What Does the Koran Teach about Violence?
Koran Book of Peace, Not War, Scholars Say
Islamists Use Taqiya to Deceive Non-Moslems about Islam
I couldn’t find a good article refuting the points in this one.
I am not saying that therefore I think all Moslems are bad people or anything, just that it is very difficult to evaluate Islam and whose who follow it closely.
Have you actually read any books by mainstream scholars of Islam like John Esposito or F. E. Peters? (To be fair, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington would be equally renowned scholars who take a more negative view. But they tend to focus on different things.) Or Marshall Hodgson’s old but still respected
The Venture of Islam, or the Oxford Illustrated History of Islam (many but not all of whose authors are Muslims), or
Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition (a book with many authors, all of whom I believe are Muslims). I am not claiming that everything said by these authors is correct or that they (the non-Muslims as well as the Muslims) don’t have their own biases. But there’s a pretty large body of scholarship on Islam out there, both by Muslims and non-Muslims, which addresses many of these issues in more depth than brief online articles can do. Note that these articles tend to prooftext without consideration of context. A particularly erroneous claim in the first article is that the Qur’anic passages speaking of violence are not “time-limited.” In fact everything in the Qur’an is believed by Muslims to have been revealed at a particular point in the early years of Islam and for a particular purpose, and that’s central to traditional Islamic scholarship. (This is also why “pro-Islamic” scholars are wrong to cite the passage from Sura 2 about only fighting in self-defense as if it settled the matter. It was revealed at a particular point and was “abrogated” by a later command enjoining offensive warfare. By the general principle of “abrogation” the later passages are seen as more authoritative, since nothing abrogated them, but it’s not quite that simple and there are quite a few Muslims who argue that the passage from Surah 2 is of more general application. Also, the later “verses of the sword” are pretty vague–many anti-Muslims argue that this means that Muslims are enjoined just to run around killing non-Muslims indiscriminately, but that is not the position of Islamic law at all.)
On taqqiya, I think it’s important to bear in mind that the Catholic tradition also has a number of casuists who allow either lying or other forms of misrepresentation. It was for some time a favorite Protestant parlor game to assemble quotes from such casuists to “prove” that Catholics believed that “no faith was to be kept with heretics” and hence that no Protestant could ever believe anything that any Catholic said. This was, in fact, the immediate occasion of Blessed John Henry Newman’s
Apologia pro Vita Sua. He had been accused by Charles Kingsley of advocating “taqqiya” (obviously not by that name
).
Indeed, nearly the entire body of accusations against Islam made by Christians today can be paralleled by things Protestants used to say (and some still do) about Catholics. It is of course possible that Protestants were wrong about Catholics but that Muslims really are as bad as Protestants used to think Catholics were. But I can’t help but be suspicious, especially when I catch the polemicists actually misrepresenting Muslims, and when the vast majority of credentialed, non-Muslim scholars of Islam disagree with or at least heavily qualify the polemical claims.
The bottom line is that religions are complicated things, and Islam is a lot more complicated than Westerners want to admit. I take the point made by the ex-Muslim poster Khalid some time ago that the range of diversity among Muslims is considerably narrower than among Christians, but with all due respect to his learning and personal experience I think he understated the diversity (he dismissed Sufis, for instance, as marginal at best, when historically that was not the case–see the aforementioned
Fundamentalism: The Betrayal of Tradition for the Sufi side of the case).
Edwin
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