Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
Paul did, all Jesus wanted to do was reform Judaism. Paul set up a new religion.
What's the problem with Islam, anyway?
- Thread starter Gangor
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Paul did, all Jesus wanted to do was reform Judaism. Paul set up a new religion.
Brian Shanahan
Permanoob
Well lets see:
Yes, that's my whole arguement there on the Paul wanting to change Jesus' message.
huh? did you notice the "conscious" bit?
I know you believe that Jesus' and Paul's goals were different. I don't know that, but I accept it as a possibility.
However, you are claiming something more than that. You claim that Paul himself thought that he is not doing what Jesus wanted. I find it very improbable and I ask you what do you base your claim on, apart from "The Last Temptation of Christ", probably
I know you believe that Jesus' and Paul's goals were different. I don't know that, but I accept it as a possibility.
However, you are claiming something more than that. You claim that Paul himself thought that he is not doing what Jesus wanted. I find it very improbable and I ask you what do you base your claim on, apart from "The Last Temptation of Christ", probably
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
How would anyone know what Jesus really wanted? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the stuff that Jesus said was often somewhat cryptic..
I think it's more of a cultural thing than a religious. Analyzing ancient scripture is not relevant here. Just because it says so in the Old Testament, New Testament, or Koran, does not mean that the followers of the religion have to follow it word for word. Christians no longer stone heretics. It's the culture that leads people to take the religion to an extreme. Let me give some examples of what I'm talking about:
Honor Killings - this has more to do with culture and a perception of humiliation. Humiliation is worse than death. I dont see someone killing their sister because the Koran says so. It's because they feel like their family has been dishonored.
More on Humiliation - when US instructors teach Arab students, say the instructor calls on a student who does not know the answer. The Arab student would perceive this as a personal insult and a humiliation. Arabs are too proud or insecure to accept constructive criticism.
On building knowledge base - There was an incident where US military personnel saw an Arab commander collecting instruction books for a certain piece of hardware. This was to preserve his standing as the only one who knows how to use the system, thereby making him indispensable.
It's this mentality that stymies innovation and progress.
Honor Killings - this has more to do with culture and a perception of humiliation. Humiliation is worse than death. I dont see someone killing their sister because the Koran says so. It's because they feel like their family has been dishonored.
More on Humiliation - when US instructors teach Arab students, say the instructor calls on a student who does not know the answer. The Arab student would perceive this as a personal insult and a humiliation. Arabs are too proud or insecure to accept constructive criticism.
On building knowledge base - There was an incident where US military personnel saw an Arab commander collecting instruction books for a certain piece of hardware. This was to preserve his standing as the only one who knows how to use the system, thereby making him indispensable.
It's this mentality that stymies innovation and progress.
Verbose
Deity
Politicised Islam etc. would become a much smaller problem, if in particular the Arab world would stop moving crab-wise economically. It wouldn't disappear, but would be reduced to (even more of) a fringe phenomenon, like the German Red Army Fraction or the Italian Red Brigades in the 1970's.
Lot of the accumulated problem is too little political freedom and too little economic opportunity. The absolute monarchies, US friends or not, don't really have much of a future unless providing either, and the republics created by the army generals on a basis of nationalist ideology in the 50's have so far failed to really deliver either, despite promising both for decades.
The problem being that the democratic potential in religious politics are about the only untapped possible indigenous source of political revival, which hasn't already shown itself coming up short. It is highly likely we are simply going to have to accept some kind of democratic Islamist take over in a great many countries through the ballot box. Preferably they should end up the variety which mounts future elections and sticks to the principles of democracy, a kind of Muslim Democratic Parties analog to the Christian Democratic Parties. The Turkish APK seems a likely candidate to be the first of such a breed, fingers crossed.
Lot of the accumulated problem is too little political freedom and too little economic opportunity. The absolute monarchies, US friends or not, don't really have much of a future unless providing either, and the republics created by the army generals on a basis of nationalist ideology in the 50's have so far failed to really deliver either, despite promising both for decades.
The problem being that the democratic potential in religious politics are about the only untapped possible indigenous source of political revival, which hasn't already shown itself coming up short. It is highly likely we are simply going to have to accept some kind of democratic Islamist take over in a great many countries through the ballot box. Preferably they should end up the variety which mounts future elections and sticks to the principles of democracy, a kind of Muslim Democratic Parties analog to the Christian Democratic Parties. The Turkish APK seems a likely candidate to be the first of such a breed, fingers crossed.
