Can we stop the "It's not Islam" crap?

[eagleskins]

Too many idiots in the world who have to believe something. All religions are a total sham. And, almost every problem in the world stems somewhat from a religious belief.

[BDKJMU]

Here's a link to a Wall Street journal article on this subject:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... %3Darticle" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"I wonder what would happen if Muslim leaders like Julie Siddiqi started a public and persistent campaign to discredit these Islamist advocates of mayhem and murder. Not just uttering the usual laments after another horrifying attack, but making a constant, high-profile effort to show the world that the preachers of hate are illegitimate. After the next zealot has killed the next victim of political Islam, claims about the "religion of peace" would ring truer."

And an interesting quote from the WSJ blog on the article:

"On February 4th, 2013, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, addressed the Duma, (Russian Parliament), and gave a speech about the tensions with minorities in Russia:

"In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law. Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell 'discrimination'. We had better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation. The Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways of most minorities. When this honorable legislative body thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the national interest first, observing that the minorities are not Russians."

Vlady is right.

[putter]

It will get very interesting in this country if these idiots who think shooting up a school full of little kids is cool and decide shooting up a mosque full of radical islamists is a better way to make a point. What will the gun control people say then????

[AZGrizFan]

Meahwhile, buddhists are killing muslims in Myanmar. Google image search buddhists killing muslims and you'll see some truly **** up things.

According to Reuters,potential reasons as to why Buddhists might be killing Muslims who are illegal immigrants in Myanmar:

"In March at least 44 people, most of them Muslims, died in the central city of Meikhtila after a rampage by Buddhist mobs incensed by the killing of a monk by Muslims, shortly after a violent row between a Buddhist couple and Muslim shop owners.

No one was reported killed in Tuesday's unrest in Lashio, which was sparked by a similar incident.

Aung Lwin, a Muslim man from a village near Lashio, said the trouble appeared to have begun after a quarrel between a Muslim man and a Buddhist woman who sold petrol. Several residents said the man doused the woman in fuel and set her on fire."

It is hard to see why those of the Islamic religion of peace are subjected to violence.

Yep. That's how all MY quarrels end.

[LeadBolt]

It will get very interesting in this country if these idiots who think shooting up a school full of little kids is cool and decide shooting up a mosque full of radical islamists is a better way to make a point. What will the gun control people say then????

I'm not aware of anyone in favor of either of those things and don't see what either one has to do with gun control. Gun control will only increase violence as has been proved in free countries where it has been put in place (see GB and Australia), or as a precursor to a totalitarian regime (see USSR & Nazi Germany).

Not a very clever straw man.

[putter]

It will get very interesting in this country if these idiots who think shooting up a school full of little kids is cool and decide shooting up a mosque full of radical islamists is a better way to make a point. What will the gun control people say then????

I'm not aware of anyone in favor of either of those things and don't see what either one has to do with gun control. Gun control will only increase violence as has been proved in free countries where it has been put in place (see GB and Australia), or as a precursor to a totalitarian regime (see USSR & Nazi Germany).

Not a very clever straw man.

My point is this. You have people going after guns because of children being shot - blaming it on the availability of guns. Less tolerance is being developed in this country against Islam because of recent events. What will happen when one person decides to start shooting outside a radical Mosque instead of innocent children???

[LeadBolt]

I'm not aware of anyone in favor of either of those things and don't see what either one has to do with gun control. Gun control will only increase violence as has been proved in free countries where it has been put in place (see GB and Australia), or as a precursor to a totalitarian regime (see USSR & Nazi Germany).

Not a very clever straw man.

My point is this. You have people going after guns because of children being shot - blaming it on the availability of guns. Less tolerance is being developed in this country against Islam because of recent events. What will happen when one person decides to start shooting outside a radical Mosque instead of innocent children???

First, blaming shootings on the availability of guns is like blaming highway deaths on the availability of cars. It ignores the real cause of the issue.

Second, the history of gun control is that it doesn't lead to a reduction in violence, but rather accelerates it, such as in Chicago or the examples above.

Third, the moderate Muslim community needs to become self-policing against violence by those claiming to commit violence against others int the name of Islam, much as the moderate Christian church has done against those who commit violence against others in the name of Christ. This is hard for Muslims, because of the teaching of the Quran that denies rights to non-believers and applauds the killing of non-believers, but until the moderates do so, it will get blamed on Islam.

