Burnt Alive For Changing Religion

[RedRalph]

actually it seems he prefers one over the other because one (Western ones) doesn't hold power anymore...

Well they got Bush elected. not exactly the same as holding power but damn close to it

 

[Mowque]

i live in America, and i wasn't burned at the stake....?

 

[RedRalph]

i live in America, and i wasn't burned at the stake....?

I'm not saying anyone was, I'm saying they have a lot of power and influence, Wienner said they didnt, which is utterly ridiculous given the last 8 years. then he changed tack and said it wasnt that theory didnt have influence, it was that they werent as bad

 

[Winner]

Obviously you were very selective on which fragments you did read then. You clearly missed the part about world brotherhood, respect for the other Abrahamic religions like Judaism and Christianity and all the other bits about leading modest, respectful and pious lives. Carefully choosing only those quotations which fit your particular bias while disregarding the main text demonstrates a moral ambiguity and intellectual dishonesty which I haven't attributed to you before. Perhaps I was mistaken.

No, you're just wrong. The fact that there are also parts which could be interpreted as "moderate" doesn't negate the fact that other parts are extremelly xenophobic and violent.

What this proves is just that Koran is an incoherent and self-contradictory text.

The existence of the violent parts in Koran is what motivates the many Islamic fundamentalists to wage Jihad against the West and other civilizations, what motivates Muslims to kill others. They're not doing anything un-Islamic, it's all there in Koran. Allah commands them to kill the unbelievers, enslave them, abuse them etc.

These parts are what's making Islam such a thorn in the back. Nothing can change that, you can't have a peaceful religion which sanctions such atrocities in its basic holy texts.

 

[Winner]

Actually they are quite similar in intent, advocating wars over what their religion teaches as right and wrong, inflicting their religious beliefs on others through the law, advocating the death penalty based on pasages form the bible...

lets face it Winner, christian fundies are most acceptable to you than Islamic ones because they are western. Both groups are scum but you prefer one because of their culture.

Not at all. Read what I said before, I am not going to repeat myself.

 

[Halcyon]

Historically, political religion is almost always the crazy violent authoritarian type. Consider the history of the Catholic Church...


It's probably worth pointing out that only a handful of Islamic countries actually have this sort of problem with religious extremism. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan's Taliban, Palestine, potentially Egypt and... then who? Moralist religionism has a fair influence in a lot of places, true, but this is true in the West, too - the US and Poland for starters.

On the other hand, there's Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, each of whom have had more trouble with reactionary militaries than theocratic fundamentalists. Then there's Bangladesh, which does quite well given that it's poor as hell and absurdly overpopulated. All those guys have Islamist parties, but they're not major players. Given how many EU countries have active neo-Nazi parties going - some of whom have been/are serious contenders (Haider, le Pen..) - having a few crazies on the benches of parliament is pretty much a given in every democracy.

Winner: Long story short, you're basically tarring ~1.5bn people with the crimes of the Saudi royalty, Khomenei and the Taliban.

I suspect that you're only using cherry-picked fragments of scripture to support what you already believe to be true. Needless to say, that sort of thing never seems to help.

vv Ah, at Winner, actually. My apologies. vv

 

[RedRalph]

Is that at me Halcyon?

 

[jessiecat]

Is that at me Halcyon?

No. I think he's going after Winner. He's one of the good guys. Long Live the Forces of Militant Moderation!

BTW Just found this great pic that I'm using as my desktop. Kinda reminds me of somebody. Any thoughts? Possible caption?

 

[RedRalph]

PM me who it reminds you of

 

[Favorius]

The existence of the violent parts in Koran is what motivates the many Islamic fundamentalists to wage Jihad against the West and other civilizations, what motivates Muslims to kill others. They're not doing anything un-Islamic, it's all there in Koran. Allah commands them to kill the unbelievers, enslave them, abuse them etc.

Apparantly you are stumbled on the so called 'violent' verses in the Koran. I am currently half-finished with it and did not encounter any violence inspiring comments.