While I agree with that some matters (honour killings) are a cultural phenomenon, I find this part of your post to be lacking in knowledge of the subject. you are simply going to another extreme: some blame it all on religion, you blame it all on culture. Both approaches is wrong. We are talking about different matters here, honour killings weren't even mentioned in this thread, if I recall correctly.
Al-Qur'an plays much a bigger role in a life of a muslim than a Bible in a life of a christian, and not just because christian societies are more laicised today.
Even on theological level: since an early debate, the official view of sunni islam is that Al-Qur'an is eternal. It is, literally, the Word of God. It's not exactly the case in christianity, where the doctrine of inspiration is more widespread. Also, in muslim countries, people actually read Al-Qur'an. Many know parts of it or even the whole book by heart. Muslims, in general, rever Al-Qur'an and take pride in its preservation to the extent that translations of Al-Qur'an do not bear the name of Al-Qur'an, or even of "translation of Al-Qur'an", but, rather "translation of the meaning of Al-Qur'an, and some non-arabic muslims learn the arabic text by heart without knowing its meaning. People have quotes from Al-Qur'an on their walls where a catholic, orthodox etc christian would most likely have an image of a saint. The claims that there are scientific truths in the Bible is mostly work of several nutty Americans. Similar beliefs about Al-Qur'an are much more widespread. Etc. However much the Bible is respected in the christian world, the respect for Al-Qur'an in the muslim world is higher.
And, obviously, there's sharia based (also) on Al-Qur'an.
new Testament doesn't say one needs to stone heretics anyway.
Verbose, while I agree that poverty incites extremism, I'd like to point out that the richest and most prosperous muslim states are among the most conservative, as well as that extremists such as Ibn Ladin etc are vey often from rich families, are educated etc.
I do not have a very deep knowledge about terrorism, so I may be wrong.
aelf
Ashen One
Excellent posts by Traitorfish and I concur with the sentiments expressed in the post above.
Unfortunately, those posts have been somewhat lost in translation. Well, I have some patience tonight so I'm going to try to translate Squonk's position into something compact and comprehensible to see whether we can finally get a hold of this slippery eel.
Squonk seems to think that (1) Islam has serious and deep-seated theological problems with divinely-sanctioned violence and repression, (2) problems that are more relevant to Islam than their counterparts are to the other Abrahamic religions because a prominent section of the Islamic community draw on them to institute reprehensible practices. He also thinks that (3) the whole Islamic community has the responsibility to resolve these problems because they originate from the same texts that all Muslims hold as sacred. These are basically the main points that I can gather.
I have problems with all three points, but my disagreement increases in magnitude from the first to the third. For the first point, I'm not sure Squonk has enough credibility to say this convincingly, as I have seen no indication that he is well-versed in Islamic theology. Just because you can and have read holy texts doesn't make you an authority on the theological problems arising from them, since you are probably not familiar with the body of the theological debate concerning them. I have a feeling this might be interpreted as an attack or a slight, but whatever.
I'm leery about the second point because I agree with what Traitorfish has said. It doesn't matter if I personally have no firm grasp on what the essence of Islam is. I can simply rely on the evidence that there is a vast number of moderate Muslims who do not share the views of the more extreme. Since I don't think I can presume to say that the moderates do not understand the essence of their religion, I am therefore satisfied that the essence of Islam must be benign and compatible enough with modern values.
My disagreement with the third point stems from that, but specifically I don't think that moderate Muslims have more responsibility than to simply practice their faith in a tolerant and benign manner. I also have no doubt that many amongst the moderates understand the difficulties that might arise from interpreting their holy texts and do actively discuss them, especially amongst scholarly circles and in religious gatherings and classes. Hence, I have little doubt that if the minds of the extremists can be changed easily through theological discussion, they would have been.
In addition, I'm also fairly skeptical of fetishising religion and ascribing to it some powerful motivational influence that is independent of human will. And therefore I believe that problems stem first and foremost from the human actors who generate and carry out whatever conception they have of their faith. But that's just me being Marxist and non-theistic.
Not all of its denominations: I don't know about alawites, for example. But sunnis and most important shia denominations do. That doesn't mean each person of those denominations has them personally.
than christianity, I don't know about judaism. It doesn't mean christianity doesn't have more problems than islam in other fields.
draw on what?
because the literal meaning of some coranic verses and hadiths is violent, and for centuries that was the official interpretation of them in most islamic denominations; these interpretations are still legal today, although if there's some new judgement in this subject, one may chose between the old and the new interpretation. Also, currently the law is mostly about taqlid, that is repeating what was already said by great jurists of yore, and anyway I honestly doubt that one can come up with an interpretation that strays much from the literal meaning.