[Hoseinexile07]

Here are some dynamics we should consider in this discussion.

1. Islam is not a monolithic category. Neither are terms like Jews, Christianity, or conservatives. Islam is a large rubric of religious and cultural systems and practices. Even as a religion, the thing has a wide spectrum that ranges from the 18th-century conservatism of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab to the loose 8th-century Sufism of nomadic Turkic tribes on the Central Asian steppe. "Islam" encompasses in its big tent (no pun intended) the heady, neo-Platonist-tinged theology of the Mutalizites and the illiterate rants and calls to jihad by Taliban mullahs, many of whom are illiterate and who have never read the Qur'an themselves. Mullah Omar himself admitted that they play hard and fast with the Qur'an. My Muslim friends are nothing like Mullah Omar. Thus, it's impossible to say "Islam (as a whole) says X," just like it's impossible to say "(All) Christians think Y" or to talk about "the West" as a discursive category.

2. Furthermore, contrary to what many may think, Islam has changed quite a bit since the seventh century. Interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith have been conditioned by the major issues of any particular time period, including the internal politics of the Muslim world, the economic situation, and the Islamic world's relationship with the West. Islam is malleable. Check out the writings of guys like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida and you'll see what I mean.

3. Continuing the the argument from 2., many 20th-century Muslims interpret their religion through the lens of their experiences, which have been bad overall. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, Britain and France carved up the Middle East (I know the Muslim world is bigger than the Middle East. This is just one example) to suit their economic and political interests. Arab countries that emerged from unwanted French and British tutelage did so with arbitrary borders that took very little in terms of demography or local economy into account, and national identities like Iraqi or Jordanian were created ex nihilo. There had never been a such thing as an Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, or Jordanian identity like what the people of these areas were presented with in the 20th century. Many in these countries, and also in places like Persia/Iran, were promised by intellectuals and politicians that secular nationalism and statism would propel them forward from poverty, underdevelopment, and prostration in the face of the west. They were bitterly disappointed in the wake of corrupt, stagnant, autocratic military dictatorships like those of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, Gamal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt, and Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. These regimes didn't bring the kind of progress people were looking for, and failed repeatedly to defeat Israel in three major wars (1948, 1967, 1973). The result was that people turned away from what they saw as a false choice between capitalism and socialism (see Sayyid Qutb's Signposts and Khomeini's Vilayet-e Faqih for their detailed discussions of the shortcomings of "western" modernity) and to Islam as a more authentic model on which to construct a a just society.

It's in this context (and add in more than 60 years of displacement, military occupation of West Bank, and poverty of Palestinian Arabs) that we see the rise of groups like al-Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. It's in a context of brutal occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army during the 1980s, the ensuing power vacuum that happened after their withdrawal, warlordism, and the huge number of refugees and angry orphaned boys that the Taliban arose. And it's with American, Pakistani, and Saudi help that Taliban power was cemented in Afghanistan in the 1990s. See Ahmad Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

All this is to say that it's impossible to parse out Islam away from people's experiences and say that "Islam breeds violence" while not considering the impact of underlying issues like bereavement, poverty, frustration, endemic political violence, and even the tendency for nationalism and religion to fuse. After all, it's worldview and experience that colors theology, not the other way round. This is not to justify acts of terrorism, but to say that they are prompted by other sources as much as by "Islam."

4. The revealed texts of Islam, the Qur'an and Hadith, sanction violence to a degree not sanctioned by Jesus in the New Testament. However, Islam does not, counter to a common misunderstanding, mean "way of peace," so it's not as if it claims to be something that it's not. Islam means submission in the way that someone who does not know something submits to the teaching of one who knows better than him. Anyway, if we look at Biblical passages like many non-Muslims look at the Qur'an, we'll find texts that explicitly sanction genocidal violence of the Hebrews against Canaanites as the way of purifying the land promised to them by God. One of the psalms even considers someone as "blessed" when he splits open the head of an enemy infant against a wall. How is it that many people who say, "Islam is an evil religion of violence; just look at what their scriptures say!" with such moral outrage rarely, if ever, apply the same hermeneutic to problematic passages of the Bible, even though in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy it is written that "ALL scripture is God-breathed"?

