Posted on 02/02/2015 5:45:45 AM PST by SJackson
It’s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a case of arrested historical development. The whole argument is a tissue of logical fallacies and historical ignorance.
The author, a professor of history at Harvard, starts by explaining that Christianity was once violent and intolerant, but changed over time, and thus can provide an example for “modernizing Islam.” But most of his catalogue of Christian violence and persecution is little more than the tu quoque fallacy. It ignores the fact that Christian violence was typical of the whole pre-modern world, a sad banality of human existence like plagues, war, torture, and famine. The comparison of premodern Christian violence to today’s Islamic terror is as irrelevant as rationalizing modern torture and executions, like the mutilation and beheading regularly practiced in Saudi Arabia, by bringing up the hanging, disemboweling, beheading, and quartering the English used to punish traitors in the 14th century.
More important, such violence and cruelty were a violation and distortion of Christian doctrine, a reflection not of eternal theological imperatives, but of a fallen human nature prone to error and sin. That’s why even during bouts of cruelty and oppression, like the brutal treatment of the New World Indians, there were those who publicly based their opposition to such behavior on Christian belief. In 1511 the Dominican priest Antonio de Montesinos scolded his co-religionists, “You are in mortal sin and live and die in it because of the cruelty and tyranny that you use against these innocent peoples . . . Are these Indians not Men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as you love yourselves?”
Later, the anti-slavery movement was similarly grounded in Christian doctrine. In 1791, evangelical Christian William Wilberforce, the driving force behind the British abolition of slavery, preached to the House of Commons, “Never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labor, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic.” No matter how often Christian ethics were violated over the centuries, they still provided the theological foundations for rejecting violence and intolerance, as happened during the Civil Rights movement in this country, which was led by a Christian minister. And today Christians know that their co-religionists who continue to act violently and intolerantly are being bad Christians.
This point makes the professor’s argument a false analogy, for there is nothing in traditional Islamic theology that provides a basis for making violence against heretics and non-believers un-Islamic. The professor wants to argue away these inconvenient truths about traditional Islam by arguing that the faith can evolve away from them, just as Christianity did. But again, whereas historical Christian violence could find no scriptural justification, and much to condemn it, Islamic violence and intolerance––and of course slavery and Jew-hatred––are not the result of fringe or extremist misinterpretations. Rather, they are validated in the Koran, the Hadith, and 14 centuries of Islamic theology and jurisprudence, all regularly and copiously cited by today’s jihadists and theologians.
Thus the doctrine of jihad against infidels––the notion that such aggression is a justified form of the defense of Islam and necessary for fulfilling Allah’s will that all people become Muslims––is the collective duty of those dwelling in the House of Islam. The Koran instructs, “Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth.” Nor can there be any “tolerance” or “mutual respect” for those who reject Islam, especially Jews and Christians: “O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.” The professor’s dream of a “broad-minded form” of Islam would require an extensive reinterpretation or rejection of some of Islam’s fundamental tenets.
That’s why one would be hard pressed to find a Muslim theologian in the 16th century scolding the jihadists rampaging through the Balkans, or seizing Christian slaves in the Mediterranean, the way Montesinos or Bartolome de las Casas criticized the brutalities of the conquistadors; or in the 18th century a Muslim arguing like Wilberforce that slavery, explicitly sanctioned by the Koran, was a “scandal” on Islam’s name. More typical are the words of the envoy representing the pasha of Tripoli, who in 1758 justified piracy and slaving in the Mediterranean by telling president John Adams that “it was written in the Koran that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find.” So too today, many respected imams and theologians throughout the Muslim world sanction Islamic violence against non-believers, and textbooks in schools teach children the same beliefs.
The facts of Islamic theology and historical practice render delusional the professor’s statement that Muslims must learn “that religious texts arose in a particular context and must be reinterpreted in the new context of modernity.” But this reduction of spiritual truth and meaning to the material world of time and social change is a habit of modernity that finds no warrant in Islamic theology. Unlike the Christian Bible, which is the product of an ongoing spiritual inspiration of humans existing in time, the Koran is the pre-existing, uncreated, eternal word of Allah, dictated to Mohammed. It is perfect as written, just as the life and sayings of Mohammed provide the perfect, timeless guide for every dimension of life, including law, economics, politics, and family life. The role of interpretive exegesis or allegory in traditional Islam, then, is vastly less significant than it has been in Christianity. Any Muslim today who desires to reinterpret, say, jihad, or relations with non-Muslims, or illiberal shari’a law, will thus find it difficult, if not impossible, to change the plain meaning of the scriptures as understood consistently by Muslims for 14 centuries.
These problems leave the professor’s article an exercise in false historical analogy. Nor does it help that he makes misleading statements, like his claim that Islam can be reconciled with democracy, and that “such reformations have been institutionalized successfully in several countries with significant Muslim populations, such as Turkey and Tunisia.” Tunisia maybe, but this “reformation” is only a few years old, and has a long way to go before it can be called “institutionalized,” let alone “successful.”
As for Turkey, despite nearly a century of aggressive secularization and de-Islamizing of society, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan it has been moving away from reconciliation with modernity towards an Islamist state. Prime Minister of Turkey for 11 years, and now the new President, Erdogan has called democracy a “train” you “get off” once you reach your “destination,” has jailed more journalists than any other country, has said, “You cannot be both secular and a Muslim! You will either be a Muslim, or secular! When both are together, they create reverse magnetism. For them to exist together is not a possibility,” and was a follower of Necmettin Erbakan, the prime minister who founded the Turkish equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood and began Turkey’s turn away from Western liberal democracy and back to a more traditional Islamic view of the social-political order. The example of Turkey makes exactly the opposite point the professor wants it to.