I am doctoral student in arabic studies. That doesn't make me a great buff in islamic theology and jurisprudence, as my sphere of interest is classical history of islam, but it shows I have some basic knowledge in this subject. What qualifications do you have?
"I know nothing on this subject, but I'm sure I'm right"
your thinking rests on several assertions. I will discuss some of them.
Firstly, you do disagree with the thought that one may judge a religion by the actions of it's adherents, when it's about bad behaviour; but when it comes to "good" behaviour, you have no doubt that one may judge islam by it. You should make up your mind. You, and earlier others, were molesting me to show the quotes of Al-Qur'an etc that support violent actions; when I did, you demanded from me to show a link between these quotes and behaviour of some. Yet, making an analogical claim, but to the contrary, you didn't provide neither quotes of Al-Qur'an nor examples of practical application.
I don't expect you to, as I know you have little knowledge in this subject and apparent disability preventing you from using google (or whatever), but I'm informing you that there are such quotes and there are examples of their practical application. They concern only a couple of problems, though, mostly well treatment of dhimmis, and the dhimmi status is result of weighting the "bad quotes" against the "good" ones.
Secondly, certainly I agree that there is evidence that the vast number, bah, I dare to say almost all of muslims don't act as the extremists do. That doesn't mean that all of those that don't act as the extremist do disagree with them, though. Your assertion is that lack of action equals a conviction contrary to this action, which is wrong. Someone can agree with extremists in part or plainly, but that doesn't mean he will act as the extremists do. Also, he simply doesn't have to ask himself the questions the extremists do. I think that most people don't pose these questions to themselves, or avoid answering them, being busy with everyday life. I think it's also possible that extremists, active extremists, may be people of specific mental condition, people unusually sensitive for dissonances in their worldview. But it's just a thought. And another thing: some do not have a possibility to express their extremist views.
In general, I'm convinced that a group of people who - potentially or consciously - agrees with extremists, although does not act as they do, exists. But its number may vary from very significant to next to none depending on a country. If one found such a person among polish Tatars, I'd be surprised. But if this number wasn't significant in, say, Yemen, I'd be surprised as well.
I do believe that there's a significant number of more or less moderate muslims, not only in actions, but also in thinking. But it's not self-evident and if you want to use it as a proof for anything, I urge you to find some polls on this subject.
Your second assertion is that the essence of islam is something that is, or is not, responsible for the extremism. Again, one would have to define what this essence is. I already stated what I believe to be the very essence of islamic religion and that that's not where's the problem.
Your third assertion is that one may judge a religion only by its essence. We've already discussed about it.
Your fourth assertion is that the moderates understand (the essence of) their religion, and that they act according to it. If one defines the essence as I did, I see no bigger problem. But one may argue that the moderates indeed do not understand the essence of their religion, as they change the established understanding of this religion to fit some un-islamic worldview. If someone views shari'a as part of essence of islamic religion, he may claim that they're not muslim anymore, while claiming they are, which would mean that modernists, in the eyes of the traditionalists, do not understand the essence of the religion.
Also, moderates may be treaten as people well aware of that shari'a is part of essence of islam, but wanting to change it, disregard it anyway. That'd make them so-called hipocrites, munafiqun.
I will answer you with an (not very precise) quote of Marx, which I used in my thesis: it's singular people that create history, but never alone, but in the circumstances they are provided with. Human actors think for themselves, but it'd be silly to ignore the cultural influence on them. And, being even more precise, a religious person may think for his own, but he has some axioms delivered by his religion. Of course, it is different if one person is laicised and individualised, when his "religion" is more a matter of a cultural tradition, when he doesn't really devote himself to any particular denomination's beliefs and choses out of his holy books and his religion's teaching what he pleases. Then it's different, but it's a very modern, fresh phenomenom that didn't reach the muslim world in a way that could be compared to the progress it's made, say, in Europe.
Nowdays I'm pretty sure one could find a person who's against the Trinity and cult of saints, is all for abortion, doesn't consider letters of St Paul as part of New Testament, denies papal authority in the church, etc, but still would say he's a catholic, as he was baptised in this church.
Well, I'm not sure if such a person is a catholic nor if he understands the concept of catholicism.
The Seljuqs/Turkomans and Byzantines weren't at war because of religion...