5. Certainly, while intolerance and violence directed against others who are different from the dominant social norms is wrong and should be condemned, I find it troubling that so many, fueled by moral outrage, line up to cast stones at Islam as if it is an horrible outlier of the human experience. It was the Catholic king Louis XIV who revoked the Edict of Nantes and who persecuted and expelled my Calvinist ancestors from France. It was the Calvinist Oliver Cromwell who presided over horrible massacres of Catholic men, women, and children after taking the cities of Drogheda and Wexford. It was American manifest destiny that helped contribute to the decimation and ghettoizing of Native peoples, and it was applications of Darwin's theory of evolution to human societies that anchored "scientific racism" and served as one of many justifications for European colonialism of Africa and Asia. So even as we seek to prevent violence and combat those who would perpetrate it, let's avoid the temptation to soapbox against Muslims or Islam as a whole. Terrorism, after all, is a method that has been used by many different types of people and ideologies from radical 19th-century-Russian populist intellectuals, to whole-scale slaughter of conquered peoples by the Neo-Assyrians in the 700s BC.

That, mercifully, is all.

[YoUDeeMan]

Here are some dynamics we should consider in this discussion.

1. Islam is not a monolithic category. Neither are terms like Jews, Christianity, or conservatives. Islam is a large rubric of religious and cultural systems and practices. Even as a religion, the thing has a wide spectrum that ranges from the 18th-century conservatism of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab to the loose 8th-century Sufism of nomadic Turkic tribes on the Central Asian steppe. "Islam" encompasses in its big tent (no pun intended) the heady, neo-Platonist-tinged theology of the Mutalizites and the illiterate rants and calls to jihad by Taliban mullahs, many of whom are illiterate and who have never read the Qur'an themselves. Mullah Omar himself admitted that they play hard and fast with the Qur'an. My Muslim friends are nothing like Mullah Omar. Thus, it's impossible to say "Islam (as a whole) says X," just like it's impossible to say "(All) Christians think Y" or to talk about "the West" as a discursive category.

2. Furthermore, contrary to what many may think, Islam has changed quite a bit since the seventh century. Interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith have been conditioned by the major issues of any particular time period, including the internal politics of the Muslim world, the economic situation, and the Islamic world's relationship with the West. Islam is malleable. Check out the writings of guys like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida and you'll see what I mean.

3. Continuing the the argument from 2., many 20th-century Muslims interpret their religion through the lens of their experiences, which have been bad overall. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, Britain and France carved up the Middle East (I know the Muslim world is bigger than the Middle East. This is just one example) to suit their economic and political interests. Arab countries that emerged from unwanted French and British tutelage did so with arbitrary borders that took very little in terms of demography or local economy into account, and national identities like Iraqi or Jordanian were created ex nihilo. There had never been a such thing as an Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, or Jordanian identity like what the people of these areas were presented with in the 20th century. Many in these countries, and also in places like Persia/Iran, were promised by intellectuals and politicians that secular nationalism and statism would propel them forward from poverty, underdevelopment, and prostration in the face of the west. They were bitterly disappointed in the wake of corrupt, stagnant, autocratic military dictatorships like those of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, Gamal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt, and Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. These regimes didn't bring the kind of progress people were looking for, and failed repeatedly to defeat Israel in three major wars (1948, 1967, 1973). The result was that people turned away from what they saw as a false choice between capitalism and socialism (see Sayyid Qutb's Signposts and Khomeini's Vilayet-e Faqih for their detailed discussions of the shortcomings of "western" modernity) and to Islam as a more authentic model on which to construct a a just society.

It's in this context (and add in more than 60 years of displacement, military occupation of West Bank, and poverty of Palestinian Arabs) that we see the rise of groups like al-Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. It's in a context of brutal occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army during the 1980s, the ensuing power vacuum that happened after their withdrawal, warlordism, and the huge number of refugees and angry orphaned boys that the Taliban arose. And it's with American, Pakistani, and Saudi help that Taliban power was cemented in Afghanistan in the 1990s. See Ahmad Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

All this is to say that it's impossible to parse out Islam away from people's experiences and say that "Islam breeds violence" while not considering the impact of underlying issues like bereavement, poverty, frustration, endemic political violence, and even the tendency for nationalism and religion to fuse. After all, it's worldview and experience that colors theology, not the other way round. This is not to justify acts of terrorism, but to say that they are prompted by other sources as much as by "Islam."

