Sanitizing Islam
Reuven Singer
Jerusalem Post Aug 26
In Funtua, Nigeria, last week, a 30-year-old mother named Amina Lawal was
sentenced to death by stoning by an Islamic court for "adultery," although
in her case this means only having sex out of wedlock. The sentence, which
Lawal has accepted as "the will of God," will be applied as soon as she is
through breast-feeding. Around the same time, CNN aired an al-Qaida
videotape showing a dog, in excruciating pain, succumbing to poison gas.
Meanwhile, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to require this year's 3,500
freshmen to read Approaching the Koran: The Early Revelations, by Haverford
College religious studies Prof. Michael Sells. The ruling came after the
Virginia-based Family Policy Network, which ordinarily might be expected to
encourage the use of religious textbooks in public school curricula, argued
that the requirement violates provisions in the Constitution against
state-sponsored promotion of religion.
According to Chancellor James Moeser, what gave rise to the assignment of
Sells's book in the first place was the need, post-9-11, for America's young
to better appreciate Islam. "The whole idea is that this is the first step
toward understanding a culture we don't know anything about," he said.
Already, this follows on a trend. Last year, following the attacks, hundreds
of students wore Islamic dress for a day "to prove their tolerance toward
Islam," according to a report in The New York Times. Islamic-studies courses
have become among the most popular on offer, and the university has moved to
hire an Islamic-studies expert.
We join in applauding the university for its new focus. American ignorance
about Islam paid no small part in leaving the country unprepared for the
events of September 11. The CIA, for example, suffers from a serious dearth
of Arabic speakers, and there has been little appreciation in the
policy-making community of the trends and forces afoot in the Islamic world
over the past decade, in part because so few people could so much as read an
Arabic-language newspaper.
Yet it may be questioned whether the approach being taken at Chapel Hill and
elsewhere in the US is the best one. Nowadays, the liberal desire to
"understand" is often confused with the politically correct need to finesse
and sanitize. And Sells's book, we fear, goes far toward accomplishing the
latter.
"From what I knew from the news," the Times quotes freshman Mary Allison Lee
as saying, "I would have perceived [Muslims] to be a violent people. So I
see one thing on TV, and another in the book." Now, she says, "I'm not sure
what to think." Lee may be forgiven her confusion. "Approaching the Koran,"
offers translations of, and commentary on, 35 early suras.
But it does not touch on Islamic notions of holy war, or Islamic ideas about
the justness of killing "infidels," from which too many of today's Muslims
draw inspiration. As a result, students are left with a scant appreciation
of Islamic culture, all the while thinking they've had their minds opened.
For our money, if the UNC really had wanted to offer its freshman a
sophisticated picture of the forces that have shaped contemporary Islam,
they would have done better to assign Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong?, or
perhaps Fouad Ajami's Dream Palace of the Arabs. Both works scholarly,
engaging and relevant offer masterly overviews of the cultural forces that
led directly to September 11.
Today, every military regime in the world but one is in a Muslim country.
Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim countries.
Eighty percent of executions carried out each year take place in Muslim
countries. No Muslim countries save Turkey and Bangladesh are democratic.
There is an urgent need in the West to understand why all this is, and
universities could have a vital role to play in achieving it. By assigning
Sells's book, all that Chapel Hill has managed to do is whitewash reality in
the name of raising awareness. For the likes of an Amina Lawal, this will
offer little solace.
Hyuwi
"Reuven Singer" <reuv...@netmedia.co.il> wrote in message
news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de...
AnonMoos
No it isn't. The term "anti-Semitic" in English has always and only
meant "Jew-hating". Furthermore, leaving aside this one fixed
19th-century genteel and ultra-polite Victorian drawing-room
euphemistic expression (invented in 1879 by the non-Jewish Jew-hater
Wilhelm Marr), in modern sound scientific usage the term "Semitic" is
used to describe _languages_, but is never used to describe peoples or
ethnic groups (unless perhaps in a strictly historical way to describe
tribesmen of 1000 B.C.). If you're trying to describe modern peoples
as "Semites" and "non-Semites" on any basis other than a strictly
linguistic one (i.e. what languages they speak), then you're trying
to resurrect an obsolete and outmoded kind of "racial science" which
was pretty well discredited 50 years ago -- in fact, the Nazis were
the last prominent proponents of the type of "racial science" which
claimed to be able to decide who was "racially" a "Semite". If you're
trying to weasel around and manipulate some kind of semantics in order
to pretend that Arabs can't hate Jews, then that's utterly lamely
feebly pathetically ludicrous.
>"Reuven Singer" <reuv...@netmedia.co.il> wrote in message
>news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de...
>> EDITORIAL: Sanitizing Islam
>> Jerusalem Post Aug 26
>> In Funtua, Nigeria, last week, a 30-year-old mother named Amina
>> Lawal was sentenced to death by stoning by an Islamic court for
>> "adultery," although in her case this means only having sex out of
>> wedlock. The sentence, which Lawal has accepted as "the will of
>> God," will be applied as soon as she is through breast-feeding.
