I’m assuming this is at least one of the reports that you referred to in your post. The report mentions Turkey, Morrocco, Jordan and Pakistan. - Countries I would expect to have large violent factions. But these countries do not hold or should they represent the majority of Muslims.
I’m not opposing your viewpoint as much as I’m trying to find the reports that back up your statements.
My apologies, BubbaDog. I thought people would be interested in more than just the one report. The rest of the countries are listed here.
w.
PS - it says a whole lot that someone would “expect to have large violent factions” in say Turkey, which is applying for EU membership, or Morocco, well away from the Middle East. Of course there’s the Bali bombings, so we’ve got to “expect” large violent factions there as well, and Lebanon, and … guess it might be easier to list the countries where we don’t expect large violent factions.
I just found another fascinating Pew poll here. Very interesting results, looks at the attitudes of (among others) British, French, German, and Spanish Muslims … religion of peace, my ass.
The disctinction I make is that Christianity is a religion of peace, founded by a man who was peaceful to the extreme of turning the other cheek.
Islam, on the other hand, is a religion of war, founded by a man who was violent to the extreme of leading armed men to kill and enslave his neighbors.
Now, both have strayed from their original path at times. There have been centuries and places when Christians have been violent, and centuries and places when Muslims have been peaceful …
But for the past couple hundred years or so, both religions seem to have returned to their roots, so to speak. About the only good news, in a bizarre way, is that the Muslims tend to fight and kill each other, rather than outsiders. For example, and I don’t want to hijack the thread but just give an example, most of the victims of the war in Iraq have been Muslims killed by other Muslims.
Is it possible that there will be a Muslim Reformation? Sure, it could happen … but until it does, let’s not pretend that these are good people with an occasional bad one in the mix. They are not. As the survey shows, more than half of them believe in suicide bombing. Heck, even in the Western world the numbers are high. The study I referenced at the start of this post asked if there were ever a time that suicide bombing is justified. The results were:
German Muslims - 13%
British Muslims - 24%
Spanish Muslims - 25%
French Muslims - 35%
That’s the problem I’m pointing at. Its not just some ragheaded nuts in the desert that hold these violent views, it’s Muslims worldwide. You can say that if in 100 years the Muslim world becomes a force for good, that their past will be just a history lesson, which is very true. And you can say that if rattlesnakes evolve to where they don’t have fangs, their past will be a history lesson as well.
But in the meantime, I’m going to be cautious around either group …
I think you screwed up the math somewhere. Looking at the numbers in your and BubbaDog’s linked reports, and comparing them to the Muslim populations of the countries you named, I get the following:
By my calculations, that adds up to somewhere between 200 and 210 million Muslims in the countries named who expressed support for “suicide bombing in defense of Islam”. Your estimate of “over half a billion people in those countries alone” is thus way off.
But if that’s what you’re basing your assertions on, then polls about current attitudes expressed by Muslims are completely irrelevant. If you’re trying to claim that “Islam is a religion of war” based on this kind of essentialist “original path” argument about the circumstances of its founding and the intrinsic nature of its teachings, then the percentage of Muslims who hold peaceful views at any given time doesn’t prove anything.
By your reasoning, even if all Muslims worldwide were dedicated pacifists and all Christians worldwide were bloodthirsty warmongers, Islam would still be a religion of war and Christianity would still be a religion of peace, because that is how you have decided to characterize their “original paths”.
You’ve gamed the premises in your argument so that statistical evidence about present-day attitudes among Muslims isn’t actually relevant. It’s heads Christianity wins, tails Islam loses, no matter what the polls say.
Monotheism has very little to do with it. Hinduism is not a monotheistic religion, and one of the central tenets of mainstream Hindu thought is that all religions are basically reflections of the same basic teachings: be good to other people, look after your parents, don’t kill, and so on.
Despite that, we’ve (I am a Deist, but since I come from a Hindu background I will take partial responsibility for acts of violence committed by other Hindus) become quite good at committing atrocities against non-Hindus, particularly Muslims, in the last half-century or so.
However, there are virtually no countries (and none of significant size) with Hindu majorities, so the only place where Hindus get to do any good oppressing is within India. And sometimes Fiji.
Look, intolerant wackjobs are intolerant wackjobs, wherever you find them, and regardless of what book they’re reading from. There are plenty of “Christian” murderers in the United States; you don’t think of them as such, though, because the pejorative term is “white supremacist”. The vast majority of them, particularly at the leadership level, find justification for their actions in the Bible.
