Posted on 07/08/2013 4:24:51 AM PDT by Kaslin
For years, terrible and violent crimes have been committed in the name of Islam. Does that mean Islam is inherently a religion of terrible violence?
The scholar Daniel Pipes has long argued that it is a mistake to attribute the evils committed by Muslim supremacists and jihadist killers to Islam itself, or to the text of the Koran and the hadith, the religion's sacred scriptures. Like every great faith, Islam is what its adherents make of it. Today, many of those adherents are influenced by Islamism, the militant totalitarian version of Islam that emerged in the 20th century. The Islamist ascendancy is reflected in the savageries of al-Qaeda, the brutal misogyny of the Taliban, the apocalyptic hostility of the regime in Iran.
But just as the nightmare of the Third Reich was far from the totality of German culture and character, so Islam's 1,400-year history is not encapsulated by the violent ugliness of the present moment. In other eras, Muslim society was known for its learning, tolerance, and moderation. "If things can get worse, they can also get better," Pipes writes in the current issue of Commentary. As recently as 1969, when he began his career in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Islamist extremism was all but unknown in world affairs. "If Islamism can thus grow, it can also decline."
Since 9/11, Pipes has summarized his approach to the threat from Islamist terror and oppression with the maxim "Radical Islam is the problem; moderate Islam is the solution." Obviously radical Muslims disagree — but even Turkey's Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, often held out as the face of moderate political Islam, rejects the distinction, insisting that "Islam is Islam and that's it."
Many non-Muslims disagree, too. The prominent Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who wants the Koran to be banned in Holland, maintains that Islam and Islamism are "exactly the same" and that moderate Islam is "totally nonexistent." Islam is not a religion like Christianity or Judaism, Wilders told me in a 2009 interview. "It's an ideology that wants to dominate every aspect of society."
To those who hold this essentialist view, Islam's teachings are immutable; the values promoted by the Koran and other Islamic scriptures are today what they have always been and always will be. By this argument, the backwardness, repression, and violent incitement against non-Muslims that hold sway in much of the contemporary Muslim world don't reflect a particularly harsh and unenlightened interpretation of Islam — theyare Islam.
Not true, asserts Pipes. "Only … by ignoring more than a millennium of actual changes in the Koran's interpretation" — on topics ranging from jihad to the role of women to slavery – "can one claim that the Koran has been understood identically over time." Take the Koran's famous injunction (2:256) that "there be no compulsion in religion." Is that a call for universal religious tolerance? Does it apply only to the various denominations within Islam? Was it limited to non-Muslims in seventh-century Arabia? Is it to be understood as purely symbolic? Does it protect only non-Muslims who agree to live under Muslim rule? Was it overridden by a subsequent Koranic verse?
As Pipes and other scholars have shown, the correct elucidation of the phrase is: All of the above. There is no monolithic reading of that seemingly straightforward passage. Muslim authorities have variously given it completely incompatible interpretations.
Like all religions, Islam changes. And like all scripture, the meaning of the Koran's text depends on its expounders. The words may be enduring, but the lessons drawn from them need not be. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament also contain passages whose normative meanings changed as the faiths based on them evolved. Do Jesus' words in the gospel of Matthew — "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword" – mean that Christianity is not a religion of peace? The answer to that question is not the same today as it would have been during the Crusades or Europe's wars of religion.
It is only fanatics who believe that they alone are in possession of the sole correct answer to every important question, and entitled to enforce it through power and persecution. The credo of the Muslim Brotherhood, which until last week's coup was Egypt's ruling party, declares categorically that "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way." That authoritarian, supremacist line — the Islamists' line — is only one understanding of Islam. As millions of Egyptian citizens have made clear in recent days, it is by no means unanimous.
Radical Islam — not Islam itself — is the menace that must be defeated. In that struggle we have no more invaluable allies than moderate Muslims. Pretending they don't exist helps no one but the Islamists.
How about in our government?
Exactly - by force of arms. If the author lived in 1930's Germany, would he be spouting similar nonsense about the "moderate" factions of the Nazi Party?
Having lived in the Muslim world, I know that there are many Muslims that are peaceful. The problem is that, with Islam, the most radical factions predominate, and no one dares oppose them. After all, they are the "most dedicated and faithful" practitioners of the religion.
