I would think that if those demanding punishment were just a radical fringe the President wouldn’t have a hard time finding a way out of a crisis that threatens his government. There would be any crisis.
As gum, tagoset al have noted, this demand for executing the death penalty appears to be a matter of the fundamental law of Islaam, and not the pipedream of some off the wall sect.
I think it would be more accurate to call it a mainstream interpretation of the Koran thru Sharia. However, I can’t see that it is fundamental to Islam, in the sense of being intrinsically a part of that religion, or unambiguosly part of the Koran. From what I’ve been reading lately, it seems mostly to have been ignored, in practice, throughout most of history, and I haven’t seen any convincing arguments that it refelcts the teachings of Mohammed.
I’ll take your word for it, but I note that you do say that it is the “mainstream interpretation” which seems counter to the idea that the practice of Islaam today is benign except for some extremists.
The idea that someone should be killed for abandoning one religion for another is so opposite to the idea of freedom that it is hard to imagine that there is any possibility of bringing “democracy to the Middle East” in under several hundred years.
Islamic Law is derived from the hadiths and the Koran. You cannot treat the Koran like the Bible and ignore all the surrounding interpretations and explications. That is not how it works. The life and example of the Prophet is the context in which the will of god expressed through the Koran is understood.
But the liberal interpretation carries little traction. To me it looks like straining at gnats. Allah hates apostates, mohammed was never averse to killing anyone who got in his way. More power to the liberal elbow but to me it looks like the traditional interpretation requires less bending of Islamic law and history.
The Wiki article seems to be putting the best spin possible on things but even so it makes very uncomfortable reading. The bottom line is that in the world today apostacy is a capital offence in Islam and if the state doesn’t cap you, some Muslim will.
It seems very easy to make the case for killing apostates from the literature, much harder to do the opposite. Not as hard as you have to wave your hands to get round the prescribed treatment of women, but still hard.
On second thought, and before I read tagos thread, I think that the subject under discussion is fundamental to the practice of Islaam. What is fundamental to a religion is whatever the mainstream of that religion says is fundamental. For example, I think that the idea that the wafer and the wine are the flesh and blood of Christ is fundamental to the practice of Catholicism even though that is not in the Bible.
“Allah hates apostates, mohammed was never averse to killing anyone who got in his way.” Likewise with Jesus if you belief certain parts of Matthew concerning the treatment to be given those who won’t accept the message of the apostles when He sent them on their missions. Over many centuries, Christians have gotten over that idea because of outside pressures that arose when control of the state was forcibly wrested from the church. Nevertheless, the germ is there although dormant at present.
Well worth checking this out as a blanacer for the above - a call by Sisters of Islam in Malaysia.
The obstacle as they point out is reopening the door to ijtihad (the process of interpreting gods will in law) as it is commonly understood that this door is officially closed. Liberal Islam is based around the idea that the individual can do this for themselves. Tradition puts this right only in the hands of scholars - much like the crux of the Reformation and the Protstant claim of the primacy of individual conscience.
But at the moment Islam, as we have to deal with it, and as believed and practiced by Muslims worldwide is essentially pre-reformation.
No - we have the Koran itself and the history of Islam in his time. We know mohamed was a brutal military leader who ordered massacres and executions. The Koran and the hadiths make no bones about it whatsoever. mohammed makes no bones about it. We don’t have to parse bits of the Gospel for false equivalencies.
I appreciate where you are coming from David, I really do but Mohammed was not a Jesus figure and he did not preach a message of tolerance and peace. He was a prophet of the sword who fought battles and ordered massacres in order to establish Islam as the One True Faith superior to all others and to subjagate non-muslims. He laid out laws defining anyone except Muslim men as subjects, as lesser beings with less rights. His message was not universal tolerance.
It is a mistake to look at Islam through Christian-tinted glasses.
