to have come out of the US constitution, bar none, and if you don't see how it benefits you, you haven't lived in a nation that doesn't have it.
(Trust me on this: I'm British and I can't go out of my front door without witnessing the long-term effects of a State religion around me -- a toothless, decrepit thing that is rapidly fading away, but a state religion nonetheless, with all the legacy of privilege that implies.)
Even better stop labelling things culturally. Do you have a problem with women's rights? Good, then fight for women's rights. Do you have a problem with the Azhan, with blasting music, with cockeral's crowing, with bloody church bells? Then your concern is public noise, not a culturally specific public noise.
Having lived with the call to prayer for several years now, I can absolutely understand resident's frustration with it.
In a secular society, it shouldn't be treated any differently than if I got on a loudspeaker and started shouting 'wake up everyone!' at 5am every morning.
http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/tilburgse-pastoor-mag-kl...
I'm all for stopping any such nonsense but then churchbells are out. All of them, they served their purpose in the times before social media and alarm clocks but nowadays there is no reason for them.
And if that is used to stop Mosques from doing their 'call to prayer' I'm all for it, but let's keep things equal.
Of course that may be a bit hard to do in a town with both a large Catholic and a large Muslim population. But either both should not take offense at what the other does or both should agree that there is no gain from any of this.
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1996/Fed-Up-With-Sound-of-Churc...
> Fed up with visitors ringing the church bells in this picturesque western England town, she took an ax to the 500-year-old church door this weekend and chopped down the belfry ropes.
> Mather's family has lived in Compton Basset almost as long as St. Swithun's church _ 400 years _ and she said she felt remorse for what she did. But she also felt that, after repeated pleas to church elders over the years, she could no longer take the bells pealing 100 yards from her home.
> ``My health was suffering and it was a choice of prison or more suffering,'' she said Monday. ``I have done my utmost to sort it out but in the end I had no option.''
> Before dawn Sunday, she spent 2 1/2 hours hacking through the church door with an ax; she then cut through the belfry ropes.
> Church Warden Robert Henly told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the belfry ropes were cut too close to the bells to be repaired.
> ``They can't be spliced,'' he said. ``They have to be new.''
> The last straw for 64-year-old Mather was the two hours visitors from Oxford spent ringing the bells on Saturday.
> ``I don't mind the ringing for village services, funerals and weddings, but when it is outsiders just doing it for fun it becomes unbearable,'' she said.
Bell ringers are arseholes too, it's not just Muslims.
I'm trying to imagine the poor people living within earshot of both a church and a mosque.
Islamic call to prayer translates roughly to "you really ought to pray right now if you want salvation. Seriously, it's time to acknowledge who is the greatest.. you know who, yeh that's right, God is greatest. And you know what? Prayer is more important than sleep, so do as I ask, just as you did yesterday, and just like you ought to do tomorrow. Get praying people".
Vs
A bell.
Religion is not like race. Religion is a choice that could be changed within a second with zero effort whatsoever.
Race you can't change, religion you can. That we agree on, there is plenty of evidence that this is possible. However, 'race' is often in the eye of the beholder and religion, how ever easy it is to change in principle has a nasty habit of becoming an integral part of the identity of the practitioner and it can be extremely hard to get rid of it, definitely not a 'zero effort whatsoever' thing, more like an extremely invasive review of what makes up the self.
Think of it as a psychological crisis and not many people go that route head-on. If anything it is usually a very slow process stretching out over many years where disillusion plays a major role. So not quite 'changed within a second'.
Am I racist for not wanting to get a horn or some loud noise 5x a day? So be it
Also I am pretty sure Jews, African-Americans and Hispanics don't got doctrine that tells them to kill apostates.
A better comparison would be Westboro Baptist Church. Except they are what, odd 20 people? Islamofascists numbers reach the millions, obviously not all are active jihadists. But many support and finance.
This isn't media panic. This is experience before the media even got attention to it.
EDIT: Yeah I saw the Wiki page just like you did. I was trying to serve a point. facepalm
Not better enough considering the number to date of homosexuals ISIS has tossed off rooftops, compared with the WBC's general standing around and sign-holding.
> Except they are what, odd 20 people?
If you're off by a factor of 2 on the Westboro Baptist Church, which you can verify in just about 2 seconds it's kind of weird to see you complain about how many active jihadists there are, it's not like they have a registry.
Does that make you dishonest, or just unaware?
There must be a better way to make your argument.
The Washington Post is extremely left-leaning. In fact, they recently published an editorial all but equating the US with Nazi Germany should we refuse to admit Syrian refugees.
