Lee Smith laments that American Muslims have to read almost exclusively about scary Muslims and slightly less scary Muslims in the mainstream American media. “One can only sympathize with American Muslims,” he writes,
those who may or may not be religious, but surely have no attachment to the obscurantist fanatics that drove them from the region, and must now be wondering what is wrong with the New York Times that the only Muslims that register with the paper of record are very scary ones, and less scary ones.
I have noticed and been annoyed by this tendency myself, and it goes double today: I'm writing this from the capital of Kosovo, the least “scary” Muslim country on Earth. I've grown accustomed to moderate Muslims after living in and traveling to places like Beirut and Istanbul, but Kosovo is surprising even to me. Islam in this country is so thoroughly liberal (“moderate” doesn't quite cover it) that, if it weren't for the mosques, there would be no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim country at all. I've been in Prishtina, the capital, for four days, and I can count the number of women I've seen wearing a hijab on one hand. Aside from the conservative dating culture, women here are as liberated as Christian women in the rest of the Balkan region.
A large number of Kosovo's Muslims are Sufis—the most peaceful and the least fundamentalist of all the world's Muslims. Sufis can be found in many parts of the Islamic world, but here in Kosovo they proudly proclaim that they are the most “progressive” of all.
Soft-imperial Wahhabis are trying to export their brand of Islam from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to this fertile green land. They have their work cut out for them with this crowd. Bosnia notoriously welcomed thousands of Salafist mujahideen fighters from the Arab world during Yugoslavia's violent demise. But the Kosovo Liberation Army brusquely told them to stay the hell out of their country—even while they faced an ethnic cleansing campaign directed from Belgrade.
A technical point: I wish Commentary would fix their website so it worked with Firefox. When I open your articles on Commentary, I have to get on another computer and use IE.
The problem is in Firefox, the rightnav stuff is positioned so it's sitting on the last inch of the article text.
My Firefox 2.0.0.14 works fine with it. I haven't found anything it hasn't worked with; I never use IE now.
I'm also running 2.0.0.14. Maybe there's some stylesheet issue? I looked more closely and the problem is the LHS of the text block is about an inch from where it should be in my Firefox, so the RHS of the text is pushed under the boxes in the leftnav.
I tried all the "dump transient internet stuff" options I could think of and the problem refuses to go away...
I use Firefox and have no problems. I don't know what else to tell you except that it must be a weird setting you have.
You have the text size artificially increased which causes the described problem. Anyone can replicate the problem by going to the site and hitting ctrl-+ a few times.
Just decrease the text size back to normal in firefox and use the on-page text size controls instead.
I use the "super-large" Windows settings since I can't see the tiny fonts that are the "defaults". I guess I'll just use IE for Commentary articles.
I disagree with the term Muslim country applied to Kosovo. AFAIK, it is an European country with a majority its population declared Muslims.
I guess the Wahhabists don't mind having their work cut out for them, because they've been busy bees in Kosovo. They've demolished centuries-old mosques because their ornamentation is blasphemous, and they've rebuilt them Wahhabi-style: bare concrete and sheetrock. They've plowed up Kosovo cemeteries, and told the Kosovars that they should not build monuments to their idolatrous ancestors, who are all in Hell.
The young Kosovars who come out of these Saudi-built Islamic centers and madrassas will be a different sort of people.
"I'm writing this from the capital of Kosovo, the least “scary” Muslim country on Earth"
Oh dear, read reports by the police from anywhere in Europe and you will know that the Kosovars are a bandit nation: they make the sicilian Mafia look like amateurs.
And get a clue about their treatment of the serbs. Just one stat: even if the serbian army was at one point involved, the Kosovars have managed to expell and kill more than the Serbians did ever since the moment the place came upon the news stage.
To get a clue about "peacefull" and "tolerant" Kosovo one must have a look at any of those:
- razed curches
- burnt out monasteries
- besieged serbian enclaves
It is not difficult to have a look at any of those: they are some scattered all around Kodovo.
>> "They've demolished centuries-old mosques because their ornamentation is blasphemous"
actually Serbs did that, along with every Catholic Church they could get their 'Christian' hands into. Just ask the Croats. Oh, and they burned some 40% of the houses, killed ~ 10,000, raped about 20,000. Really good 'Christians' those Serbs. In Bosnia the numbers are much higher of course.
>> "To get a clue about "peacefull" and "tolerant" Kosovo one must have a look at any of those"
At most the Kosovars can get in a silver medal, after the Serbs, in Tolerance Olympics.
>> Kosovars are a bandit nation: they make the sicilian Mafia look like amateurs.
Forget about the Sicilains, how do they make Serbs look like?
"Serbia's government says the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was carried out by members of an organized crime group. "
"In the process of establishing and maintaining the Red Berets, the long-serving head of state security during the Milosevic era, Jovice Stanisic, managed to establish a degree of control over Serbia's expanding criminal underworld. But with the Red Berets recruiting many hardened criminals, the symbiotic relationship between Serbia's secret police and mafia bosses increasingly turned into an uncontrollable - and unreliable force."
"They were the government people who had closer contacts with the mafia - and these are people from Zoran Djindjic's vicinity."
do you feel kinda dopey now?