Islam: A Peaceful Religion?

Slate ^ | 18 Oct 2001 | Seth Stevenson

[white trash redneck]

Islam: A Peaceful Religion?
George W. Bush says yes, Osama Bin Laden says no. Who's right? 

By Seth Stevenson
Posted Thursday, Oct. 18, 2001, at 10:00 a.m. PT

President Bush has repeatedly stated that terrorists are not true Muslims—that Islam is at heart a peaceful religion. David Forte, a Bush adviser on Islamic issues, recently argued that Islamic radicals "engage in tactics that are far beyond what is acceptable in the Islamic moral tradition." These claims conveniently avoid stirring resentment in the world's 1 billion Muslims. But are they true? Is Islam peaceful? Or does Islam in its very nature breed and condone violence? President Bush has repeatedly stated that terrorists are not true Muslims—that Islam is at heart a peaceful religion. David Forte, a Bush adviser on Islamic issues, recently argued that Islamic radicals "engage in tactics that are far beyond what is acceptable in the Islamic moral tradition." These claims conveniently avoid stirring resentment in the world's 1 billion Muslims. But are they true? Is Islam peaceful? Or does Islam in its very nature breed and condone violence?

"kill the disbelievers wherever we find them" (2:191);

"fight and slay the Pagans, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem" (9:5);

"slay or crucify or cut the hands and feet of the unbelievers, that they be expelled from the land with disgrace and that they shall have a great punishment in world hereafter" (5:34).

OK, not all that neighborly. Yet within this same Quran many verses call for peace and tolerance. In this London Guardian article, for example, Muslim writer Ziauddin Sardar offers the verse, "Even if you stretch out your hand against me to kill me, I shall not stretch out my hand against you to kill you." Also in the Guardian, Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens) tells us that "the Koran specifically declares: 'If anyone murders an [innocent] person, it will be as if he has murdered the whole of humanity. And if anyone saves a person it will be as if he has saved the whole of humanity.' "

Similarly, one could argue over key definitions in the text. Does the term Islam mean "peace" or the (to some eyes) far more ominous "submission"? Is a fatwa a "death sentence" or, according to Sardar in a different essay, "simply a legal opinion based on religious reasoning ... [that is] the opinion of one individual and is binding on only the person who gives it"? And is jihad "the inner struggle that one endures in trying to practice Islam" or is it "an absolutely aggressive war against non-Muslims"? (Islam Online argues that the attacks cannot be termed jihad because—among other reasons—women, children, and Muslims were killed.)

To further complicate debates, the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society claims that compassionate Quranic verses (the ones cited by moderate Muslims) come from the time before Mohammed (Islam's prophet) became strong and that everything "changed drastically when he came to power. Then killing and slaying unbelievers with harshness and without mercy was justified in innumerable verses." ISIS believes these later "sword verses" supersede any previous calls for tolerance, and this site (run by a Christian group) agrees that "these verses came to Muhammad after he was strong militarily and after he realized that the Christians and Jews were not becoming followers of his new religion." Historian Theodore Zeldin, quoted on this page, acknowledges these violent passages, but suggests they have come in and out of vogue: "It is true that after Islam's rapid military victories, the 'sword' verses of the Koran were held to have superseded the peaceful ones; but theologians, as usual, disagreed. Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817-98), for example, argued that holy war was a duty for Muslims only if they were positively prevented from practising their religion."

Of course, there is a problem with this entire close-reading exercise: Any text, if vague and poetic enough (I'm looking at you, Bible—and you, Catcher in the Rye), can be invoked to justify violence. And any text will mean different things in different eras. In fact, the Quran may mean nothing at all, according to a 1999 Atlantic Monthly article. It quotes a scholar who says that "every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible [italics in the original]."

Any debate based on Quranic interpetration could go back and forth forever without end. But if the Quran does not clearly condemn nor condone force, perhaps there are seeds of violence hidden in Islam's long history?

At the infancy of Islam, facing total defeat, Mohammed did indeed defend his faith with force. Al-Islam.org recounts the crucial battle of Badr, during which Mohammed "took a handful of gravel when the battle was extremely heated [and] threw it at the faces of the pagans saying 'May Your faces be disfigured.' " According to the same page, "This battle laid the foundation of the Islamic State and made out of the Muslims a force to be reckoned with by the dwellers of the Arabic Peninsula." So Islam was at least partly forged in battle, albeit in self-defense. And sure, Mohammed wasn't the aggressor ... but still, you rarely see Jesus chucking gravel at pagans.

