This is my first time visitting this forum and what a pleasant surprise to read the comments here. Good to see most people are not falling for the formulaic dawah whitewash in the article.

TurnRightThenLeft, in your first post you talk about most Islamic nations being poor. But not for a second do you consider that the culture of these nations is at least party responsible. For all their oil money they are still in the Third World. This has everything to do with Islamic culture holding those nations back. Dont blame "wars prompted by Western interference". Blaming the West for everything is ridiculous - Russia is gaining momentum each year, despite 4 decades of the Cold War, Japan was decimated in World War 2, the whole of Europe was levelled, South Korea had the Korean War etc etc etc. All the wars currently in Africa have little to do with Western influence.
Ralph Peters makes some good points about the above here:
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/arabs_last_chance_opedcolumnists_ralph_peters.htm
In addition I recommend Dennis Prager's article where he asks whether particular religions make people better or worse:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2006/09/05/does_religion_make_people_better_or_worse
There is no question that there are millions of decent Muslims out there. But he also asks "How many kind and decent Muslims are kind and decent because of Islam, and how many evil Muslims are evil because of Islam?"
(not necessarily the best articles on the subject, but recent, so came to mind)

Billie, the Mormons have nothing to do with the future of modern Australia, so their failings are irrelevant. And "the sexual excesses of Islam's founder" have everything to do with judging Islam because Muslims hold him to be an absolutely perfect human being. This is a fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, the other monotheistic religions.

(continued from last post)
Christians do not hold Jesus to be perfect, ie he was capable of making mistakes. As Muhammed was NOT capable of making mistakes, being perfectly guided by Allah in all his actions, everything he did must be explained away, and is to be emulated. This includes having sex with a 9 year old, raiding caravans, spreading his faith by the sword, forcefully taking women taken from defeated "infidels" as wives, recommending female genital mutilation because it is more sitely and pleasurable for the man, beating your wife, having multiple wives etc etc Noone is tarring all Muslims, as most where born into it (like say Russians were born and indoctrinated) into Soviet Russia), but Islam can be discussed as a religion, an ideology, a way of life. Islam makes no distinction between religion and politics (thus no separation of mosque and state) therefore can be critiqued as a totalitarian ideology, much like Communism - ideal in theory, but a tragedy when applied in practice, as can be seen by numerous examples. Muslims continue to pursue their utopia, promised by the unwavering belief in Islam, based completely on faith. But when you realise it has no basis in reality and judge it on its merits, without faith, you realise it is a system that may have been progressive in 7th century in Arabia, but has now become, as Churchill said 'the greatest retrograde force' on the planet. As Muslim says Islam does not need to conform to the 21st century, the 21st century should comform to Islam". And try and try they do.

'untutored mind', if you don't know about this religion or any other, perhaps its best to stay out of what is essentially a theological discussion. (invariably a political discussion with a Muslim becomes a theological one, for reasons sited above)

and thats just for my first post ;)

Nayeefa, The problem is NOT YOUR RELIGION. Its the fact that the majority of fundamentalist muslims only marry fundamentalist muslims and over generations they form tribes at the biological level. Every war and massacre in history has been between two tribes including religious tribes, over control of the land and resources. The war between the Jews and the Muslims in the Middle East is a Territorial Dogfight. ITS OVER THE LAND. Sucide bombing is a form of ethnic cleansing. That is territorial males trying to kill members of the other tribe and get them off the territory. The fact that is inescapable to me is that if their were no Muslims at all in this country then my children and grandchildren wouldnt be in danager of having their arms and legs blown off by some suicide bomber. And if the Muslims go down the tribal path of non assimimlation, then when they number in the millions are they going to demand a separtist state (territorial control) and then my children and grandchildren will be plunged into bloody conflict with more and more bombings as the so called freedom fighters fight for a Muslim state. I really dont care if you believe in pink fairies but I do care about the fact that if you change the fancy academic name of Ethnic Cleansing to territorial massacre it gives a much more accurate picture of the bloody territorial tribal warfare that has raged across this planet since the first recording of history.
Racism is as a cough is to the flu its a symptom of the much more deadly underlying territorial hostility. If letting it all hang out means a rapist gets 35years for attacking woman in the West but in Muslim societies its always the woman who is punished for sexual crimes then I say let it all hang out.

I want to apologise to Nayeefa Chowdhury whose article was both sincere and well-informed, but met with such a crass and ugly reception from most correspondents here. It's clear now, after reading OLO for a few months, that nobody can write anything on OLO about Muslims in Australia without attracting swarms of racists, like flies around an outback dunny, airing their ignorance and prejudice. One cannot "argue" in civilised fashion with such people, any more than one can "argue" with anti-semites. They are quite impervious to reason.

Some of you might actually read a good book - "Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain", by Maria Rose Menocal (Back Bay Books, New York, 2002). The title speaks for itself. You just might learn something.

Tony Kevin

As for the Arabs being responsible for all the inventions and technological advances of the West there's a list of people who invented a lot of these things for example-: Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, Madame Curie invented penicillin, Isaac Newton discovered gravity, Its a long list and there aren't that many Arab names amongst them.
I saw that obviously biased show on the ABC that tried to push that idea that the West owes all its advances to the Arabs but you only have to look at the names of the people who actually did invent these things and the stories of how they came to invent them to realise how ridiculous the claims on that show were. I turned it off half way through after realizing it was not presenting the whole picture.

It's ridiculous to credit Muslims or Arabs with so many inventions or innovations. Take paper, for example...when Muslim Arabs invaded and conquered Buddhist Central Asia they fought the Tang Dynasty Army and kidnapped Chinese papermakers as POWs. They were then taken back to Samarkand and forced to produce paper. The gentle Buddhist civilisations of Central Asia were forever lost to Islam. They make the Crusades look like a picnic. Similarly, "Arabic" numbers and the concept of zero are the invention of Indian Hindus, merely conveyed to the West by Arabs - this is why I, for one, refuse to call them Arabic numbers.

Many other similar innovations and inventions were the product of civilisations conquered by the invading armies of Islam (Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, Roman and Greek), and whose victims continued to live as second-class "dhimmis" under Islamic supremacy if they refused to convert. By the 12th Century a rigid orthodoxy and mental stagnation had set in to the Islamic world and the collective memory of pre-Islamic achievements had withered away under the suffocating weight of religion, and the oppressed dhimmi groups held less and less influence in Islamic society. Any flexibility, tolerance and openness to other civilisations that Islam had in this romanticised "Golden Age" was now finished. And that brings us directly to the 21st century...