BTW in your previous posts you have mentioned about 'normal Islam' and wrote Wahhabis represent the Sunnah and the normal Islam. I strongly disagree with that. Wahhabis are extremely fundamentalists and do not use their 'mind' to understand the holy book or the Sunnah. If you want to encounter normal Islam, come to Anatolia, where no-one interferes anyone's belief. Everything is between the God and the person.

I see myself as a normal muslim -perhaps not too devoted-, I love the God, I try to be a good person and I try to be humanist. Thats because I was born and grew in the geography and culture that was the home of the great humanist Mevlana Celaladdin Rumi and Yunus Emre. UNESCO declared 2008 as the year of Mevlana, maybe that can arouse your interest and his teachings can influence your negative opinion about islam positively.

 

[jessiecat]

Good post. I was hoping a Muslim would counter those bigoted views. Thanks.

 

[emzie]

True Islam is every form of Islam practiced by every individual Muslim. It's violent, loving, hateful, xenophobic, and accepting. In other words, Islam as practiced by adherents is quite amorphous.

We have a.... winner. Islam is a very personal religion. The west makes a mistake when it looks at organized beliefs like Catholicism and thinks Islam is like that. Islam is more like the Pentecostal movement -- me, my directive and God. Of that, you'll have a lot of crazies. A lot of pacifists. A lot of boring people worried more about the price of bread than international relations.

Using a broad paintbrush and lumping very different peoples in together isn't unlike saying "That Estonian is white. He must be like the French"

 

[Pannonius]

hm, wasn't it the Al Saud family who are best friends with the Bush family?

And why is a pro-Bush poster now pointing fingers at Bush's best friends?

I've been called many names here on CFC, but never a pro-Bush poster...

 

[Pannonius]

You should be celebrating her glorious martyrdom.

And I do, but it doesn't mean that burning someone is O.K.

 

[emzie]

And I do, but it doesn't mean that burning someone is O.K.

Well no. I agree that it should be frowned upon.

 

[Phlegmak]

Pannonius, I apologize if this has been asked to you before. Where are you from?

 

[Lockesdonkey]

The practice and the theory are quite different things. Islamic "theory" is... well, Islam in its true form is an ultimate totalitarian ideology bent on world conquest. Islamic practice varies from place to place, but fortunately most Muslims don't stick to the "true" and "genuine" Islam.

I will argue against the idea that the Wahhabi form of Islam is "true" or "real" Islam. So I dispute this.

First, I must remind you that in the realm of religion, ALL PARTIES CLAIM TO BE THE "TRUE" FORM OF THE RELIGION. The question then is what the religion is: it's a battle of which form is the "correct" form. The Qur'an is an incredibly complex text (which in the minds of many Muslims is proof of God's existence, though I personally dispute this) and as a result there is significant debate on its interpretation, to say nothing of the role of Sunnah (what the Prophet did), the role of Hadith (what the Prophet said), and traditions in the religion. Many Wahhabi practices are in fact not based in the Qur'an but rather subsequent practice and jurisprudence--none of which anyone considers divinely inspired, let alone revealed.

Still, the minority of the fundies (and the largely indifferent Muslim population which refuses to get rid of them) are all it takes to give the rest of the world a serious headache.

The Muslim population has other problems to attend to, such as the fact that the vast majority of them are poor and oppressed. Furthermore, they have good political reasons to at least ignore terrorism: they feel that their culture is under threat from the West. The fundamentalists are a bold, if somewhat distasteful, counter to this acutely-felt threat to Islamic culture and tradition by a West they view as imperialistic, materialistic, and thoroughly spiritually bankrupt.

Oh I did, not whole of it of course, that would be a real torture. It says pretty clearly, that Islam should expand by means of conquest and destroy all other faiths, especially the polytheist ones. It also says that unbelievers who refuse to embrace the one true faith (tm) should be slain, as well as all the apostates and heretics. I must say that it's a book full of hatred, a manual to world conquest. The guy who compared it to Main Kampf had a point there.

No, you're just wrong. The fact that there are also parts which could be interpreted as "moderate" doesn't negate the fact that other parts are extremelly xenophobic and violent.

What this proves is just that Koran is an incoherent and self-contradictory text.