The article reads to me like a typical "changing neighborhood" piece, albeit one where the author perhaps failed to toe the party line sufficiently to your liking. If you really believe the Post is "jumping on the Trump bandwagon," you clearly haven't read them enough.
> It doesn't sell newspapers to point out that there are around 2 billion muslims world-wide, of whom maybe 20,000 are active jihadis in AQ and Da'esh; the rest are just ordinary folks who are happy to get along
Just ordinary folks who are happy to get along--and who broadly support the death penalty for apostasy, the stoning of adulterers, and making Sharia the binding law of the land:
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...
> NB: expecting downvotes
Really? Expecting downvotes on HN for criticizing an article on Muslims that wasn't a complete whitewash? I'm quite confident my comments will end up subzero long before yours.
And by the way, don't you have some critical comments to moderate on your echo chamber of a blog? Must keep those "safe spaces" safe, after all.
"In many ways, Hamtramck is a microcosm of the fears gripping parts of the country since the Islamic State’s attacks on Paris: The influx of Muslims here has profoundly unsettled some residents of the town long known for its love of dancing, beer, paczki pastries and the pope."
Fearmongering, pure and simple. Won't somebody think of the dancing, the beer, the pastries and the pope.
How about waiting to see what that majority Muslim council gets up to before condemning them? If they do something about the kielbasa then maybe it's time to start articles like these.
Mainly curious on that point because i'd consider going that way against a church down the road if they'd jangle their bells more than once or twice a week.
That way you can either count the "rings" for every hour or just count how many it was since you heard the jingle.
I actually do the latter after 12 for "faux" Pomodoro.
That said, the aforementioned church tends to break out in minute-long sessions of jangling, and isn't even particularly interesting since they only have 2 or 3 identical bells.
But it's still religious bullshit behind those call to prayers, and that is worth remembering before allowing it to rock your neighbourhood every morning.
Muslims should download an app that streams the morning prayer privately into their homes rather than blasting the streets. If that app doesn't exist, then quick, someone make it and sell it for a dollar.
Personally I'd prefer to hear local musicians, or kids choirs, or just something that isn't religious bullshit. It's 2015, we're about to head to Mars, we don't need this religious bullshit.
You overestimate the depth and breadth of the spread of always-connected devices.
> Church bells are not interesting or even musical.
Not true! A few kilometers in town we have this church:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=aegidienkirche+...
It has a very nice set of bells that play various songs throughout the year: http://marktkirche-hannover.de/wp-content/uploads/MK_Aegi_Gl...
It is not very loud though, so i cannot hear it from my apartment.
Isn't that an illegal violation of the separation of church and state?
Most states have or allow their local communities to have rules prohibiting liquor sales near various kinds of community locations, which are generally some subset of schools, churches, playgrounds, daycare centers, and similar. These have been around a long time and have been actively enforced, so I'd expect that if they were a problem they would have been challenged long ago.
Also the noise violations for the prayer call
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia condemns atheists to death
I would imagine that it's fine for a county to, say, ban non-halal meat (if they had the power to do so). But it wouldn't be fine to legally mandate daily prayers.
Probably not in the mostly Hindu areas (India is huge), but Pakistan was made in order to have Muslims rule over the part of the former India,
"About half a million Muslims and Hindus were killed in communal riots following the partition of British India. Millions of Muslims living in India and Hindus and Sikhs living in Pakistan emigrated in one of the most colossal transfers of population in the modern era"
and the violence didn't stop after Pakistan was formed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Pakistan_relatio...
"violent partition (...) three major wars, one undeclared war and (...) numerous armed skirmishes and military standoffs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide
And the atom bombs prepared on both sides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
And you are absolutely right that "the only real issue most Muslims have with any non-Muslim country is that it is a general perception that they're Muslim first." Unfortunately, Islam has its political component still considered as the inseparable part of the religion.
For many (myself not included, thanks), there is a tremendous conflation of Islam and Arab. Simply look at the comments in the OP. (edit: But, you are right, bigoted would be a more accurate choice of wording.)
This article will certainly serve as reinforcement for people who are already afraid of Islam and WaPo knows this (which is, for me, ultimately why I find this article bigoted). This is extrapolated journalism drawn from a tiny modicum of truth, which I find irresponsible. Unfortunately, this is the status quo in American media.
He sounds like a conquer gloating over the corpses of the vanquished.
> The mosque’s leaders plan to put a minaret — a spire — on the building and use it to continue broadcasting a call to prayer five times a day.
Being woken up at sunrise by the azhan: one of the many joys diversity and multiculturalism have to offer.