Pope Francis Quotes
I believe that in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists.
Pope Francis. "In-Flight Press Conference from Central African Republic to Rome." Vatican.va, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 30 Nov. 2015.
Many would argue that the situation is the same today, over a hundred years later.
While Perez describes the situation accurately, he does not mention here that there is a minority of fundamentalist Jewish Israelis, and they too do not make compromises easily. Nor do the Christian fundamentalists in the United States. All say, “How do you compromise with the will of God.”
Huqqani was specifically referring to Muslim religious scholars, but his point is more general and applies equally to some religious scholars and clerics of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and other persuasions.
The Torah comprises the first 5 books of the Bible (Old Testament). The Arab countries of the Middle East are not alone in having to content with ultra-religious clerics who want to control the government and use it to impose religious law on the entire population. Israel also has the problem. In the Arab countries to deny being religion is to put yourself in danger including risking your life. So no one really knows what proportion of the population supports the religious imposition from the government. In Israel, however, this is easily determined by polls. The majority of Israelis are secular Jews. Of the religious Jews, the majority of them believe in extensive separation between the state and the religion. But there is a minority of ultra-orthodox which would have Israel to be a Theocracy. They are a minority but they are politically very strong. They receive large financial support from extremely wealthy Americans, have religious political parties, are extremely passionate advocates, and are willing to devote huge amounts of time to make Israel a more religious state and ideally a theocracy. Ironically, there is a great religious and philosophical similarity between the extremist Jews of Israel and the extremists Muslims in many of the Arab nations. They both want a theocracy. The only difference is which religion should the Theocracy represent.
Pope Francis is the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State. Francis is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since Gregory III, a Syrian who reigned in the 8th century.
