Posted on 10/30/2002 3:29:04 AM PST by dennisw
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:58:25 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Q: Where, then, did jihad originate?
A: The ideology of jihad was formulated by Muslim theologians from the eighth century onward. It separates humanity into two hostile blocks
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
We failed to crush them in The Crusades and now they have computers and the internet... all western inventions.
They took over most of Spain untill the Spanish couldn't stand the smell and drove them out.
Now they reside happily in France, England and Belgium... but they still smell... the French don't care.
They come to America... the melting pot, but they don't melt too good.
For some strange reason, they hate Israelis more than us.
There will be a report due on Friday... class dismissed!
I believe the article went far overboard in its attempt to explain what jihad means to the Muslim and the effect it can have on non-Muslims. To equate the word jihad to only mean war against non-believers is false and misleading to say the very least. Muslims believe there are two kinds of jihad.
To understand how Muslims view the two kinds of jihad it would be necessary to understand how Islam views war. But in order to understand Islam’s view of war it would be necessary to have an understanding of what Muslims believe.
Muslims believe in One, Unique, Incomparable God, and God's complete authority over human destiny and in life after death.
Muslims believe in a chain of prophets starting with Adam and including Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Moses, Aaron, David, Solomon, Elias, Jonah, John the Baptist, and Jesus.
Muslims believe that from Adam to Jesus mankind never achieved what God intended for man. If man had achieved what God intended, there would have been no need for the additional prophets after Adam.
Muslims respect and revere Jesus and await his Second Coming. They consider Jesus to be one of the greatest of God's messengers to mankind but not God’s last messenger.
Muslims believe that God's final message to man was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad and that message summed up all that had gone before through the previous prophets from Adam to Jesus.
One becomes a Muslim by simply by saying there is no God apart from God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God. By this declaration the believer announces his or her faith in all God's messengers and the scriptures they brought.
The Arabic word 'Islam' simply means 'submission', and derives from a word meaning 'peace'. In a religious context, it means complete submission to the will of God.
With that simple background, how does Islam view war? Like Christianity, Islam permits fighting in self-defense, in defense of religion, or on the part of those who have been expelled forcibly from their homes. As Muslims see it, injustice would be triumphant in the world if good men were not prepared to risk their lives in a righteous cause. War, however, is the last resort, and is subject to the rigorous conditions laid down by the sacred law.
The term jihad literally means 'struggle'. That brings up the second meaning of jihad, which to the Muslim is the inner struggle, which everyone wages against egotistic and material desires. This is the day-to-day struggle every Muslim must overcome in order to fulfill the commitment to submit his life to the will of God.
Consider the struggle we each go through every day when faced with the numerous and ever expanding temptations that the modern Western culture places before us. When faced with those very same temptations consider how much more difficult that struggle must be for those who have submitted their lives to the will of God.
This negative influence can be more than some Muslims can resist and they are pulled away from the path they promised God they would follow. The prophets in the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each advised eliminating the negative influences and very likely for the same reasons.
It may now be possible to see how some Muslims can bring the two meanings of jihad together to wage war against those who bring these negative influences to their doorstep.
Ethiopia
Somalia
Sudan
Chad
Algeria
Egypt
Tunisia
Nigeria
Uganda
Israel
Lebanon
Yugoslavia
Russia
India
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Phillipines
Indonesia
East Timor
Thailand
United States
It all turns on how this phrase is interpreted. The list that I've posted above indicates the way this phrase has been interpreted in practice.
The militant, murderous, armed Jihad is the one non-Muslims are much better acquainted with. Contrary to your writing Islam engages in many aggressive wars. That are hardly wars of self-defense. I see Islam "theologians" and mullahs churn out all kinds of turgid rationales for killing and subjugating non Muslims. Muslims have a psychological need to have their phony god's seal of approval before they go out to kill and destroy the works of others.
Islam is all about making other peoples submit to Islamic rule in the exact same Islam's hypnotized masses submit to phony god Allah. Islam ripped off some material from Judaism and Christianity. Other than that I don't see these two religions having much in common with this one founded by a pedophilic psycho killer. My conclusion is that Muhammad was the first in a long line of Jihadist murderers.
Jesus was a Jew. The followers of Jesus are Christians. The mohommedans perverted the story of Christ so that he was not the Son of God, was not crucified/executed, and did not rise up (negating any effect that He had on dying for our sins).
The muslims like to play up the similarities of the faiths (ignoring the major detail that mad man mo' had the Bible rewritten).
Definitely a "pick one from column A, and one from column B" religion.
The acceptability of Muslims hinges on their answers to two questions:
1) You see a fellow Muslim about to kill a 10-year-old Hindu girl. You have a gun in your pocket. Would you shoot the Muslim in order to protect the girl?
2) You overhear some fellow Muslims planning to bomb a synagogue. Do you call the FBI and report their names?
If the answer to both questions is Yes, then the Muslim may be considered an American in good standing. If either answer is no, then the Muslim is not fit to be considered an American
The dualism of Jihad has largely played itself out in external Jihad - wars of conquest and subjugation. All the way from Spain to the Hindu Cush Islam brought its war of subjugation to ancient civilizations - crushing them underfoot and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Hence, the notion of internal Jihad is entirely meaningless. In a real sense Islam's problem has been one of the failure at self-reflection and self-criticism. That's why whenever I see the notion of the internal Jihad it is of completely specious value in considering the historical movement of Islam.
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