Saturday, December 05, 2015

Reforming Islam versus Reforming Catholicism

I thought about this while watching the movie, Spotlight, yesterday (about the sexual abuse scandal of the Catholic church).  I mean, the problem of sexual abuse within the church is rather institutional with corruption extending from the Popes down to the parishes and yet: no one ever called for reforming the Catholic religion because of this scandal.  In Islam, there are individual terrorists who commit terrorist act but never with any institutional cover or endorsement (but in Islam there are no real religious institutions per se because those institutions have been corrupt from their very brith and have been for sale from the very beginning).  It takes one act of terrorism by one Muslim or two for Westerners to insist that Islam needs to be reformed.  If you remember, Western colonialists wanted to reform Islam because of the acts of resistance back in the early 20th century--not to compare, of course, acts of resistance in the early 20th century with the dastardly acts of terrorism of the 21st century, but the comparison of Western reactions and motives still apply.