helping jr
3 views
Skip to first unread message
James Kelly
Mar 1, 2021, 2:31:38 PM3/1/21
to Tony Koltz, David Kolb, T.J. McGuire, Thomas McGuire, Smith, Brian, John Podsiadlo, SJ, co...@googlegroups.com
Tony - Here's something else you can help me with.. As a member of pax christi's educational ctee I used to get asked, "Well, non-violence is sweet - but how about Hitler?" Now, it's, How about the Muslims? Anything in any direction or in any way you can help me with this would be deeply appreciated blessings, jim
THE LESS THAN TEN ESSENTIALS OF AN UNBIASED UNDERSTANDING OF THE COMPLEXITIES OF ISLAM FOR BUSY PEOPLE WHO DO GOOD THINGS AND SO WHO RIGHT NOW HAVE ONLY ABOUT A HALF-HOUR LEFT FOR READING
1) There is no single person or institution that speaks for all Sunnis or all Shiites much less for all branches of Islam. Qur'an literally means "Recitation" and Muslims agree that the Qur'an in translation is not the Qur'an, that there is no Islamic counterpart to the King James Bible and that, in effect, each translation is a commentary. So, the best generalization about the Islamic world is that there is no best generalization about the Islamic world.
2) Todd Green notes that Muslims are already condemning violence and in doing so often invoke the Islamic tradition - and that, indeed, if you goggle "Muslim condemnations of terrorism" you will find countless entries. So he tells us we should not allow Muslims who commit acts of violence to speak to us for Islam as it sets up an us-versus-them scenario, rather than encouraging us to examine the complex set of factors - including our own histories of violence - that play a role. (Source: Jordan Denari Duffner, AMERICA, Fall, 2018: 32-33. A review of Todd Green’s PRESUMED GUILTY: WHY WE SHOULDN'T ASK MUSLIMS TO CONDEMN TERRORISM, Fortress Press: 32).
3) We don't own God. God belongs to all of us. The Qur'anic God presides over the three Abrahamic faiths; the deity of Judaism and Christianity is the same God of Islam. (Jack Miles cited in Harper Magazine, Nov. 2018:89, by Anna Della Subin).
4) Now here’s a surprise. Thanks to Islam, Columbus discovered America. I better directly quote here: In the “16th-century Christians saw everything, including the Americas, through the lens of their struggle against Islam. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the very year that Spain's rulers destroyed Iberia's last Muslim kingdom, he assured his royal patrons that his voyages were merely continuations of their anti-Islamic crusade. What sounds foolish today - Turks invading Mexico - did not seem so in 1573".(Ian Morris, "The Sultan at the Center of the World, THE NYTIMES BOOK REVIEW, Oct. 18 2020: 21).
5) Here’s something we really need to hear. The deepest hatred in Islam is the hatred of war. For Islam, fighting war is close to betraying Islam. This goes so contrary to what we so often hear that we need to go to a highly credible source. The following anti-war exhortations come from a Sept. 19, 2014 open letter to "Dr. Ibrahim Awwad Al-Badri, alias Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-proclaimed 'Islamic State', signed by 126 Muslim leaders and scholars. From the Letter’s Executive Summary: #6 "It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent”. #8. “Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the right purpose and without the right rules of conduct”. # 22 "It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims", #23 "Loyalty to one's nation is permissible in Islam". Let’s go to the full text of the letter.
2) # 4 "When there is a difference of opinion among eminent scholars, the more merciful, i.e. the best, opinion should be chosen. Severity should be avoided. #8 JIHAD: "there are two kinds of jihad in Islam: the greater jihad, which is the jihad (struggle) against one's ego; and the lesser jihad, the jihad (struggle) against the enemy. ... Finally, one of the most important principles when it comes to the manner of jihad is that only combatants may be killed; their families and non-combatants may not be killed intentionally". #9 ON DECLARING PEOPLE NON-MUSLIM (in Arabic, “takfir”). "Quintessentially in Islam, anyone who says: 'There is no god but God; and Muhammad is the Messenger of God' is a Muslim and (so) cannot be declared a non-Muslim". "It is not permissible to kill any Muslim, (nor any human being), who is unarmed and a non-combatant". So, according to the best of Islamic scholarship, rather than a warrior, a faithful Muslim is more likely to be a conscientious objector.
