Taslima shares a long string of excerpts from the Koran and the Hadith that mandate the kind of thing the murderers did to Avijit Roy.
The Islamic killers used big sharp knives to kill Dr. Avijit Roy, the well known progressive blogger. ISIS terrorists use sharp knives to behead people. They like knives because Muhammad liked knives to kill nonbelievers. Islamist leaders convince fellow Islamists to kill nonbelievers for the sake of Islam. Allah Himself advise people to kill. There are many Islamic organizations in Bangladesh working to indoctrinate young people with Islam. The leaders of those organizations insist people to believe in the Quran, the words of Allah and the Hadith, the words of Muhammad. Governments and almost all established organizations encourage people to believe in Allah the God and Muhammad the messenger.
If you are a Muslim, you have to believe in the Quran and Hadith. And if you believe in the Quran and Hadith, you have to agree with Allah that atheists should be brutally killed. These are the texts that inspire Islamists to kill Avijit Roy, the freethinker. These are the texts that inspire ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab etc. to kill nonbelievers and non-Muslims.
Read and ponder the whole list in all its horribleness. I’ll select just a few from Taslima’s selection.
Quran (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”
Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
That’s the “prophet” that we are told Muslims love the way they love their parents, only more.
Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.”
If that were something written by Plato or K’ung-fu-tzu people would be free to say we’ve outgrown that kind of thing, and just ignore it. But no, it’s in The Holy Book, so it’s a crime and Forbidden and a sin and idolatry and unbelief to say we’ve outgrown it.
Quran (9:29) – “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
Fight fight fight; conquer; squash; extort money.
Fuck that noise.
The exhortations in the Qu’ran pose quite a dilemma for all those supposed millions of ‘moderate’ Moslems who are supposed to be out there, somewhere.
That’s why ‘Islamophobia’ is the only rational reaction to an ideology that sanctifies, violence, oppression, slavery and theft. Islam is a gangster’s religion.
Ophelia: How are you feeling about Obama’s refusal to talk about “Islamic terrorism”? Me, not so good. From a practical standpoint, of course, if he did he’d risk alienating our “allies”, the Saudis.
I blame Lawrence of Arabia.
Some of the exhortations of the Bible would pose a dilemma for modern Christians, except that the progressive influences of centuries have gradually forced a significant subset of them to find some less literal interpretations and explanations for the more problematic ones, such as instructions to kill disobedient children. While there have been no publicly available alternative explanations from ‘moderate’ Muslims, that isn’t to say it can’t happen.
Of course, we don’t really have centuries to wait on this.
That said, as a long-time advocate of social justice, I believe that religion in general and Islam in particular presents a problem for social justice activists. For years I have participated in the Moral Monday (previously HKonJ coalition) actions in North Carolina. As time as gone on, it seems to me that these protests have taken an increasingly religious tone, with participation by imams and rabbis, as well Christian ministers. Part of this I attribute the dominant role of the black churches in the civil rights movement, and the laudable effort to be inclusive. The movement overall supports secular law despite the religious overtones. But given the history of religion and the ease with which holy books can be re-interpreted to support most anything, basing social justice goals on religion is a no-win strategy. Opponents of social justice will trot out their own interpretations. ‘Moderate’ Muslims (whatever that means) at some point will have to disavow the Qur’an as a foundation of law, as will moderate Christians the Bible and Jews the Torah.
@3 Broken Things
Yes, however, we also can’t assume that progress in ‘moderating’ Islam is inevitable or even probable. Essentially the expectation appears to be, that Islam, as practised in liberal democracies, will be transformed into a more humane ideology, let’s hope. The West might still be governed by the Catholic Church and divinely ordained autocrats, if Martin Luther had decided to be a plumber.
“basing social justice goals on religion is a no-win strategy’
Perhaps not for believers, since each religion presents different views of social justice, a cynical observer might say that the ultimate aim is a protected status for religious practices.
Yeah, pretty much all religions can lend themselves to high levels of violence and oppression even without having direct commends to murder the Others in their holy traditions and books. It’s something that makes Islam that much more vulnerable to being practiced in that manner.
