Sometimes I am brought up short by the clarity and courage with which someone else — with more to lose than I have — states a truth. I am a Catholic Christian, who often dismisses “secular humanists”. But I’m in awe of people like Canada’s Irshad Manji, the “Muslim refusenik”, who had the courage in her book The Trouble with Islam
Another is Wafa Sultan, an Arab woman practising psychology, now living in the States. A self-professed “disbeliever in the supernatural”, she has posted essays on the Internet in Arabic, including research into the fate of women under various Islamic regimes. She has willingly and ably confronted Muslim fanatics on Arab TV, most recently on Feb. 21st, when she debated Dr Ibrahim Al-Khouli on Al-Jazeera. A transcript and video clips with English subtitles were made available this week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (“Memri”) — an indispensable institution, based in Israel, that distributes hard information and accurate translations of documents from the Arab world. (It is useless to condemn it as “Zionist” — everything Memri publishes is sourced and checkable.)
. . . more
I was reading the Turkish on-line newspaper, The New Anatolian, for the Rashoman-like experience of seeing the same events decribed from vastly different points of view. I was surprised, but pleased to to read a commentary by Turkish columnist Recep Guvelioglu, calling for greater and understanding dialogue between Christianity and Islam.
Recep Guvelioglu writes:
http://www.thenewanatolian.com/opinion-2613.html
There are moderate Muslims out there. If we are to be true to our duty as Christians to be healers and peacemakers, we need to seek out Muslims like Mr. Guvelioglu and join the dialogue he proposes. The obstacles are formidable; there are a lot of haters and extremists who will do everything they can to prevent such a discussion.
The alternative however is rising hatred and animosity leading to mutual destruction. It may be the dream of religiious bigots like Franklin Graham to hasten the end of the world, and the coming of his Millenialist fantasy, with cascading eruptions of nuclear weapons enveloping the earth in a radioactive shroud. That is not the dream of true Christians however, who believe, as Jesus taught, that we should seek peace and not destruction.
All Muslims think that women are deficient in intellect
There are no Muslims who can with intellectual consistency and integrity reject the hadith (teachings of Mohammed) that has been accepted by all schols of Islam which teach that women are “deficient in intellect.”
There are no Muslims who can with intellectual consistency and integrity reject the premise that Mohammed’s life was without blemish, that he was the “perfect man” and that he is the model for all.
There are no Muslims who can with intellectual consistency and integrity reject the premise that Allah told Mohammed to wage war for the spread of Islam until the world was related.
Jews and Christians have learned to live together, Muslims need to learn the same thing
The history of Jewish/Christian relations has included some shameful events, however, at least in America. Jews and Christians have learned to live together.
I would like to see the beginning of the same kind of accommodation from the Muslims. They can start with the religious minorities in their countries.
There is no type of Muslim would could accept the concept of God assuming human form, as in our Lord Jesus. Given that, they may talk all they want about worshipping the same God, but, they do not. Sorry Pope Benedict. We do not worship the same God unless those Gods have the same characteristic.
Allah does not have the same characteristic with the Trinity. Given that WE DO NOT WORSHIP THE SAME GOD.
It is not helpful to blur this distinction because it has the result of demoting Christ from his rightful place. Demote Christ to a prohet and you are a Muslim (or close to it.)
As I said, Jews and Christians have found a way to live together in America without compromising their religious integrity. Muslims need to learn to get along in the 21st century. They have a long way to go.
Peace with Muslims by betraying our people
Historically the West has bought peace with Muslims by agreeing to look the other way when Christians and religious minorities in Muslim lands were persecuted cruelly. I am not willing to support peace with Islam on this basis, or on the basis of the denial of the truth of the Gospel, the Divinity of Jesus or the rights of women. Time for Islam to change.
Today in Afghanistan a Muslim who converted to Christianity is on trial for his life
Aren’t you glad we “all worship the same God.”
Today, in Afghanistan, a Muslim man born and raised in the country, has openly converted to Christianity and he had been brought to trial and faces death under sharia law.
A female journalist was jailed for printing articles critical of the criminal code of sharia ( stonings for women accused of adultery in particular) is in jail.
I thought peace for Muslims means submission?
JBL, interesting comment. If I knew Arabic, I would investigate the vocabulary used by the Koran and other writings used to describe relations with non-Muslims. It may very well be that the word used for “peace” in such a context has just such a connotation.
Anyone out there know enough Arabic to prove or disprove my hunch?
Bill C., If you don’t know dhimmitude you don’t know Islam
Suggested reading:
Bat Ye’or —-Islam and Dhimmitude
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0838639437/ref=pd_sim_b_3/002-4760282-9369611?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
Rober Spencer—PC Guide to Islam
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895260131/ref=pd_sim_b_3/002-4760282-9369611?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155
Elizabeth Ann Myer—Islam and Human Rights
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0813335043/qid=1142802614/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-4760282-9369611?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
Bill C. Interpreting the Koran
Language
Bill, the Koran is written an a medieval form of Arabic which few people speak today. Consequently, very few Muslims have really studied in the Koran in a meaningful way, but, many have memorized the words. Note, Christopher Luxembourg, is the pseudonym of a Swiss ancient language scholar who believes that what is considered the Koran is actually written in Syriac, a closely related ancient language. His life is under threat and he cannot live freely.
