Dear MPAC,

Please note that your headline is grammatically incorrect and can be interpreted as being offensive to Muslims: soomehting, I'm sure, is the last thing that you intended.

It is not possible to be 'stricken'with a pathology. You can be stricken with a disease; and that disease has a particular charecteristic including how it takes hold, progresses, and ends. Any living creature can have a disease; but only a disease can have a pathology.

Therefore when you say 'The Pathology of the Muslims', you are implying that Muslims constitute a 'disease'.

azaad, the headline is what is known as a 'rhetorical question' and therefore is not offensive.

You need to understand the meaning of the word pathology. The article says that 'Pathology is the nature, the cause, the progress and the symptoms of a disease.'

so when the writer says the pathology of the muslims they are talking abt the nature, the cause, the progress and the symptoms of the diseased muslim mind.

in fact my understanding is that the writer is saying that the Muslim ummah is in fact stricken with a disease and this disease has particular characteristics, therefore when the article refers to the pathology of the ummah it is talking about understanding the nature, the cause, the progress and the symptoms of this disease.

And yes in that case the article is in fact claiming that muslims are stricken with a disease and it has higlighted in para 3 to some extent what the disease is making the Muslim ummah become like and i have to say i must agree. In fact the condition is worse then that, 'that makes them unable to lift a finger for Allah...that is making them lose their identity,'is just a mild way of putting it.

Colin/Galaxy,

If John has Malaria, we say 'pathology of Malaria', not 'pathology of John'.

That is, pathology refers to the disease, and not to that which has the disease.

This is why the headline, can be construed to be offensive.

I support anything in which Muslims come to their senses that there "is" a problem within their Ummah that needs to be addressed by 'themselves'. Non Muslims have been saying this for several years now, but it always gets thrown back in our faces as if the person is "Islamophobic". There is a problem in the Ummah. Stop pointing at everybody else for your failings.Recognize there is a problem amongst your Ummah,and stand up to condemn it. You will be greatly admired if this is done,and my guess is that a considerable amount of anger towards the non violent Muslim community, will fade.

The problem with so many "Muslim societies" has little to do with Islam. It's that these societies (mostly) never had the "Romeo and Juliet" revolution, by which women can marry whoever they like. This is what explains the relative "backwardness" of Middle Eastern societies - they're (mostly) locked into a tribal way of operating.

Modern western societies are based on the notions of "fairness and justice" they get from juries and elections. Neither of those things can work in tribal societies.

I said that the position of women had "almost nothing to do with Islam" and that's correct. However, it was actually the Catholic Church refusing to marry cousins that triggered the revolution to which we owe so much. I'm not sure why they did this - though there are, as we now know, quite good scientific reasons for it.

Judaism took several centuries to catch up with Christianity (or rather, the Western version of Xianity). But in the last century the number of "religious" Jews started dropping quite dramatically (even catastrophically if you're a rabbi) as Jewish women discovered the same thing and chose their own husbands, often non-Jewish.

When will Islam catch up? Western societies are not going to tolerate oppression of women and forced marriages for very long - not least because it's linked in the popular mind with large families and poverty.

I'd like to support the "Muslim community" - but until the position of women is westernised, I will feel permanently excluded. That's not a healthy situation, I'd really like to see MPAC and/or other Musllims treat this as "a problem" and address it.

we can say pathology of john...then if someone asks whats the pathology of john the answer would be the pathology of john is malaria but taking your point into consideration a better title might have been 'the pathology of the muslim mind', however the article does explain clearly what it means so I dont see how anyone can take it as an offence unless of course they are in denial. Lets not fuss over titles and try to understand the much broader message the article is trying to convey.