There’s a fairly reprehensible group called the KKK that I spend no time protesting. There are others such as “White Power” that I also ignore. I take it on faith that the rest of the not-white world is smart enough to know we’re not all like that.
Here’s a link of some Muslim condemnation of the Paris murders:
Obviously by the header and theme of the webpage, its creator has an agenda of his own and may have cherry-picked the statements to support his position, but my point is that given the fact that Islam is not a monolith, those statements exist for him to cherry pick.
There is some truth to the statement but it’s not a catch all statement of fact. I’ve seen/heard Imams in Western countries repeat the punishment of blasphemy as stated by Mohammad. These laws are in direct conflict with freedom of speech.
While it’s encouraging to see Muslims object to the violence committed in the name of the religion it’s still a function of the teachings of Mohammad to deal with blasphemy on those terms.
So that makes the peaceful followers of Islam MINO’s in the eyes of the more violent. Which gives rise to the bloody internal conflict among Muslims.
This goes both ways, though – the terrorists are MINO’s to the peaceful ones… they even say so.
From our point of view, I don’t think we can point to one or the other as the ‘true’ representation of Islam on a factual basis. But in terms of the strategy of ‘winning hearts and minds’, it’s pretty clear which ones we should be calling the ‘real Muslims’.
public opinion doesn’t really play into this. If the Prophet Mohammad clearly defines his wishes then that is the basis for the behavior of his followers. It’s never going away. The religion is specifically designed as a political structure and blasphemy is a serious component of that structure. You do NOT want to cross that line in a Muslim country. This is what people fail to realize and why it’s a huge problem in countries like France. When the religion hits a critical mass of people to the point they isolate themselves then that ceases to be part of the country.
From my reading of the Koran, the Prophet Mohammed did not by any means clearly define his wishes in many ways, any more than the Bible does for God’s wishes.
The paragraph above doesn’t describe all Islam – it describes part (some sects) of Islam. There are parts that this does not apply to. It’s not like one group “correctly” follows the Koran and the rest do not – any more than one denomination “correctly” follows the Bible and the rest are wrong.
I disagree. We’re not talking about the Koran, we’re talking about Mohammad. You can’t dismiss what he said because, he’s the progenitor of the Koran. He wrote it. His opinion counts and this is not an area of dispute among any of the Muslim sects. The commonality of this clearly shows up in Blasphemy laws.
There’s plenty of dispute among Muslims as to whether people should be put to death (or even punished at all!) for various religious transgressions, including blasphemy.
What Muhammed and the Koran say are not this simple. There really are legitimately different interpretations. In one passage Muhammed says “kill him” for a transgressor, and in another, Muhammed says “forgive him”. It’s not reasonable to claim that one is true and the other false.
I really don’t get the repeated insistence that one sect, especially the most violent ones, are somehow the most “true” representations of Islam.
Perhaps a better reaction would be to aggressively fight the militant Islamic terrorist mindset for the other 364 days of the year. Far too many Islamic organisations and individuals do not. Condemning attacks such as this really is the easy part.
You’re still not getting it. Your opinion of what the true religion is doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing. It doesn’t exist. Thus the interfaith conflicts. What does exist are the words of Mohammad. And I believe your cite about forgiveness is linked to living prophets if atonement is offered to them. The ability to forgive dies with the prophet.
Regardless of any of that blasphemy is a serious crime in any Muslim country. It doesn’t matter if the death penalty is used. The crime carries across borders. This is why people go ape-shit 6000 miles away from a suggestion that the Koran is defiled.
All of this goes back to the op’s premise. It’s dangerous to publicly contradict the word of Mohammad. It’s one thing to say murder is bad but it’s another to break it down and say Mohammad didn’t mean what he said.
He didn’t, though. Caliph Abu Bakr had the first Koranic texts written and compiled some 20 years after Muhammad’s death, the work was continued by his next two successors. And much like the Bible, there’s still plenty of open historical questions regarding the decisions that were made at that time re: what to include in the canon, what to exclude as apocryphal (and why), whether some additions or corrections were made, why the order of the surahs is all jumbled up chronologically and which guidelines prompted their traditional (and seemingly thematically incoherent) order etc…
Compiling the Koran was just as political a decision for Abu Bakr and Uthman as Constantine’s pick-and-choose approach to the Christian NT canon was. And, much like the Bible, the Koran and the hadith can appear very self-contradictory.
Not all Muslims believe this, and you’re moving from “what Mohammed said” to “what some later Muslim authorities say about forgiveness”. Mohammed (according to the Koran) talked about condemning some transgressors and he talked about forgiving some transgressors. Punishing blasphemy severely is not any more “true” to Mohammed’s words or the Koran than not punishing blasphemy severely.
Google searches tell me that most Muslim countries have various free speech restrictions, though in many cases blasphemy is not singled out – only provocation, or something similarly vague. You’ll have to define “serious crime” and cite this if you want to make this claim. Regardless, there are plenty of Muslims around the world who don’t think blasphemy should be a crime.
Again, you’re not talking just about Mohammed’s words – you’re talking about interpretations and laws based on the Koran and later texts. These all exist under multiple interpretations.
nice attempt at rewriting history but this is not what Muslims believe. The Koran was the word of God as revealed to him by Gabriel. Unless you have a video of Mohammad running through a meadow with flowers in his hair the reality of the religion is one of strict observance and an extreme dislike of blasphemy.
That’s reality. If you can shove your version of it up the asses of the hundreds of thousands raised-from-birth-radicals who believe otherwise then your version has no meaning.
That’s the answer that first came to my head, too. If I engaged in protest against everything done by persons I could be classed with, I’d have little else to do.
On the other hand, if I hear beliefs ascribed to smaller in-groups I’m a member of that I’m strongly against (e.g.:Texans, Southerners: Secede like nitwits who just can’t learn), I’m rather vocal in my condemnation of the idea. In the case of secession, I’m probably over-aggressive. I’m possibly fundamentalist on the subject. The reason for this is two-fold: I want those outside the group to know this is not a universal belief, and I want to make clear to those inside the group that it will tear it apart.
I think that in general, the Muslim population at large reacts to religious terrorism in the same way as I do to secession. Islam certainly has its equivalents to Rick Perry, the idea of an opportunistic idiot knows no boundaries, and headlines are one of their tools. You’ll always hear more news articles about the people saying extreme, inflammatory things. To imagine that it represents the opinion of the average person is almost certainly a distortion of reality.
Your analogy is flawed. The radical groups you mention are unlike radical Islamic groups, because:
They have zero support from any government anywhere in the world.
They have zero support from any large international organization anywhere in the world.
They have zero ability to fill the streets anywhere in the world with 10’s of thousands of supporters shooting in the air, screaming for blood, and calling for new converts.
So…fine… I expect you to spend no time protesting them.
No action is necessary.
For Muslims who want to be accepted as moderates, we need to see action. Not just words.
Very good, and as a Muslim the standard must be to see action and not just the words to accept any of the Americans as not being the promoters of criminal war crimes and the state terrorism of the torture adopted from the nazis and the soviets…
And of course I can only accept an american as not being an anti muslim bigot and an enemy if that person has praised explicitly the heroes and the sacrifices of the specific actions of the muslims against the blaspephemous criminals like Amedy Coulibaly and , like Ahmed Mrebet and Lahssane Bathily.
This is the only fair and not hypcrocitcal bitoted standard that is equal to this.
not that these are the rationale ways of thinking, but to be equal in the idiocy and the bigotry.