The Guardian has the story. A refreshing change from newspaper reports criticising mosques for being 'hotbeds of radicals'.
Although his mosque is tiny, Satardien has attracted a loyal following from 20 nationalities of Muslims now living in Ireland. Haris Puskar, 19, fled from Bosnia to Ireland with his family while he was still at primary school. A victim of Serb ethnic cleansing in Banja Luka in the early 1990s, Puskar now speaks English with a Dublin accent and is an ardent Gaelic football fan.
'The imam preaches the same kind of tolerant Islam that my family grew up with back in Bosnia. He is a moderate voice against the extremists. I also like him because he preaches in English, which is the language I have grown up speaking since I came to Ireland at the age of eight,' he says.
Can we get this guy over here????
Regarding extremism:
I have been giving some thought lately to a five volume hard-cover study, published by the University of Chicago (I think), entitled "Fundamentalisms."
The opening pages point out the curious irony that, although fundamentalists of all religions shun modernism and express a reactionary yearning for some earlier age, yet they all enthusiastically embrace the latest technologies of software and Internet to publish and distribute their views.
This five volume study identifies fundamentalist groups in almost every known religious group, from Buddhists to Hindus to Jews to Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.
So, my thought is that every religion and "revealed" or inspired scripture and ideology contains the building blocks of extremism, but also exibits adherants who are conservative, or even liberal and progressive.
Joseph Campbell, I believe in his "Power of Myth", quotes a letter from Cotton Mather, famous preacher of early American history, urging that a ship-load of heretic Quakers, recently having set sail from England, be seized by pirates and sold into slavery in the Caribbean, and the monies used for some charitable cause. This, Mather saw as God-pleasing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremism
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