6)“Shariah”, the broad Arabic term for everyday law, doesn't rhyme with “hellish”. In terms of everyday life, what might we rightly expect if our lives brought us to live in an authentic Muslim culture? Here’s a scholarly summary. "Fiqh,” that is Islamic jurisprudence, is geared to solving practical problems and balancing its 1,400 year old tradition with modern exigencies. Both Sunni and Shite Muslims possess an extremely complex set of principles (called usul al-fiqh) and there is a hierarchy in their prudent application: (a) The Qur'an. (b) The Sunna is a vast collection of sayings of the Prophet or stories about him related by closest companions; there are 'strong' and 'weak' traditions of interpretation (c) Examples from Islamic history are seen as types of precedent. To conclude our Muslim “a, b c”s”, it seems extremely likely that anyone in their first semester of law school would say “I don’t use the word, but Shariah makes sense to me”. (See AMERICA March 16, 2015, Elias D. Mallon, WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM? pp. 19-22).
7)But, putting our Qur'an back on the shelf, doesn’t reality require that we be really real about Islamic practice? Despite what scholars teach, what about the bad stuff done in the name of Islam? For example, in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Turkey there were about 3 and 4 million Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians), about 20% of the total population (I’ll give the sources in #8).. By 1924, “through three successive waves of massacre, deportation, abduction, and forced conversion, Christians had been reduced to 2 percent of Turkey, and almost all who remained would depart in the following decades”. The authors claim this was not Turk versus Armenian but a 30 year Muslim versus Christian genocide. And that, despite Qur’an teaching (Q 2:256) that ”there is no compulsion in religion. “’All of this occurred with the active participation of Muslim clerics and the encouragement of the Turkish press’”. After its First World War defeats, Mustafa Kemal effected a highly nationalistic new Turkish Republic, now “religiously cleansed”, that was highly admired by Hitler. “’Who after all, speaks today of the Armenians?’ he famously said”. “Turkey has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the genocide, purged its archives of incriminating evidence, and pursued diplomatic retribution against those countries that recognize the genocide”. Let’s give a critical comparative thought to these “Islamic really reals”).
8) To faithful American Christians and Jews, the nationalistic distortions of the Qur'an can sound like the American distortions of the Constitution and of the Biblical beatitudes. We can critically think of what the Bible and our Constitution means to the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Philippines, and the many more who have experienced what we have called our necessary self-defense as a murderous terror. ( See Gabriel Said Reynolds, WHAT TURKEY DID TO ITS CHRISTIANS, a review of Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi THE-THIRTY YEAR GENECIDE: TURKEY’S DESTRUCTION OF ITS CHRISTIAN MINORITIES, 194-1924, in COMMONWEAL, June 2020: 44 - 47.).
9)OK - You’re running out of time. So, How about a cogent summary of our half-hour honest efforts? I think we have one. In his 2017 WHAT THE QUR’AN MEANT AND WHY IT MATTERS (Viking Press) the polymath Gary Wills invites us to join him in going beyond the headlines and to delve deeply into the depths of the Qur’an. In terms of regnant political western misunderstandings, here are just a few of Wills CORE TAKE-AWAYS:
(1) He could not find in the Qur’an any defense of killing the innocent, any doctrine of fatwa, nor any definition of Shari’ah law. (2) What too many brand as Islamic essences are in fact Islamic heresies and it is clear that Muhammad’s revelations were meant to lay a basis for peaceful relations among followers of Torah, Gospel and Qur’an, and any Muslim developments that deny or cancel these foundations are Islamic heresies. (3) Indeed, terrorists are Qur’an illiterates and act mostly on secular motives of resentment against colonial powers. (4) But while the religion of the Qur’an is a religion of peace it is a different matter to say that Islam is a religion of peace; for just as we can say that the religion of the New Testament is a religion of peace, after the numberless wars of religious conquest, crusades and inquisitions, we cannot say that about historical Christianity. (5) As Clausewitz noted, war escalates by the ratchetings-up of reciprocal hostilities and thus tends toward the absolute and so the defensive war justified in the Qur’an soon became an imperial effort to impose Islam as a ruling power and, just as the Christian empire grew by war, so too did the Islamic empire, as popes and imams alike found ways to distort the Gospel and the Qur’an into justifications for war. (6) On the worth of women, the Torah and the Gospel cannot boast more enlightenment than the Qur’an. (7) The Qur’an says little about the veil and it pertains only to Mohammad’s wives. For some Muslim feminists, removing the hijab would be tantamount to a moral surrender to Western colonialism. (8) Regarding the long arc of history as empirically found by THE FUNDAMENTALISM PROJECT (Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (1995), the West’s ongoing scientistic rationalistic secularism itself engenders a fundamentalist reaction and so its proud hegemony undermines itself.
