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Discussion about the "Arab Revolution"
I had quite a interesting discussion today with a friend of mines, called Abdel. We talked about the situation in the Arab world, that is to say, we talked about the Arab revolution and the underlying reasons of it. The fact that free elections cause victories for islamic parties isn't a coincidence and doesn't mean that those people are hardliners. The fact is that a lot of these people are religious and don't know anything else. They also had bad experiences with more western-oriented idea's (dictators, colonialism etc.). So the Islamic Parties are the only alternative left. The Islamic Parties are also very active in daily life (for example Egypt and even Tunisia, that is more western-oriented) and help the poor via their social activities. But mostly those parties get to much power and interfere religion into politics, and that's were things go wrong...
He had another opinion on religion. For us, religion seems not that important anymore, but for many muslims it still is, and we should respect that without losing our sense of reason of course (if Muslims want to live here they also have to adapt there way of thinking to the European Convention on human rights). I also think that we have more in common than we think, and that we should focus on those points and not on our differences.
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