Organization (or the lack there of ) of the Koran
The Koran is composed of chapter called Suras. The Suras are arranged with the shortest Sura first and the longest Sura last. Therefore, the Koran is not a book that contains a narrative starting at one point in time and continuing to a later point in time. The Koran is a collection of words which Muslim believe where spoken by the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed. Gabriel is understood to have directly conveyed the actual syllables used by Allah.
Suras relate to a specific event in time
The message Muslims think is conveyed by the Angle Gabriel were delivered in response to a certain event in early Muslim history. For instance, if Mohammed was tired or confused after a long day butchering his enemies and seizing their women, he could ask for guidance and Gabriel would obligingly provide it.
TopicsThe topics covered by the Koran are confusing. One Sura will talk about how to conduct a court hearing and how the testimony of witnesses will be treated. Women’s testimony being half the value of men’s. Other parts will be general exhortations to kill the enemies of Allah. These exhortations often popped up just as Mohammed was planning another military campaign. Other sections instruct men that they are favored by Allah, can have up to four wives or any female slave in their household and they can “scourge” their wives if they are disobedient.
AbrogationLater messages from Allah abrogated or cancel earlier messages from Allah. One famous quote from the Koran is “there is no compulsion in religion.” This allows apologists to claim that the Koran promotes tolerance. But in fact that section has been abrogated by later sections. The Koran does make clear that the penalty for blasphemy or apostasy is death.
Episodic Nature
Each sura was delivered by Gabriel at a different time in Mohammed’s glorious career as a war lord. Mohammed would frequently resort to Gabriel with his troops were getting rest less and he needed some buttressing of his power.
Therefore, it is truly impossible to understand the Koran by simply reading it front to back, it will make no sense.
Full understanding, need Iqbal and the Hadith
A full understanding of Islamic doctrine requires not only the Koran, but the hadith and Iqbal biography of Mohammed. The Hadith are collections of sayings of Mohammed and stories of his life. There are six volumes of these things. Most of Islamic life is taken from the Hadith. I have a translated copy of one of collection of the Hadith and believe me it is trully a bizarre. Six volumes of ignorant nonsense lacking in any beauty. Anyone reading this stuff has to recognize that Mohammed was just a very determined narcissist with a good command of guerlla warfare.
Reading the Koran OR how not to make friends with a Muslim
Right now Bill you are simply an unclean infidel. You have the benefit of ignorance, not much of a benefit, but it is something. If you read the Koran in an effort to be truly multi-cultural and you tell a Muslim that you have read the Koran, you could be in trouble. Now you have been informed of the teachings of Allah, you simple refusal to convert makes you a willful and knowing rejector of Allah. One American contractor in Saudi Arabia may have fallen afoul of this. He had lived in S.A. for decades and had made Saudi friends. In an effort to get along he read the Koran and told his Saudi friends he had read the Koran. They ended up beheading him.
Bill C. Arabic difficult to learn by Westerners
Arabic is difficult for Westerners to learn because there are so many words with multiple, unrelated meanings. The same word can be a verb in one sentence and a noun in another.The verb and the noun can refer to completely different things. The native reader can make the adjustment and put the correct meaning on the word, but the non-native reader has a hard time until he has studied for quite a few years.
The spoken Arabic word is hard for Westerners to understand because Arabic uses vowels more frequently than English does. The spoken word is a balance between consonants which cut off the flow of air and define beginnings and endings of sounds and vowels which allow air to flow out of the mouth in a conintuous sound.
Some people joke that German and Polish have too many consonants and that Arabic has too many vowels.
Good luck on the that interpretation thing, Bill. Westernizers whose knowledge and truthfulness that I trust have told me that the original Arabic of the Koran is much, much harsher than the usual English translation.
Missourian, this exchange puts me in mind of a Palestinian I spoke with once who said that he could live very well as a Christian in modern-day Jordan. I wish now that I had said, “That’s because you’re already conditioned for dhimmitude. I’m conditioned by the American Constitution and I’m just not wired that way.”
Thanks for the heads-up on not publicizing one’s non-believing knowledge of the Koran. It is tragic that the contractor you mentioned might have died just for trying to understand his neighbors. There is no room in Islam for toleration, only for domination.
I have some experience with biblical languages from my time at St. Vlad’s, enough to know that English translations often miss the intended sense of the original texts. Your posts reinforce my hunch that the same is true with the Koran. What if America knew what it really said?
Bill wrote,
Yes and no. Life for a Christian in Jordan is, of course, not on par with life in the United States. (Well, taxes are lower in Jordan, but that is a different discussion.) However, for the region, life in Jordan is quite good for a Christian, particularly compared with life in Iraq or the PA. While your friend in Jordan may not be looking at the situation the same as a citizen of the most powerful nation on Earth, he is not at all insane or somehow intellectually inferior. The Hashemite Kingdom is not such a bad place to be a Christian, considering the neigborhood standards.
Which only leads one to ponder exactly how low those standards really are, and why the West has done exactly zero to raise them.
One thing I would interject here is this simple observation. “Secular humanism” is a bad thing in Western societies. It causes people to reject God, and to turn to alternative methods of organizing society that result in nasty things like Communism.
However, “secular humanism” is a good thing to export to the Muslim nations. The more secular in the Middle East, the better. Secular regimes (with the unfortunate exception of Turkey) tend to provide more freedom for Christians than do regimes like Saudi Arabia or Iran.
However, members of the right-wing establishment in the United States seem to be allergic to ‘secularists’ in Muslim nations, and somehow (I don’t get this) drawn to working with ‘people of faith.’ If Allah is your guide to faith through Muhammad, then I’d rather work with the committed Marxist. He is bound to be more reasonable.
