I have to take strong exception to the portrayal of Muslims as quite militant regarding faith and Christians spreading faith with missionaries. The Spanish conquest of Mexico involved ruthless armies butchering coutless indigenous peoples, followed by a highly corrupt system of monestary towns that accumulated great wealth for church officials at the expense of natives, as depicted aptly in “Triumphs and Tragedy: A History of the Mexican People”, Ramon Eduardo Ruiz. Through the colonial era, many Christian nations justified their greedy subjugation of native peoples by bringing in missionaries to save the “poor heathen savages”. Christian history has involved many ruthless, bloody conquests.
Don’t get me wrong, guys. I’m not drawing any conclusions. As I’ve said, my knowledge of the religion is next to nil.
DLB: So you are saying that ‘submission’ by itself is so incomplete as to be tantamount to a lie. Does that mean that saying it means ‘peace’ is also a lie? It seems to me that saying ‘submission’ is a lot closer, according to your own definition. And I also have to note that Johnson did not in any way imply that it meant “Submission of Others”. In fact, when I read his paragraph my feeling was that it meant “Submission to God”, which according to you is essentially correct. Which brings us back to the point that it really doesn’t mean ‘peace’ in a pacifist way as just about everyone in the world is telling us right now, but ‘you will find peace through submission to Allah’, which a totally different sentiment.
Here’s the problem as I see it - apparently, the Koran is large and complex enough that it can be interpreted in many different ways, and trying to draw significant meaning from individual passages is a fool’s errand, no better than the fundamentalists who have tried to use individual sentences or phrases in the bible to justify intolerance to all kinds of groups.
If Christian theology can be complex enough to create groups as diverse as Mennonites and Norhern Ireland Pub Bombers, then I assume that Islam is much the same.
However, it seems striking to me that Islamic nations tend to be repressive. Almost all of them are dictatorships or dictatorial monarchies. Human rights abuses are common. And there is plenty of violence, not just against Israel, but within the Muslim community itself.
This may or may not have something to do with the religion, and may have more to do with the culture. But sometimes the culture that springs up around a religion can cause believers to behave in common ways, even if they aren’t mentioned at all in the bible. For instance, I’m pretty sure the Bible doesn’t say anything about being a Televangalist, but Christianity seems to collect them. A culture builds up around the religion that may or may not have much to do with the literal teachings.
So I guess what I’m wondering is if a culture has built up around Islam which is perhaps much more repressive and violent than the literal reading of the book implies. Has the religion been co-opted by violent people who use it to coerce people into doing things that are heretical to it, much like the corrupt Catholic Church did before the Reformation?
If not, how would you, as someone who seems to know a lot about Islam, explain why almost every Islamic country seems so hostile to democracy and political and economic freedoms?
Yeah, that Paul Johnson advocates in many more words to “kill all the ragheads”. So does the NY Post.
Yeahhh!!! <high fives>
And remember, you read it here first.
And if we look at Christian Europe up until recently, we would find the same thing. Read a decent description of society in Orthodox Russia or the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire. Heck, even those freeedom loving Dutch demonstrated a rather harsh attitude toward Catholics for many years, and Scandinavia and Prussia were not heavenly lands to which people journeyed for freedom.
The U.S. took over 140 years to recognize that women should be allowed to vote (and Britain took much longer, considering that women’s suffrage occurred around the same time in Britain as it did in the U.S.). The nations that you are looking at generally only came into existence around the end of WWI with the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. And since that time, they have had other nations interfering with their internal politics in ways that the U.S. and Britain have not experienced for a very long time. I would suggest that most of the repression is the result of peoples with no tradition of democracy struggling to define themselves under adverse conditions.
I do not condone the abuses that occur, but I do not chalk up every political problem (backed by years of history) to their religion.
Nations such as Indonesia are not suffering from Islamism, but from authoritarian regimes propped up by “anti-communist” outside forces. Egypt is not as open as I would like to see it, but it is currently going through the “typical” cycle of repression in which governments engage when they are under direct attack–in this case, by religious extremists.
Iran was moving toward a society that would have interconnected nicely with the secular West. They did not simply say “Oh, let’s go become religious fanatics.” Rather, the Shah felt threatened by any demonstration of religion and banned many Islamic practices. The Iranian-on-the-street was not aware of what they were about to unleash by bringing back and supporting Khomeini. They were just tired of having secret police wage war on them in the name of suppressing “extremist” Islam. Had the Shah tolerated Islam without trying to repress it, the Islamists would have been marginalized in the way that Pat Robertson marginalizes himself every few years in the U.S.
It is not Islam, but a whole array of cultural and political factors that create and support “dictatorial monarchies”.