The existence of the violent parts in Koran is what motivates the many Islamic fundamentalists to wage Jihad against the West and other civilizations, what motivates Muslims to kill others. They're not doing anything un-Islamic, it's all there in Koran. Allah commands them to kill the unbelievers, enslave them, abuse them etc.

These parts are what's making Islam such a thorn in the back. Nothing can change that, you can't have a peaceful religion which sanctions such atrocities in its basic holy texts.

1. The Qur'an is very, very complex. If you're reading it in translation, you really have to read it multiple times; different translators have different agendas and perspectives that they bring to the Qur'an, and this has an influence on how YOU read it. Arabic is notoriously difficult to translate, especially the Classical variety in which the Qur'an is written. It tends towards flowery constructions and elaborate metaphorical games; for instance, saying things like "apparent and obvious" is considered better form than "clear." And Qur'anic Arabic is archaic; meanings of words have changed. For instance, the Arabic word "qahwah" means "wine" in Classical Arabic, but in Modern Standard Arabic, it means "coffee." There are also more radical changes in meaning, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. The point is, all of this makes a translator's job very difficult.

2. One of the major disputes over Qur'anic interpretation is how to regard the context of the revelations. In the Islamic view, the Qur'an was revealed over the whole second half of the life of Muhammad, coming in bits and pieces from time to time. Even if this view is not true, bits of Qur'an definitely appeared over time. This means that certain Qur'anic texts may have been intended for different circumstances. Many of the verses calling for war, for instance, are directed specifically at the Islamic community while it was under threat of attack from the still-pagan Quraish (the tribe in charge of Mecca). Previous verses (the ones from when the Muslims were still in Mecca) had called for patiently suffering the attacks of Quraish (who were persecuting them); the new verses gave divine permission for retribution.

This contextuality throws some serious monkey wrenches into the Wahhabi works, since if these verses are contextual, they only apply to certain cases: war against Arab pagans (who do not exist anymore). Wahhabis are apt to argue "it's in the Qur'an, so it applies." This is an easy position to dispute, given that most other verses preach moderation, the brotherhood of mankind, the importance of respecting everyone equally (Muhammad is famously rebuked for turning his back on a poor blind man to try and convert a rich man in Sura 80, Abasa), and the importance of coexistence (Surat al-Kafirun, which ends لَكُمْ دِينُكُمْ وَلِيَ دِينِ Lakum dīnakum wa līya dīn "you have your religion and I have mine"). These principles are enshrined in the Makkan suras of Juz' `Amma: the ones that Muslims teach first and believe contain the essence of Islam.

3. Your argument that "it's all there in the Qur'an, so it's not un-Islamic" is disingenuous in the light of the contextuality of the Qur'anic verses the fundies cite. Paradoxes are common--nay, necessary--in scripture; they give the religion the nuance and flexibility it requires to survive.

Furthermore, the "atrocities" it sanctions (or appears to sanction) amount to war (since when is war an atrocity?) against former oppressors.

4. In general, we're talking about interpretation. Qur'anic interpretation is a complex business (as I've said), and it more closely resembles English or American common law than European civil law; an interpretation is made of key texts, and then that interpretation is considered binding precedent on subsequent jurists. Confusingly, there are several different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and precedent is only considered binding on jurists who follow a particular school, and is only binding on laymen who choose to be bound by a particular school's decisions. Each individual Muslim is actually empowered to interpret the Qur'an for him or herself (a concept the Protestants borrowed from the Muslims, in point of fact), which means that what Islam is (the fundamental question I posed above) is ultimately up to each Muslim. It is thus difficult to say that any form of Islam is false, so long as it accepts the Five Pillars (Shahadah, prayer, fasting, charity, and Hajj) and the six articles of faith (the unity and character of God, belief in the angels, the holy books, the prophets, the day of judgment, and God's omniscience--interpreted by most contemporary Sunnis as predestination, and by Shiites and the Mu`tazili Sunnis as divine justice).

Comparison with the Old Testament is not relevant for many reasons (the most important one is that it is a collection of Jewish history), and as far as I know the New Testament, there is nothing even remotely comparable to the insanities included in Koran. If this book is a set of instruction for the Muslims (and it is) of how their life is supposed to look like, nobody who read it can be surprised that Islam is spawning so much radical fundies compared to other great religions.

