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One of the great things about blogging is, it enables conversations between people from all over the world. Last night, in response to a post regarding Islam, this comment came in from Eagle in Pakistan:
There is not any religion in the world which teaches violence. All religions give some way or path to its follower. This concept about Islam is also wrong that it favours violance. It teaches that to kill a man is like killing a whole mankind.
There is need to respect all religions. The violance in the world is due to us, not due to religions.
Religion is an important part of life. We cant ignore it.
everyone in the world should try for peace and humanity on individual level. We should not wait for some revolution at country level or world level. We need to change ourselves. Look beside you, dont ignore poors which are near by you, speak well to your servents, be honest in your duties, try for the betterment of yourself and the people around you, stick to a path which u think is right..
Be a good man, everything in the world will be alright.
Welcome to the site, Eagle. I'm glad to hear that this is your view of Islam. However, when you read the Koran, you may find something different from the view you support. For example, let's take the verse you refer to:
It teaches that to kill a man is like killing a whole mankind.
Here's the verse from the Koran (5:32):
For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah's Sovereignty), but afterwards lo! many of them became prodigals in the earth.
So this verse, is as much a justification for killing your fellow men, as it is a call not to do so. Unfortunately, it says that you can kill your fellow men for "corruption in the earth."
Now, what could that be? The next verse talks about it. Here's the very next verse:
The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom;
So "corruption in the earth"/"corruption in the land" is made by anyone who makes "war upon Allah," and such people are to be "killed or crucified."
Islam declares war on everybody who isn't a Muslim. From About.com:
A crucial distinction made in Islamic theology is that between dar al-harb and dar al-islam. To put it simply, dar al-harb (territory of war or chaos) is the name for the regions where Islam does not dominate, where divine will is not observed, and therefore where continuing strife is the norm. By contrast, dar al-islam (territory of peace) is the name for those territories where Islam does dominate, where submission to God is observed, and where peace and tranquility reign.
So, Islam declares war on anybody who isn't a Muslim. Anyone who is, as a result, at war with Islam, is making "corruption in the Earth," and is to be "killed or crucified."
The result is that the part you quoted, from the verse, only applies to Muslims. It doesn't apply to non-Muslims.
Just in case anyone might think that Islam looks kindly on those of other faiths in any situation, a few verses later (5:36 and 5:37), the Koran says:
As for those who disbelieve, lo! if all that is in the earth were theirs, and as much again therewith, to ransom them from the doom on the Day of Resurrection, it would not be accepted from them. Theirs will be a painful doom.
They will wish to come forth from the Fire, but they will not come forth from it. Theirs will be a lasting doom.
Taken with the preceding verses, it appears that the Koran is saying that Muslims cannot co-exist with others.
This does not look very much like a "religion of peace."
Your misfortune, is that if you tell your kids that the Koran is the word of Allah, some of them are likely to read it and come to the conclusion that, according to the Koran, Allah says to kill non-Muslims. And they're going to be in grave danger of wasting their lives by devoting themselves to racism, violence, and hatred.
It appears that the only way Muslims are going to be able to co-exist peacefully with others - which you are good enough to say is your goal - is to explicitly and publicly repudiate these verses - and other similar ones - from the Koran. A Muslim thinker from Sudan has shown a philosophical basis on which this can be done. As discussed by Daniel Pipes:
...note the original thinking of the Sudanese theologian Mahmud Muhammad Taha (1909-85). Taha built his interpretation on the conventional division of the Koran into two. The initial verses came down when Muhammad was a powerless prophet living in Mecca, and tend to be cosmological. Later verses came down when Muhammad was the ruler of Medina, and include many specific rulings. These commands eventually served as the basis for the Shari'a, or Islamic law.
Taha argued that specific Koranic rulings applied only to Medina, not to other times and places. He hoped modern-day Muslims would set these aside and live by the general principles delivered at Mecca. Were Taha's ideas accepted, most of the Shari'a would disappear, including outdated provisions concerning warfare, theft, and women. Muslims could then more readily modernize.
