22 January 2009
No More Queen for Scottish Muslim Scouts
Posted by admin under: religion .
Hm. I have two minds on this issue besides the fact that it doesn’t affect the Boy Scouts of America since this is a UK Boy Scouts topic. First, to describe what the issue is:
Boy Scouts in Dundee will be able to pledge allegiance to ‘Allah’ and drop the traditional oath to God and Queen, says the Scout Association in Scotland.
The Association has given its backing to starting Dundee’s 45th troop which will specifically target Muslim boys.
In the oath Muslim recruits will be able to replace the name ‘God’ with “Allah, the Most Beneficent and the Most Merciful”, and pledge to honour “the country in which I am now living” instead of the Queen.
At least one blog is definitely against this change, but from what sounds like anti-Muslim grounds. I don’t approve of that reason. Regarding tradition and difference from other UK Boy Scouts, though, I feel like this isn’t a good direction for their organisation (to use the British spelling). If the government in England is a constitutional monarchy, why can’t Muslim Boy Scouts take the same pledge as others? The use of Allah instead of God is a tiny detail and irrelevant since it reinforces the Scout’s duty to our Creator by any name which is one of the methods of Scouting to develop good character. Avoiding a pledge to the monarch, though, seems unnecessarily divisive and I can’t think of a good reason for it. We’ll have to see if Dundee has made a poor choice in the years ahead.
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3 Comments so far...
Walter Underwood Says:
22 January 2009 at 7:28 pm.
Scouts UK supports modified versions of the Scout Promise for different religions. The document I found is version 3 from 2006, so this is nothing new. This fact sheet explains accepted variations (including those in the news article) and the reasons behind them, including why Scouts of some faiths cannot use the traditional Promise.
http://www.scoutbase.org.uk/library/hqdocs/facts/pdfs/fs322016.pdf
The BSA really should do something similar, but they seem pretty ignorant abut the details of different faiths. For example, it is a big stretch to make the “obligation to God” in the Declaration of Religions Principles work for Buddhists. One of our local troops is chartered by a Buddhist temple.
admin Says:
22 January 2009 at 7:44 pm.
Yeah, but the document you cited indicated the use of “the country in which I am now living” is for other nationalities living in the UK. I don’t understand how that has stretched to other religions as cited in the original article unless the author misunderstood the information you have shared which seems entirely plausible. A UK citizen of any nationality should be able to pledge to the Queen since that is the governmental form.
Blogs vs Twitter II « JC Shepard Says:
23 January 2009 at 2:03 pm.
[...] blog in that post, then saw him tweet about muslim Scouts in Scotland and their special Oath. Hmm. Maybe a topic for a follow-up post, so a quick [...]