And as Jesus is for Christians, Mohammed is, according to PBS.org's site on the Islamic empire, "the perfect Muslim" who "still serves as the model for all believers." So Mohammed's willingness to fight (it is echoed in many other tales) seems to mark a clear distinction between the religions. Al-Islam.org (which invites non-Muslims to "let this site serve as a means of introducing Islam to you, and provide you with options for exploring the beauty of this religion further") explains its take on the Islamic attitude toward war:

[W]ar is natural and instinctive and man cannot do without it. ... [A] religion, a perfect religion, unlike Christianity, recognizes the necessity of warfare. Christendom superficially claims that there must be no war. ... They relate what they think are the words of Christ, If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other cheek. Has it been so in practice? Where have all these wars come from in this world? ... The purpose of warfare, Islam says, is so religion, all of it, is for Allah. ... If it is a true religion, it must take up the sword and advance.

Like Christians, Muslims were initially persecuted. But within Mohammed's lifetime, Islam began a long series of conquests. What was behind this expansionism? University of Chicago professor Fred Donner, in his book The Early Islamic Conquests, theorizes that there may be something intrinsic to Islam that spurs a conquering attitude: "[T]here is the possibility that the ideological message of Islam itself filled some or all of the ruling elite with the notion that they had an essentially religious duty to expand the political domain of the Islamic state as far as practically possible; that is, the elite may have organized the Islamic conquest movement because they saw it as their divinely ordained mission to do so." Though these conquests were at swordpoint, many Muslim scholars argue that conversions to Islam by the vanquished were done of free will. Donner suggests, however, conversion was in part accomplished with the promise of booty from further conquests.

In an essay posted on the ISIS site, Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union writes, "To pretend Islam is a religion of peace and love is to delude ourselves. ... Islam, which means 'submission,' submission to the will of God, has been a religion of conquest. Convert or die." Also at ISIS, Paul Kurtz of Free Inquiry magazine argues (scroll down) that "if one studies the history of Islam, one finds that it expanded its hegemony by the use of the sword. Mohammed himself raised an army of ten thousand men and destroyed his enemies and he advanced Islam by ruthless methods." Yet in the same essay Kurtz refers to the Crusades. Christianity is expansionist, with missionaries across the world. If it no longer spreads through violence, Christendom certainly conquered by force during the Crusades.

In his well-known essay "The Roots of Muslim Rage," Bernard Lewis actually frames the last 14 centuries as a struggle between Islam's and Christendom's expansion. For the last 300 years, Islam has been losing. And there may be something in Islamic culture that cannot tolerate the encroachment of infidels. Lewis, echoed by many other sites, writes that "in the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam." Muslims see the House of Unbelief expanding rapidly—even finding toeholds within their own countries. The culture of the West has taken root inside the House of Islam. Lewis claims that for Muslims, "What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law." The intolerance for non-believers is so stringent, argues historian Paul Johnson in the National Review, that "in all countries where Islamic law is applied, converts, whether compulsory or not, who revert to their earlier faith, are punished by death."

But no one would claim that Christianity has been free from brutal intolerance (I'm looking at you now, Holy Inquisition). So it may be less useful to look at Islamic history—for any long history will be filled with dark chapters—than to examine modern, sociological factors that might lead to brutality. In his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (as described in this dissenting book review), crusty historian Samuel P. Huntington offers several possible causes behind mass Muslim violence. According to the review, they include the fact that Islam is a "religion of the sword" and has "no concept of non-violence"; that there is an "indigestibility" to Muslims that makes assimilation in either direction difficult; and, moving on to modern issues, that there is no central, dominant Islamic "core state" and that a demographic "youth bulge" in Arab populations has not surprisingly led to trouble. (Huntington repeats his "youth bulge" theory in this 1997 interview with David Gergen.) In the National Review, David Pryce-Jones argues that modern Muslim society has been a failure, politically and economically, and that rather than look in the mirror Muslims decided they "were not responsible for their plight, it was all the fault of the West, to be rectified by war."

Along with Bernard Lewis, several sites conjure the image of a once-proud civilization now licking its wounds and itching to strike back. In this Chicago Tribune article, anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood says, "Muslims have strong memories that there was a time when they were on top." Mahmood also claims that in the world of Islam, people self-identify as Muslims, not as Iraqis, Indonesians, or Afghans—suggesting any battle with a Muslim country will soon be a battle with all of Islam. Finally, the New Republic's Franklin Foer claims the biggest influence on Bin Laden and his followers is Wahabbism, a "central movement" of modern Islam whose ranks include the Saudi royal family and whose followers preside over 80 percent of American mosques. Nothing marginal about that.

So can we at last conclude that Islam is violent? Edward Said, writing in The Nation (in part as a rebuttal to Lewis and Huntington), dismisses the very question as folly because you can't characterize "Islam"—or for that matter, "the West." "Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization ... or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam." But this, too, gets us nowhere, since the West does characterize Islam, and vice versa. Saying it's wrong doesn't make it go away. In the end, as in the beginning, it comes down to the practitioners. Islamic fundamentalists are violent, and there are roots of this violence to be found both in the Quran and the cultural history of Islam. At the same time, this is a faith with a billion adherents of every race and color, in countries across the globe, with hundreds of different sects and movements. Peaceful Muslims are practitioners, too.