Also, even "moderate" Muslims can be easily radicalized by what one observed called "the incandescent fury of Islam..." - as in the early flashbulbs that smoldered before igniting. Many Muslims are taught to hate the "infidel" and that violent Jihad against those who oppose their religion is their sacred duty. Thus underneath the "thin veneer" of moderation run dark currents that are unimaginable to the Western mind.
I disagree with Pipes. The entire framework of the Islamic faith is based on the idea that people are slaves to Islam and the absurd idea that a person can be “converted” by force.
Contrast this to the free, but conditional, gift of salvation that God offers humanity through Jesus Christ. This gift can only be accepted in a framework of informed consent, which by its very nature must be voluntary. Nowhere in the Bible is the idea that people can be “converted” by force.
I think what Pipes is reacting to in Islam is that some people just cannot accept what the literal reading of the Koran implies. But on the other hand we see so many major Protestant sects such as Methodists who cannot bring themselves to accept the plain statements in the Bible regarding what God considers righteous and what He considers Sin. A good example of this is the issue of sexual immorality, which Jesus says in Revelation 22:15 disqualifies a person from having eternal life.
You have to look at the total context of that verse to see its real meaning. Jesus was referring to the upheaval and decention that would come to Jewish families when members of the family follow Jesus in the new covenant rather than current Hebrew teaching.
There is a similar passage in Luke 12:49-53 that clarifies this ....... "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo [His death and resurrection], and how distressed I am until it is completed! Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
How about in our government?
A violent world-domination movement cleverly disguised as a religion.
And who, exactly, was Mohammed? Islam was founded by a desert bandit who made his living robbing caravans and sacking towns. Mohammed was the kind of guy who would order a woman's murder because she made satirical poems about him.
The "exemplar for Muslims" was a psychopathic killer, rapist, and pedophile.
There is a principle in Islam whereby the latter verses of the Koran, when they conflict with earlier verses, are the ones that prevail. (And generally the latter parts of the Koran are the more militant ones.) Jacoby ignores that, quotes an early verse, and leaves it at that.
His logic is similarly riddled throughout. Surveys show majorities in most of the Muslim world believe that sharia law should be enforced as the law of the land, even though a majority of Muslims aren’t personally geared toward becoming violent themselves. And, part of Islam’s stated strategy is to move peacefully into a new area until the conditions can be created to prevail by force.
Jacoby is the Globe’s token ‘conservative’ writer, and we know how that tends to work out over time.
*has been*
“Mosques should be shut down.
No, they should not be arrested, but including them in our military is lunacy.”
No mosques and no military would have gone a long way toward reducing the domestic threat. Too bad you weren’t advising George Bush.
The religion is demonic.
Because Islam is demonic.
What is Islam?
A gutter religion.
The question that Jacoby does not ask himself is: why are many Muslims violent in this day and age when most other religions gave up violence centuries ago? Sure, some Muslims, like Indonesians, are relatively non-violent and do not seek to conquer the earth. But why are so many Muslims from the Mid-east violent and seek to conquer the world with their twisted ideology? Why does Islam condemn to death those who seek to leave it? Why is Islam the only religion that is doing those things? Jacoby should be honest with himself and try to answer those questions.
I’m willing to say - in my rational moments - that it IS a religion.
The fallacy is that it’s not a religion in the same sense that WE think of a religion.
Maybe a bit like saying “Being a hitman for the mafia is a job”. Well yes, maybe it is a job. But it’s not a job the way most people think of a job like an accountant or a truck driver.
What is islam - death, to the body and the soul
Right Here:
Book - http://babylonscovertwar.com/index.html
I dealt with personally on a military/diplomatic level like no one who has written about it has before...Pamela Geller can’t touch this book, Robert Spencer, Morey, or any of the others...the only reason they get press time is because they have inside press contacts...but for a veteran who served 4 tours and was instrumental in going against the largest insurgent faction < Mahdi Militia > I get sidelined for stating what no one else will state...I know and fully understand Islam...
Pipes is wrong; the Mohammedan “religion” is based entirely on violence. The koran is filled with lying, cheating, killing and outright terrorism. To equate it to other religions by stating: “Like every great faith, Islam is what its adherents make of it.” is a lie.
Anyone can quote Scripture to prove or disprove a point. That is what is done here. The koran must be taken in its entirety, just as Scripture must be taken. If one does that, we get two different pictures - one a message of terror, the other a true religion of peace.
And to the NSA trolls, FU.
How did Mohammed practice islam?
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