Sarah Khan, director of Inspire, has a short outraged public post on Facebook.
I’m #makingastand. I will not be celebrating Eid in remembrance of Alan Henning. There is nothing to celebrate. My faith has been hijacked by extremists. Wake up Muslims. Before more innocent people are murdered in the “name of our religion.” Reclaim our faith back from these monsters.
Sad, and right, and inspiring.
Not a recent thing, though.
I remember the Taliban in Afghanistan.
“hijacked by extremists”. Really?
Those extremists are simply following the example of their prophet, who was a murdering bandit and slave dealer, Islam was spread by violence and conquest from its invention in the 7th century.
Who is the better Muslim?
I saw that on Twitter and felt rather sad. It is not her fault, and was in fact so extreme an act that even Muslims with the most hateful and intolerant views find it unislamic.
@ RJW
“hijacked” – yes, why not reject it and claim the religion for the majority which is not violent extremists?
You have to acknowledge that a majority of modern Muslims are not violent extremists, even if Muslim states may be broadly reactionary and repressive, particularly with respect to women.
Most Muslims don’t practice violent medieval Islamism, in the same way that most Christians don’t practice the historic barbarism of the OT.
Most Muslims practice a personal religion, and concern themselves with living their own lives.
Bernard Bumner,
“You have to acknowledge that a majority of modern Muslims are not violent extremists, even if Muslim states may be broadly reactionary and repressive, particularly with respect to women.”
Agreed, however, there’s an anomaly, isn’t there? It’s that divergence between the putative attitudes of the majority of ‘moderate’ Muslims and the majority Muslim societies in which they live. Spain and Italy are nominally majority Catholic countries, but both are functioning liberal democracies, with the usual flaws and limitations. I can’t think of a single Muslim country that I would class as a liberal democracy, Turkey is islamising and the Indonesian government has surrendered an entire province to Sharia. There’s something toxic in the Islamic ideology.
So, I’m very sceptical, arguments as to which is the ‘true Islam’ and claims that the religion has been ‘hijacked’ seem pointless, there are a thousand ‘Islams’.
RJW,
I certainly don’t claim that Muslim states are anything other than generally reactionary and repressive, authoritarian at best. However, once you look outside of Europe and North America, there are relatively fewer representative liberal democracies. Most of the world is not very stable and most people on the planet are not well served by their national elite.
Most regimes are authoritarian and corrupt, even if they are relatively benign.
Human rights are routinely violated be nations of all religious bents.
That said, there is a trend in Islamic states, but perhaps that is due as much to sectarianism, chauvinism, and the relatively unsettled nature of states emerging from an imperial past. Islam is a pretext as well as a motivation, as was Christianity in the not too distant European past.
There are many examples of oppressive and brutal Christian states in e.g. Africa which reflect a similar history of political instability and colonialism/imperialism.
It is a combination of religious control and political power games which creates that environment, I think. Most of the Islamist terror groups have strong non religious political aims.
Mohammed was a very violent and murderous psychopath. Islam’s core texts are poisonous and hate-filled. I would strongly suggest people familiarize themselves with the Koran and Hadith and see for yourselves.
Islam hasn’t really anything in common with either Christianity or Judaism, contrary to what we’re often told.
Isis, Boko Harem, The Taliban and a myiad of other “extremist” outfits are not at all exceptions.
I would strongly suggest that Sarah Khan abandon the cult once and for all because it simply isn’t reformable.
@Decker,
Of course the Koran and Hadith are full of violencertain and hate.
Unlike the Bible, wherein god drowns every living thing except a boat full of refugees, rains fire on cities full of people considered to be morally dubious, and wipes out a country’s worth of first born children (including the children of slaves).
A vast majority of Muslims are not violent jihadists – most of them are people living their little lives, and their primary concern is them and theirs. That doesn’t say that practical Islam isn’t horribly misogynistic and repressive.
There is no reason to believe that moderates could not transform practical Islam in exactly the way that many Christian sects have selectively modified their dogma.
This brand of violent Islamism is a recent invention.
—I would strongly suggest people familiarize themselves with the Koran and Hadith and see for yourselves.—
Especially these passages:
And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.
And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free.
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.
He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed.
Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it is holy unto you: every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.
Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.
And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword.
Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: And ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it.