>> Around the same time, CNN aired an al-Qaida videotape showing a
>> dog, in excruciating pain, succumbing to poison gas. Meanwhile,
>> the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the right of the
>> University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to require this year's
>> 3,500 freshmen to read _Approaching the Koran: The Early
>> Revelations_, by Haverford College religious studies Prof. Michael
>> Sells. The ruling came after the Virginia-based Family Policy
>> Network, which ordinarily might be expected to encourage the use of
>> religious textbooks in public school curricula, argued that the
>> requirement violates provisions in the Constitution against
>> state-sponsored promotion of religion. According to Chancellor
>> James Moeser, what gave rise to the assignment of Sells's book in
>> the first place was the need, post-9/11, for America's young to
>> done better to assign Bernard Lewis's _What Went Wrong?_, or
>> perhaps Fouad Ajami's _Dream Palace of the Arabs_. Both works
>> scholarly, engaging and relevant offer masterly overviews of the
>> cultural forces that led directly to September 11. Today, every
>> military regime in the world but one is in a Muslim country.
>> Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim
>> countries. Eighty percent of executions carried out each year take
>> place in Muslim countries. No Muslim countries save Turkey and
>> Bangladesh are democratic. There is an urgent need in the West to
>> understand why all this is, and universities could have a vital
>> role to play in achieving it. By assigning Sells's book, all that
>> Chapel Hill has managed to do is whitewash reality in the name of
>> raising awareness. For the likes of an Amina Lawal, this will
>> offer little solace.
--
SAUDIA OMNIS IN PARTES TRES DIVIDENDA EST! Free Arabia by
splitting the Saudi tyranny into its three natural parts:
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Murderers are not Martyrs!
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William S. Hubbard
"Reuven Singer" <reuv...@netmedia.co.il> wrote in message
news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de...
Devon Hill
"Reuven Singer" <reuv...@netmedia.co.il> wrote in message
news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de...
What they mean to do is to enforce the idea under the guise of scholarship
that Islam is peaceful........this is almost as cynical and disgusting as
Hitlers 'Work makes Free' admonition over his Death Camps....
>
> Already, this follows on a trend. Last year, following the attacks,
hundreds
> of students wore Islamic dress for a day "to prove their tolerance toward
> Islam," according to a report in The New York Times. Islamic-studies
courses
> have become among the most popular on offer, and the university has moved
to
> hire an Islamic-studies expert.
Great...just great.........and who will this 'Islamic expert' be accept some
pro Islamic idiot who will be serving up a pile of pc shit to his
students...
>
> We join in applauding the university for its new focus. American ignorance
> about Islam paid no small part in leaving the country unprepared for the
> events of September 11.
Yes, ignorance of Islam's brutal intentions.....we all need to be aware that
we are members of Darul Harb and that goes for Jews, Christians, Secular
Muslims, Hindus and Secularists and everyone else and they mean to take us
over either by peaceful (immigration and high birth rate) or by the more
popular Muhammed induced scimitar method!
The CIA, for example, suffers from a serious dearth
> of Arabic speakers, and there has been little appreciation in the
> policy-making community of the trends and forces afoot in the Islamic
world
> over the past decade, in part because so few people could so much as read
an
> Arabic-language newspaper.
>
> Yet it may be questioned whether the approach being taken at Chapel Hill
and
> elsewhere in the US is the best one. Nowadays, the liberal desire to
> "understand" is often confused with the politically correct need to
finesse
> and sanitize. And Sells's book, we fear, goes far toward accomplishing the
> latter.
Absolutely true and as one who has been following and learning about islam
for 21 years and having dated a Turk for a few years and my best buddies
growing up were Sunnis, I find what Sell's is doing is pure Geobell
propagands bullshit........
Notice in his text that the book only deals with the early Meccan
period.........this is absolutely crucial as it is Muhammed's later Medinian
period where we see the true colors of this madman show........his looting
of other Caravans, his murder of poets for the great crime of satire, his
ayat about Muslim men being allowed to bitch slap their wives, and his
gruesome and evil murder of 800 hundred innocent Jewish males and to top it
off, he marries a 6 year old and plugs her Aiashia when she is nine and the
nobel Muhammed was 53........
You can be damned sure that the University won't be discussing these lovely
traits of Muhammed along with the countless disturbing brutal Sahih
hadiths...
>
> "From what I knew from the news," the Times quotes freshman Mary Allison
Lee
> as saying, "I would have perceived [Muslims] to be a violent people.
Fairly decent discernment here but I would add that most Muslims are fairly
decent folk but it is Islam the ideology that is brutal and deserves our
contempt...
So I
> see one thing on TV, and another in the book." Now, she says, "I'm not
sure
> what to think." Lee may be forgiven her confusion. "Approaching the
Koran,"
> offers translations of, and commentary on, 35 early suras.