However, time and again, religious conservatives end up supporting Islamists out of some kind of fear of secularism. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander. Simply because we want to hang onto our Christian heritage, does not mean that we don’t need to encourage Muslims to jettison theirs.
In fact, the future of the world depends on exactly that. I would much prefer to have a committed policy of encouraging secular, even socialist, states in the Muslim world than one predicated on the idea we can get along with Muslim radicals in power.
Bill C., About Christopher Luxembourg
Luxembourg is an interesting guy. Here he is an unasuming Swiss language nerd. I use the term “nerd” with affection. I consider myself a nerd. High IQ guy who is fascinated with ancient languages and probably lives in a library. He is studying a fairly obscure topic by modern Western standards.
His theory, which he has previewed in a very obscure philogical journal, is that the Koran is not written in ancient Arabic, but, rather in Syriac. The two languages apparently were very simliar and overlapped to a large extent.
This is significant because scholars of Arabic will tell you that there are parts of the Koran that make absolutelly no sense. In other words, there are passages in the manuscripts for which no one can put together a complete sentence or thought. HOWEVER, it you read those same ancient manuscripts assuming that they are written in Syriac rather than ancient Arabic, those passages become intelligible.
There can’t be very many people who can look at those old manuscripts and compare interpretations between Syriac and Arabic. Obviously, if Luxembourg were to prove this to the satisfaction of the world’s scholars, Islam is a sinking ship.
It is something like the Mormons who have a real problem on their hands. Their founder claimed that Native Americans were the descents of some branch of the tribes of Israel. Given that we now have knowledge about DNA, this is a testable hypothesis. Native Americans do not share genes with Jews, they share genes with Asian people. It is pretty well established that they migrated across Alaska and down into the lower 48 from Asia.
Anyway, I think a very big volcano is about to blow and I frequently end my comments here with the phrase “heaven help us.”
Bill C. Christians in Jordan
Robert Spencer has reported on the hardships of living as a Christian in Jordan. One Christian woman lost custody of her children after her husband died. The Court awarded custody of her Christian children to a Muslim relative of her husband. She is fighting that in the Courts but Jordan favors Muslim custody for children. Nice. Huh.
You are familiar with Robert Spencer’s Jihadwatch.com?
Missourian:
Do you have a more detailed reference for Luxembourg’s work?
Ibn Warraq (pseudo. He is a dissident Muslim writer who promotes secular humanism) has an interesting section on the formation of the Koran in his book “Why I’m not a Muslim”. (He also has a more detailed examination of the Koran in “Origins of the Koran”) Where there is detailed discussion on the issues with the Koran over, foreign vocabulary, variant versions, readings, etc.
JBL Luxenberg Reference with Correct English Spelling
Just Google for “Christoph Luxenburg” Here is one reference to his article.
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Text/luxreview1.html
Let’s stop being so despondent!
Remember: “I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it”(Matthew 16:18) I’m not an intellect or anything like that but those are powerful words, a promise from God! I live in a country that’s surrounded by 280,000,000 Muslims and on Sunday morning the church bells still toll, the churches are packed. After 2,000 years, we’re still here! The best way to confront Islam is to fill our churches. This is spiritual warfare! So instead of arguing about Islam maybe we should start practicing Christianity and hold on to God”s promise.
Tony, Point Taken
Thanks, Tony, good point taken. I don’t want to spread doom and gloom but what we here in the U.S. encounter is a refusal to confront the truth of Islamic history. There is a very strong and well funded movement to whitewash Islam’s history.
People often respond to my comments with the observation that persons calling themselves Christian have also committed crimes and some of them have claimed to have been acting for Christ. This is true in various times of history, the difference Tony is that the West has acknowledged these events openly and truthfully. The Muslims haven’t openly acknowledged their comparable acts.
The West is now complicit in the oppression of wome and Christian in Afghanistan, yes, Afghanstan, the land Bush claims to have liberated is subject to sharia law and a Christian convert from Islam had been arrested for converting. Americans need to know what is being done in their name.
Assyrian Christians are under seige in Iraq.
Tony, let me give you one more example. Quite a few years ago I contacted a member of the United Methodist Church who was involved in “outreach” to Muslims and I asked her if she understood that the Quaran authorizes men to beat their wives. She didn’t have a clue, not a clue and she was shocked. She had been led to believe that anything negative about Islam was purely the result of scurrilous, ignorant prejudice. I had to give her the direct reference to the text.
Americans cannot formulate policy unless they the truth.
Missourian wrote,
Give that lady a prize! That is the critical point! Bat Ye’or also dealt with it in one of her books. She said that people often said things to her like, “But what about the Christian persecution of Jews?” She would respond, “And who is excusing that or justifying it?”
“Well, no one,” would be the reply, outside of a gaggle of wingnuts that no one takes seriously.
Bat would then reply, “Then why should I waste time condemning something like the Inquisition that is already universally condemned?”
I think about that all the time. Yes, Christians did horrendous things in the past. But who is standing up saying, “Burn more witches!” or “Bring back the Scarlet Letter!”
No one. No one that I know of, at any rate. Even the nuttiest of the pre-millenial dispensationalists, on their worst day off their meds, could conceive of, let alone execute, the kind of routine horrors that we take for granted in the Muslim world. I would live in the deepest Baptist enclave on the planet and walk unafraid, whether I was black or white, Hindu or Muslim, I would be perfectly safe. They might try to convert me, they might bring me food and invite me to church, but no one is going to beat me, pour acid on my wife, or any of the other things.