It's true that on one level, yes, non-Christian groups were occupying Christian holy sites. But that wasn't a cause, although it was part of the story. That's like saying the Roman Empire fell because of the inherent problems in managing premodern states, especially large one - sure, that was part of it, but that doesn't say anything about why Rome fell the way it did. Similarly, control of Christian holy sites by Muslim authorities contributed to the Crusades - but it hardly made them inevitable, or necessary. Why make bones about the whole thing in the eleventh century, five hundred years after the fact? Because of millennialism, the Cluniac monastics, the Investiture controversy, and Italian power-politics.
I actually don't "know" what was the cause of seldjuk - byzantine war. And I'm not sure if one can say that there was only one cause. i think it's safe to say religious differences were part of them. For most parts, after all, Byzantines weren't fighting the sultan himself, but pesky turkish tribes that, for booty, for glory, for religious reasons, for good pastures for their lifestock, were invading Byzantium.
When it comes to crusades, as I've mentioned that was only one of the reasons, and an indirect one, as well as I acknowledged the role of cluniac movement etc in this phenomenon, so I don't know why you seem to think we do not agree in this subject.
onedreamer
Dragon
Here, I have highlighted the problem for you. Specifically, the problem seems to be Mass Media, the ignorance of people that work for Mass Media, and the consequent ignorance of people "educated" by Mass Media.
The subject of the thread is "Islam". Noun, singular.
Suddenly in your post, this subject, a religion, becomes a not better identified "they" and you blame on these unidentified people things that have nothing to do with religion and specifically Islam. I think that this "they" expresses very well the confusion that the majority brainwashed american people have in their heads about what is Islam, what is an arab person and what is a terrorist person. In fact, in these confused minds, these three very distinct subjects, "they", are actually all in one.
aelf
Ashen One
I don't think whether I can show off my qualification matters, since I believe there are logical arguments for my position which still stand.
Squonk said:
Your arrogance makes me laugh. I'm sorry if you can't seem to understand freaking arguments in English. I didn't say I was sure for nothing, but evidently you fail to comprehend what I was saying.
Squonk said:
Again, why do you get so very defensive? Who the heck is "molesting" you anyway? You mean pestering you for quotes from the Quran? I did no such thing, FYI. And since I didn't demand it of you, I don't see why I should provide quotes myself. In any case, surely I don't have to provide good quotes from the Quran. I thought you are a doctoral student of Islam! Whatever you are, you seem to have rather poor reasoning skills for all the blowing of your own horn.
As for your objection, not quite. I'm not looking to give Islam credit or blame for the actions of its believers per se. What I was trying to do is to disprove the claim that the essence of Islam is bad because you can trace the practice of reprehensible things by its believers to its essence, and I did so by showing that you could do the same with the practices of the moderates. I suppose I should instead have concluded clearly that this would result in contradictory claims, thereby making such arguments nonsensical, instead of trying to conclude that there is also evidence for the opposite. My bad. But I am nevertheless satisfied that this argument dissociates the actions of extremists from the essence of Islam, thereby preventing anyone from making the first claim.
Squonk said:
Fair enough. But as there is a lack of information to give certainty either way, neither can you use this to claim anything convincing about the question of whether a sizeable portion of the moderates agree with the extremists.
Squonk said:
I still don't need to define what it is. The question can be left up in the air and you still can't claim that the actions of some believers have any ramifications on the essence of Islam. And if the essence of Islam is not proven to be bad in any way, it would be quite useless to make any criticism on the nature of Islam itself. At most you could only criticise the state of the Islamic community.
Squonk said:
That seems kind of obvious
Your only real response has been to say that I haven't defined the essence of Islam and therefore you win by default, which seems to say nothing about why we can make any judgement about a religion itself without at least taking its essence into consideration.
Squonk said:
Well, if your response is to accuse the moderates of being hypocrites, then I have nothing to say. I'll only note that you have so far presented no evidence for such an assertion and have in fact admitted that more study needs to be done on the views of moderates. So I'll leave it at that.
Squonk said:
In Marxist thinking, it's a far cry from claiming that human actors act within their contexts and positing that a religion as an idea compels people to act in a certain way as if it has a life on its own. Cultural influences such as religion only define the context of individual actors as the manifestation of the will of the group. Human actors may or may not be collectively responsible (though I don't believe that they are), but it suffices to say that cultural influences such as religion cannot seriously be antromorphised and faulted.
What are they?
yeah, sure.
True, my mistake, you weren't in this thread yet when the quotes were demanded. But you did as for confirmation of that there are examples of modern usage of these quotes to limit the rights of non-muslims (which confirms your ignorance, because for shari'a, it doesn't matter if a law opinion was issued yesterday or in XIV century), and you did suggest that interpretation of these violent verses can overturn, neutralise their violent meaning. So my point stays. You claim that muslim law can neutralise the meaning of these words, but do not give evidence for it.
