Friday 11 December 2015

Reasons Why ISIS is not about Islam

Some interesting Analysis by Loren Thompson for Forbes (from back in February 2015) called "Five Reasons The ISIS Fight Isn't About Islam". He lists these as:

1. Numbers: prospective ISIS supporters would be a minority within a minority:

"Four out of five Muslims aren’t Arabs and don’t live in the Middle East. Among those who do maybe a quarter are young Sunni males, and most of them show little inclination to actively support ISIS."


2. Non-Muslims have committed similar atrocities.

3. Everybody in ISIS doesn’t believe the same thing.

4. For many ISIS members, Islam is a pretext:

"It appears that every culture produces large numbers of young males who can be mobilized in the pursuit of millenarian philosophies, not because of the specific content of the vision, but because young men yearn for power and status and resources"

5. ISIS says more about human nature than about Islam.

You can read the full article here.














Muslim Canadian Dentists Provide Free Care for Syrian Refugees

The Canadian Newspaper Global News (7th December 2015) picked up the story of two Canadian Muslim sisters who have travelled to Jordan to provide free dental care for Syrian refugees. The sisters, Asile and Asraa El-Darahali, raised funds for equipment and spent five days treating up to twenty patients a day:

"The two volunteered at the Zaatari refugee camp, one of the largest communities in the country, as part of a trip by the Syrian American Medical Society.

The women, who live in Dartmouth, skipped lunch breaks to treat up to 20 patients per day, which is double the normal amount of people they treat. They paid $3,000 each for travel and accommodations.














image source

You can see more in the original article and video here. and a video about their work here.