Islam and Christianity can not be compared in this manner, and shouldn’t be.
Missourian,
I know exactly what you’re talking about because I live in Cyprus. We have tested and tasted the Muslims for many centuries. That’s why it has been very difficult for us to understand Western support for a large Muslim country(Turkey,70 million) and ignore the plight of a small country like mine (1/2 million), which both historically and culturally belong to the wider scope of western civilization. You see we’ve been hammered by the ‘west’ (crusaders, British) and the ‘east’ (Arabs,Ottomans, New Turks). Nobody recognized us as ‘front-line Christians” and that it was a matter of time before Islam would metastisize to the west.
Tony,
Did you read the article that Fr. Jacobse posted about the Cyrprus? It was written by a Greek Cypriot who had a chance to travel through the area of the island occupied by Turkey. He sadly recounted how ancient churches and monastery buildings had been trashed, destroyed and abused. Had anything similar happened to Muslim sites of any kind, let alone sites containing priceless ancient artifacts, all heck would have broken loose. Actually, it did, remember the brou-ha-ha over the Baghdad museum? It turned out that the losses were minor and that any thefts were inside jobs by museum employees. However, the world simply howled at the thought that anything in the Baghdad museum might have been damaged. The answer is that Muslims hold anything and everything preceding Mohamed in contempt. They believe they are fully within their rights to destroy the Christian Churches, Buddhist statutes, Hindu temples, even if they are historical/cultural treasures.
We need a new expression “clueless as an Anglican Bishop.”
Here is another alarming quote from a Very Clueless Anglican Bishop
Marine ventues into “deepest Baptist enclave.”
Glen, I commend you for venturing into the “deepest Baptist enclave.” There are real dangers there. Some of the church ladies have mastered scrumptious varieties of fried chicken, corn pone and homemade chocolate cake that will pile on the pounds in no time. Luckily, you could rely on your Marine Corps training. I would just have to eat my way out.
Please note the ladies of the Orthodox Church are masters of the culinary arts in their own right. Our local Greek Festival hosted by the Greek Orthodox provides an amazing smorgasbord (sorry, the Swedish term fits) of homemade delights guaranteed to overcome anyone’s self-discipline. What was that about fasting anyway?
The question I would like to pose is this: Are the disturbing examples of behavior by Muslims that we have discussed (misogeny, suicide bombings, cultrual intolerance, hatred and anger) intrinsic to the teachings of the Islamic faith? Or are they the result of a fundamentalist backlash by certain segments of the Islamic world that have resulted in harsh and intolerant sects or subsets within that faith?
During the late middle ages, the Arab world far outstripped western Europe in terms of learning and intellectual development. Arab scholars translated ancient Greek philosophy into Arabic, for example, centuries before western Europeans. It was contact by the Crusaders with the Arab world the helped pull western Europe out of the darkness of the Middle Ages as returning pligims brought back not just spices and silk, but intellectual tools such as Arabic numerals.
But something happened in the Arab world after the Crusades. As Europeans sprinted ahead in subsequent centuries in terms of trade, economics and scientific advancement, the Arab world fell into an insular backwardness and reflexive anti-intellectual conservatism. During the later half of the twentieth century growing Islamic fundamentalism was fed by fear of Western secular society which was seen as corrupting and threatening to islamic identity, and anger over western economic and political imperialism in the middle-east.
Fundamentalism is a phenomenon that is not limited to Islam, but found in Christianity and Judaism as well. Karen Armstrong, Author of “Tha Battle for God” writes in the introduction to that book:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/armstrong-battle.html
If Islamic radicalism and militancy is the result of a rise in fundamentalism, and the rise fundamentalism is itself a backlash to perceived threats from the outside world, than it would seem that combatting Islamic radicalism with additional threats directed at their faith as a whole, would seem to be like fighting fire with gasoline.
Dean is precising and exactly wrong, there is no such thing as “fundamentalism” in Islam, fundamentalism is, itself, a Western concept
There has never been a “kinder, gentler” Islam. Osama Bin Laden is able to attrack so many followers precisely because he can invoke so many passage in “sacred” Islamic literature and the example of the LIfe of the Mohammed
Significance of the Life of Mohammed
What Dean ignores and what no Muslim would ignore is that Mohammed is considered to be the “perfect man” and his deeds, all his deeds, are forever considered proper, pleasing to God, and worthy of imitation. This, by itself, means that there never was a “kinder, gentler” Islam. Iqbal is the author of a biography of Mohammed which is held in near sacred regard. Every single thing that Mohammed did is considered above reproach. If you were to criticize the assasinations, rapes and torture direatly conducted by Mohammed or authorized by him in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia or other Muslim countries you would be arrested, possibly put to death for blasphemy.
A Muslim cannot criticize the practice of polygamy without committing blasphemy and “insulting the Prophet (sic) because the Prophet (sic) had 11 wives and allowed others four wives. No Muslim may criticize this and every Muslim is duty bound to work for the imposition of Sharia law wherever he lives. Any Muslim who does not work for the imposition of Sharia law is an apostate. Islam is sharia and sharia is Islam.