I don’t know. Most of the violence by Mohammed’s Muslims was retalliatory, not initiated by them, and at least when Muhammed was first put in charge of Medina, he negiotiated a peace and alliance treaty between the Muslim, Jewish and pagan tribes of the city. (The treaty didn’t work, but that was mostly due to the actions of the Banu Qurayza, and not the Muslims). If you look at Mohammed’s life, and the Muslim community during the time of Mohammed, the impression that you get isn’t one of “massacres in order to establish Islam as the One True Faith superior to all others and to subjagate non-muslims”, but one of a group of people who wanted to be left alone to, more or less, peacefully set up a society and convert their neighbors.
I’m not sure it’s a simple as that. He was quite an active ruler and was wont to ambush caravans from Mecca and otherwise harass the city-state. Moreover, once open war did break out he finished what he started. This type of violent expansion was continued after his death and was clearly justified/supported by Mohammed’s own actions whilst he was alive.
I don’t doubt or deny any of what you’ve written, but how common was/is that practive in Muslim societies? How many apostates have been executed in the last 200 years?
Well, yes, of course, but by the point he and his followers were forced to flee to Medina, the Meccans (by forcing him to flee) were his enemies, and the justification the Muslims gave for the raids was that it was retribution for the property that the Meccans seized when the Muslims were forced to flee.
First of all, the idiots in Afghanistan calling for this guy’s blood are tools who never read the Koran, IMHO. The directives for killing apostates, made by Muhammad, were done so in a time of war. An apostate was one who supporeted the Muslims in their war against the pagans, and then turned coats. A traitor. Punishable by death. Under American law.
Let’s read this according to Islam and the Koran. In the Koran, ‘la ikrah fid deen’, there is no coercion in religion. Anyone who is forcing someone to change their religion is doing something un-Islamic. An idiot in a turban is not going to convince me otherwise. And neither is an idiot in jeans.
I don’t want to carry this hijack too be and you are probably right. However, don’t we have a lot more authoritative information about Mohammed than we do about Jesus? So how do we know Jesus was all that peaceful since the information about Him is contained only in writing by those promoting Him as the Son of God?
As far as Jesus as a figure of peace goes, anyone with radical ideas could take the words in Matthew literally. Such words as those about eternal damnation (Matt 12:30-32) and all that talk about casting into the furnace of fire (Matt 13:41. And of course there is that bit about turning son agains fathers. The Jesus of Matthew also one who preached tolerance toward those who accepted his message and eternal damnation to those who didn’t.
In any case, that’s enough of that. The subject is Islaam and I agree with you that it seems that the current practice of it by its authorities is anything by peaceful, toward women or toward those who disagree with their interpretation. The inclination right now is to strike out physically against anyone who they think demeans Islaam and the view of what is demeaning is pretty broad.
His military activism continued, however, and it most certainly affected his followers and the further expansion of Islam. Put another way, Muhammad was a warlord. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is debateable but he is an entirely different figure than say Christ or Budda. That is, whilst Christians may have gleefully conqured and slaughtered their enemies, the philosphical conerstone of their religion was not himself an active warlord.
Probably better to say that Muhammed was a merchant who had warlordism “thrust upon him”. so to speak. And I don’t know that “warlord” is the best term anyway…a warlord is a military figure who takes on civil authority. Muhammed was given civil authority first (by Medina), and only afterward commanded an army.
Here’s the treaty I referred to above, that Muhammed worked out with the various tribes to govern Medina, btw:
But obviously Muhammed wasn’t Jesus, but they were in entirely different positions. Arabian society at Muhammed’s time was totally different than Palestinian society at Jesus’s time, and Jesus was a poor disenfranchised peasant, while Muhammed was a fairly prosperous merchant who had ties of blood, marriage, and friendship to important people in his city and society.
He then became a virtual dictator for the remainder of his life. He also sanctioned or tacitly approved further expansion.
A significant one. It goes to the very heart of the movement that someone is following as well as to the justification of future actions. That is, an adherent can say that he is fighting a religious war much like Muhammed was or that he is living a peaceful life much like Jesus did. Both might be utterly delusional but it does contrast the differences between the two figures.
They certainly did but usually not from direct quotes from Jesus. Moreover, the Bible is generally not considered to be the literal, direct word of Christ unlike the Koran whose very essence is the word of God as directly quoted by Muhammed.