Broken Things said that “some of the exhortations of the Bible would pose a dilemma for modern Christians.” I immediately wonder what these exhortations are. You can’t, for example, refer to the genocide apparently commanded in the Jewish Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), since these, if they indeed represent divine commands (or represent historical events in any sense at all, which is now considered doubtful), are local and immediate, and do not have a general application. There is no universal exhortation to genocide anywhere in the Bible. Take the New Testament then. Which “exhortations” pose dilemmas for modern Christians? It might be thought that some of St Paul’s lists of sins, including what appears on the face of it to be homosexuality, are such exhortations. But it is not easy to see, within such lists, a condemnation of the natural propensity of a person of one sex having sexual feelings towards those of another person of the same sex, since Paul is quite clearly talking about pagan mores here, and we can scarcely lift pagan mores from the first century and simply take them as read in the twenty first.
On the contrary, however, the commandments in the Qur’an and the Hadith are in fact universal prescriptions, and are to be obeyed by all faithful Muslims now, period, without qualification, since the Qur’an is held to be the uncreated word of God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God. The role of scripture in the Church and the role of the Qur’an and the example of the prophet in Islam are totally different. The first is understood to be written by men (and, if Harold Bloom is right) perhaps by women as well, and to suffer from the limitations of all textual evidence. The Qur’an, however, must be supposed faultless in a way that Christian or Jewish scriptures could never be, since in the Qur’an (unbelievably, but truly) it is assumed that we are dealing with the very words of God.
By the way, Martin Luther was a typical product of the Catholic Church, argumentative and transgressive. All you have to do is to read medieval theology and philosophy, and you will see how deeply rooted doubt, disagreement and argumentation were in the development of Christian theology. What Luther argued for was a Council of the Church in order to work some of these things out, but it was mainly the secular power of the papacy that opposed him, not the normal to-and-froing of theological discussion. That doesn’t make Luther right, it just exemplifies one of the main aspects of Christian thinking about the truths of faith, a process which has led, in the contemporary world, to revisionist and radical theologies which are not anticipated in the history of Christian thought. This is not a defence of Christian theology, but it is a rejection of the implied equivalence between Christianity and Islam which seems to mark the comments above. There is simply no relationship, and no such equivalence, except insofar as some Christians are thankful to Muslims for the resurgence of concern for religious faith. Were they to dig a bit deeper, they would soon see that this resurgence is not good news for Christianity, and that, overall, it is simply disastrous for the cause of justice and human freedom. But supposing the equivalence is at once to derogate from the importance of Christianity in the development of what we now think about simply as the West. It is a kind of cultural masochism, and does not stand up well against the cruel certainties of Islam. Just read some early political philosophy, like Locke, and see what an important place religious faith had in the development of secular freedoms. Much of it of course developed out of a critique of religious hegemony, but at the same time borrowed much of its morality and concern for human rights from Christian sources.
@Eric McDonald
And yet, whether the exhortations are as explicit or as global as the Qur’an, fundamentalist Christians do interpret them as such. To people such as Scott Lively, these ‘hidden’ exhortations apparently have the status of divine commands. As to the contribution of religiously educated authors to concepts of social justice, I don’t deny it. But the people that made those contributions had to cherry-pick from the Bible to do that. I have not read Locke, although it is high on my list. I wonder though if Locke addressed homosexuality, or sexuality in general. The culture of the era in which Locke wrote would have influenced the degree to which he felt safe in addressing moral issues, and that he referenced the Bible to do so is an acknowledgement on his part that it is a primary reference text. That should not be true anymore, yet it is.