Closing of Sunni Interpretation
What “happened” to Islam is a codification of Sunni interpretation in the 11th Century. The author of this article is not well informed or he or she is seeking to deceive. This is why. In the 11th Century the Mohammedan empire ranged over all of North Africa and the Middle East. The Sunni Caliph was both a military and religious leader. He noted a divergence of interpretations by various clerics and ordered a convocation. The purpose of the convocation was to “end interpretation.” Essentially a consensus was reached on major theological tenets and these tenets became the official teaching of Sunni Islam.
Even with so-called “divergent” interpretations there never was an Islam in which women were not “tilth”
Mohammed taught that “women were deficient in intellect.” Mohammed told Muslim men to treat their wives as farmers treat a fertile field, “tilth.” There is no concept of companiate marriage in Islam. Men and women are not, emphasis, not deemed to be partners in a marriage. A marriage consists of a household headed by a man and it contains up to four women. The women are subject to corporal punishment by that single man. They may be divorced at any time, for any reason by their “husband.” They are concubines rather than wives in the Christian sense. There has never been a teaching in Islam that a husband and a wife become one upon marriage. There is no teaching of mutually sacrificial, exclusive and life-long love in Islam. The strongest family ties in Islam is between a parent and a child, not a husband and a “wife.” No one in the Muslim world may challenged this teaching without risking death. The teaching has been unchanged since Mo walked the earth. It has NOTHING WHAT SO EVER TO DO WITH WESTERN INFLUENCE. Mohammed built his harem and constructed his prison for women before he died. The Koran states in Chapter 4:34 that “man are superior to women.” Men are to direct women’s lives. Mohammed also taught that most of the people in Hades were women.
No Dean, the West did not cause the harsh teachings of Mohammed. Mohammed caused the harsh teachings of Mohammed. They are found forever codified in the Koran, nothing we do will change that, nothing we did caused that.
Missourian –
Ah yes, fried chicken. My favorite, just not this time of year. Christian fundamentalists have their problems, but interpersonal violence is definitely not high on the list. That is one reason why no one worries about insulting them. It’s a safe sport, since they usually just pray for you. I hear about people getting death threats for saying anti-Christian things, but I don’t take them seriously. There are nuts out there, but they are shunned and pushed aside, not held up as role models.
Dean wrote,
Those were Greek, Assyrian, Syrian, Aramean, Coptic, and Hindu scholars that were responsible for translating into Arabic. Read St. John of Damascus, for example. The learning that Arab societies exhibited was the learning of the societies the Muslim armies captured. Arabia was pretty much the same then as it is today – arid and worthless.
The Arabs were parasites who ruled as a militaristic hierarchy. The ‘decline’ of the Muslim Umma perfectly tracks the increasing conversion of the captive populations to Islam. The fewer the Christians under their control, the greater the intellectual and economic poverty became. The Ottoman Empire always needed the Greek merchants and financiers to run its business. When it up and killed or drove them all out, the result has been modern Turkey and its laughing stock currency and horrible finances.
You can’t compare the Arabic and Turkic Empires with their fabulously wealthy captive populations with the Germanic peoples of Western Europe. If you compare the Arabs, for example, who remained in Arabia with the Germanic tribes of Western Europe – that would be a fair comparison. And the Franks, Lombards, and Teutons come out very favorable in that comparison indeed.
I just don’t get it, Dean. After all the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Muslims, why are you so anxious to give them a pass? I certainly don’t advocate killing Muslims because they are Muslims, and I have argued against the Iraq War and its civilian casualties. I don’t wish to invade Muslim nations, or anything of the sort. But at the same time, I don’t underestimate the threat that Islam poses to the West.
You can tell the truth about Islam and its current wretched state without advocating massive violence. The two aren’t linked.
If the Koran is sacred, women are objects
Misogynist teachings come directly from the immutable Koran augmented by the Hadith. BOTH the Koran and the Hadith had been reduced to writing and the sacred (sic) texts agreed upon long before the Crusades or even significant Western influence on Islam.
Sura 4:34 sets out the basic relationship between men and women and defines what passes for a Muslim “marriage.” This is undisputed and simply not the subject of interpretation, never has been. The Sura opens with the statement that men are favored by God and are in charge in women’s lives. If follows up with the statement that men can have four free women as “wives” and any slave woman owned by the man may be sexually exploited. This is very concrete language using every day words. There is nothing poetic or ambiguous about it. It is very direct. The word used to describe the beating that a woman may receive from a man is “scourge.”
Let me repeat. If you believe that the Koran is sacred, you have to believe that God directly told men that they could own and sexually exploit as many slave girls as they wanted to. God directly condoned and approved of the treatment of women as property and sex objects. Direct from the Koran, Dean, direct.
Karen Armstrong is no Light to Guide
Armstrong is generally understood to be a Muslim apologist.
Sadly, she joined a Roman Catholic convent at an early age and had a terrible time there. She literally hates Christianity. She lives to undermine it. I have read the book she wrote about her time at the convent. If her book is true, she was abused by the convent authorities. However, it was America and last time I looked no one could force you to stay in a convent against your will.
I have heard her speak at various meetings in various settings. She is a total syncretist as long as it doesn’t involve orthodox Christianity. At Fuller Theological Union she gave a speech in which she found something to praise about every major religious tradition except Christianity. She has publicly condemned Christianity for claiming that salvation is exclusively through Christ. However, Muslims do claim that only those who acknowledge Mohammed’s prophethood will be saved from Hell. This remains outside her disapproval.