4. The revealed texts of Islam, the Qur'an and Hadith, sanction violence to a degree not sanctioned by Jesus in the New Testament. However, Islam does not, counter to a common misunderstanding, mean "way of peace," so it's not as if it claims to be something that it's not. Islam means submission in the way that someone who does not know something submits to the teaching of one who knows better than him. Anyway, if we look at Biblical passages like many non-Muslims look at the Qur'an, we'll find texts that explicitly sanction genocidal violence of the Hebrews against Canaanites as the way of purifying the land promised to them by God. One of the psalms even considers someone as "blessed" when he splits open the head of an enemy infant against a wall. How is it that many people who say, "Islam is an evil religion of violence; just look at what their scriptures say!" with such moral outrage rarely, if ever, apply the same hermeneutic to problematic passages of the Bible, even though in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy it is written that "ALL scripture is God-breathed"?

5. Certainly, while intolerance and violence directed against others who are different from the dominant social norms is wrong and should be condemned, I find it troubling that so many, fueled by moral outrage, line up to cast stones at Islam as if it is an horrible outlier of the human experience. It was the Catholic king Louis XIV who revoked the Edict of Nantes and who persecuted and expelled my Calvinist ancestors from France. It was the Calvinist Oliver Cromwell who presided over horrible massacres of Catholic men, women, and children after taking the cities of Drogheda and Wexford. It was American manifest destiny that helped contribute to the decimation and ghettoizing of Native peoples, and it was applications of Darwin's theory of evolution to human societies that anchored "scientific racism" and served as one of many justifications for European colonialism of Africa and Asia. So even as we seek to prevent violence and combat those who would perpetrate it, let's avoid the temptation to soapbox against Muslims or Islam as a whole. Terrorism, after all, is a method that has been used by many different types of people and ideologies from radical 19th-century-Russian populist intellectuals, to whole-scale slaughter of conquered peoples by the Neo-Assyrians in the 700s BC.

That, mercifully, is all.

Yes, that's all well and good...but Obama's a Muslin and a violent, secretive, vindicative President. No doubt about that.

[kalm]

Here are some dynamics we should consider in this discussion.

1. Islam is not a monolithic category. Neither are terms like Jews, Christianity, or conservatives. Islam is a large rubric of religious and cultural systems and practices. Even as a religion, the thing has a wide spectrum that ranges from the 18th-century conservatism of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab to the loose 8th-century Sufism of nomadic Turkic tribes on the Central Asian steppe. "Islam" encompasses in its big tent (no pun intended) the heady, neo-Platonist-tinged theology of the Mutalizites and the illiterate rants and calls to jihad by Taliban mullahs, many of whom are illiterate and who have never read the Qur'an themselves. Mullah Omar himself admitted that they play hard and fast with the Qur'an. My Muslim friends are nothing like Mullah Omar. Thus, it's impossible to say "Islam (as a whole) says X," just like it's impossible to say "(All) Christians think Y" or to talk about "the West" as a discursive category.

2. Furthermore, contrary to what many may think, Islam has changed quite a bit since the seventh century. Interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith have been conditioned by the major issues of any particular time period, including the internal politics of the Muslim world, the economic situation, and the Islamic world's relationship with the West. Islam is malleable. Check out the writings of guys like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida and you'll see what I mean.

3. Continuing the the argument from 2., many 20th-century Muslims interpret their religion through the lens of their experiences, which have been bad overall. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, Britain and France carved up the Middle East (I know the Muslim world is bigger than the Middle East. This is just one example) to suit their economic and political interests. Arab countries that emerged from unwanted French and British tutelage did so with arbitrary borders that took very little in terms of demography or local economy into account, and national identities like Iraqi or Jordanian were created ex nihilo. There had never been a such thing as an Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, or Jordanian identity like what the people of these areas were presented with in the 20th century. Many in these countries, and also in places like Persia/Iran, were promised by intellectuals and politicians that secular nationalism and statism would propel them forward from poverty, underdevelopment, and prostration in the face of the west. They were bitterly disappointed in the wake of corrupt, stagnant, autocratic military dictatorships like those of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, Gamal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt, and Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. These regimes didn't bring the kind of progress people were looking for, and failed repeatedly to defeat Israel in three major wars (1948, 1967, 1973). The result was that people turned away from what they saw as a false choice between capitalism and socialism (see Sayyid Qutb's Signposts and Khomeini's Vilayet-e Faqih for their detailed discussions of the shortcomings of "western" modernity) and to Islam as a more authentic model on which to construct a a just society.