So, fellow pilgrims, let us humbly ponder Wills’ last sentence: “We believers (should) encourage each other over the barriers raised by people who do not wish any of us well.” (James R. Kelly, pax christi; emeritus prof. of sociology, Fordham University.)
1) There is no single person or institution that speaks for all Sunnis or all Shiites much less for all branches of Islam. Qur'an literally means "Recitation" and Muslims agree that the Qur'an in translation is not the Qur'an, that there is no Islamic counterpart to the King James Bible and that, in effect, each translation is a commentary. So, the best generalization about the Islamic world is that there is no best generalization about the Islamic world.
2) Todd Green notes that Muslims are already condemning violence and in doing so often invoke the Islamic tradition - and that, indeed, if you goggle "Muslim condemnations of terrorism" you will find countless entries. So he tells us we should not allow Muslims who commit acts of violence to speak to us for Islam as it sets up an us-versus-them scenario, rather than encouraging us to examine the complex set of factors - including our own histories of violence - that play a role. (Source: Jordan Denari Duffner, AMERICA, Fall, 2018: 32-33. A review of Todd Green’s PRESUMED GUILTY: WHY WE SHOULDN'T ASK MUSLIMS TO CONDEMN TERRORISM, Fortress Press: 32).
3) We don't own God. God belongs to all of us. The Qur'anic God presides over the three Abrahamic faiths; the deity of Judaism and Christianity is the same God of Islam. (Jack Miles cited in Harper Magazine, Nov. 2018:89, by Anna Della Subin).
4) Now here’s a surprise. Thanks to Islam, Columbus discovered America. I better directly quote here: In the “16th-century Christians saw everything, including the Americas, through the lens of their struggle against Islam. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the very year that Spain's rulers destroyed Iberia's last Muslim kingdom, he assured his royal patrons that his voyages were merely continuations of their anti-Islamic crusade. What sounds foolish today - Turks invading Mexico - did not seem so in 1573".(Ian Morris, "The Sultan at the Center of the World, THE NYTIMES BOOK REVIEW, Oct. 18 2020: 21).
5) Here’s something we really need to hear. The deepest hatred in Islam is the hatred of war. For Islam, fighting war is close to betraying Islam. This goes so contrary to what we so often hear that we need to go to a highly credible source. The following anti-war exhortations come from a Sept. 19, 2014 open letter to "Dr. Ibrahim Awwad Al-Badri, alias Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, leader of the self-proclaimed 'Islamic State', signed by 126 Muslim leaders and scholars. From the Letter’s Executive Summary: #6 "It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent”. #8. “Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the right purpose and without the right rules of conduct”. # 22 "It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims", #23 "Loyalty to one's nation is permissible in Islam". Let’s go to the full text of the letter.
2) # 4 "When there is a difference of opinion among eminent scholars, the more merciful, i.e. the best, opinion should be chosen. Severity should be avoided. #8 JIHAD: "there are two kinds of jihad in Islam: the greater jihad, which is the jihad (struggle) against one's ego; and the lesser jihad, the jihad (struggle) against the enemy. ... Finally, one of the most important principles when it comes to the manner of jihad is that only combatants may be killed; their families and non-combatants may not be killed intentionally". #9 ON DECLARING PEOPLE NON-MUSLIM (in Arabic, “takfir”). "Quintessentially in Islam, anyone who says: 'There is no god but God; and Muhammad is the Messenger of God' is a Muslim and (so) cannot be declared a non-Muslim". "It is not permissible to kill any Muslim, (nor any human being), who is unarmed and a non-combatant". So, according to the best of Islamic scholarship, rather than a warrior, a faithful Muslim is more likely to be a conscientious objector.
6)“Shariah”, the broad Arabic term for everyday law, doesn't rhyme with “hellish”. In terms of everyday life, what might we rightly expect if our lives brought us to live in an authentic Muslim culture? Here’s a scholarly summary. "Fiqh,” that is Islamic jurisprudence, is geared to solving practical problems and balancing its 1,400 year old tradition with modern exigencies. Both Sunni and Shite Muslims possess an extremely complex set of principles (called usul al-fiqh) and there is a hierarchy in their prudent application: (a) The Qur'an. (b) The Sunna is a vast collection of sayings of the Prophet or stories about him related by closest companions; there are 'strong' and 'weak' traditions of interpretation (c) Examples from Islamic history are seen as types of precedent. To conclude our Muslim “a, b c”s”, it seems extremely likely that anyone in their first semester of law school would say “I don’t use the word, but Shariah makes sense to me”. (See AMERICA March 16, 2015, Elias D. Mallon, WHO SPEAKS FOR ISLAM? pp. 19-22).