She is constantly hired by Islamic organizations to act as a spokeswoman to explain Islam to the West. In her history of religion, military brutality of Muslims is “placed in context” of the day and is found to be “not so bad.” Comparable military brutality of Christian armies of the same medieval era is considered to be crime against humanity.
She discussed but does not condemn the mass murder of the Quayish tribe by Mohammed. Mohammed had 400 Q uayish men and boys lined up in front of a ditch, he proceeded to behead each of these unarmed and helpless prisoners of war. Karen Armstrong has never criticized this act. She merely explains that Mohammed considered himself to be executing “traitors.” But Mohammed defined “traitor” as anyone who didn’t bow to him as the “Last Prophet.”
Really, Dean, you need to do more reading and be a little less credulous.
NYT got it wrong all through the Cold War
Remember that NYT keep Walter Duranty on staff all through the Stalinist era. they printed his lies about life in Russia as truth. Documents available today show that Duranty knew of the Ukrainian forced famine but hid it from his readers in the NYT.
How can you take anything these people print seriously?
Eleven million Black African slaves fopr the glory of Allah
Dean, before the Crusades began, the Ummayad and Abbassid Muslim empires captured and enslaved 11 million black african slaves. Many of the men were crudely mutilated into eunuchs and forced to fight in the Muslim conquest of India. The women were enslaved into concubinage, their bodies and their children reduced to property. This was done in the name of Allah and for his glory.
How could you assert with a straight face that the brutal and bloody conquest of the INdus Valley was the result of anything but the desire for conquest which exists as the template of their warrior Prophet (sic)
Liberal principle, third world peoples and cultures are moral zeroes, they are never responsible for their own behavior. There behavior is always the result of something we do.
Note 28. On Karen Armstrong:
A Liberal Definition of Fundamentalism
Note 29. The NYT still refuses to disclose the full truth about Walter Duranty. He received a Pulitizer Prize for his flawed reporting on Soviet Russia and there is movement to have it rescinded. Duranty willingly hid the truth from his readership. He has been thoroughly discredited although the NYT still refuses to acknowledge his malfeasance.
Glen – I’m not trying to give Muslims a pass, but exploring the best strategy for dealing with them. As you see I listed some of the worst features of Islam that we see today (misogeny, suicide bombings, cultrual intolerance, hatred and anger). The best way to overcome an adversary is to understand the way they think and be able to anticpate their reactions. So if we want to overcome Islamic radicalism it’s important to know what drives and feeds that movement.
Yes, Greeks suffered at the hands of the Turks, but you know what, they were not a weak race of victims and often gave as good as they got. After Bishop Germanos raised the Greek flag, and declared independence on March 25th 1821, one of the war cries that followed was “Not a Turk will be left in Morea (Peleponesus, southern Greece)”. Able to fulfill that promise because the Turkish garrisons were empty, the Greek revolutionaries put roughly 20,000 Muslim noncombattants to death in a matter of weeks. The Turks responded with the slaughter or enslavement of nearly 90,000 Greeks on the island of Chios.
During the Balkan Wars of 1912-1914 Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian forces drove into Macedonia scrambling for territory, and ethnic cleansing operations sent thousands of fleeing Turkish refugees streaming eastward. The Turks responded by attacking Greek villages along the Sea of Marmara and northwest Anatolia, sending thousands of Greek refugees westward.
In 1922 Greek troops occupied Smyrna and drove eastward scoring many impressive victories over a Turkish Army weakened by years of fighting against the British, Anzacs and Russians during WWI. It’s astonishing to look at a map of Turkey and see how far the Greek troops were able to advance. But they became too thinly stretched over a 400-mile front and eventaually Attaturk’s army was able to punch holes in the Greek lines and win victories through encirclement and envelopment. The retreating Greeks pursued a scorched earth policy and generally terrorized or killed any Turkish civilians they came into contact with. Once again, the Turks exacted their revenge by burning Smyrna and killing or driving out its Greek and Armenian inhabitants.
While most Greeks prefer not to even think about this war because it was a defeat, it left the Turkish national psyche so traumatized that they refer to it to this day as their war of independence. Greeks appear as the villain and boogeyman in all the Turkish history books, just as Turks are the principal evil-doer in any Greek history book.
So what we have here is less a story of one-side aggression and more a two-sided story of tit-for-tat aggression, in which each side focuses on the shocking evil of the atrocities committed by the other side, while ignoring or rationalizing any atrocities they themselves committed. This is a story that seems to me could go on and on with unfortunate results as we dwell on the past, or hopefully could be ended if we make an attempt to understand the other side and work towards a more peaceful future.
Everyone asks what we can do about islam. Well, I read in a book about Father Paisios from Holy Mount, and he quoted a Saint who said that Islam will be defeated through its women! And he gave a missionary calling to all Christian women to present Christ! You cannot bash Islam and expect results. You don’t take a blind man’s cane away; you give him sight and then he throws the cane away himself.
Toni, Dean, the hallmark of our civilization is anathema to theirs
The West needs to pull its head out of the sand and take Islam at its word. Islam openly states that it is a “complete way of life” that supplants everything else, the goal is to spread this totalitarian political/religious system across the world. They have told us this many times. We need to face the real problem, the real conflict.
Freedom of thought is truly unthinkable in Islam. This is not slander, this is the fact of life in Indonesia for example. Indonesia today will prosecute anyone who remotely criticizes any aspect of Islam, its history or its prophet (sic).
This was announced this week by the Indonesian government. Freedom of thought is the hallmark of our civilization and one of its greatest achievements. Freedom of thought is anathema to them.