[white trash redneck]

An interesting article on Islam. While the author makes the politically correct conclusion (after all, he is writing for Slate, it's not hard to read between the lines.

[Fighting Falcons]

There are also portions of Islam doctrines that command Islamics to practice deceit of all kinds, therefore no Muslim should be trusted.

[philosofy123]

Actually Christianity, and Jewdism also has so many statement in their books that can be considered barbaric. The difference is Christianity, and Jewdism has graduated from the stone-age religeon, and learned to ignor the savage/barbaric stuff. Islam is either unable or unwilling to graduate. The less people pay attention to the literal words of the religous books, the better they are. Now I am Christian, but I found most Christians and Jews not aware of the barbaric statement in their books. To give you a few: Exodus 21-20, Leviticus 15-19, Numbers 19-11 and 31-17, 2Samuel 5-13,1King 11-3, Thalmud Menahoth 43b-44 If Moslem people would have a leader that will teach exclusively tolorance and love like most Christian churches do, may be they will reform their barbaric religeon just like we did with ours.

[AppyPappy]

Funny, I heard the same thing about the Jews. Maybe you could provide some references.

[KirklandJunction]

Islam, having no formal hierarchy like the Vatican to Catholics, has more splinter groups than a woodpile.
Perhaps Islam will have something like Martin Luther's Reformation to retain the positive ethics and trash the doctrinaire bureaucracy?

[philosofy123]

If a moslem leader would have the courage to start a reform movement, he will have to have a mess of life-guards. The fanatics will do with him what they did with Sadat !

[wildbill]

The problem, of course, is that the two militantly evangelical religions are like great tectonic plates, rubbing against one-another and causing friction. No one fears "militant fundamentalist Bhuddists." The idea is an oxymoron.

For the most part, the fundamentalist Christians have forsworn the sword (miltancy) for the meeker and more civilized "outreach and missionary" approach. As we see in the plight of the women on trial in Afghanistan for teaching Christianity, even this approach is punishable by death from Muslim fundamentalists. One could hardly have a starker contrast.

Anyone who doubts there are millions of fundamentalist Muslims that are militant in the strictest sense of the word has not been reading newspaper or watching TV for a very long time. Arab moderates have never seemed to get the hang of how to handle this branch of Islam--and they don't want anyone else to deal with it either--lest a fellow Muslim be harmed. That seems to be a pernicious doctrine that will not solve the problem for anyone.

Make no mistake. This IS a religious war, foisted upon us by the fundamentalist Muslim factions. The now infamous "root causes" are found within the Muslim religion and not within the foreign policies of the United States or the territorial claims of Jews and Palestinians.

[MaxwellWolf]

Old testament has been superseded by the New Testament and Christ's teaching can only be found in the latter. A simple question for you - how does the fact that these statements exist in the Old Testatment justify their existence in the Koran? Can the same justification be used by US to kill Muslim civilians since Muslims killed innocent civilians here?

[rebdov]

Taqiyah is permission to lie to confound one's enemy.

[ChadGore]

To quote Forest Gump: Islam is as Islam does.

[rebdov]

Let's take the test. You see a group of Jewish Yeshiva students walking down a dark street. Do you feel nervous and cross the street, walk around them, or walk through them? You see a group of Catholic Seminarians walking down the same street, same questions. You see a group of Islamic Madrassa students walking down the same street, same questions.

[eno_]

This is what it comes down to. But, as the article points out Wahabbist Imams are in 80% of U.S. Mosques. It's a bit like saying all Germans are not Nazis, but if you have evidence 80% are reading Mein Kampf, you got a problem.

[Utah Girl]

Ping

[gfactor]

George W. Bush says yes, Osama Bin Laden says no. Who's right?

If bin laden is right about this, could he also be right about the US being an imperialist/terrorist nation? And who cares if islam is peaceful or not -- even if it were, i'd hate to see a bunch of conservatives "blame society" instead of the guilty.

[MissAmericanPie]

"If one kills an "innocent" person, it is as if he killed the entire world"

This would hinge on what the meaning of "innocent" is, wouldn't it. If you reject Islam you are no longer innocent but an infidel. A full 95% of Muslims in the USofA while not actually having committed terrorists acts have certainly made it clear enough that they are anti-American, and a large percent of them have given evidence, by dancing in the streets of America, that they are pro-terrorists. That is all I need to know, they can stowe the PR garbage, I don't care to hear it.

[Fighting Falcons]

Why I am not a Muslim

[white trash redneck]

Talk about cutting to the chase!

[Rick_Hunter]

Mohammad was a pervert, who liked little girls. Nuff said.

Damn right. He was also a stupid, goat-f**king peasant with an insane religion.

[steenkeenbadges]

PC, welfare and the Black Panthers laid the groundwork. Prior to their being radicalized and enraged, black males were outstanding family men with a lower divorce rate than the white population. They lived out the principles of the Gospel more sincerely and effectively than many whites, as well.