Frankly, all of you expressing a belief that Islam has jumped the “religion of peace” shark and is now worthy of our hatred are idiots. So what? What are you going to do? Officially relabel all your Muslim acquaintances as murderers, child killers, and terrorists?
You can’t judge a faith by the actions of a few individuals any more than you can judge an individual by their faith. Learn this simple truth: human beings are not the Borg. No two people are alike, regardless of how many of the same pigeonholes you can stuff them into.
In a poll (warning:PDF) conducted by CBS News and the New York Times, 60% of Americans are okay with thousands of innocent people dying in “TWAT”. Does that make America a country of war and bloodshed in your opinion?
Frankly, all of you expressing a belief that kittens are cute and are now worthy of being stomped on are idiots. Oh wait, the first part of the sentence was drawn from actual beliefs while the second part was wholly invented in a ham handed attempt to invalidate the first part.
I’m also kind of frustrated by all the moral relativism on this thread. Are these guys saying: “Since Christians were pricks 500 years ago we can’t criticize Islamists now?”
Or, “Since today’s Islamists are part of a greater whole which has some good stuff, that we can’t criticize Islamists?” Which would be like saying that we can’t criticize the Inquisition because it’s part of Christianity.
I happen to be one of those Americans who is willing to see thousands die to win the War on Terror. It’s a small price to pay to save millions, maybe billions from dying at the hands of the Islamists. And I realize that I may be one of those killed. I’d just rather the pool of dead people is in the thousands.
Kimstu, thank you for your post. A couple of comments:
By your calculation, Pakistan is only 80% Muslim, Bangladesh is only 70% Muslim, and Palestine is only 50% Muslim, which I doubt … but it doesn’t matter. Let’s take your figures instead of mine. My point was that there are not just a few Muslim fanatics out there who believe in bloodshed and suicide bombings. They number in the hundreds of millions, by your numbers or mine. It’s about a third of the Muslims, by your numbers or mine. This is not the “fringe” of a religion, it is a huge number.
The original paths of the two religions are quite different, as different as the actions of their founders in their lifetimes. One preached and practiced peace, love, and tolerance. The other preached and practiced war, Jihad, and slavery. You obviously think this is immaterial. I do not.
The fact that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who believe in suicide bombing is not an accident of history. Recently, a Sunni Muslim loaded up a truck with watermelons and drove it to a nearby Shiite village. Once all the women and children were gathered around, he exploded the bomb.
I don’t recall many recent instances of, say, Methodists doing this to Baptists … why? Among other reasons, because Muhammad in the Koran specifically states that it’s OK to do that, and Jesus in the New Testament says it’s specifically forbidden to do that. You seem to think this is immaterial.
I’m not sure if this was aimed at me or not. If so, somehow I’m ending up in the center arguing both sides of this one!
Anyway, my contention is that since Christians were pricks 500 years ago, it would be appropriate to get into a time machine and criticize them then. Just like it would be appropriate to criticize Islamists now.
What I have a problem with is this “Religion of Peace” thing that seems to be used as a shield, but is actually a meaningless term. If a significant number of members of the ASPCA start hacking off the heads of innocent people in the name of starving puppies, then the ASPCA ceases to be an “organization of charity” and becomes a terrorist group, regardless of what their charter says.
But has anybody been claiming otherwise? It seems to me that you’re knocking down a strawman here. Who here is arguing that the Muslims who are willing to express support for violence and terrorism “in defense of Islam” (at least theoretically in answer to a poll question) consist of only “a few fanatics”?
I’m sure that the number of Muslims who are willing actually to personally commit or assist in such violence and terrorism is much smaller, but it’s still larger than “a few”.
But just because a minorty of Muslims (even if it’s a large minority) express support for religious violence doesn’t prove that Islam is intrinsically violent. As you yourself noted, there were historical periods where large numbers of Christians supported religious violence, yet you still maintian that Christianity is intrinsically peaceful.
But as I noted, if you’re basing your evaluation of the two religions on these opinions about their founders, then the views of their current adherents are irrelevant.
I’m simply pointing out that you can’t have it both ways. If you feel that the lives of Jesus and Muhammad (as you understand them) are what determined the unchanging essential nature of the religions they founded, then your survey statistics about modern Muslims’ views on violence are beside the point.
According to you, Islam is a religion of war and would remain so even if all modern Muslims adopted pacifist principles overnight, because the “original path” of Islam is violent.
But you’re being selective in your examples here by limiting them to “recent instances”. Are you suggesting that, say, Protestants and Catholics in the European religious wars of a few centuries ago didn’t know that Jesus in the New Testament said it’s specifically forbidden to kill people? Since they were followers of the Christian “religion of peace”, why were so many of them so violent and bloodthirsty?