Go to the sources of Islam....read the Quran, Sahih Hadiths and early
sycophant Arab bios of Muhammed.....all the brutality of islam is contained
in their own writings...
>
> But it does not touch on Islamic notions of holy war, or Islamic ideas
about
> the justness of killing "infidels," from which too many of today's Muslims
> draw inspiration. As a result, students are left with a scant appreciation
> of Islamic culture, all the while thinking they've had their minds opened.
Typical of our Ivory Tower elites who want to relativise everything....
>
> For our money, if the UNC really had wanted to offer its freshman a
> sophisticated picture of the forces that have shaped contemporary Islam,
> they would have done better to assign Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong?, or
> perhaps Fouad Ajami's Dream Palace of the Arabs. Both works scholarly,
> engaging and relevant offer masterly overviews of the cultural forces that
> led directly to September 11.
Or try the brilliant liberal Muslim Ali Dashti in his 23 years which details
Islams good and bad points........for this 'great crime' Dashti was tortured
to death by the Iranian Fundies in Iran in the early
80's................such is the tolerance of literal Islam for dissent...
Or try reading from an Ex Muslims point of view who has had the chance to be
an insider to this brutal arab ideology.....like Ibn Warraq or Anwar
Sheik.........granted they are quite polemical but this topic deserves it!
>
> Today, every military regime in the world but one is in a Muslim country.
> Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim
countries.
> Eighty percent of executions carried out each year take place in Muslim
> countries. No Muslim countries save Turkey and Bangladesh are democratic.
And Turkey and Bangledesh, are hardly what one would call free open liberal
democracies..........just try converting from islam to another faith in
these countries and you will find yourself quickly in prison hanging upside
down being tortured, if not killed.......
>
> There is an urgent need in the West to understand why all this is, and
> universities could have a vital role to play in achieving it. By assigning
> Sells's book, all that Chapel Hill has managed to do is whitewash reality
in
> the name of raising awareness. For the likes of an Amina Lawal, this will
> offer little solace.
Damned right and I am sad too say that it will take another 9-11 to awaken
the vile ivory tower elitists up to the reality of Darul Islam...and I'm not
sure that would even work but among us 'unenlightened masses' the tolerance
for this brutal ideology of islam would be completely negated and rightly
so....
I look forward to the day that CNN or BBC has ex muslims or secular muslims
on discussing frankly the vile side of Muhammed...
Devon Hill
Proud Citizen of Darul Harb
>
>
>
>
>
>
who
support islam in any way,their unholy unclean cult of violence is a disgrace to
all people everywhere.
WC
what a difference a mother makes!
Chris Alger
> In message <CZY99.16052$Cq.6...@ozemail.com.au>,
> "Hyuwi" <hy...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> > This is a very anti-Semitic piece.
>
> No it isn't. The term "anti-Semitic" in English has always and only
> meant "Jew-hating".
You are historically correct, as you point out, due to an accident of
history. But of course the piece is profoundly racist, which is the
actual point Hyuwi made. To wit: "[T]he Muslim obligation to eternal
jihad" means that Muslims "may never rest until they have conquered
and enslaved every last Christian and Jew."
To this charge, you reply: "If you're
> trying to weasel around and manipulate some kind of semantics in order
> to pretend that Arabs can't hate Jews, then that's utterly lamely
> feebly pathetically ludicrous."
So calling this moronic screed racist is the same as pretending that
Arabs are incapable of hate? Who's being "utterly lamely feebly
pathetically ludicrous?"
AnonMoos
> of course the piece is profoundly racist,. To wit: "[T]he Muslim
> obligation to eternal jihad" means that Muslims "may never rest
> until they have conquered and enslaved every last Christian and
> Jew."
I'm not sure what you think you're talking about -- that quote is not
contained in the original posted message in this thread,
URL:<news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de>! Are you
confusing the Jerusalem Post story with a personal rant by one "Samuel
Fistel" (i.e. message
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=349DC3AA.11A4%40erols.com ) --
which is threaded together with Reuven Singer's message in Google
Groups (due to having the same subject line), but which was posted on
Dec. 21st 1997, and so obviously has nothing whatever to do with the
August 2002 Jerusalem Post piece?
Mr. Fistel seems to have been at best only moderately well-informed
about the technical details of Islamic law, and he makes a number of
too-sweeping and categorically broad statements; however, he made some
pretty shrewd remarks about Arafat, and some predictions about the
failure of Oslo which look somewhat prophetic in retrospect. Since
you brought up the quote from Mr. Fistel's 1997 posting about "eternal
jihad", I would like to point out that it was only a sweeping broad
categorical statement about the same facts of Islamic law which are
explained in the following scholarly analysis:
"According to Muslim teaching, _jihād_ is one of the basic
commandments of the faith, an obligation imposed on all Muslims
by God, through revelation. In an offensive war, it is an
obligation of the Muslim community as a whole (_farD kifāya_);
in a defensive war, it becomes a personal obligation of every
adult male Muslim (_farD `ayn_). In such a situation, the
Muslim ruler might issue a general call to arms (_nafīr `āmm_).