No you didn't, now you do, but you didn't at that point, as I didn't mention it earlier in this thread, you ridiculed me for thinking that CFC posters know less than me (in this subject), accused me of "ignoring the whole realm of islamic legal thought" (while, in fact, it's you who ignore it both by not knowing much about it and by denying its importance) or whatever, which I doubt you'd do if you knew that etc, suggested I am possibly very ignorant in this subject at another occasion.
Don't pretend to be "submitting to my superior knowledge" or whatever in this case, if you don't do it in another, anyway.
I didn't claim that one can trace the practice of reprehensible things by its believers to its essence, Au contraire, I clearly stated that the essence of islam in the way I'm seeing it (5 pillars) is not bad at all.
By saying "I did so by showing you could do the same" and "saying there is also evidence to the opposite" you seem to accept the notion that one can actually trace the bad things to the essence of islam.
But I know you don't want to claim that actually, that this and your earlier refering to Al-Qur'an as "old (and irrelevant) passages" does not mean you have some repressed bias against islam, you just experience difficulties expressing yourself clearly.
You claim that "this would result in contradictory claims, thereby making such arguments nonsensical". Here, your assumptions are
1) that these claims are contradictory,
which seems to rest on two more assumptions:
2) that "the essence" is one unit or several perfectly harmonic units, rather than several ones that can not match perfectly
3) that there can be only one interpretation of this essence
and, as it seems, also
4) that religious beliefs of "moderates" and "extremists" are different
which comes from
5) different behaviour comes from different convictions
Even if you don't need to, please do it for me
No, you really do
otherwise, how do you want to test it if it's "bad in any way"?
You've just agreed that you can't prove either way judging on actions of islam's followers.
That seems kind of obvious
It depends, also on how do you define essence.
Is essence ALL we can say about a religion, or rather the most important bits of it? If it's the first thing, why is it called essence. And if it's the second thing, there can be said something about islam that isn't part of essence of islam.
(btw, it's only now I realised that indeed my definition of essence of islam is bad if one would have to make it encompass all muslim groups, but I'm not sure of it)
Also, as I've mentioned, the essence doesn't have to be a perfect unity, nor does it have to have one interpretation. And surely muslims have different ideas what the essence of islam is.
And if you mean by essence "what every muslim agrees on", what rests is that the essence of islam is "submitting to God", which doesn't really mean anything without stating what's the God's will. One may - although only after ignoring some of most heterodoxical, extinct muslim groups - claim that "and Muhammad is God's prophet"
is also part of the essence. But that also doesn't really mean anything unless we know what's the word of God transmitted by Muhammad. And you'd agree that the words are nothing without interpretation... and the interpretations are in ash-shari'a (although they're often mixed with interpretations of hadiths)
How can we "take its essence into consideration" when we don't know what is it?
I only claim that such voices may occur, and they do, and there's some logic in them, although their premises are a matter of discussion.
Do you think the religion is a "manifestation of the will of the group"? It implies that the will of the group is one, that the adherents of an religion (unless you mean actual, full followers) always agree with it, it denies any importance to the holy scriptures of a book etc.
A similar claim about holy books would be even sillier, taken into account that they could, at best, manifest the will of the group that existed when they were created.
Also, indeed, Jesus' teachings were manifestation of the will of the group (of people he lived in), so this group killed him for manifesting their will...
and yes, I do believe religion, as any other ideology, or thought, can be faulted, and that doesn't equal their antropomorphisation.
I think Al-Aziz' near destruction of the Holy Sepulcher was also significant.
Wasn't that al-Hakim? Anyway, that was eighty years prior, and at the time nobody gave a damn; not the Byzantines, who were engaged in destroying the Kometopoulan empire, and certainly not the Papacy or Western Christians.
oops' one caliph off, you're right
Perhaps it wasn't a major reasons that Urban 2 ended up declaring a crusade but doubtless it helped motivate the errantry of Europe to avenge the honor of the Christ.
I'm pretty sure it was more the promise of rewards in heaven, where remission of sins was offered to any who might die in the undertaking which did it. I mean those medieval lord dudes tended to be pretty sinful guys, and they loved chaotic warfare, even though they knew that the barbaric sport which they loved was putting their souls in damnation - that's why they got multitude of monks praying for their souls. An opportunity to war while having their souls saved was win-win for them.
