The True, Peaceful Face of Islam
Muslim With Mission
By Reading Islam Team
In this article, Karen Armstrong writes, "There are 1.2 billion
Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world's fastest-growing
religion. If the evil carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11 were typical of
the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such violence, its
growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both Europe and the
U.S. would be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this is not the
case."
Armstrong argues the case that "Islam is not addicted to war", and
that jihad is only advocated in the Qur'an for defensive purposes.
To read the full article, click here.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,175987,00.html
The True, Peaceful Face of Islam
By Karen Armstrong
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world's
fastest-growing religion. If the evil carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11
were typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such
violence, its growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both
Europe and the U.S. would be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this
is not the case.
The very word Islam, which means "surrender," is related to the Arabic
salam, or peace. When the Prophet Muhammad brought the inspired
scripture known as the Koran to the Arabs in the early 7th century
A.D., a major part of his mission was devoted precisely to bringing an
end to the kind of mass slaughter we witnessed in New York City and
Washington. Pre-Islamic Arabia was caught up in a vicious cycle of
warfare, in which tribe fought tribe in a pattern of vendetta and
countervendetta. Muhammad himself survived several assassination
attempts, and the early Muslim community narrowly escaped
extermination by the powerful city of Mecca. The Prophet had to fight
a deadly war in order to survive, but as soon as he felt his people
were probably safe, he devoted his attention to building up a peaceful
coalition of tribes and achieved victory by an ingenious and inspiring
campaign of nonviolence. When he died in 632, he had almost single-
handedly brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
Because the Koran was revealed in the context of an all-out war,
several passages deal with the conduct of armed struggle. Warfare was
a desperate business on the Arabian Peninsula. A chieftain was not
expected to spare survivors after a battle, and some of the Koranic
injunctions seem to share this spirit. Muslims are ordered by God to
"slay [enemies] wherever you find them!" (4: 89). Extremists such as
Osama bin Laden like to quote such verses but do so selectively. They
do not include the exhortations to peace, which in almost every case
follow these more ferocious passages: "Thus, if they let you be, and
do not make war on you, and offer you peace, God does not allow you to
harm them" (4: 90).
In the Koran, therefore, the only permissible war is one of self-
defense. Muslims may not begin hostilities (2: 190). Warfare is always
evil, but sometimes you have to fight in order to avoid the kind of
persecution that Mecca inflicted on the Muslims (2: 191; 2: 217) or to
preserve decent values (4: 75; 22: 40). The Koran quotes the Torah,
the Jewish scriptures, which permits people to retaliate eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, but like the Gospels, the Koran suggests that it is
meritorious to forgo revenge in a spirit of charity (5: 45).
Hostilities must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and must
cease the minute the enemy sues for peace (2: 192-3).
Islam is not addicted to war, and jihad is not one of its "pillars,"
or essential practices. The primary meaning of the word jihad is not
"holy war" but "struggle." It refers to the difficult effort that is
needed to put God's will into practice at every level--personal and
social as well as political. A very important and much quoted
tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as they go home after a
battle, "We are returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to the
greater jihad," the far more urgent and momentous task of extirpating
wrongdoing from one's own society and one's own heart.
Islam did not impose itself by the sword. In a statement in which the
Arabic is extremely emphatic, the Koran insists, "There must be no
coercion in matters of faith!" (2: 256). Constantly Muslims are
enjoined to respect Jews and Christians, the "People of the Book," who
worship the same God (29: 46). In words quoted by Muhammad in one of
his last public sermons, God tells all human beings, "O people! We
have formed you into nations and tribes so that you may know one
another" (49: 13)--not to conquer, convert, subjugate, revile or
slaughter but to reach out toward others with intelligence and
understanding.
So why the suicide bombing, the hijacking and the massacre of innocent
civilians? Far from being endorsed by the Koran, this killing violates
some of its most sacred precepts. But during the 20th century, the
militant form of piety often known as fundamentalism erupted in every
major religion as a rebellion against modernity. Every fundamentalist
movement I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is
convinced that liberal, secular society is determined to wipe out
religion. Fighting, as they imagine, a battle for survival,
fundamentalists often feel justified in ignoring the more
compassionate principles of their faith. But in amplifying the more
aggressive passages that exist in all our scriptures, they distort the
tradition.
It would be as grave a mistake to see Osama bin Laden as an authentic
representative of Islam as to consider James Kopp, the alleged killer
of an abortion provider in Buffalo, N.Y., a typical Christian or
Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 worshipers in the Hebron mosque in 1994
and died in the attack, a true martyr of Israel. The vast majority of
Muslims, who are horrified by the atrocity of Sept. 11, must reclaim
their faith from those who have so violently hijacked it.
Karen Armstrong has written many books on religion, including Islam: A
Short History, published last year by Modern Library