You seem to be trying to argue something like “Christianity is a religion of peace and Islam is a religion of war, because Jesus was peaceful and Muhammad was violent. And we see these characterizations confirmed in the fact that nowadays, there’s much more support for terrorist violence among Muslims than among Christians.”
But your argument is inconsistent. If you’re trying to empirically validate claims about the intrinsic essential nature of any religion, you need to examine how those claims hold up throughout the entire history of that religion, not just during one particular historical period.
If you’re simply arguing that Islam nowadays has on the whole more violence and more support for violence than contemporary Christianity, well duh: no argument there. But if you’re trying to argue that Islam is intrinsically, essentially a religion of violence while Christianity is intrinsically, essentially a religion of peace, then you have to extend your comparisons much farther than just the present day.
I don’t think it is immaterial; I know that it is a false assertion.
Please point to the Suras in the Qur’an that state that it is acceptable to murder women and children. Provide a citation of the selections of the hadith that permit such an act.
There are sections of the Qur’an that talk about waging war and killing enemies. Those Suras were specifically directed toward events in which various groups were waging war on the early Muslims. Murder remained forbidden. Murder of other Muslims was particularly forbidden.
As to the polls: it is simply not that difficult to get people to respond in particular ways that do not really affect them, personally, in a poll. The fact that some loosely identified group of Arabs, frustrated by nearly 60 years of conflict with Israel , might nod their heads that it was OK for Palestinians to use suicide bombing as a weapon in the Palestinian struggle with Israel does not translate to “all those people believe in suicide bombing.” It merely means that a group of people who are frustrated with recent historical events will nod their heads to agree that some other people somewhere might have a case for fighting their struggle against overwhelming odds.
At the end of the 70s, when OPEC had a brief resurgence over some issue and there were rumblings that they would shut down production as they had in the early 70s, some polls taken in the U.S. showed that more than half of the population thought we had a “right” to that oil and were willing to use total war to demand it (or take it). Does that mean that 110 million Americans are in favor of murdering millions of Arabs and stealing their oil? Or did it simply mean that a lot of people who are frustrated at events they cannot control will nod their heads to even the most nasty suggestions–as long as they are not called upon to actually carry them out?
(Heck, at least the people who “support” suicide bombing recognize that one of their own has to die to carry out the plan; we just expected to rain death from the skies with no cost to ourselves.)
Is there a current and real problem with the Islamists? Yep.
Does that mean that any significant number of Muslims get up each morning and hope that they will be recruited by al Qaeda that afternoon? Nope.
Sure, be glad to. We can start with the fact that the Koran divides the world into different classes - among them unbelievers, people of the Book (Jews and Christians), apostates, and Muslims.
As you point out, it’s never OK to murder a Muslim. However, it is no problem at all to kill an unbeliever. It is also not a problem to kill an apostate, someone who turns their back on the Faith. Sura 4:90,91:
The meaning of this passage is made more than clear by the the commentary of Baidhawi on the passage, which says:
Note that it is not just OK, it is a religious duty to kill the person who turns their back on Islam, just as if they were an infidel.
The problem is the Sunni-Shiite split. In 632, upon Muhammad’s death, one group (Sunnis) wanted the Prophet’s uncle to succeed him, while another group (Sunnis) supported his son-in-law. Each group believed that their man represented the true faith and accused the other group of turning their back on the real, true, honest Islam … I’m sure you can see the problem. Both groups think the other are apostates, and there is a requirement to kill them.
tomndebb, the fact that the bombers, torturers and killers are often good Muslim boys, and many have been Madrasseh students, should have been a big clue that your claim was wrong. These are not isolated individuals working on their own. They pray five times a day, they believe implicitly in the Koran, they follow the Five Pillars of Islam, they have the support of their brethren, their community, their Mullah … and they go out and torture and bomb and kill other Muslims.
Why? Because they believe the other Muslims, men, women, and children, are apostates who have turned their back on the true religion, and THE KORAN SAYS TO KILL THE APOSTATES. Not just the men, all the apostates, women and children.
You asked where the Koran says it’s OK to kill women and children?
That’s where. And as a related aside … I don’t recall Jesus recommending anything of the sort.
Sunni and Shi’a co-existed (more or less, given the nature of political power struggles) for over 1300 years. Even now, there have been no calls within Iraq for the destruction of the “apostates,” simply the “normal” hate fests of civil war embedded in power struggles. In fact the only significant fatwa that has been issued in Iraq was a joint Sunni/Shi’a fatwa against Hezbollah.) Muqtada al Sadr has not called for any violence against Sunnis in his various proclamations; he is focused on driving out the Westerners.
