A rchive Date
[ 07-02-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Islam ]
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[http://salon.com/news/letters/2001/10/16/islam/index.html
"Islam: Religion of the Sword?"
By Richard D. Connerney
In his article, the author states that jihad "is the very origin of Islam, the sine qua non of the faith." This is a blatant misrepresentation. Jihad is essential (sine qua non) but not the origin, much the same as stopping at a red light is essential but not the origin of driving.
Islam does not derive itself from jihad. Jihad is a part of one's everyday life but does not define it.
Do I attempt to find the owner of the dollar bill I found? Do I watch the game or mow the lawn? Do I try to understand another's point of view or simply dismiss it?
All of these are jihad. He does not bother to distinguish between the physical struggle of jihad and the non-physical struggle of jihad after his opening paragraph. Instead, the article attempts to reinforce the incorrect association of "jihad" and "war."
He states, "It is no secret that representative democracy does not take well in the Muslim world," implicitly stating that the reason that there are no democracies in Muslim-majority countries is because of the teachings of Islam. He ignores the fact that all of the Muslim-majority countries and many non-Muslim majority countries are or were ruled by dictators that were put into power by the United States, and that the United States takes covert steps to reinforce those dictator's regimes. Whenever a democratically elected government is put into place anywhere in the Third World the United States takes steps to remove the democratically elected leaders and replaces them with military dictatorships. Witness the history of Chile, Panama, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Nicaragua, Philippines, and Guatemala. This is only a partial list.
Finally, he gets into his huge problem: "This idea, of a government without a religious vision of absolute truth, is contrary to the Muslim community's very conception of religious community. And herein lies the keystone of our problems."
An Islamic government is the greatest fear of the secular West. This ancient fear was created during the Crusades 1,000 years ago by the European Christian demagogues who started the real "holy war."
Long periods of peace and freedom have existed in only one civilization in recent history. This was during the rule of the Islamic empire from 800 to 1600. Peace, freedom of thought and action, and invention had never been so widespread in a civilization until that period in history.
Any Jew who knows his history will tell you that the Golden Era of the Jews was in Spain under Islamic rule.
Christian and secular European colonialists slowly chipped away at this until the final destruction of Islamic rule in Turkey in the early 1900s, as the author so conveniently pointed out. He describes with obvious ignorance of the facts the "successful secularization" of Turkey.
Kamal Ataturk, the destroyer of Turkey, brutally enforced Turkey's secularization.
Religious learning was forced underground. The language was changed from Persian letters to Latin letters, thereby rendering the entire population illiterate in the state's official language. Any public displays of a religious nature were banished and violators were imprisoned. There is still no freedom to publicly practice religion in Turkey. Until very recently a woman could be arrested for wearing a scarf on her head!
The current era of peace and freedom in the United States has been comparatively short-lived. It is also fraught with problems that are slowly compounding. Money and power is slowly moving away from the masses into the hands of very few. There is more crime and imprisonment in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The government no longer acts in the interests of its people. It acts upon the interests of "interest groups."
Why?
I propose that it is because there is no moral foundation for the laws in the United States. Some people are saying that their laws are better than another's laws so those are the ones that get implemented.
How can a person tell another person what is right and what is wrong?
There must be divine guidance for morality and morality must underlie the laws of a nation. Otherwise our human deficiencies get magnified and some people become oppressed. Witness nearly every ethnic group that immigrated to America or was forcibly enslaved here. They've all been oppressed to some degree until recently.
The Christians of Europe in the Middle Ages failed at creating a just government. The Islamic government of the same time succeeded. The American democracy has a great many similarities to a real Islamic government. Why not give it a try?
- Dawood Ali
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I'm grateful that someone was finally brave enough to run an article questioning the assertion - repeated over and over again by "journalists" who have never read a single page of the Qur'an - that Islam is a religion of peace. As nice as it sounds, the reality is much more complicated than that. I'm really sick of seeing countless articles where they ask a moderate Muslim to provide the "true" meaning of the Qur'an, then rule out anything a "radical" believes. That's like quoting friendly Rabbi Schwartz at the reform temple saying that the Orthodox Hasidim don't know the Torah.
My heart goes out to Muslims as much as it does to anyone, but let's be honest about what the Qur'an really says. It's full of beautiful phrases like this one: "For those [wives] of whom you fear disobedience, send them to beds apart and beat them."
