Religions change over time but is Islam an inherently violent religion?

WASHINGTON -- Is Islam an inherently violent religion? A debate on this subject has received much attention in the United States. The question is absurd. It is like asking whether Christianity is a religion of peace. Well, there is Francis of Assisi. And there is the Thirty Years' War. Which do you choose? Religions are interpreted by the people of their time and thus change over time. Scripture can be invoked to support almost any position. Islam has its periods of violence and its periods of tolerance. The Ottomans gave refuge to the Jews expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492. Today the Arab world is the purveyor of the most vicious anti-Semitic propaganda since Nazi Germany. (Egyptian state television is currently showing a 41-part television series based on the notorious czarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)

Which stands for the real Islam? The question is not just unanswerable, it is irrelevant. The real issue is not the essence of an abstraction--who can say what is the real Christianity or the real Judaism?--but the actions of actual Muslims in the world today. And there is no denying the fact, stated most boldly by Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of Civilizations?" that "Islam has bloody borders."

From Nigeria to Sudan to Pakistan to Indonesia to the Philippines, some of the worst, most hate-driven violence in the world today is perpetrated by Muslims and in the name of Islam.

Take the most recent example, the Miss World riots in northern Nigeria. Muslim mobs respond to an offensive newspaper article by burning down the newspaper's offices, massacring innocent Christians and issuing a fatwa on the life of the author of the article.

In Sudan, the Arab government in Khartoum has for decades been conducting a genocidal campaign against the Christian and animist blacks in the south -- a campaign that includes mass starvation, the bombing of hospitals and slavery.

In Pakistan, Muslim extremists have attacked Christian churches, killing every parishioner they could. Just last month in Lebanon, an evangelical Christian nurse, who had devoted her life to caring for the sick, was shot three times through the head, presumably, for "proselytizing."

The Bali disco bombers have confessed to a series of previous church bombings. In the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf specialize in kidnappings and beheadings of hostages in their terrorist campaign against the predominantly Catholic central government.

On the northern tier of the Islamic world, even more blood flows -- in Pakistani-Kashmiri terrorism against Hindu India, Chechen terrorism in Russian-Orthodox Moscow and Palestinian terrorism against the Jews. (The Albanian Muslim campaign against Orthodox Macedonia is now on hold.) And then of course there was Sept. 11 -- Islamic terrorism reaching far beyond its borders to strike at the heart of the satanic "Crusaders."

This says nothing about inherent violence; the vast majority of Muslims are obviously peaceful people living within the rules of civilized behavior. But the actual violence, bloodletting against nearly every non-Muslim civilization from Hindu to African animist, demands attention. Underlying most of the individual grievances is a sense that Islam has lost its rightful place of dominance, the place it enjoyed half a millennium ago. Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Zawahiri's allusions to the loss of Andalusia (medieval Spain) reinforce the bin Laden promise of revenge and redemption.

This feeling of a civilization in decline -- and adopting terror and intimidation as the road to restoration -- is echoed in a recent U.N. report that spoke frankly of the abject Arab failure to modernize. It is one thing for the Arabs to have fallen behind the West. But to fall behind South Korea -- also colonized, once poor and lacking any of the Islamic world's fantastic oil wealth--is sheer humiliation.

Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and leader of perhaps the largest Islamic society in the world, traces Islamic radicalism not just to a failure of self-respect and self-identity -- deep feelings of inadequacy and loss -- but also to an enormous failure of moderate Muslim leadership. The murderers speak in the name of Islam, and the peaceful majority cannot find the courage to challenge them.

"The Islamic world today is being held prisoner," writes Salman Rushdie, "not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open." And "the majority remains silent." Until they speak, the borders of Islam will remain bloody.

Stalin and Pol Pot were atheists. In fact Stalin and Pol Pot both despised religion. Hitler, I believed was supposed to be either lutheran or catholic, but appears to have actually had pagan beliefs and was more or less a devout follower of some of the old nordic religions mixed with various pagan beliefs. He tried to more or less follow some of the now defunct religions of the past and mix it with his ideology. Its an interesting note, that for all of Hitlers anti-semitism, he himself rarely used the old anti-jewish logic of "they killed jesus, so kill them", his followers did use it, but it was not a primary reason. Pol Pot and Stalin feared islam and its grip. Stalin believed that it extremely dangerious to the Soviet Union, while Pol Pot believed it was the most fanatical of all the religions of the world. Hitler was intrigued by the devoutness of its followers, and sought to find a way to make the followers of nazism to be more like the muslims in there fervor.

Hello BrowningBAR,

I've conceded in another posting that I should not have made that statement at all. It was not provable nor necessarily germane to the points I was attempting to make here.

I thank you for the link to the book by Mr. Craig. I have always had a deep interest in history and have an extensive collection of books in that regard, especially military history. I'll hunt down a collectible version of this book and read it with great interest.

Thank you,

V.T. Eric Layton
***Tempus Fugits***
vtel57@softhome.net

So...your anti Christian faith bias finally rears its head out of the murky depths of this discussion. As I see it the conversation hinged on whether you could see past your miunderstanding of islamic ideology and how religion does not change but people's perceptions do. You were unable to get past your anti Christina bias and that fact negated my attempt to engage in a logical discussion with you. Bottom line - if you cannot see past your anti Christian bias - this conversation (an honest attempt on my part) ends here.

I guess you missed the part in history where the Catholic Church was aiding
and abetting Hitler in his genocide of the Jewish people, huh?

Seeing how a number of Jews (including people of partial Jewish heritage)
served in the German military in WWII, it's not suprising that some Germans
(and add in Austrians, Norwegians, etc.) of almost any faith might have been willing
participants in the maelstrom.
(The uncovering of the Jews participating in the German military was on NBC DateLine
earlier this year, IIRC. The young collegian who pursued the project had been
told by his professors that he'd not find anything...so much for professors knowing everything...)

Anyway, the plans of the Nazis to go after Jews AND Christian groups is getting
aired by The Nuremberg Project.
There's an article about it at:

http://www.sjmagazine.com/0205feature1.asp

I think the actual scholarly reviews are being published by some law school
journal at Rutgers University...probably easily found via google.com.

Hi eleni121,

Actually, I don't have an "anti-Christian" bias. If you understood my points in my postings it would have been obvious to you that I have an "anti-religion" bias... there is a difference. I don't judge or spite people for their faiths or beliefs. If my aversion to religion keeps us from having further discourse, then I'm saddened, but so be it.

Regards,

V.T. Eric Layton
***Tempus Fugits***
vtel57@softhome.net

Hi again, BrowningBAR...

I was able to obtain an older hardcover copy of Mr. Craig's book through one of my online book sources late last night. Hopefully, I'll be able to peruse it in a few days time. Again, thank for the civil discourse and the information.

Regards,

V.T. Eric Layton
***Tempus Fugits***
vtel57@softhome.net

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.