The basis of the obligation of _jihād_ is the universality of
Muslim revelation. God's word and God's message are for all of
mankind; it is the duty of those who have accepted them to
strive (_jāhada_) unceasingly to convert or at least to
subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit
of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has
either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of
the Islamic state.
"Until that happens, the world is divided into two: the House
of Islam (_dār al-Islām_), where Muslims rule and the law of
Islam prevails; and the House of War (_dār al-Harb_), comprising
the rest of the world. Between these two, there is a morally
necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war,
until the final and inevitable triumph of Islam over unbelief.
According to the law books, this state of war could be
interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce of
limited duration. It could not be terminated by a peace, but
only by a final victory."
- Bernard Lewis, "The Political Language of Islam" (1986, Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press), chapter 4, page 73.
The word "enslaved" in in Mr. Fistel's posting was certainly
unnecessarily inflammatory, but the reality of Islamic theology isn't
really all that much better: the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine discussed in
the Lewis quote above (which is an integral part of the mainstream
consensus of traditional Islamic theology), while it doesn't
necessarily obligate any specific person to undertake any specific
action at any specific time, does amount to an obligation on Muslims
collectively to eventually dominate the whole world, and reduce all
non-Muslims at best to the "dhimmi" status of second-class citizens
with limited rights (who must pay extra taxes, are forbidden from
participating in any way in the political system of the Muslim state,
and who are not allowed to build new places of worship in cities).
Now to be fair, a great number of Muslims don't pay much attention to
this theoretical "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine in their day-to-day lives, and
many current-day Islamic scholars don't think that the "Dar-ul-Harb"
doctrine has much practical concrete application in the modern world.
However, Osama bin Laden thought it had quite a lot of applicability
to the modern world, as do many Muslim extremist groups. If Muslims
wish to avoid being subject to factual and truthful accusations about
Islamic doctrine, or to suspicion about their ultimate goals, then
they should authoritatively repeal Dar-ul-Harb (i.e. not just one
mid-level mullah making an off-the-cuff remark that the "Dar-ul-Harb"
doctrine might have little concrete practical application in the
modern world, but rather an authoritative consensus of high-level
scholars formally declaring that "Dar-ul-Harb" in fact never had any
validity in the past, and will never have any validity in the future,
regardless of the situation). So far, the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine of
Islamic law and theology has not been repealed, and it's not clear
that it ever could be, as long as the "gate of ijtihad is closed" (a
poetic way of saying that Islamic theology has been in a
thought-to-be-desirable officially-declared and self-imposed state of
stagnation for the past 700 years or more).
Meanwhile, the point of the article that you actually should have been
replying to (URL:<news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de>)
remains valid -- if the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
forces its students to read a very tendentiously selected partial
overview of the purely spiritual side of Islam, but presents the
students with nothing whatever about the side of Islam that motivated
Osama bin Ladin, then it seems that the school is indulging in an
ideological propaganda whitewash of Islam, rather than any kind of
balanced overview, and it's doing nothing whatever to properly help
its students understand the background to 9/11.
Chris Alger
> confusing the Jerusalem Post story with a personal rant by one "Samuel
> Fistel" (i.e. message
> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=349DC3AA.11A4%40erols.com ) --
> which is threaded together with Reuven Singer's message in Google
> Groups (due to having the same subject line), but which was posted on
> Dec. 21st 1997, and so obviously has nothing whatever to do with the
> August 2002 Jerusalem Post piece?
I sure was. Sorry. Thanks for a thoughtful response anyway.
As for the Jerusalem Post editorial, it's about what I'd expect: that
the "better" approach to teaching university students about Islam is
to link it to 9/11 through the works of Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami
in order to avoid "sanitizing" Islamic ugliness. Note that fear of
the opposite reaction -- blaming 9/11 on "Arabs" and "Islam" --
doesn't seem to concern the writer much, which is the reaction you'd
expect only from someone that welcomes the bigotry and hysteria that
resulted, characterized by posts like Fistel's.
>
[snip to Lewis quote]
>
> "According to Muslim teaching, _jihād_ is one of the basic
> commandments of the faith, an obligation imposed on all Muslims
> by God, through revelation. In an offensive war, it is an
> obligation of the Muslim community as a whole (_farD kifāya_);
> in a defensive war, it becomes a personal obligation of every
> adult male Muslim (_farD `ayn_). In such a situation, the
> Muslim ruler might issue a general call to arms (_nafīr `āmm_).
> The basis of the obligation of _jihād_ is the universality of
> Muslim revelation. God's word and God's message are for all of
> mankind; it is the duty of those who have accepted them to
> strive (_jāhada_) unceasingly to convert or at least to
> subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit
> of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has
> either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of
> the Islamic state.
The eternal obligation to convert is a mainstay of Christian theology
as well, and hardly a grounds for fear, unless we adopt the zero
tolerance premises of certain religous fundamentalists of every
stripe.
