Posted on 11/30/2002 5:55:25 PM PST by Michael2001
(Ministries Today) Our missionaries working in Islamic countries are often shocked at some of the ideas being promoted in the West about Islam. What we hear in the press is a confusing mix of relativistic propaganda and wishful thinking, so I thought I'd clear the air with some information explained to me by my friends working with Muslims in the Middle East.
First, there are 1 billion Muslims in the world--not 2 billion--as many reporters have falsely reported. The most generous estimate is 1.2 billion.
Second, most Muslims interpret the Quran by the principle of nasikh, which essentially means that the later passages supercede the earlier passages and totally negate them.
The Quran was written over a 22-year period. In the early years, when Muhammad's following was small and he was militarily weak, he wrote the 114 verses that speak of living peacefully with others. By the end of his writing, when he was militarily strong and had a larger following, he penned verses that declare that all infidels must be destroyed or submit to being totally subjected and humiliated.
Sura 9 appears at the beginning of the Quran, but it is one of the last texts written. It declares that all infidels should be killed or completely subjugated. These later verses, which overrule the 114 peaceful verses, are what drive the current jihad movement.
According to Muslim scholars, the Arabic words nasikh and mansukh are both derived from the same root word nasakha, which carries meanings such as “to abolish, to replace, to withdraw, to abrogate.” The nasikh (an active participle), “the abrogating,” while mansukh (passive) means “the abrogated.” In technical language, then, mansukh refers to certain parts of the Quranic revelation that has been “abrogated” by the others. In other words, for fundamentalist Muslims, the most virulent passages of their sacred text have priority.
So, when we Westerners talk about Islam by quoting the early “revelations,” we are not communicating the truth about fundamentalist Islam and the Quran but are actually inoculating and misleading those within our spheres of influence against the true nature of Islam. No doubt, a few Muslim scholars have tired to negate the “annihilate the infidel” passages, but their arguments are weak, convoluted, unconvincing and considered non-mainstream to the most vocal and influential fundamentalist Muslim scholars throughout the world.
These scholars are the equivalent of those in liberal Christianity who try to manipulate the Bible to make a case for homosexual marriage or “save the whales” instead of “save the people” ideologies. These liberal interpretations are, to most of us, easily identifiable distortions of the biblical text. Likewise, many Muslims view the peace-loving Muslim clerics the way we would view our own liberal theologians.
Al-Hazar University in Egypt, the highest regarded Muslim theological seminary, teaches the nasikh principle and its inevitable application to jihad. Most of the radicalized leaders have been trained there, including Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind cleric who is imprisoned in Minnesota for his role in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Simply put, it’s time for all of us to learn more details about Islam. As we do, we’ll discover that the sinister spirit of violence and hatred that inflames so many fundamentalist Muslims is indeed the attitude taught in the Quran.
Article reprinted with permision from the December 2002 issue of Ministries Today.
The messengers and message of Christianity and Islam seem to me far too different to draw such a parallel in their evolution. Even the flocks are different. Who names their children Christ? Contrast that to Islam where nearly everyone is Mohammed, Ali, Fatima, etc. The clergy is structured differently. In Christianity one makes the church a vocation. Anyone can apply for the job. In Islam, the clerics all claim to be descendants of Mohammed or his family. This gives the Islamic cleric privileged rights over the masses. I don’t need to get into dhimmitude, the keeping of women as chattel, and the widespread institution of slavery under Islam; plenty has already been written in this forum. Everything about Islam is backward and all signs indicate it will remain so.
The Old Testament has commands to specific Jews alive at specific time to wage war on specific communities of unbelievers. It does not have commands to Jews as a group to wage war on unbelievers as a group. This is because Judaism is a national religion, but Islam aspires to world domination.
Jihad in Islam is the equivalent to evangelization in Christianity. Some don't believe in it, but they're unfaithful to their faith. It's commanded in each religion's scriptures. It's the means by which the religion has historically spread, and has been in continuous practice from the earliest times to the present. Not all Muslims are Jihadis, just as not all Christians are missionaries, but those who are are cheered on and given financial support by the mainstream of the religion.
BTW, all Muslims are fundamentalists, just as outside of America virtually all Jews are fundamentalists and before the 20th century all Christians were fundamentalists. Reading literally isn't the problem. The problem is what they're reading.
I hope people listen to him and the other two wise men -- Graham(fils)and Falwell also. I hope they are not killed by this "religion of peace," too.
There is simply no comparison between the systems of Christianity and Islam. What you have done here is to use Western reasoning (note I do not say Logic), to say that all religious systems are the same, or share the same goals for humankind. They most certainly do not.
There was a time, when Saudi Arabian oil was beginning to be developed, that the house of Saud hired St.John Philby as their Press Agent to explain Wahabism, to which he was outwardly a convert, to the West. The analogy he chose was Puritanism. The house of Saud he compared to the early Plantagenets. Philby (father of Kim Philby) hated his own land and aimed the books he wrote at more gullible Americans. They were crap then, and they are crap now. The objective: make sure the House of Saud got a good deal from the Americans, vs. the deal the British offered. We gave the Saudis 50% of the proceeds and absorbed all production costs. The British were offering 10%, the same they had given the Iranians. That and only that is why Saudi oil is ours today.