It's in this context (and add in more than 60 years of displacement, military occupation of West Bank, and poverty of Palestinian Arabs) that we see the rise of groups like al-Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. It's in a context of brutal occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army during the 1980s, the ensuing power vacuum that happened after their withdrawal, warlordism, and the huge number of refugees and angry orphaned boys that the Taliban arose. And it's with American, Pakistani, and Saudi help that Taliban power was cemented in Afghanistan in the 1990s. See Ahmad Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

All this is to say that it's impossible to parse out Islam away from people's experiences and say that "Islam breeds violence" while not considering the impact of underlying issues like bereavement, poverty, frustration, endemic political violence, and even the tendency for nationalism and religion to fuse. After all, it's worldview and experience that colors theology, not the other way round. This is not to justify acts of terrorism, but to say that they are prompted by other sources as much as by "Islam."

4. The revealed texts of Islam, the Qur'an and Hadith, sanction violence to a degree not sanctioned by Jesus in the New Testament. However, Islam does not, counter to a common misunderstanding, mean "way of peace," so it's not as if it claims to be something that it's not. Islam means submission in the way that someone who does not know something submits to the teaching of one who knows better than him. Anyway, if we look at Biblical passages like many non-Muslims look at the Qur'an, we'll find texts that explicitly sanction genocidal violence of the Hebrews against Canaanites as the way of purifying the land promised to them by God. One of the psalms even considers someone as "blessed" when he splits open the head of an enemy infant against a wall. How is it that many people who say, "Islam is an evil religion of violence; just look at what their scriptures say!" with such moral outrage rarely, if ever, apply the same hermeneutic to problematic passages of the Bible, even though in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy it is written that "ALL scripture is God-breathed"?

5. Certainly, while intolerance and violence directed against others who are different from the dominant social norms is wrong and should be condemned, I find it troubling that so many, fueled by moral outrage, line up to cast stones at Islam as if it is an horrible outlier of the human experience. It was the Catholic king Louis XIV who revoked the Edict of Nantes and who persecuted and expelled my Calvinist ancestors from France. It was the Calvinist Oliver Cromwell who presided over horrible massacres of Catholic men, women, and children after taking the cities of Drogheda and Wexford. It was American manifest destiny that helped contribute to the decimation and ghettoizing of Native peoples, and it was applications of Darwin's theory of evolution to human societies that anchored "scientific racism" and served as one of many justifications for European colonialism of Africa and Asia. So even as we seek to prevent violence and combat those who would perpetrate it, let's avoid the temptation to soapbox against Muslims or Islam as a whole. Terrorism, after all, is a method that has been used by many different types of people and ideologies from radical 19th-century-Russian populist intellectuals, to whole-scale slaughter of conquered peoples by the Neo-Assyrians in the 700s BC.

That, mercifully, is all.

Yeah...in your face JSO!

[YoUDeeMan]

Yeah...in your face JSO!

It would serve you well to try to add something of substance to the conversation.

[kalm]

Yeah...in your face JSO!

It would serve you well to try to add something of substance to the conversation.

[Ivytalk]

It would serve you well to try to add something of substance to the conversation.

So we have the Executive Summary of a doctoral dissertation in Muslin Studies from a Presby guy who has 22 total posts in 3+ years.

[kalm]

So we have the Executive Summary of a doctoral dissertation in Muslin Studies from a Presby guy who has 22 total posts in 3+ years.

Hater!

[Hoseinexile07]

Sorry that I wrote a dissertation on this topic last night; it was late, I was wired on coffee, and I didn't want to work on my actual dissertation at that point in time. The main point I wanted to make was that people's experiences color their theology, and that things like suicide bombing, Hamas, and al-Qaeda are 20th-century phenomena that formed as reactions to distinctly 20th-century issues. Thus, the root of violence my some Muslims isn't just Islam, but the background issues that frame their understandings of it.

[Hoseinexile07]

So we have the Executive Summary of a doctoral dissertation in Muslin Studies from a Presby guy who has 22 total posts in 3+ years.