Eagle, would you consider the approach suggested by Taha, so as to save your children from the danger of wasting their lives by devoting themselves to racism, violence, and hatred?
Yesterday morning I watched the film "Muslims Against Jihad," produced by Frank Gaffney and Martyn Burke. I'd like to comment on a particular passage in it. Here it is, as quoted on the Foehammer blog:
Around 8 minutes into the first segment of the program is the Omar Bakri statement that I believe is one of the most important utterances from an Islamist that I have ever heard:
"The only way you can stop us, by give up your democracy. If you give up democracy and Freedom of Speech, and start to stop us and ban us the way you started to do, that the way you can stop us. But that mean we succeed. We say to the people: 'You see? Democracy-Hypocrisy. We have always said so.' You do not believe in democracy."
What exactly is Bakri referring to? Why does he say we have to give up democracy in order to stop people who want to destroy democracy? Here's the background that specifies what Bakri is referring to.
1. Islam is a political project with the goal of dominating any society in which it can implant itself. In the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Islam is a political project. It is a supremacist movement. It has a three-tiered stage, and has always had that. And those stages - the first one is dawa, or missionary work, persuading individuals to agree with the basic tenets and principals of that political project. The second is hejira, or emigration - spreading the faith, by planting people who have been converted to the faith, in other areas. And finally there's the stage of jihad. And that, I don't have to tell you.
2. A key strategy for domination of the host society, is the filling of the Muslim community with rage and hatred so that there are always Muslims itching to do violence. As I have posted recently:
Ayaan is describing the phenomenon we are all beginning to become aware of. Islamists emigrate into an area, and once there in sufficient numbers, they begin threatening the public with riots and violence. They do this not by specific direction; that is, they don't, as the Mafia did, have leaders who identify specific targets for attack. Instead, they do this by general direction, as per the Koran, to be at war with non-Muslims in general. This effectively results in enough acts of violence because the Islamist culture is intentionally filled with hate for non-Muslims, so that there are always more than enough Islamists itching to do violence. The non-Islamic host culture is unused to such an attack. Arresting the specific perpetrators of violence doesn't solve the situation, since the Islamist culture always produces more violence-prone Islamists. The non-Islamic host culture typically has no systems in place to root out the Islamist culture that is attacking it. Blindsided, without thinking about the long-term implications, the non-Islamic host culture usually attempts to appease the Islamists by giving them more and more of whatever they demand, hoping that they will then abandon violence. But Islam doesn't seek co-existence; as Ayaan says, Islam is a political project. It seeks political domination and supremacy. In many cases the result is that the non-Islamic host culture is destroyed, in a manner comparable to a body attacked by cancer.
This is a strategy that is brilliantly crafted to attack non-Islamic cultures. It has been developed and honed literally over centuries.
3. One of the principal methods used by the Islamists to fill the Muslim community with rage and hatred, is the continual exhortation of crowds at mosques, by Imams, to hate all non-Muslims. A few examples:
- British TV exposed the hate-filled preachings of the Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, England.
- The Society of Americans for National Existence exposed similar events at mosques in the U.S.
- Religious, government, and media leaders in Islamic nations, routinely call for murder to be done in the name of Islam:
Egyptian Cleric Hazem Sallah Abu Isma'il on the Rewards of the Martyr
Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi Justifies the Killing of Israeli Women and Children in Suicide Operations
So Bakri is saying that democracy protects his right to fill Muslims with rage and hatred, such that there will always be some Muslims who, on their own initiative, without being specifically directed to do an attack, go out and commit murders, a la the many murders attempted and/or committed by Muslims almost weekly in various nations - including last week in England and Scotland.
Which brings me to the comment I'd like to make on Bakri's statement. Under our present system, Bakri is right that there is nothing we can do to stop Islamists from pursuing the strategy of jihad to commit murder and destroy our culture. We must figure this out; we must make an adjustment to our laws to enable us to shut down Islamist leaders who preach hatred of non-Muslims. It should be doable. We've rightfully made it impossible for anyone to say anything hateful about Blacks. Why shouldn't we be able to make it impossible for Muslims to say anything hateful about non-Muslims?