>
> "Until that happens, the world is divided into two: the House
> of Islam (_dār al-Islām_), where Muslims rule and the law of
> Islam prevails; and the House of War (_dār al-Harb_), comprising
> the rest of the world. Between these two, there is a morally
> necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war,
> until the final and inevitable triumph of Islam over unbelief.
> According to the law books, this state of war could be
> interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce of
> limited duration. It could not be terminated by a peace, but
> only by a final victory."
>
> - Bernard Lewis, "The Political Language of Islam" (1986, Chicago:
> The University of Chicago Press), chapter 4, page 73.
>
If true, then Muslims either (1) have an incredibly long timeline or
(2) have been spectacularly unsuccessful during their last 700 years
of war in which h they have failed to expand their influence much
beyond the initial Islamic sweep through Asia and Africa. Surely if
this Islamic "state of war" were ubiquitous, as Lewis suggests, we
would for the last 1,000 years have seen much more severe
manifestations than al Qaeda and similar gangs.
Since I'm not sure how you define "Muslim extremism," I'll concentrate
on your suggestion that Muslim terrorism generally can be at least
partly traced to Dar-ul-Harb because these are actual, concrete
problems.
It doesn't make sense in light of undisputable facts. Empirically, it
cannot be said that Dar-ul-Harb has *apparently* triggered terrorism
because such a tiny percentage of Muslims commit terrorism and the
ones that do have started recently. Current terrorism by Muslims
obviously relates in part to current geopolitical and cultural
problems rather than merely competing religious ideologies. Thus,
there is no reason to believe that terrorists are actually propelled
by Dar-ul-Harb even if they invoke it to rationlize their actions, or
that they would meaningfully alter their conduct if the doctrine were
altered or abolished.
>
> Meanwhile, the point of the article that you actually should have been
> replying to (URL:<news:ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de>)
> remains valid -- if the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
> forces its students to read a very tendentiously selected partial
> overview of the purely spiritual side of Islam, but presents the
> students with nothing whatever about the side of Islam that motivated
> Osama bin Ladin, then it seems that the school is indulging in an
> ideological propaganda whitewash of Islam, rather than any kind of
> balanced overview, and it's doing nothing whatever to properly help
> its students understand the background to 9/11.
I didn't understand the purpose of introducing freshman to Islam was
to explain 9/11, at least I hope that's not the case. 9/11 obviously
triggered new interest in Islam in this country, and highlighted our
broad ignorance of Islamic thought and practice and Islamic complaints
about U.S. foreign policy. This by itself would justify teaching
Islam while treating 9/11 as a dramatic abberation, or a footnote to a
much different story.
While I'm generally sympathetic to fears of whitewashing, when I look
around this forum and the general media and see so much racist
insanity characterized by messianic and neo-nazi raving, I can't agree
that a little sanitizing right now is all that bad. Like Fistel, for
example.
AnonMoos
>> Meanwhile, the point of the Jerusalem Post article remains valid --
>> if the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill forces its
>> students to read a very tendentiously selected partial overview of
>> the purely spiritual side of Islam, but presents the students with
>> nothing whatever about the side of Islam that motivated Osama bin
>> Ladin, then it seems that the school is indulging in an ideological
>> propaganda whitewash of Islam, rather than any kind of balanced
>> overview, and it's doing nothing whatever to properly help its
>> students understand the background to 9/11.
> I didn't understand the purpose of introducing freshman to Islam was
> to explain 9/11, at least I hope that's not the case. 9/11
> obviously triggered new interest in Islam in this country, and
> highlighted our broad ignorance of Islamic thought and practice and
> Islamic complaints about U.S. foreign policy. This by itself would
> justify teaching Islam while treating 9/11 as a dramatic abberation,
> or a footnote to a much different story. While I'm generally
> sympathetic to fears of whitewashing, when I look around this forum
> and the general media and see so much racist insanity characterized
> by messianic and neo-nazi raving, I can't agree that a little
> sanitizing right now is all that bad. Like Fistel, for example.
> As for the Jerusalem Post editorial, it's about what I'd expect:
> that the "better" approach to teaching university students about
> Islam is to link it to 9/11 through the works of Bernard Lewis and
> Fouad Ajami in order to avoid "sanitizing" Islamic ugliness. Note
> that fear of the opposite reaction -- blaming 9/11 on "Arabs" and
> "Islam" -- doesn't seem to concern the writer much, which is the
> reaction you'd expect only from someone that welcomes the bigotry
> and hysteria that resulted, characterized by posts like Fistel's.
Since Fistel's post
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=349DC3AA.11A4%40erols.com was
made on December 21st 1997, it is obviously impossible for it to be a
reaction to the events of 9/11. (Not to mention that you seem to have
overlooked the fact that it's Muslims themselves who are doing a lot
of the "neo-nazi raving" here.) My attitude is this:
1) If Islam is the "religion of peace" which many Islamic spokesmen
are so quick to claim that it is, then Muslims can have no objection
to having the whole truth about Islam become widely known.
2) If Islam is not in fact really a "religion of peace", then it's
best for us to know the truth, since the truth in this matter will be
relevant to preparing for and striving to prevent any future attacks
similar to 9/11.
In neither case is it either honest scholarship or sound preparation
for the basis of future U.S. foreign policy to hide or blur over the
truth because you're afraid of possibly offending someone. The truth
is the truth, regardless of whether it conveniently fits in with a
particular pre-packaged ideology or not. I'd rather have a whole lot
less fuzzy vague bland meaningless pan-cultural post-modernist
deconstructionist non-offensivity, and a whole lot more hard factual
scrutiny of possible future threats to the U.S.
>> "According to Muslim teaching, _jihād_ is one of the basic
>> commandments of the faith, an obligation imposed on all Muslims
>> by God, through revelation. In an offensive war, it is an
>> obligation of the Muslim community as a whole (_farD kifāya_);
>> in a defensive war, it becomes a personal obligation of every
>> adult male Muslim (_farD `ayn_). In such a situation, the
>> Muslim ruler might issue a general call to arms (_nafīr `āmm_).
>> The basis of the obligation of _jihād_ is the universality of
>> Muslim revelation. God's word and God's message are for all of
>> mankind; it is the duty of those who have accepted them to
>> strive (_jāhada_) unceasingly to convert or at least to
>> subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit
>> of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has
>> either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of
>> the Islamic state.
>> "Until that happens, the world is divided into two: the House of
>> Islam (_dār al-Islām_), where Muslims rule and the law of Islam
>> prevails; and the House of War (_dār al-Harb_), comprising the
>> rest of the world. Between these two, there is a morally
>> necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war,
>> until the final and inevitable triumph of Islam over unbelief.
>> According to the law books, this state of war could be
>> interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce of limited
>> duration. It could not be terminated by a peace, but only by a
>> final victory."
>> - Bernard Lewis, "The Political Language of Islam" (1986,
>> Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), chapter 4, page 73.
> The eternal obligation to convert is a mainstay of Christian
> theology as well, and hardly a grounds for fear, unless we adopt the
> zero tolerance premises of certain religous fundamentalists of every
> stripe.
Yep, it certainly is a spiritual goal for Christianity to eventually
convert all humanity (the "great commission" of Matthew 28:18-20) --
but there's nothing whatsoever in Christian theology which requires
Christians to conquer the whole world and politically-militarily
dominate over all non-Christians. Crusading is not any kind of
sacrament or core faith doctrine of the Christian religion and never
was any kind of sacrament of the Christian religion -- it was a
contingent interpretation which was taken up by one period and dropped
by subsequent periods, without ever affecting the essence of the
faith. By contrast, the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine is an integral part of
the mainstream consensus of traditional Islamic theology, which has
never yet been repealed (authoritatively declared to be invalid), as I
mentioned below.
> If true, then Muslims either (1) have an incredibly long timeline or
> (2) have been spectacularly unsuccessful during their last 700 years
> of war in which h they have failed to expand their influence much
> beyond the initial Islamic sweep through Asia and Africa. Surely if
> this Islamic "state of war" were ubiquitous, as Lewis suggests, we
> would for the last 1,000 years have seen much more severe
> manifestations than al Qaeda and similar gangs.
That's what "the gate of ijtihad is closed" means -- the only type of
government discussed in Sunni Islamic political theology and religious
law is a single pan-Islamic Caliphate which confronts hostile
non-Muslim states on all sides. The political unity of Islam
(i.e. all Muslims ruled by a single state) already started breaking up
in the 8th century A.D., while the pan-Islamic caliphate didn't count
for much in history (even as a legal fiction) after 1258 A.D.
However, all these events have had almost no effect whatsoever on
Islamic theology and religious law, which continues to slumber in its
self-imposed 700+ years period of sultification and stagnation, and
which therefore refuses to envisage any type of government than a
pan-Islamic Caliphate, and also keeps the Dar-ul-Islam doctrine on the
books.
The fact that a pan-Islamic Caliphate is the one and only religiously
legitimate form of government (according to Islamic theology) often
hasn't had much effect on real-world politics over the course of
Muslim history. The "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine has also been frequently
been ignored (though it has sometimes been more relevant than you seem
to assume, since it provided the religious justification for Ottoman
conquests in Greece and the Balkans, and Mogul and other Islamic
conquests in India). However, since the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine has
always remained on the books, someone like Bin Laden can choose to
pick it up (and use it as the explanation for his actions) at any
time.
>> The "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine discussed in the Lewis quote above
You're right about one thing -- the fact that the theoretical
"Dar-ul-Harb" has been on the books of Islamic theology obviously was
not in itself the sole or direct trigger for the actions of Osama bin
Laden. (For that matter, the majority of Muslim extremists direct
their actions against other Muslims, or Muslim-run governments.)
