That is something there is no shortage of that. East, West, North or South. I just was just listening to a Muslim group discussing Islam in UK. They sounded the biggest supporters of multi-culturalism in UK. Clearly having a secular, diverse, multicultural society is good for Islam. The same bunch in Pakistan will decalre secularism as manifestly evil and antithesis of Islam. They see secularism as toxic to Islam in Pakistan. In UK apparently secularism, multiculturism and Islam are natural partners.
Basically they can't enforce sharia in a religiously diverse society. Still you will find an occasional Anjem Chaudry.
Every society has to choose a system which best reflects their culture, social values, traditions, and religion. What's good for the West might end up in a disaster if applied in the East and vice versa.
In the West, everything is not honky dory. There are many so-called secular laws in the West which have destroyed the institution of the family, the Western people need to figure that out themselves. What we Pakistanis need to do is to copy the good things from the West like education, infrastructure, law and order, sectarian tolerance, sanitation, clean water supply etc which are our core problems instead of granting a legal status to moral vices such as homosexuality, alcohol, gambling and prostitution. These have not done anything good to the Western society and won't do any good to us if we are to legalize them in our relatively conservative society.
With that being said, the real sharia is not what you see in the KSA where one cannot criticize the monarchs without getting his rear end whipped. The problem is that the majority of the mullahs believe in an adulterated version of sharia. They mix many of the medieval Semite laws with sharia without realizing that only a few of those laws are Islamic in essence. The rest of those so called sharia laws were the Semite laws which every Muslim,Jew, Christian, and pagan followed in the middle ages.
The Mullahs are chasing mirages instead of focusing on the real problems related to Islam like the abolition of usury, getting rid of the corruption, and establishing a better system of governance.
This is why the saber rattling against Russia (which today is unofficially an Orthodox Nationalist nation that espouses traditional values) all throughout the West has had very little effect on the people. More and more average Westerners are beginning to detest what their governments are pushing for and now resent their own governments (thus the increase in anti-establishment Right Wing popularity).
" Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian state has carefully nurtured its relationship with the Church. Putin especially is not only a powerful political actor but – like the Tsars – a religious one. In his speeches he presents himself as defender of Christian values abandoned by the degenerate West. "
Putin criticized the moral degeneracy of the West in many of his speeches. Russia is now a totally different country as compared to the Soviet Union of the past. Religion has been freed in Russia and most of the Russians proudly identify their religion.
When Communism was the "big thing" these "Liberals" were Commies, now they changed their skin when the old ship sank.
That's true for their kin in Pakistan. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan, these local reds used to taunt the regular folk that the red storm is coming and you will soon be Rahmanov, Karimov, and Sultanov and that the Soviets do not leave any place on which their armies step their feet and soon there will be a revolution in Pakistan. What happened after the Soviet withdrawal was that these same guys started saying that the Soviets weren't here for warm waters and they posed no threat to us and we fought America's war and blah blah blah. Now they are known as the liberals in Pakistan who are unwilling to tolerate burka and beard.
That is true. Even our so called Pakistani "Liberals" encourage Pakistan recognizing Israel, despite Israel has every characteristic of "Nazism", the most obvious one which is ethnic cleansing Palestinians from their ancestral land for "Lebensraum" for Jewish settlers
I do not condone any of the Nazi concepts like living space, master race and the persecution of the jews and I won't ever defend those concepts. However with that being said, many of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime were blown out of proportions by the victors.
It is disturbing to see people defending Israel even when the members of the Knesset openly advocate the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The logic of many of those people when they advocate for diplomatic relations with Israel is that 'we can learn a lot from them if we make relations with them'. Apparently what we can learn from them can't be learnt from scores of other nations?