7)But, putting our Qur'an back on the shelf, doesn’t reality require that we be really real about Islamic practice? Despite what scholars teach, what about the bad stuff done in the name of Islam? For example, in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Turkey there were about 3 and 4 million Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians), about 20% of the total population (I’ll give the sources in #8).. By 1924, “through three successive waves of massacre, deportation, abduction, and forced conversion, Christians had been reduced to 2 percent of Turkey, and almost all who remained would depart in the following decades”. The authors claim this was not Turk versus Armenian but a 30 year Muslim versus Christian genocide. And that, despite Qur’an teaching (Q 2:256) that ”there is no compulsion in religion. “’All of this occurred with the active participation of Muslim clerics and the encouragement of the Turkish press’”. After its First World War defeats, Mustafa Kemal effected a highly nationalistic new Turkish Republic, now “religiously cleansed”, that was highly admired by Hitler. “’Who after all, speaks today of the Armenians?’ he famously said”. “Turkey has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the genocide, purged its archives of incriminating evidence, and pursued diplomatic retribution against those countries that recognize the genocide”. Let’s give a critical comparative thought to these “Islamic really reals”).
8) To faithful American Christians and Jews, the nationalistic distortions of the Qur'an can sound like the American distortions of the Constitution and of the Biblical beatitudes. We can critically think of what the Bible and our Constitution means to the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Philippines, and the many more who have experienced what we have called our necessary self-defense as a murderous terror. ( See Gabriel Said Reynolds, WHAT TURKEY DID TO ITS CHRISTIANS, a review of Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi THE-THIRTY YEAR GENECIDE: TURKEY’S DESTRUCTION OF ITS CHRISTIAN MINORITIES, 194-1924, in COMMONWEAL, June 2020: 44 - 47.).
9)OK - You’re running out of time. So, How about a cogent summary of our half-hour honest efforts? I think we have one. In his 2017 WHAT THE QUR’AN MEANT AND WHY IT MATTERS (Viking Press) the polymath Gary Wills invites us to join him in going beyond the headlines and to delve deeply into the depths of the Qur’an. In terms of regnant political western misunderstandings, here are just a few of Wills CORE TAKE-AWAYS:
(1) He could not find in the Qur’an any defense of killing the innocent, any doctrine of fatwa, nor any definition of Shari’ah law. (2) What too many brand as Islamic essences are in fact Islamic heresies and it is clear that Muhammad’s revelations were meant to lay a basis for peaceful relations among followers of Torah, Gospel and Qur’an, and any Muslim developments that deny or cancel these foundations are Islamic heresies. (3) Indeed, terrorists are Qur’an illiterates and act mostly on secular motives of resentment against colonial powers. (4) But while the religion of the Qur’an is a religion of peace it is a different matter to say that Islam is a religion of peace; for just as we can say that the religion of the New Testament is a religion of peace, after the numberless wars of religious conquest, crusades and inquisitions, we cannot say that about historical Christianity. (5) As Clausewitz noted, war escalates by the ratchetings-up of reciprocal hostilities and thus tends toward the absolute and so the defensive war justified in the Qur’an soon became an imperial effort to impose Islam as a ruling power and, just as the Christian empire grew by war, so too did the Islamic empire, as popes and imams alike found ways to distort the Gospel and the Qur’an into justifications for war. (6) On the worth of women, the Torah and the Gospel cannot boast more enlightenment than the Qur’an. (7) The Qur’an says little about the veil and it pertains only to Mohammad’s wives. For some Muslim feminists, removing the hijab would be tantamount to a moral surrender to Western colonialism. (8) Regarding the long arc of history as empirically found by THE FUNDAMENTALISM PROJECT (Martin Marty and Scott Appleby (1995), the West’s ongoing scientistic rationalistic secularism itself engenders a fundamentalist reaction and so its proud hegemony undermines itself.
So, fellow pilgrims, let us humbly ponder Wills’ last sentence: “We believers (should) encourage each other over the barriers raised by people who do not wish any of us well.” (James R. Kelly, pax christi; emeritus prof. of sociology, Fordham University.)
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages