More thoughts on this topic, from Neoneocon:
…although in many respects Islam goes beyond what we think of as a religion, into the governmental and political (you can see some of the results in Iran), religion definitely has something to do with it. And if Islam did not call itself a religion, it would not be so difficult to rally support for fighting against jihadis, who present the added problem of masquerading as being followers of a regular religion rather than a murderous apocalyptic death cult.
Are all Muslims followers of a “murderous apocalyptic death cult”? No, but (a) they are followers of a religion that in its most fundamental form can easily become one, and often has; and (b) they are followers of a religion which, if adhered to at all strictly, is antithetical to our Western doctrines of liberty and human rights.
Yup.
[Update a few minutes later]
Ross Douthat: The Islamic Dilemma:
to any Muslim who takes the teachings of his faith seriously, it must seem that many Western ideas about how Islam ought to change just promise its eventual extinction.
This is clearly true of the idea, held by certain prominent atheists and some of my fellow conservatives and Christians, that the heart of Islam is necessarily illiberal — that because the faith was born in conquest and theocracy, it simply can’t accommodate itself to pluralism without a massive rupture, an apostasy in fact if not in name.
But it’s also true of the ideas of many secular liberal Westerners, who take a more benign view of Islam mostly because they assume that all religious ideas are arbitrary, that it doesn’t matter what Muhammad said or did because tomorrow’s Muslims can just reinterpret the Prophet’s life story and read the appropriate liberal values in.
The first idea basically offers a counsel of despair: Muslims simply cannot be at home in the liberal democratic West without becoming something else entirely: atheists, Christians, or at least post-Islamic.
The second idea seems kinder, but it arrives at a similar destination. Instead of a life-changing, obedience-demanding revelation of the Absolute, its modernized Islam would be Unitarianism with prayer rugs and Middle Eastern kitsch – one more sigil in the COEXIST bumper sticker, one more office in the multicultural student center, one more client group in the left-wing coalition.
The first idea assumes theology’s immutability; the second assumes its irrelevance. And both play into the hands of ISIS and Al Qaeda: The first by confirming their own clash-of-civilizations narrative, the second by making assimilation seem indistinguishable from the arid secularism that’s helped turn Europe into a prime jihadist recruiting ground.
The good news is that there is space between these two ideas. The bad news is that we in the West can’t seem to agree on what that space should be, or how Christianity and Judaism, let alone Islam, should fit into it.
The problem with the Left is that they don’t take religion seriously in general, so they can’t get their heads around this particular one, though it actually has some appeal to them as a potential ally against western liberal values and “imperialism.” So the multi-culties pretend or imagine that Islam is merely another quaint colorful cultural thing, with funny clothes and more prayers than most, and can’t conceive how antithetical it is to their own way of life.
[Update early afternoon]
Related: Angela Merkel is doing much more damage to the future of the West than Donald Trump:
Alas, there are two true things lying behind his idiotic policy suggestion. The first is that the problem is about Muslims. The second is that our “elected representatives” do not know what to do about it.
The above-mentioned Ayatollah Khomeini also said “Islam is politics”. He meant that Islam tells you how to rule, and therefore any unIslamic way of ruling is illegitimate. . . .
Such ideas have become powerful in the West, partly because of arithmetic: we now have a great many Muslims in our midst – far more here, proportionately, than in Mr Trump’s country, and more in France than here. The risk of violence rises with the total. Even if it is true that 99 per cent of Muslims would not hurt a fly, when you increase the numbers you inevitably get more of those who would. People are, therefore, right to worry more about mass immigration from, say, Syria, than from, say, Poland.
But, even with high numbers, the problem would be much less severe if our leaders and institutions had greater cultural confidence. If they upheld a robust belief in the Western way of life, reflected in what our schools taught, what the BBC broadcast, what rules of citizenship were insisted on, and what was considered injurious to our values, then the doctrines of Islamism would be better resisted.
But they remain willfully blind to the problem.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of willfully blind, the Merced knife attacker claimed to be an extreme Muslim, and had an ISIS flag, but the authorities still won’t call it terrorism.
Here’s a youtube video by Raheel Raza, a Sunni speaking for the anti-extremist Clarion project, saying that the numbers of radicals, supporters, and apologists is very large, and that Obama and Hillary are lying about it.
And here’s a video by Brother Rashid, a former Muslim with a call in show, explaining to Obama that ISIL is in fact Islamic. There’s another entertaining video of him taking a call from a jihidst in Sweden. It’s subtitled but worth it because it really illustrated their mindset.
Ross Douthat said:
“Muslims simply cannot be at home in the liberal democratic West without becoming something else entirely: atheists, Christians, or at least post-Islamic.”
Correct, right up to the term “Post-Islamic”. Instead that should have been ‘Post-Imperial”
There are 2 ideas contained in the assumption Mr. Douthat made:
1.) That Islam *must* be defined by scriptural literalist doctrine in regards the Koran, and the assumption that the latest Suras in the Koran have the greatest priority.
2.) That Islam *must* be in support of an imperial Caliphate.
That used to be thought true of Christianity from 325AD to 1648AD as well. That period, almost as long as the entire history of Islam, was the period of imperial capture of the Church by Constantine and his successors. Yet 350+ years after 1648, and the Treaty of Westphalia, no one thinks that of Christianity. The reaction to proposing a multi-billion dollar revival of the Roman Empire of Constantinople, with dominion over the whole Earth, would be a gout of laughter almost everywhere.