Poisonous and hate filled indeed. I wish more Muslims would call out the bad apples among their numbers and refuse to celebrate the holy days until the faith as a whole decried the corruption, violence, and misogyny of the practice.
@Bernard B.
This brand of violent Islamism is a recent invention.
I’m afraid that you’re wrong on that. This ‘brand’ of Islam is as old as the faith itself. As I stated in my comment above, Mohammed was a violent psychopath and it is from him that ISIS draws its inspiration. All who questioned the desert brigand’s prophetic ‘credentials’ were brutally killed.
Unlike Christianity Islam is an ideology that purports to micromanage every last aspect of a person’s life, including precise instructions of how to defecate and urinate.
It claims to be ‘Abrahamic’ but that’s not the case at all.
It’s radically different and not amenable to reform in the way both Judaism and Christianity are.
7-
Islam is definitely part of the category of religions to which Judaism and Christianity belong. Allah simply means “the God” and is explicitly meant to be the same God the other monotheistic religions worship. Most major Biblical characters appear in the Quran–Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Job, Jonah, Jesus, Mary, etc.
However, the other two monotheistic religions are more open to interpretation because they are older and thus the scriptures are written by more people and are less internally consistent. Reformers have more elbow room. But it’s ultimately up to those who practice a religion to define it.
Mohammed was a very violent and murderous psychopath. Islam’s core texts are poisonous and hate-filled.
Remarkably little is known about Muhammad, and there is certainly no basis from which to psychoanalyze him. Furthermore, the compiled and edited oral tradition purported to be his sayings contains chunks lifted verbatim from zoroastrian, talmudic, and biblical traditions. In other words, it’s not quite as easy to point a finger as you seem to think it is. I suspect you’d benefit from a review of some of the published histories of the creation of the koran.
However, the other two monotheistic religions are more open to interpretation because they are older and thus the scriptures are written by more people and are less internally consistent.
Interpreting the koran’s arabic is a problem that leaves it as open to finagling as the bible. While the koran appears to be a unified text (and is now considered to be as perfect and unchanging as the writings of L. Ron Hubbard) it exists in its written form because of Uthman’s copy-editing. Basically it’s the same kind of unified canon as the post-Nicean council version of the bible.
It’s radically different and not amenable to reform in the way both Judaism and Christianity are.
That just caused me to contemptuously snort coffee all over the table in my favorite bagel joint. Thanks.
I’m sorry you snorted your coffee.
People sit waiting for an islamic Reformation/Renaissance, but Isis, The Taliban, Bokop Harem and a whole host of similar groups ARE that renaissance.
The founding of the MB in 1928 was the beginning of all this.
The Judeo-Christian world went back to its Greco-Roman roots and in doing so reduced/attenuated the influence of religion.
Islam has no Greco-Roman roots. Its dilution under western colonialism, a period that saw a reduction of religious influences in the Islamic world, is considered a temporary setback by ‘reformers’.
When We think ‘renaissance’ we think Less religion and greater secularism. When Muslims think ‘renaissance’ they mean MORE religion and LESS secularism.
@6 Bernard Bumner,
(1) ‘once you look outside of Europe and North America, there are relatively fewer representative liberal democracies.’
Yes, but the distinction is not geographic but cultural, most democracies outside Europe are part of the Anglosphere.
(2) “the relatively unsettled nature of states emerging from an imperial past.”
Those ‘states’ were unsettled and dysfunctional long before the first European imperialist arrived and the fact that other oppressive non-Islamic regimes exist really doesn’t refute the argument that the Islamic ideology has a retrograde influence.
Decker has explained the singularly violent origins of Islam, there’s a widespread myth in the West, which is also promoted by Muslim apologists, that the conflict between Islam and the West was initiated by Christian European crusaders, it wasn’t.
@15 Decker,
(1) “Islam has no Greco-Roman roots.”
Certainly very little that endured beyond the first few centuries of the conquest, in reality, Muslim armies destroyed Greco-Roman civilisation in the NE and North Africa and came very close to extinguishing it in Europe, luckily the French won the battle of Tours.
As long as Muslims use the word Islamic as a synonym for good, they are fueling the righteousness of groups like ISIS.
Muslims saying non Muslims are just as good is what I want to hear. Just saying ISIS are not true Muslims does nothing. As long as they indoctrinate that being more Muslim is a good in and of itself, extremists will continue to recruit from their ranks. They are doing ISIS’s work for them.