1. See above.
2. Regardless of what the Old and New Testament are, very religious Jews and Christians use them as a life-guide, too. The New Testament is a rather odd book, being expressly an account of Jesus' life and of the early Christian community, so I'm not going to talk about it. Besides, the Qur'an has plenty of sweetness-and-light verses, too (see above). However, the Old Testament says a lot about acts of God, and is it a violent book! God sanctions killing all of the Canaanites, which Joshua apparently does. And Israel and Judah are always at war with somebody, usually the Philistines.

Because you're obviously trying to relativize what I said, and that's not acceptable. Christian fundamentalists equal in agenda and fanaticism to their Muslim counterparts are a tiny minority in the Western world (which is not composed just of the United States of America...) and they're actively being suppressed by the authorities.

The kind you call fundamentalists (religious right in the U.S., some ultra-catholic parties in Poland etc.) are boy scouts compared to the Islamic fundamentalists like Hamas, Hezbollah or Taleban. You can't even start comparing them.

The reason they're "boy scouts" is that they had the good fortune of cropping up in stable, wealthy societies where the rule of law is entrenched, the government is very effective in maintaining its monopoly on organized armed force, and where people do not have sufficient economic, political, and social grievances to engage in armed action. In addition, they have a hope of influencing government policy by means other than armed action.

The Taleban arose in an anarchic Afghanistan, so nobody could influence government policy by means other than armed action, in which case you became the government. Hezbollah arose in similar circumstances during the Lebanese Civil War as the primary protectors of the Shiite interest in Lebanon. The difference is that after the war, all the parties kept their militias. They are fundamentalist, but they are, significantly, Shiites: their brand of fundamentalism is explicitly based not on the Qur'an but the rulings of Ayatollahs.

Hamas is another story altogether, since it is primarily a nationalist independence movement. Hamas' violence, significantly, has only been directed at Fatah during the civil war (that's what it was) of 2006; all other times, it has been directed at Israel, which is, after all, directly occupying the West Bank and Gaza Strip--Islam is simply an energizing tool for a nationalist movement. And it's not a new tool, either; the first leader of the Palestinian nationalist movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He fell into obscurity after 1948, but the Islamic vein remains in Palestinian nationalism.

In short, the extremeness and propensity for violence among the Islamic fundamentalists is more a function of their situation than their beliefs.

How many witches were burnt? How many homosexuals were hanged? How many people were killed because they refused to convert to Christianity?

Get a grip. Media hype is one thing, the reality is another. Learn to separate them.

Again, the right-wing Christians live in law-abiding, wealthy, stable societies in which protests and elections are effective ways to get influence over the government. In most Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world, elections are either (a) nonexistent (as in Saudi Arabia) (b) a sham (as in Egypt) (c) ignored (look at what happened to Hamas!) or (d) while fair, of limited utility (as in Lebanon, where the political system is carefully balanced so as to avoid civil war; a Shiite will always be Speaker of the House, but never President or Prime Minister). Protests are often carefully regulated (as in Lebanon, where protests can lead to civil war) or outright banned (as in Egypt, where essentially everyone but the Islamists are allowed to protest. If they ask politely and don't actually do anything). Thus violence is seen as the only way to get influence over the government, and these people being radicals, they're more likely to use it than more moderate people (the rest tell jokes and grumble).

 

[Hitti-Litti]

Winner@

The Quran was written about 1300-1400 years ago. Of course it has messages that don't fit to the modern world! World was very different 1300-1400 years ago, warfare and violence were the best ways of spreading a religion. If the Bible had same kind of "spread Christianity with warfare and violence" message, there would be Christian suicide bombers.

So, your "Islam is the root of all evil because the Quran encourages violence" argument is beaten.

 

[JollyRoger]

And I do, but it doesn't mean that burning someone is O.K.

So God burning someone for eternity is not ok?

 

[emzie]

Pannonius, I apologize if this has been asked to you before. Where are you from?

Croatia, unless I'm mistaken.