I've gotten a lot busier in the last two years. Plus, there isn't exactly much to say about PC football or the Big South in general. Both haven't been that great.

[Ivytalk]

So we have the Executive Summary of a doctoral dissertation in Muslin Studies from a Presby guy who has 22 total posts in 3+ years.

Hater!

Actually, I was quite impressed!

As for you,

[kalm]

Sorry that I wrote a dissertation on this topic last night; it was late, I was wired on coffee, and I didn't want to work on my actual dissertation at that point in time. The main point I wanted to make was that people's experiences color their theology, and that things like suicide bombing, Hamas, and al-Qaeda are 20th-century phenomena that formed as reactions to distinctly 20th-century issues. Thus, the root of violence my some Muslims isn't just Islam, but the background issues that frame their understandings of it.

So you're saying there's more to it than simply hating western infidels for their freedoms? But,but,but that story is so less nuanced and easier to understand!

[AZGrizFan]

Sorry that I wrote a dissertation on this topic last night; it was late, I was wired on coffee, and I didn't want to work on my actual dissertation at that point in time. The main point I wanted to make was that people's experiences color their theology, and that things like suicide bombing, Hamas, and al-Qaeda are 20th-century phenomena that formed as reactions to distinctly 20th-century issues. Thus, the root of violence my some Muslims isn't just Islam, but the background issues that frame their understandings of it.

Is this the cliff notes version of that book? Good...now I don't ahve to read it.

[CID1990]

Here are some dynamics we should consider in this discussion.

1. Islam is not a monolithic category. Neither are terms like Jews, Christianity, or conservatives. Islam is a large rubric of religious and cultural systems and practices. Even as a religion, the thing has a wide spectrum that ranges from the 18th-century conservatism of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab to the loose 8th-century Sufism of nomadic Turkic tribes on the Central Asian steppe. "Islam" encompasses in its big tent (no pun intended) the heady, neo-Platonist-tinged theology of the Mutalizites and the illiterate rants and calls to jihad by Taliban mullahs, many of whom are illiterate and who have never read the Qur'an themselves. Mullah Omar himself admitted that they play hard and fast with the Qur'an. My Muslim friends are nothing like Mullah Omar. Thus, it's impossible to say "Islam (as a whole) says X," just like it's impossible to say "(All) Christians think Y" or to talk about "the West" as a discursive category.

2. Furthermore, contrary to what many may think, Islam has changed quite a bit since the seventh century. Interpretations of the Qur'an and hadith have been conditioned by the major issues of any particular time period, including the internal politics of the Muslim world, the economic situation, and the Islamic world's relationship with the West. Islam is malleable. Check out the writings of guys like Muhammad Abduh and Rashid Rida and you'll see what I mean.

3. Continuing the the argument from 2., many 20th-century Muslims interpret their religion through the lens of their experiences, which have been bad overall. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1, Britain and France carved up the Middle East (I know the Muslim world is bigger than the Middle East. This is just one example) to suit their economic and political interests. Arab countries that emerged from unwanted French and British tutelage did so with arbitrary borders that took very little in terms of demography or local economy into account, and national identities like Iraqi or Jordanian were created ex nihilo. There had never been a such thing as an Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, or Jordanian identity like what the people of these areas were presented with in the 20th century. Many in these countries, and also in places like Persia/Iran, were promised by intellectuals and politicians that secular nationalism and statism would propel them forward from poverty, underdevelopment, and prostration in the face of the west. They were bitterly disappointed in the wake of corrupt, stagnant, autocratic military dictatorships like those of Hafiz al-Assad in Syria, Gamal Abd al-Nasser in Egypt, and Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran. These regimes didn't bring the kind of progress people were looking for, and failed repeatedly to defeat Israel in three major wars (1948, 1967, 1973). The result was that people turned away from what they saw as a false choice between capitalism and socialism (see Sayyid Qutb's Signposts and Khomeini's Vilayet-e Faqih for their detailed discussions of the shortcomings of "western" modernity) and to Islam as a more authentic model on which to construct a a just society.

It's in this context (and add in more than 60 years of displacement, military occupation of West Bank, and poverty of Palestinian Arabs) that we see the rise of groups like al-Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. It's in a context of brutal occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Army during the 1980s, the ensuing power vacuum that happened after their withdrawal, warlordism, and the huge number of refugees and angry orphaned boys that the Taliban arose. And it's with American, Pakistani, and Saudi help that Taliban power was cemented in Afghanistan in the 1990s. See Ahmad Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.

