Of course, I don’t believe Islam is True. However, that does not mean that there is not a “true” Islam - one that either really does condone violence or one that is truly peaceful.
Yes, it does mean that. What do you mean by “true Islam”? What criterion determines which version of Islam is “true”? Why are you competent to make this determination? Would you similarly grant non-Christians the authority to read the Bible and early Christian sources for themselves and decide which version of Christianity is “true”?
I don’t feel as if your Episcopalian faith is True, either
Exactly. And so you have no business saying that one Episcopalian is a “true Episcopalian” and another one isn’t. You should sit back and observe what Episcopalians actually believe and practice. Same with Islam.
I would like to know what “true” Islam is
But the term is an oxymoron.
so that I know if I need to be prepared to openly oppose it 100% (as would be the case if it “truly” condones and teaches forced conversion or death) or if I simply need to oppose that radical element that is twisting the teachings to condone their acts of violence and work with the “true” Muslims who are following a peaceful faith in hopes of bringing them to the fullness of Truth found in the Catholic Church.
I know this would be convenient (because you wouldn’t have to deal with the complexity of what actual people believe and do), but it’s not the way things are. There simply are Muslims–that is to say, people who identify themselves with the Islamic tradition. Some of them are relatively more peaceful, and others are relatively more violent. My dad’s cousin, for instance, converted to a version of Sufi Islam that is very peaceful and tolerant. I’m sure many Muslims would consider her “not really” a Muslim.
We should work with those versions of Islam that are closer to the Truth. Why are you, as a Christian, interested in preserving the “purity” of Islam? If (for the sake of argument) much of what Muhammad originally taught was evil, and Islam shows promise of developing into something better than what it originally was, why not welcome this? Obviously we can’t encourage Muslims to be historically dishonest, but we don’t need to do that. I can agree to disagree with my Sufi cousin regarding whether Muhammad actually was the way she thinks he was. But I can welcome the elements of her faith that are good and true, even while doubting whether Muhammad’s own belief and practice was anything like hers.
The danger, as I see it, is that a fundamentalist (“Salafi”) version of Islam has gained a lot of strength in the past few centuries, and is trumpeting itself as the “true” Islam. Christians are only strengthening the hand of the Salafis by accepting these claims and treating the more traditional (pre-1800 or so) versions of Islam (which tend to be heavily Sufi) as the “corruptions” the Salafis say they are (never mind the more radical versions of Sufism and “Islamic modernism” which are certainly different from the historic mainstream of Islam). I can see why fundamentalist Protestants work this way–after all, they believe that the Bible is simple and can be interpreted in only one way. But this is obviously crazy. Catholics have no excuse for treating the Qur’an this way–they recognize that the Bible is complex and that traditions of interpreting it undergo genuine and legitimate development. Why not let Islam do the same thing with the Qur’an?
Here’s a specific example: there are vague statements of tolerance in the Qur’an (most famously “there is no compulsion in religion”), and then there are the “verses of the sword,” etc. Many Muslims claim that the “verses of the sword” must be used to interpret the “no compulsion” passage rather than the other way round, because they were written later and later passages supercede earlier ones. Other Muslims do not accept this hermeneutical principle. Why on earth should Christians accept this as the only way to read the Qur’an? Yet I hear that argument on these boards and elsewhere all the time from conservative Christians, totally dismissing those Muslims who in good faith believe that the “no compulsion” passage can be interpreted so as to nullify the more violent and intolerant aspects of Islam. Yet we Christians do this sort of thing with the Bible all the time. We find specific statements or actions (particularly in the OT) that seem morally objectionable, and we find basic principles elsewhere in Scripture that provide a basis for interpreting the troubling passages in a morally acceptable manner. I for one do not have a lot of patience for people like Sam Harris who say things like “the Bible authorizes slavery,” because he’s ignoring the way Christians today interpret the Bible, and ignoring the mitigating factors in the original historical context. Yet Christians do exactly this to Islam.
Edwin