Beyond the fascinating world of oil, there is no "Can't we All Just Get Along" with Islam. Sunni, Shia, Wahabi are not Catholics, Methodists, and Presbyterians. All of them, jointly and severally, have been at one stage of war or another for 14 centuries with with Christendom. The West fought back, unsuccessfully, in their attempt to regain the Christian lands seized by the Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa, including Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and even Iraq, and failed. We did succeed in driving them from Spain, Sicily, and Austria. They were unfortunately not driven completely from Europe until 1913, still managing to leave behind the turncoat Bosnians and their thuggish hit-men the Albanians.
You are desparately searching for some evidence of "good Muslims." They exist on a man-to-man basis. However, institutionally speaking, there is no "good Islam."
We are somewhat handicapped by our Western modes of thought here. Because actually, there is no such thing as Islam. There is no unifying authoritarian body to say what it is or isn't. There is no Southern Baptist Convention, no Missouri Synod, no Vatican. The only unifying factor among Muslims is in what they actually do.
What they do is seek the conversion or eventual death of those who do not accept Islam. Moderate Islam has many steps on the road to conversion before death: namely enslavement, taxation, or torture. Their "fundamentalist" brothers in Allah, whom they are bound to support (and enthusiastically do) in simply do away with the intermediate steps.
There is no comparison with Christianity. Last year, in East Timor, The Sudan, Macedonia, Kosovo, The Phillipines, and in the USA, Muslims killed more Christians than the Roman Empire, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, Bloody Mary, Cromwell, and The Salem Witch Trials, Combined. To match the slaughter of innocents over the centuries, the Muslims are in the same league as Hitler and Stalin.
I commend you in Christian fellowship for your forbearance. But please remember, The Good Reverend Pat may well be a fundamentalist, but as far as is known, he has not condemned those who will not watch the "700 Club" to death. No Snake-Handling, Strychnine-Drinking Pentecostal has flown a 747 into the Vatican.
Your comparison of Christianity and Islam tells us nothing about either.
The other 70% are [nearly all] foreign-born usually Arab or Iranian persons classed as whites by the USA census.
It appears that nearly 2 million persons have some contact or occasional visits to mosques or other Islamic religious societies in USA, however, [this includes the 400M]... and that virtually none of these [except the 120M already mentioned] are Afro-American or Negro.
Of course they do. Anyone who has read the Bible and the Koran would know this. Most of those who preach the "religion of peace" nonsense have read neither, yet are willing to spread their ignorance, "proving" their point with a couple of proof texts.
The only change I would make in the above quote would be to replace the "many" with "most". After all, our liberal theologians can prey on Biblical illiteracy, but these people memorize the entire koran in childhood.
Tom, you are correct in this. Frankly, I would not trust any book purporting to present Islam published in the past decade or so; there are far too many agendas out there, far too many smokescreens. And I have seen this firsthand, including a fellow I know who is the head of the local CAIR chapter; he talks nice, but somehow quite fails to persuade. (Microsoft has many Muslims/Arabs in its employ so we have quite a few in the area.)
However, as I pointed out, I was not reading a book on Islam, but on the Arab's way of thinking, his perception of the world, his expectations, reactions behaviors, etc. The book establishes these roots in the pre-Islamic era and brings them forward. One of the major points that comes across is how neatly Islam fits into the Arab's inherent patterns of thought formed in centuries of stark Bedouin existence, from his monochromatic (black & white) way of thought to the necessity of submitting to the tribe to the disparagement of physical labor to the almost continual presentation of obvious lies. The book goes on to show the varied cultural adaptations to a "settled" existence, from the lowest laboring classes (the fellahin) to the elites who in some cases (particularly North Africa) found themselves culturally and even linguistically (at the time of writing) cut off from their Arab roots.
Perhaps this close fit between Arabism and Islam shouldn't be a surprise, given the origin of Islam. It is odd, though (as reported -- I've only begun to read a translation of the Koran; 35 years old, so less likely to be subjected to modern PC) that Mohammed started out with semi-peaceful preaching he got more strident as time went on.
The picture this book paints is unsettling. It explains the baffling intransigence of the Palestinians, for example, continuing to suffer and fight when they could have so easily had what they claim they want. We are in for a long, long battle.
Tom, I think you are wrong. I have no problem with Christianity. Our past is not perfect, though as another poster on this thread pointed out, what was done was not Biblical.
I don't even have a problem with fundamental Christianity, except where it becomes a means of control and isolation. (Memories of the girlfriend who refused ever to set foot in my church, and members of the evangelical youth group of another who quite visibly recoiled when they learned I was *gasp* Anglican. And no, I do not think that isolation and control are endemic in the fundamentalist churches, nor are they the sole province of same.)
More than that, I don't even have a problem with the Rev. Pat Robertson. (I supported him in '88.)
Gideon, is that all that it is? Does it not also prescribe the way of life for the Jews?
As a Christian I believe that the Koran and the New Testament are antithetical to each other
As written definitely no argument here.
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