All this is to say that it's impossible to parse out Islam away from people's experiences and say that "Islam breeds violence" while not considering the impact of underlying issues like bereavement, poverty, frustration, endemic political violence, and even the tendency for nationalism and religion to fuse. After all, it's worldview and experience that colors theology, not the other way round. This is not to justify acts of terrorism, but to say that they are prompted by other sources as much as by "Islam."

4. The revealed texts of Islam, the Qur'an and Hadith, sanction violence to a degree not sanctioned by Jesus in the New Testament. However, Islam does not, counter to a common misunderstanding, mean "way of peace," so it's not as if it claims to be something that it's not. Islam means submission in the way that someone who does not know something submits to the teaching of one who knows better than him. Anyway, if we look at Biblical passages like many non-Muslims look at the Qur'an, we'll find texts that explicitly sanction genocidal violence of the Hebrews against Canaanites as the way of purifying the land promised to them by God. One of the psalms even considers someone as "blessed" when he splits open the head of an enemy infant against a wall. How is it that many people who say, "Islam is an evil religion of violence; just look at what their scriptures say!" with such moral outrage rarely, if ever, apply the same hermeneutic to problematic passages of the Bible, even though in the New Testament book of 2 Timothy it is written that "ALL scripture is God-breathed"?

5. Certainly, while intolerance and violence directed against others who are different from the dominant social norms is wrong and should be condemned, I find it troubling that so many, fueled by moral outrage, line up to cast stones at Islam as if it is an horrible outlier of the human experience. It was the Catholic king Louis XIV who revoked the Edict of Nantes and who persecuted and expelled my Calvinist ancestors from France. It was the Calvinist Oliver Cromwell who presided over horrible massacres of Catholic men, women, and children after taking the cities of Drogheda and Wexford. It was American manifest destiny that helped contribute to the decimation and ghettoizing of Native peoples, and it was applications of Darwin's theory of evolution to human societies that anchored "scientific racism" and served as one of many justifications for European colonialism of Africa and Asia. So even as we seek to prevent violence and combat those who would perpetrate it, let's avoid the temptation to soapbox against Muslims or Islam as a whole. Terrorism, after all, is a method that has been used by many different types of people and ideologies from radical 19th-century-Russian populist intellectuals, to whole-scale slaughter of conquered peoples by the Neo-Assyrians in the 700s BC.

That, mercifully, is all.

[kalm]

I rest my case.

[CID1990]

The murder monkeys do not hate us because of our freedoms. That is a self congratulatory fallacy and it is hawked by idiots on both sides.


Sent from the center of the universe.

[dbackjon]

Here's a link to a Wall Street journal article on this subject:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... %3Darticle" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"I wonder what would happen if Muslim leaders like Julie Siddiqi started a public and persistent campaign to discredit these Islamist advocates of mayhem and murder. Not just uttering the usual laments after another horrifying attack, but making a constant, high-profile effort to show the world that the preachers of hate are illegitimate. After the next zealot has killed the next victim of political Islam, claims about the "religion of peace" would ring truer."

And an interesting quote from the WSJ blog on the article:

"On February 4th, 2013, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, addressed the Duma, (Russian Parliament), and gave a speech about the tensions with minorities in Russia:

"In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law. Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell 'discrimination'. We had better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation. The Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways of most minorities. When this honorable legislative body thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the national interest first, observing that the minorities are not Russians."

Wow - quoting Putin in defense of Human Rights?

You have sunk to a new low.

[kalm]

The murder monkeys do not hate us because of our freedoms. That is a self congratulatory fallacy and it is hawked by idiots on both sides.


Sent from the center of the universe.

Pretty sure the conks own that meme.

[CID1990]

The murder monkeys do not hate us because of our freedoms. That is a self congratulatory fallacy and it is hawked by idiots on both sides.


Sent from the center of the universe.

Pretty sure the conks own that meme.

Oh really? The liberal hawks like Hillary have a better explanation?

Don't fool yourself. Better yet, ask yourself if the has been any change at all- towards addressing what ails the muzzie world about the West now that the Lightbringer has had more than 4 years to cure?

Smart Power!


Sent from the center of the universe.