pls no ban
Alright so I wanted to hear the experiences and opinions about islam, from people who live in countries where islam isn't a major religion.
Have you ever talked to a muslim? How radical did they seem? Have you ever seen a woman in niqab/burka irl? What are your opinions about islam and muslims?
I'll share my experiences too, which i have plenty of since I live in a country that's like 50% "muslim"(quotation marks necessary).
So I went (and still go to) muslim religion class in school. There's some stuff about values and morals etc., but we mostly learn about hadith (quotes from mohammad, in which you can sometimes see that they were written by a camel herder in the desert), surahs (basically memorizing small bits of the quran), and just general **** that i dont really listen to much. My teachers love to represent western countries (particularly the US) as wastelands full of drug addicts, ***** and school shooters. Oh yeah, and the jews are a frequent topic. They sure to love to hate jews. There's lots of hadith about how the jews are gonna have a real bad time when judgement day comes. But that's nothing compared to the hatred towards any muslim that does anything differently from them. God forbid a woman puts a cloth on her head the wrong way, she's gonna burn in hell for that!
The thing about my religion class though is that it's in Bosnia, the place where the most liberal muslims in the world live.Lots of here people call themselves muslims yet they eat pork and drink hard liquor. I can't imagine what they teach kids in other places.
I know a few guys who aren't that radical, and they refuse to shake the hand of, or even touch a woman. In fact they don't even want to sit next to women.
My rather informed opinion (i'm around muslims every day) is that islam is not even close to the "religion of peace and tolerance" that it portrays itself as. It is a religion of hate, intolerance and closed mindedness. The more you follow the quran and hadith (the more muslim you are), the more backwards, stubborn and hateful you become.
Also fun fact, my brother sold a pair of sneakers to a guy who a couple of months later would be in Syria, fighting for ISIS, and making a video telling Bosnians to poison the food and bomb the cars of infidels in Bosnia. But that's not all! I know a guy (literally lives like 50 meters from my house) whose whole family (father, mother, and two brothers) went to fight for ISIS. His father and 1 of his brothers are now dead, while the younger brother and mother are god knows where. Oh yeah, this guy also unknowingly drove a guy to Sarajevo, who would a only few hours after being dropped off go on to shoot at the US embassy there with an AK. The father of the guy I know was a member of the communist party in Yugoslavia, and then in a few short years became an islamic terrorist.
You could definitely say that it's not a religion, but an ideology.