Trying to generalize that Islam is a religion of hatred or violence from the disrupted cultures currently locked in battle (particularly when they are not actually appealing to their own scriptures to rationalze their actions) seems to indicate that you are imposing your own desire to have the world be a nice, neat place where one religion is “bad.”
While Shiites and Sunnis have both existed for 1,300 years, they have also spent a good deal of that time killing each other. There is a long and bloody history between them for 1,300 years. The first Shiite Caliph, Ali, was murdered in the year 660 by a Shiite because Ali wanted a negotiated solution to the Shiite/Sunni civil war which had broken out when Ali took power.
Civil war between Shiites and Sunnis broke out again in 680, culminating in the massacre of Ali’s son and dozens of his followers. This is one of the seminal events in Shiite history, and is one of the sources of their emphasis on martyrdom as a holy act.
There have been various fatwas over the course of history. In the year 1000, Ibn Hazm said "“Shia are not even Muslims” … note that that makes them eligible to be murdered as apostates. This belief has persisted into modern times, and is still strong.
You say that there have been no fatwas against the Sunnis or the Shiites in Iraq … why should there be? They kill each other quite well without fatwas. And this is not just a “power struggle” as you claim. If it were, there would not be dozens of people discovered every week who are not only dead, but have been extensively tortured before death. The ancient hatreds run deep.
You seem to have missed one of the most important fatwas issued in Iraq. The Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq did issue a fatwa calling for the killing of Iraqi gays and lesbians “in the worst, most severe way possible”. Note that women and minors were not exempt from this fatwa, and that the people to be tortured and murdered were Muslims … a 14 year old Muslim boy was killed as a result of this fatwa. “Religion of peace” my ass, some nasty old man ordering women and children to be tortured to death is not a religion at all. Unfortunately, this is all too typical of Islam. See the fatwa against Salman Rusdie, the killing of innocent civilians because of cartoons halfway around the world, the calls for the death of the cartoonists, the whipping of women caught in adultery, the stoning to death and chopping off of hands … and that’s just a small sample.
Oh, yeah, there was another fatwa in Iraq. This one was a joint Sunni-Shiite fatwa, and is of particular interest to this discussion. This fatwa declared that henceforth, suicide bombings against Muslims would be a sin … which of course means that up to that point, in the view of both the Shiites and Sunnis, suicide bombings against Muslims wasn’t a sin. In any case, the fatwa doesn’t seem to have had much effect.
I am not trying to generalize that Islam is a religion of hatred or violence from the current situation. It has been a religion of violence and hatred from the start. Muhammad was a wartime leader who led his men on the following campaigns: The Battle of Badr, the Battle of Badr-2, the Battle of Ohod, the Battle of Uhud-2, the Battle of Trench, the Banu Quraizah, the Battle of Haibar, the Battle of Mut’ah, the Conquest of Makkah, the Battle of Hunayn, the Battle of Ta’if, the Battle of Tabuk, and the Conquest of Mecca. He personally murdered his enemies, executed captives, and enslaved women and children.
The following centuries saw Islam spread at the point of a sword, as recommended by Muhammad and the Koran.
Yes, Christianity spread at times by the sword as well, but neither Jesus nor the Bible recommended that course of action.
Please read the Koran, along with a life of Muhammad, if you don’t believe me. I note that now you are not disputing that the Koran tells Moslems to murder people, and have given up your claim that women and children are exempt.
Also, please don’t misconstrue what I say as support for Christianity over Islam. I despise both religions, for different reasons. The problem is not religious intolerance … it is tolerance of religions. Both of them are hidebound, traditional, puritanical systems well out of step with the modern world, that encourage hypocrisy and create more problems than they solve. You are imposing your own desire to have the world be a nice, neat place where I think one religion is good and one is bad. I think nothing of the sort.
I do think, however, that it is a very grave mistake to view Islam as ‘just another religion’. All men may be created equal … but all religions are not.
Mind you, from a review of other hadiths, it seems the only reason Muhammad wanted the children spared was to sell as slaves and his cut was a whopping 20% of the take. Targo
And have there been any similar statements made recently? Or, as you yourself note:
Which more than strongly suggests that the violence is a cultural artifact and has nothing to do with their religion.
Aquila Be], Those hadiths each talk about launching raids in which women and children are at jeopardy, not the deliberate massacre of the women and children. And they are clearly not identified as Muslims–as were the people killed near the watermelon-filled truck.
You folks are mixing and matching patches of inconsistent information in order to make a coherent claim and it is not holding together.