However, "Dar-ul-Harb" is far more than a mere "justification" for Bin
Laden's actions -- it's an explanation which Bin Ladin and his
associates use to make favorable propaganda for themselves in the
Arab-Muslim world, and to gain support and further recruits. The fact
that the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine has existed in Islamic theology for
the last thousand years or more means that Bin Laden's arguments have
a resonance and superficial appeal in the thought of many Muslims who
take their religion seriously. If the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine were not
on the books, Bin Ladin would have found it harder to gain support and
recruits among Muslims. In that sense, the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine
certainly does have the effect of facilitating terrorism.
--
Murderers are not Martyrs!
Chris Alger
> cral...@attbi.com (Chris Alger) wrote in message news:<2f733f72.02082...@posting.google.com>...
> >anon...@io.com (AnonMoos) wrote in message news:<a8e7ce7.02082...@posting.google.com>...
>
> best for us to know the truth, since the truth in this matter will be
> relevant to preparing for and striving to prevent any future attacks
> similar to 9/11.
Translation: Islam is responsible for 9/11 to the extent that it is
not really a "religion of peace," whatever that means. That's some
stretch.
I agree that the historic connections between religion and violence
should be taught more widely, but you seem to want to restrict it to
Islam, which to my way of thinking would defeat the purpose.
> However, since the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine has
> always remained on the books, someone like Bin Laden can choose to
> pick it up (and use it as the explanation for his actions) at any
> time.
Just as he can pick from a hundred religious and secular doctrines
that have been used to explain and rationalize terrorism. Or he could
continue to restort to "traditional" Islamic theory if Islamic
doctrine were somehow altered. You could make the same argument about
the Old Testament injunction to destroy the tribe of Amalek that
(prominent Washington D.C. attorney) Nathan Lewin recently invoked to
argue for the murder of families of terrorists. True, Lewin was
vigorously denounced by Talmudic schoalrs, just as bin Laden was
denounced by Koranic scholars. Demanding that such religious leaders
also try to "change" their doctrine to prevent nuts like bin Laden and
Lewin from perverting it is neither a necessary, effective or
realistic tool for reducing the threat of violence. The real point of
these arguments therefore appears to be abstract notions of which
religions are "better" or "worse," a prescription for bigoted
generalization.
> If the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine were not
> on the books, Bin Ladin would have found it harder to gain support and
> recruits among Muslims. In that sense, the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine
> certainly does have the effect of facilitating terrorism.
Religious doctrines aren't statutes that can be nullified by being
taken on or off "the books." There is no prospect of a significant
revision of Islamic doctrine because of Muslim extremism generally,
much less the murderous rampages of Osama bin Laden. There's room for
Islamic leaders to downplay the role of violence and retribution in
Islamic thought and it's happening now, but for the most part you're
arguing for nothing more than a wider perception that Islam causes
terror, which is scarcely necessary, especially since 9/11 and, as you
point out, even before.
More importantly, your argument (that Islamic doctrine led to 9/11 and
similar incidents) is based on nothing more than the assumption that
the religious doctrines invoked by Muslim terrorists are the prime
movers of the terrorism. One could just as easily assume that the
specific political complaints invoked by the terrorists are more
important factors. It goes without saying that bin Laden can most
effectively recruit from conservative Islamic countries by invoking
Islamic thought. This is not even slight refutation of the empirical
fact that hardly any Muslims are prone to terrorism, which powerfully
suggests that Islam is not the crisis threat you portray it. It only
only hints at the possibility of a causal link.
This is why I think that we're seeing so much meaningless controversy
over Islam and so little meaningful controversy over U.S. foreign
policy. We can do little or nothing about the former, but aspects of
the latter that might cause intolerable repercussions are a function
of politics, and are indeed capable of being taken "off the books."
The extent that we focus on Islam to the exclusion of other factors
testifies to our refusal to take these issues seriously.
AnonMoos
>anon...@io.com (AnonMoos) wrote in message news:<a8e7ce7.02082...@posting.google.com>...
>> 2) If Islam is not in fact really a "religion of peace", then it's
>> best for us to know the truth, since the truth in this matter will
>> be relevant to preparing for and striving to prevent any future
>> attacks similar to 9/11.
> Translation: Islam is responsible for 9/11 to the extent that it is
> not really a "religion of peace," whatever that means.
Don't ask me what its exact connotations are intended to be --
"religion of peace" is the standard term that all the Islamic
apologists and self-appointed spokesmen in Western countries use.
> I agree that the historic connections between religion and violence
> should be taught more widely, but you seem to want to restrict it to
> Islam, which to my way of thinking would defeat the purpose.
A comparative course on the general subject of religion and violence
in all their aspects, in all cultures thoughout history, would be an
interesting graduate seminar, but it has very little relevance to the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill situation.