Unfortunately, the history of the West is filled with disgraceful betrayals of Christian minorities in Muslim lands. United and determined the West cannot be defeated. It simply cannot. The only force that can destroy our civilization is our own unwillingness to stand up for it.
I am not suggesting violence, but, I am suggesting that when a man is imprisoned in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity that something happens. Something adverse must happen to Afghanistan. They must fear adverse world opinion, they must fear the loss of aid, something. Please something other than supine hand-wringing.
We have been royally betrayed by the very elites who should, now, be coming to the defense of the civilization. The insanity at Yale is direct proof that academia is the preserve of the enemies of America and its highest principles.
We are many steps behind where we should be and the long is getting later and later.
#26. Glen is correct. The recovery by the West of the intellectual traditions preserved by Muslim scholars midway through the Middle Ages (let’s get the chronology right) was a recovery of what had always been of the West, not of Islam. It is striking to see what happened when Western civilization reappropriated Aristotle, for instance. A case could be made, I think, that the flowering of culture (including science) in the High Middle Ages formed the real foundation of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment.
Did Islamic civilization experience a similar wholesale intellectual realignment? I think not. Islam may have preserved the texts of the Western and other traditions, but it did not truly assimilate them. If it had, perhaps the West would be jealously trying to play catch-up with Islam today, instead of the other way around.
But hasn’t Islam always been trying to catch up? Has it ever had a self-sustaining principle of growth independent of violent coercion?
Bill, monks also preserved ancient manuscripts
Monks in Ireland and other parts of Europe preserved ancient manuscripts and knowledge of the Hellenic world. Muslims are now trying to claim that our entire knowledge of the Hellenic/Roman/Classical world was delivered to us through them.
There is an active taquiyya campaign to appropriate all history for Islam. Muslims have claimed that indigenous native Canadians were descended from Muslims sailors. Muslims have claimed that Australias aboriginal population was actually descendent of Muslims from India. They have also tried to claim that Columbus a devout Christian had a Muslim on his ship. They want to appropriate the cultural history of the world.
Afghanistan’s imprisonment and prosecution of a man who converted from Islam to Christianity is an outrageous violation of human rights. This is just as bad, if not worse, as imprisoning people for their political beliefs. Religious persecution of Christians occurs in in many lands, not just Afganistan, but it is especially intolerable when it occurs under government auspices.
I know the religious right in America doesn’t think too highly of international law or organizations like the United Nations. But it seems to me these are exactly the vehicles we should be utilizing to promote religious freedom throughout the world. We should insist that freedom of religion should be codified in every charter, treaty and body of international law governing relations among nations. Foreign aid should be subject to compliance with these laws. Non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International should focus more on religious persecution and also be used to shine a harsh spotlight at the offending nations.
Dean –
This incident in Afghanistan is undercutting the Bush Administration and its policy of promoting democracy by force in the Middle East in a great number of ways.
Here is Michelle Malkin:
Joseph Farah, president of Worldnetdaily.com, wrote this:
What American conservatives are waking up to is the fact that having elections that perpetuate Islamist domination over ‘liberated’ societies is a bad thing and a tremendous waste of American blood and treasure, not to mention the civilian deaths that accompany a regime change. The right is going to be turing away from Bush’s ideas in droves over the next few years.
The problem is – what will they gain by going over to the Democratic Party? Will the Dems step up to defend human rights of Christian minorities, Hindus, or athiests under Muslim rule?
I don’t think so. The Dems are so blinded by a feel-good multiculturalism that I don’t see them challenging Islam. I also don’t see the Dems (the party of Wilson) coming out against ‘nation-building wars.’ American citizens who eschew military social engineering (especially when the new regime is worse than the old, or at least just as bad but at a high cost in U.S. blood and treasure) will not look at the Dems as a reall alternative.
That is, unless the Democratic Party can actually get out in front on some of these issues. Taking a bold stand on immigration in defense of American workers would also be helpful, make no mistake.
There is, in short, tons of room to the real right of Bush that a pro-peace, anti-interventionist, pro-defense, pro-border security, pro-Christian party could exploit, if only it were not held in thrall by political correctness.
The Dems should be out in front on the issue of the Christian in Afghanistan. They should be out front calling for protections of the Assyrians. They should be out front condemning the intolerance of Islam, and calling for real Constitutional government, not merely elections to codify the Sharia.
The fact that they aren’t doing these things isn’t giving me any pleasure. I’m not interested in electing another George W. Bush, I want action on the issues I care about. If that comes from the Democratic Party, then that is just fine by me. A lot of conservatives feel that way. We are in the Republican Party not by choice, but out of default.
I’d love to see the Dems get a clue on these issues. Having two parties seriously courting me would finally give me and conservatives like me some leverage.
Note 35. Scholars call this the Twelfth Century Renaissance when many of the ancient Greek manuscripts were opened to European scholars (chiefly monastics). They were preserved in the Arab world but clearly the work of Byzantine scholars who predated the Muslims. American history books, at least when I was a student but probably still true today, assumed that because the Arab world was the source of these manuscripts that Arab culture also produced them, largely because of historical ignorance concerning the Patristic era forward.
Note 38. Glen, the Democrats will not be able to muster the moral courage to challenge Islam. This will have to come from conservatives.