The alternative - and not an unthinkable one - is to recognize that Islamists have declared war on us, from within our midst; and to declare war back on them, and throw the hate-preaching Islamists in jail under the rules of war, rather than under the rules of civil society.
It's probably going to have to be one or the other of these two alternatives.
That the Islamists have declared war on us is not a matter of question. From About.com:
A crucial distinction made in Islamic theology is that between dar al-harb and dar al-islam. To put it simply, dar al-harb (territory of war or chaos) is the name for the regions where Islam does not dominate, where divine will is not observed, and therefore where continuing strife is the norm. By contrast, dar al-islam (territory of peace) is the name for those territories where Islam does dominate, where submission to God is observed, and where peace and tranquility reign.
In Islam, by "peace and tranquility," is meant the absence of free speech; the oppression and eventual absence of Christianity, Judaism, and atheism; separation of men from women before marriage; the absence of freedom for women; legal status for women as being one-half that of the legal status of men; so-called honor killings of women by their own family members; beatings of wives by husbands; the instilling of rage and hatred into little children; and the whole list of specifications for hell on earth that is actually put into practice in Islamic nations today.
With his review of the film, A Mighty Heart, Judea Pearl makes a massive contribution to the end of moral relativism:
I used to believe that the world essentially divided into two types of people: those who were broadly tolerant; and those who felt threatened by differences. If only the forces of tolerance could win out over the forces of intolerance, I reasoned, the world might finally know some measure of peace.
But there was a problem with my theory, and it was never clearer than in a conversation I once had with a Pakistani friend who told me that he loathed people like President Bush who insisted on dividing the world into "us" and "them." My friend, of course, was taking an innocent stand against intolerance, and did not realize that, in so doing, he was in fact dividing the world into "us" and "them," falling straight into the camp of people he loathed.
This is a political version of a famous paradox formulated by Bertrand Russell in 1901, which shook the logical foundations of mathematics. Any person who claims to be tolerant naturally defines himself in opposition to those who are intolerant. But that makes him intolerant of certain people--which invalidates his claim to be tolerant.
The political lesson of Russell's paradox is that there is no such thing as unqualified tolerance. Ultimately, one must be able to expound intolerance of certain groups or ideologies without surrendering the moral high ground normally linked to tolerance and inclusivity. One should, in fact, condemn and resist political doctrines that advocate the murder of innocents, that undermine the basic norms of civilization, or that seek to make pluralism impossible. There can be no moral equivalence between those who seek--however clumsily--to build a more liberal, tolerant world and those who advocate the annihilation of other faiths, cultures, or states.
...I am worried that A Mighty Heart falls into a trap Bertrand Russell would have recognized: the paradox of moral equivalence, of seeking to extend the logic of tolerance a step too far. You can see traces of this logic in the film's comparison of Danny's abduction with Guantanamo--it opens with pictures from the prison--and its comparison of Al Qaeda militants with CIA agents. You can also see it in the comments of the movie's director, Michael Winterbottom, who wrote on The Washington Post's website that A Mighty Heart and his previous film The Road to Guantanamo "are very similar. Both are stories about people who are victims of increasing violence on both sides. There are extremists on both sides who want to ratchet up the levels of violence and hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this."
Drawing a comparison between Danny's murder and the detainment of suspects in Guantanamo is precisely what the killers wanted, as expressed in both their e-mails and the murder video. Obviously Winterbottom did not mean to echo their sentiments, and certainly not to justify their demands or actions. Still, I am concerned that aspects of his movie will play into the hands of professional obscurers of moral clarity.
...Danny's tragedy demands an end to this logic. There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts -- no ifs, ands, or buts. Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, on January 31, 2002.
There was a time when drawing moral symmetries between two sides of every conflict was a mark of original thinking. Today, with Western intellectuals overextending two-sidedness to reckless absurdities, it reflects nothing but lazy conformity. What is needed now is for intellectuals, filmmakers, and the rest of us to resist this dangerous trend and draw legitimate distinctions where such distinctions are warranted.
The end of moral relativism will change the world. See this previous post for more on the movement to end moral relativism.