What quite a number of people (including individuals who have never
heard of Daniel Pipes) are wondering is, if in response to 9/11 you're
going to force students to read a book about Islam, then is it honest
to choose a highly selective book which presents only the purely
spiritual side of Islam, and deliberately leaves out all aspects of
Islam which motivated the 9/11 attackers? In this particular context,
forcing all students to read this one selective source only, seems
more like a partisan slanted tendentious exercise in whitewashing
propaganda, than it does any kind of balanced scholarly inquiry into
the whole truth.
>> However, since the "Dar-ul-Harb" doctrine has always remained on
>> the books, someone like Bin Laden can choose to pick it up (and use
>> it as the explanation for his actions) at any time.
> Just as he can pick from a hundred religious and secular doctrines
> that have been used to explain and rationalize terrorism. You could
> make the same argument about the Old Testament injunction to destroy
> the tribe of Amalek
All religions which have been around long enough have enactments on
their books which seem to be out of step with 21st century modern
society. That in itself is not really the issue. What is very
noticeable with respect to Islam is that:
1) Islamic theology and religious law include an extensive and
detailed political theology, and detailed regulations governing many
specific minute points of how an Islamic government should be run.
2) Islamic political theology and the Islamic religious law of
government are calibrated almost exclusively to the Abbasid Caliphate,
and do not really take into account changes in politics, government,
and the overall world situation which have occurred since the fall of
the Abbasid caliphate.
3) Since the "gate of ijtihad is closed" (i.e. Islamic theology is
in its thought-to-be-desirable self-imposed 700+ year period of
stagnation), therefore the Islamic doctrines of political theology and
religious laws of goverment which are outdated cannot really be
authoritatively repealed, nor can there be a widely-accepted
constructive effort to build a new political theology which does not
take the existence of the Abbasid Caliphate as its basic fundamental
axiom. At most, there is interpretive nibbling around the edges
(which allows Muslims to evade obeying the letter of some of the most
incongruous old laws, but which does nothing whatever to lay
foundations for a new fully-renovated Islamic political theology).
So not only does Islam have a much more politically-oriented theology
than most other religions (certainly more so than Christianity), but
the politics is drastically and dangerously outdated, and currently no
one has the authority to update what's outdated in Islamic political
theology. I don't think one has to be maliciously anti-Islamic to
consider that this is an undesirable situation (certainly some
reformist Muslims consider that this is an undesirable situation), and
I don't think it would be fair to call someone an anti-Islamic bigot
for pointing out the above truths.
> Demanding that such religious leaders also try to "change" their
> doctrine to prevent nuts like bin Laden and Lewin from perverting it
> is neither a necessary, effective or realistic tool for reducing the
> threat of violence.
I wasn't really "demanding" that the Dar-ul-Harb doctrine of Islamic
political theology be repealed (for one thing, I'm aware that
currently no one in Sunni Islam really has definitive authority to
fully repeal it). What I was pointing out was that the "Dar-ul-Harb"
doctrine was far from being a mere theoretical abstract paper
terrorist "justification" -- in the hands of al-Qaeda and Bin Laden,
it was a highly effective and dynamic recruiting tool which they were
able to use to gain recruits and support throughout the Arab and
Muslim world.
What I'm really saying overall is that it would be in the Muslims' own
best interests to get their intellectual act together and stop
dragging the millstone of the Abbasid Caliphate around their neck.
However, until Muslims choose to do so, and as long as some Muslims
use impeccably traditional and widely-accepted Islamic doctrines to
justify terrorism, and many other Muslims are somewhat reluctant to
condemn them for doing so (that's what the whole "4,000 Jews" hoax so
rampantly widespread around the whole Arab/Muslim world right now
really amounts to), then Muslims will have no real right to complain
if they are sometimes regarded with suspicion, and not all of those
who sometimes feel some suspicion of Muslims are necessarily
anti-Islamic bigots.
Of course, the position I have outlined above is completely different
from saying "Islam is a terrorist religion" (something which I haven't
said, and don't believe).
Karl Ericson
this the way Michael Sells did this in his book protects Islam. He
omitted negative statements in the Koran about killing the infidel on
the grounds that they were too complicated for UNC freshman. They are
only complicated if you try and pretend they don't mean what they
mean. Then you have to develop contorted complicated explanations to
explain away the truth. For a web site that discusses Islam
objectively I recommend
Islam and Jihad
http://www.primechoice.com/philosophy
"Reuven Singer" <reuv...@netmedia.co.il> wrote in message news:<ak9kvp$1g9lbb$1...@ID-141531.news.dfncis.de>...
Ariadne
> Islam is an evil religion that commands war with the infidel. Hiding
> this the way Michael Sells did this in his book protects Islam. He
> omitted negative statements in the Koran about killing the infidel on
> the grounds that they were too complicated for UNC freshman. They are
> only complicated if you try and pretend they don't mean what they
> mean. Then you have to develop contorted complicated explanations to
> explain away the truth. For a web site that discusses Islam
> objectively I recommend
> Islam and Jihad
> http://www.primechoice.com/philosophy
>
Thank you. It requires time but judged by Page 1
it looks like a very good site.