We have in Christianity but one major remnant of imperial influence, scriptural literalism. Between the crucifixion and Constantine’s Council of Nicea Christianity grew quite well without scriptural literalism being enforced on it. Until a Christian Emperor took power, there was no one to enforce a particular scripture, or a demand for literal interpretation of specific parts of it.
Only when Constantine needed a united Christian Church as a prop for the Empire was anyone with political leverage even interested in scriptural literalism for Christianity. Unfortunately, its usefulness was not at all lost on the first Caliphs after Emperor Heraclius’ demonstration during the final Roman/Sassanid Persian War.
Where Christianity had 300 years to grow as an independent institution, with wide scriptural writing before being constrained, Islam did not have a single decade. Imperial enforcement of one scripture made certain that scripture supported the Caliph’s power, and demanded scriptural literalism. So, it is the greater imperial influence on the Koran, and on the religion of Islam that provides leverage for today’s would-be imperial hierarchs within Islam.
For us, the focus *should* be simple, as long as *we* do not demand scriptural literalism, and that is the hard part. If we demand that Muslims give up on scriptural literalism, because it requires an imperial dominion, we will find ourselves asked to give it up as well, whether we want Empire, or not.
In this, Christian institutions face their true test in world war 4.
As I’ve commented before, Christianity is very flexible whereas Islam is brittle. We can give up a lot of literal interpretations without harming the faith, and a great many Christians do. I’ve heard sermons that explained that the fish and loaves wasn’t at all miraculous, that as soon as people saw Jesus’ example of giving out food, many in the crowd started doing the same with the food they brought. Another sermon explained that when Jesus told Peter to cast his net on the other side of the boat, it was because that’s how people always fish in that area, with a spotter on shore looking down because the fisherman are too low on the water to spot the fish in the shallow water.
But pointing out that the Bible contains inaccuracies and contradictions is something Muslims would all agree with, so it doesn’t do much good unless we focus on inaccuracies and gross errors that were repeated in the Koran. Since Muslims are told that every word in the Koran is absolutely true, they don’t have much wiggle room when some imam starts focusing on the passages calling for war and bloodshed. Proving just one instance of a horrendous error would do severe damage to that conviction, and might even prove fatal to the religion’s insistence that Allah “revealed” the Koran to Mohammed. Since Allah can’t make a mistake, it would mean the mistake must’ve been Mohammed’s, but Muslims likewise believe Muhammed incapable of error, so the cut becomes a rip.
A different approach would be to attack some of the basic premise. I would be interesting to ask something like this: “So if Allah gave laws to the Jews and sent another prophet to teach the Christians, why would he send a later Prophet with instructions to fight, slay, and enslave the people who were already worshiping him? If Allah does things like that, might not he one day send a prophet to some other group with instructions to kill all the Muslims?”
Or perhaps it might be as simple as screaming that Muslims don’t capitalize the name of Allah or Muhammed, which to civilized people is the most severe insult imaginable, and one which must surely condemn them all to Hell for grossly insulting and disrespecting Allah each and every day ever since the first page of the Koran was put on paper. They might protest that Arabic has no capital letters, but obviously they didn’t want to capitalize “Allah” because it would only take a 4-year old two-minutes to invent a capital ‘A’ and they haven’t done it in 1,300 years.
It was my understanding that Allah sent Muhammad in order to restore to purity the true religion given to Abraham that had become corrupted over the generations.
But Muhammed didn’t do that. If God wanted to issues some corrections, it would’ve motivated some rabbis and priests to issue corrections. Instead someone completely outside those faiths was given orders to slay them or tax them. If God wanted to correct Christianity and Judaism, merely subduing and taxing them without modifying their erroneous practices makes no sense at all.
And it’s worse. One of God’s most basic commandments was “Thou shalt not steal.” Muhammed’s version is “Kill them and take their stuff!” Did God think people weren’t stealing enough shit?
Regarding the post title “Is Islam A Religion?” My understanding is that in the Islamic world, religion and politics are regarded as basically the same thing. The separation between them is a Western idea, strongly reinforced by Enlightenment thought, and highly beneficial to social development. Clearly, the more people of Muslim background who come round to the Western way of thinking on this, the better for all of us.
>Is Islam A Religion?<
still no after 14 years since 9/11/01. or the barbary pirates.
The question is: Can Muslims live with infidels who are not submitting to them?
A similar question has been answered by the Shiite part of Islam: Can Shiites live with heretics who are not submitting to them? Most Shiites are able to do so.
Maybe we should establish a dhimmi/jizya system for them if they want to live in the West. Sauce for the gander.
That’s a bit like saying that black people did pretty good under Jim Crow laws.
A foundation of secular humanism enshrined in our Constitution turned us into a tolerant country. It subdued the worst prejudices of Christianity, which you now just accept as some ‘natural’ characteristic of Christian theology, though any historical reading of the Bible or Christian supremacy in the West will tell you otherwise. Conservatives are cynics who don’t think that the foundation of our nation can stand up to newcomers with different beliefs. I have greater faith in the Enlightenment genius our forefathers than you do.
No, conservatives are people who know we encountered an entire continent filled with different beliefs. We intermarried and made sure the nonsense about ambushing and killing girls to prove how brave a guy was got extinguished as a cultural norm for anyone who was going to live anywhere near us.