Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!bloom-beacon!mintaka!think!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!husc6!m2c!wpi!shari From: shari@wpi.wpi.edu (Shari Deiana VanderSpek) Newsgroups: soc.religion.islam Subject: Re: Trouble Posting Message-ID: <8000@wpi.wpi.edu> Date: 9 Feb 90 02:32:29 GMT References: <7978@wpi.wpi.edu> Reply-To: mucit@cs.rochester.edu (Bulent Murtezaoglu) Organization: University of Rochester Computer Science Department Lines: 63 Approved: shari@wpi.edu In article <7978@wpi.wpi.edu> nyevax!steve@CAS.ORST.EDU writes: [stuff deleted] >>Maybe Mr. Dodd also didn't receive the articles in soc.culture.arabic >>and talk.politics.mideast where I was the only non-Muslim to defend Islam > >A non-Mulsim is not qualified to defend Islam. Certainly not in prefrence to >Muslims. As long as you chose to sit in the middle you will catch the >cross-fire. The Muslims are well aquainted with groups who be-friend them >to police their interactions with others. I don't question your intentions. >It just won't work with a Muslim. I don't know how this "defending Islam" bussiness would work. It seems to me that every person is defending (if at all that is) his/her understanding of Islam. I don't see why a non-Muslim wouldn't be qualified to talk about (or "defend") Islam, one could know quite a lot about what the Quran is saying without necessarily declaring himself to be a Muslim. >>by Joachim Martillo. And maybe he forgets that the reason that I agreed >>to take on co-moderatorship of this group is because of my respect for >>Islam and its followers. I may not be a Muslim, but that does not mean that >>I am automatically going to be an attacker. I think my past actions >>have proven the opposite to be true. > >You are attacking me for defending Islam. The prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an >leave no room for non-Muslims over Muslims. The Qur'an holds all of the acts >of non-Muslims as vain. You cannot earn anything by being a so-called >friend to Muslims. If you wish to make input you must first accept Islam! It depends on the way you read it I suppose. I personally would hate to see the equivalent of Christian exclusivism being advocated as _the_ way Islam should be interpreted. >>If Mr. Dodd still feels the same about my actions as moderator of this group >>after Behnam and I have explained to him that he is not being censored, then >>I shall leave it up to you, the readers of the group, to decide. > >The readers may be able to vote about the net but Islamic issues are >not resolved by a vote of unbelievers and muslims. I still am unable >to respond in soc.religion.islam without first going through you. You >are surpressing the message of Islam. Only Allah may decide! I don't see why taking a vote would be a problem. I don't think "Islamic issues" should be settled by a vote even if only the Muslims would vote. If the readers of this newsgroup are unhappy with the way it is moderated, the only way I can think of to settle the matter is a vote of the _readers_. I don't think anybody should claim to be absolutely sure that what he wants to say is the message of Islam. Of course only God may decide. And only God knows what the "right" set of beliefs are. That is why we pray to have true faith. Here's an idea that might help prevent misunderstandings: Why don't the moderators post the statistics about the number of articles they received and the proportion they chose not to post at the end of every month? A promise to notify the authors if their postings don't get posted also would be nice. I seem to remember replying to an article and never seeing it posted, maybe it was a glitch of some sort. If we have the assurance that we will get notified, it would be easy to tell why the postings don't appear. -B.M.