And they wonder where the violence comes from?
- Richard Baimbridge
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Hungarians had a 150-year-long fight with the Ottoman Empire, and this is what we got out of it: The croissant!
The croissant, which seems so essentially French, actually originated in Hungary. The name - "kifli" in Hungarian - means "crescent moon," and has a remarkable history.
At the end of the 17th century the Turks laid siege to the city of Budapest and, in order to subjugate the city, tunneled under the city walls. As the Hungarian bakers practiced their trade in the early hours of the morning, they were able to raise the alarm in time and the enemy failed in their attempt to capture the city.
As a symbol of the victory the bakers baked the emblem of the Turkish empire, the crescent moon, out of puff pastry. It caused a sensation in Vienna as well as in Budapest and it was the Austrian-born Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who brought it with her to Paris in the 18th century.
- Istvan Banyai
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I am a history major with an M.A., and did much of my graduate work on the origins of Islam, so I am somewhat versed in its lore. I am not a premium member, so I have not read the full article on Islam. But I disagree with the assertion that Islam somehow rose by the use of military might, whereas Judaism did not. The Quran was finished by the time the conquests of Persia and Rome had begun, since the Prophet had died. Those conquests were a byproduct of the unity created by Islam, not part of the religion. The Quran is full of battle and war, as you say, but it is battle and war for the purpose of the survival of the Prophet himself, who grew up in a violent part of the world, and was the target of many attacks by those in power he was threatening. His war prowess was important to the faith, but mainly in a self-survival mode. This is probably how Bin Laden sees his fight, actually, as a struggle against forces bent on his, and Islam's, destruction. He would not have seen the WTC attacks as a first strike, but as retaliation for the attacks we have made on Islam (in his opinion). But to say that Islam is a religion based on war is going too far.
There is a constant myth that Islam grew and conquered by the Sword. This is false. Islam conquered its neighbors, but did not try to convert those they had conquered. The conversions came later, as people saw religious, political and social benefits to conversion. As non-Muslims, they had to pay a poll tax, which made them want to convert while simultaneously making their leaders want them to stay non-Muslims.
Now, concerning Judaism. There is not a clear history of how and when Judaism was formed, since most of the Old Testament was written around 600 BC, half a millennium after the time of Abraham and Moses, the supposed founders. Reading through the books of War, the books of Judges and Kings, of conquest after they left Egypt and began to take the Promised Land, one reads of constant battles, sanctioned and supported by God. This is how the Jews come into world history - before this time there are only legends, but from this time on we have indications that they exist as a people and a religion. And it is through war that they define themselves. None of this is to imply that there are not elements of peace, nor of morality, in Judaism, only that it grew and survived, even according to the Bible, as much by war as did Islam. To say that one is more warlike than the other is wrong.
Christianity is another story. It grew up in the Roman Empire, too weak to espouse anything other than passive resistance, love and forgiveness. Yet from shortly after its inception until the present day, Christians have seen their own religion as simply a continuation of the Jewish religion, and thus the origins of Christianity, to many Christians, also involve war. As does its long history. Christians have used the Old Testament to justify wars from the earliest times, through the Crusades, and up until now. Both Hitler and the Allies believed firmly that God was on their side in World War II.
In short, at least from the intro to your story, I think you are using Western eyes to misinterpret Islamic history and to gloss over our own Western faiths. I doubt bin Laden would agree with your version. To him, Christians and Jews have killed most of the people he knows, have been killing his fellow Muslims for hundreds of years, and are now conspiring to kill him. The West has used religion as an excuse to occupy Palestine, to roll tanks over little Muslim children, to occupy Saudi Arabia (where we prop up the hated family government), and to obliterate Muslims in Iraq. He sees us as the followers of violent religions, and himself as a defender of violent onslaughts - a defender justified in its use of horrible force by the horrible crimes committed against Islam. That is why people are burning American flags around the world.
Let me give a disclaimer. I am not saying I agree with bin Laden, only that he feels that way. We have to understand who we are at war with, or we will underestimate his will, and the danger from other quarters. Our long-term solutions need to understand the causes of the conflict, and not reduce them to simple naive Western misconceptions.
- Joseph B. Comstock
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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