The comments on various postings on the subject. The Arabs did not transmit Byzantine knowledge into the world, the Byzantines fleeing their gradually destroyed state did. It was not through monasteries it was through christian and not-so-christian scholars, merchants, aristocrats, engineers, craftsmen establishing communities in neighboring Italy and from there spreading west-ward. For example as much as Venice was a conquering state of Byzantine land it also saw a great and vibrant Greek-Byzantine community develop in its heart (its remnants are still there, still maintaining orthodoxy) and in the twelfth century the University of Padua was founded by mostly greek physicians. Thus was the Rennaissance established in Italy and spreading north- and westward. The fleeing Byzantines also went to France, even to Spain.
The West was flooded with texts and other treasures they had never imagined before by the conquest of Byzantine grounds and particularly by the sacking of Constantinople, in 1204. Of course Magna Grecia was always a repository of Greek culture/knowledge in Southern Italy but it did not seem that their culture traveled north-ward. Historians such as Runciman and the amateur yet amazing Ernle Bradford are good authors to read on the subject as well as for a fair understanding of Islam and its interaction with the Christians.
The newly discovered “importance” of the Arabs/muslims in Western Culture as presevers of Greek wisdom has its basis in virulent anti-hellenic propaganda, though some math and medical texts may have made their way to Spain through them.
It is absolutely true that in the middle-ages the Muslims were no more barbaric or oppressive towards the Eastern orthodox than were the Western Christians. And in the Western Christian countries, feudalism was very oppressive and religious wars among sects very barbaric. But things progressed in Europe and got stiffled in Islam.
Religious oppression by Islam in some ways preserved Eastern Christianity, left a well-tried, martyred remnant.
I have Muslim friends and they are very nice and caring, loving people. Extremely well educated, scholarly also. They cannot read and interpret the Curan. The language makes it inaccessible to them. They have to follow whatever the mosque intructors tell them and they can have no judgment of it. They do, however, have a choice of mosques and as I understand it there is a great variety of strictness in rule and of rule in general from one mosque to another. Islam lacked homogeneity in practice from its genesis. I doubt the clerics at the mosque are better educated and better able than my friends to make their own critical reading of the Curan. I therefore do not understand
how people can be trapped in a religion they cannot evaluate.
With respect to comments such as: “it is time for Islam to change” let us accept their truth but how is the change to be enforced? I thought our Way is: “Whoever wants shall follow Me”.
Comments like, “secular humanism is bad for us but good for them” give me the hibbie-jibbies. I recall that in 1821 the Sultan could not execute the Patriarch of Constantinople without the permission of the moufti. And since the moufti refused to give such permission, the Sultan did away with the mufti first, then he ordered the martyrdom of the Patriarch. The secular Turks need no mufti’s permission. I recommend also you watch Kakoyannis’ Attilas video to see the humanity of the secular invaders of Turkey in 1974. Turkey is not the exception, it is just a giant among the monsters of secular humanism. Sadam’s carreer began with a secular regime, too.
I suppose one could argue it is OK to introduce to the now Islamic world abortion? Or same-sex marriages? Is it very Christian to introduce grey-zones in the morality we plan to impose on others? I don’t have the answers, perhaps we do in our hearts.
Hm…. I guess I agree with Tony. Fill up the churches and fight the adversary mystically. A grain of faith can move even mountains, not? And Fr. Paissios even foresaw the liberation of Cyprus, so let us pray and watch.
“I suppose one could argue it is OK to introduce to the now Islamic world abortion? Or same-sex marriages? Is it very Christian to introduce grey-zones in the morality we plan to impose on others? I don’t have the answers, perhaps we do in our hearts.”
No, I was thinking more along the lines of Constitutionally limited government, separation of citizenship from religious affiliation (as opposed to not granting citizenship to non-Muslims), creating a civil codex that would independent of the Sharia, barring direct influence of the clerics on the government, and other moves along those lines. I don’t think the Muslim world needs gay marriage or abortion. Come to think of it, I don’t think anybody needs those things.
What I was emphasizing in my secularism point is that people crusading for the things I mentioned above in the Muslim world are, in reality, bad Muslims. They are secularists who are looking to emulate a Western model. They are oppose by deeply religious people. American conservatives, God bless them, tend to rally towards other religiously-minded people. Americans seem to distrust ‘secularists’ in the Muslim world and gravitate towards support of ‘people of faith.’
Well, I think that is just plain stupid. I am all in favor of bad Muslims who want more classical liberalism such as personal autonomy and freedom combined with a government that is limited in its reach and can’t tell women how to dress, or force people to pray who don’t want to. That kind of secularism is just plain peachy with me.
The Turkish model is, of course, not the way to go either. I think, however, that the mass slaughter in Turkey was not directly attributable to a ‘secular’ state emerging. Rather, I think it had more to do with the Turkish character, the instability of Turkey’s borders with such large minorities, and some other factors that we could explore. Syria, for example, is a relatively secular place that has not seen mass executions of Christians.
Now, do I support a radical separation of the government of the United States from the Christian religion? No, I don’t. I never will. But having a 10 Commandments plaque on a courthouse wall will never strip a non-Christian of his citizenship or his protection under the law. Having a government favorably disposed to Christianity will never force women to dress in a veil, or force women to stay uneducated. Having a relatively Christian friendly government will never cripple the financial system (no interest), or lead to the mass imprisonment and execution of religious minorities.
Islam’s position and the ramifications of its position are not analogous to that of Christianity in Christian states. They are not equal, they should not be treated equally. What is good for the goose, is not good for the gander.