Well, Broken Things, while it is true that fundamentalists use the Bible in a literal way, it is very difficult to derive genocidal commandments from it. And the use of the ancient Jewish law regarding adulterers, homosexuals, etc. is simply a non-starter for anyone who has even a limited understanding of the gospels. For Bible thumpers to put everything within the Bible on an equal plane is simply to ignore, from the Jewish point of view, the word of the prophets, sceptics like Job and the writer of Ecclesiastes, as well as some of the Psalms. and, from a Christian point of view, the word of Jesus. One thing that does have an unreasonably secure place within a Christian world view, given the New Testament, is, sadly, anti-Semitism, one of the deepest failures of Christianity, and, in fact, a repudiation of the fundamental fact that Jesus was a Jew. Christians should excise from the NT the anti-Semitic passages, of which Daniel Goldhagen has provided a fairly exhaustive list in his book A Moral Reckoning. The extremism of American fundamentalism, which their missionary endeavours have spread to Africa, South America, and Asia, is simply incompatible with a reasonable interpretation of the biblical text. And it’s not a matter of “cherry-picking”, to choose passages that are central to Christian understanding of the Gospel. There is a long tradition of interpretation, where the basis for such interpretation, in the light of what we know about Jesus, and the teachings about him, is fairly well established. It is within that tradition that the text makes sense, since it is, as a collection of writings, multiply contradictory. Without that tradition — and fundamentalists must do without it — the texts make no sense whatsoever.
There is simply no traditional conception of verbal inspiration in the tradition that has stood the test of time. Remember, too, that Locke himself wrote a book entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity which by no means treats the Bible as being in any sense the outcome of a plenary inspiration. American Christianity in its fundamentalist form is really the odd man out, even though its simplicity has commended itself to many people of little learning. Remember, this is not a defence of Christianity, but it is hard to ignore the conclusions to which students of the Bible like Dennis Nineham (The Use and Abuse of the Bible) or Gerald Downing, who wrote a trenchant analysis of the idea of revelation in the Bible (Has Christianity a Revelation?), and concluded that it did not have a revelation in the normal acceptation of that word. Not that either of these books would be read without denunciation by fundamentalists.
By the way, it is a long time since I read Locke’s Reasonableness, but I am sure he did not address questions such as homosexuality, etc. That would simply be inconsistent with the mores of the time. I am not familiar with the moral theology of the period in any detail, and cannot say what was said by seventeeth century theologians about homosexuality, though I daresay it was not positive. However, while suicide was generally condemned in Christian moral theology, John Donne wrote a book (not published in his lifetime) in which he argued that it is not always wrong, and based himself on a wide-ranging examination of contemporary moral theology, both Protestant and Catholic. And, of course, Thomas More, in his Utopia seemed to offer support for suicide as well (which is often neutralised by suppose the Utopia a fanciful tale and does not reflect More’s genuine beliefs), and Spenser in The Fairie Queen, so the reach of Christian reason is not forever bound to one conclusion on moral issues. Paul Gibson, a contemporary Anglican theologian, in his book Discerning the Word: The Bible and Homosexuality in Anglican Debate argues cogently that there is no biblical support for contemporary biblical arguments that the Bible opposed homosexuality as such, but merely took homosexuality as unnatural, which, as it happens, it isn’t. The Jewish scriptures also say that the rabbit chews the cud, but no one can possibly believe that now, however much it may appear to do so.
Eric, I’m not understanding your claim here.
A “local” genocide is no less a genocide for being local. The genocide in the Balkans was local, the genocide in Rwanda was local – what of it? They were still genocide.
Which “exhortations” pose dilemmas for modern Christians? It might be thought that some of St Paul’s lists of sins, including what appears on the face of it to be homosexuality, are such exhortations. But it is not easy to see, within such lists, a condemnation of the natural propensity of a person of one sex having sexual feelings towards those of another person of the same sex, since Paul is quite clearly talking about pagan mores here, and we can scarcely lift pagan mores from the first century and simply take them as read in the twenty first.
Yeah, well, plenty of present-day Christians do exactly what you say is hard to do. It’s not that hard at all when you’re quote-mining the Bible to support your pre-existing bigotry.
And was Paul really talking “clearly” about “pagan mores?” Or was he (and/or his later “editors”) spouting ignorant stereotypes and scare-stories to demonize people of other faiths?
You can’t, for example, refer to the genocide apparently commanded in the Jewish Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament), since these, if they indeed represent divine commands (or represent historical events in any sense at all, which is now considered doubtful), are local and immediate, and do not have a general application.
Again, plenty of bigoted Christians do indeed refer to such stories, so they can justify more of the same based on the belief that since God commanded genocide before, it’s easier to conclude he’d command another one today, if only we were faithfully listening to his commands.