Ignoring the theological foundations that militate against a “reformation” of Islam or even its coexistence with modernity is a form of myopia akin to Obama’s refusal to say “Islamic extremism” or his claim that “no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” Nor does it help those Muslims who sincerely want to find some way to reconcile their faith with a world that these days is more intimately interconnected than ever. The tenets of Islam make their job hard enough, but we don’t make it any easier by indulging our “willful blindness,” as Andrew McCarthy calls it, to truths that offend our ideological prejudices or do not serve our political interests.
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Exactly what have the terrorists done that the so-called prophet Muhammed didn’t do?
Invasion followed by:
*Theft?
*Destruction of non-Muslim cultural and religious symbols?
*Forced conversions?
*Beheadings of the captive men?
*Slavery, including sexual slavery, of women and childran?
*Stonings?
Exactly what has ISIS done that the murderous scumbag Mohammed didn’t do himself and demand of his followers?
The answer, of course, is to stop allowing these disagreeable comments to be posted after the glorious, government-approved articles are gifted to the public, either by disabling the comment option, or hunting down these offensive racists and handing their information over to the IRS for scrutiny. :/
I’m an atheist but I have to agree with him. It’s simply common sense that a religion built on a man who walked around preaching and telling parables until he was murdered is going to be less violent than a religion built on a sand pirate with multiple wives. It’s like comparing Buddha to Blackbeard.
It is about time that someone pointed out that tu quoque is a logical fallacy. I get sick of hearing this ignorant garbage being touted so much. And such ignorance from a Harvard professor?
It occurred to me earlier today that maybe the reason leftists buy into the Muslims are here only to co-exist with us peacefully lie is because either they haven’t been lied to enough or just too stupid to know one when they see one or they really do want them to takeover not realizing that their heads go on the chopping blocks first (or they are forced to jump to their death). For a group that claims to be so smart they sure are stupid.
Maher: ‘Stop Respecting’ Islamism’s ‘Medieval Bullsh*t’. Breitbart’s headline and I couldn’t agree more! Even in America, the protected religion of Islam requires women to worship apart from men. In countries we cooperate with like Saudi Arabia, women are treated like cattle. This religion gets more respect when it has done so much damage. Both are using the other, leftists/communists/socialists/atheists and Islamists. They will eat each other up if all other opposition is gone.
The powerful and untouchable elites are pushing the ‘Islam is a soft bunny’ story line and are leading us to oblivion.
The political interests of a preponderance of our nation are in conflict with the religious interests of the rest of us. Some of us understand with perfect clarity that the struggle with Islam is religious. It has never been political.
Treating Islam as a political issue gives us Obama. There is no possible resolution under him that allows Judaism and Christianity to stand. Christianity may tolerate Islam but it does not accept its truth. Every Christian knows Islam is a tissue of lies.
Obama has pointedly positioned himself as the protector of Islam against those who oppose its teachings. He has thereby made himself an enemy of Christ's salvation, for Christ said, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Light. No one comes to the Father except through Me."
Long after Moses and Jesus were established as central to God's Plan of Salvation, Mohammed came to overthrow God and His plan. He established blood lust and hatred of Jews and Christians as the very foundation of his beliefs. This is so clearly the work of Satan only one who denies God can treat it as a purely political matter. Islam thereby sounds the death knell to moral relativism.
The civil rights victories of the 50s and 60s were likewise driven by the sound of the moral trumpet. King and his colleagues were ministers of the Gospel before they were social activists (unlike the Revs Sharpton and Jackson, who have never been anything but master baiters).
The printing press was developed so that the masses could have access to religious literature. The first book printed was a Bible.
Much of the music of Western culture arose from the chants used by monks during worship. Drama came from the Greeks originally, but was a vehicle for the celebration of religious events for the edification of the populace. Art depicted many of those same events, whether in paint, marble, or clay.
Christianity didn't just guide Western civilization. It IS Western civilization.
And from the Dark Ages on, it has been at constant war with Islam, which has not progressed one inch from its invention in the 7th century.
The prof in question ought to compare and contrast the life of Jesus with that of the “prophet” and then get back to us.
So does Orthodox Judaism. Though the similarity ends there.
Ths veritable definition of speciousness.
Think about it! Islam is just another form of liberalism… which explains (IMHO) the strange affection for it by modern liberal/“progressives”. Few if any forms of tyranny offend them (maybe Hitler cause he attacked their precious Soviet Union… then lost the war). Like liberalism, Islam seeks to order and control every aspect of our lives… how/what we eat, drive, talk, think and live… (oppressive taxing, regulating, licensing and permitting. being the liberal version of Sharia Law). No matter the atrocity, liberals like this Harvard professor will defend and rationalize Islamic actions. When the Islamic treatment of women, gays and non-Muslims is observed… we are admonished to “understand” their culture… which is the dead giveaway of how liberals think of anyone. Their “protected” groups are only used to gain power over all of us “ordinaries”… then they will be just another piece of human “livestock” to be managed by our liberal version of “Imams” (aka: “owners”, “masters”, politburo, etc.). From Stalin, Mao, Castro… to Iran and ISIS… liberals/(misnamed) “Progressives” ALWAYS side with the tyrants of the world!
Great scholarship here....
Many years ago, I read an account of the Conquistadors arrival at the capital of the Aztecs. What they found in terms of human sacrifice practices was mind-boggling. Pure evil.
It sounded far worse than being the first Allied Soldier through the gates of Auschwitz.
Correct. I would never want the government or society to dictate how men and women worship but if a religion, such as Islam, promotes things like Jihad, Sharia law, government takeover, etc., that is another story.
Great read. Thank you for posting.
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