The argument goes that the Qur’an’s teachings were acceptable or downright liberal and enlightened…1500 years ago.
We muslims believe that the Bible was intended to be the word of God, but was distorted by some of the human beings who wrote, translated or copied it.
What if we stop being arrogant and admit that the possibility of the Qur’an also being corrupted is not 0. It’s not 0 because nobody can prove what happened a millennium and a half ago. All the suspects are dead. All the evidence is dust.
So maybe the reason the Qur’an is at odds with today’s cherished values (why should non-muslims pay more tax, or women’s testimony be worth half a man’s?) is because the text is not perfect and must be updated to reflect the current environment.
I know that there are many muslim dopers around, and I’d like to hear what they think about breaking the taboo that is the sacrality of the Koranic texts.
Progressivism, the moral framework from which you critique Islam, is just an outgrowth of Christianity. Since Christians already consider Muslims to be following the beliefs of a false prophet, saying that Muslims are all a bunch of retrograde reactionaries doesn’t do much to sway them.
More importantly, Islam explicitly holds that Muhammad is the final prophet of Allah, and the text of the Quran has been standardized since Abu Bakr. This severely limits your avenues to revise the religion. What you are proposing, then, is pretty much heresy.
No more than any other religious re-interpretation. The Bible and the Torah have been re-interpreted, and so have Hindu and Buddhist texts. (How often do modern Jews put their children to death for talking trash to their parents?)
All religious texts can be interpreted in any number of ways. The Bible hasn’t changed particularly much in 1700 years…but look at the staggering number of different Christian denominations and doctrines.
The finalization of the Qur’an is not enough to have prevented the schism into Sunni and Shi’ite faiths. Liberal Islam is widespread in the far east. Why does anyone imagine that Islam is immune from internal progressive, humanist influences?
The way religions get mellow and liberal, as e.g. modern Christianity and Judaism have got, is not by formally repudiating the unpalatable parts of their scriptures but by re-interpreting them/constructing plausible reasons for holding them in abeyance/tacitly ignoring them.
Mops is right. That’s why newer religions, LDS and the like, are so strict. They haven’t been in existence long enough to find the workarounds. British Jews spent a decade constructing an eruv with a perimeter of 13 miles at a cost of 350,000 pounds just to let moms push prams around on the Sabbath. Well, not just for that reason, but for reasons like that. It takes a 3,500 year old religion to come up with a loophole that big.
Maybe, but in that view I’d put Islam in the “too new to accept change” category.
Don’t even ultra-Orthodox accept the (rather flimsy, smirking-at-God) notion of string eruvs? I sparked a discussion on this a while back and the supporting notion seems to be that God approves of such fine reasoning with His laws - in Talmudic thought, anyway.
I don’t know how much of Islam is “moderate” - believing, but in the way of most modern Christians. All we seem to hear about are those who are so casual about it we’d call them “holiday Christians” or “cafeteria Christians” - or what seems to be the more widespread idea that only the strict word of the Qur’an is valid.
Is there any significant sect or subset of Islam that follows such a modernized line of thought - belief, practicing the personal and family values, but recognizing that the harsher aspects of the book are from a time 1000 years or more in the past?
I think of it as reasoning rather than smirking. I think it emanates from the nature of Abrahamic religions as covenant religions. Of the three, Islam is very much the new kid on the block. Think of where Christianity was 700 years ago. The dietary restrictions during Lent were very similar to those of Ramadan.
Well, the reasoning of the smart/smartass kid in the back, maybe. I find much of the modern interpretation of the Talmud awesomely hair-splitting and have to scratch my head to imagine the supreme being who approves of such elaborately extended interpretations…
So are we to allow all religions 2000 years to reach equilibrium with human rights?
So we should just tolerate Muslims destroying our buildings, executing our citizens, burning people alive in cages, selling slaves, etc. for 700 years?
Just curious, as I know very little about pre-Christian Judaism: when did Jews stop following the harsh strictures of Leviticus et al. - stop killing insolent children, men who lay with other men, people who experimented with cloth blends, fellow villagers with the wrong length hair, etc.? I think (many of us think) of all this as early (pre-Middle Ages) Christian belief, but it was 1000+ years old at that time.
Didn’t Mohamed himself write the Quran, in Arabic? It isn’t like the Christian/Hebrew bible where hundreds of authors were involved.
Most fundamentalist Christians think the bible is infallible, but I’ve met many reasonable Christians who admit that it was written by fallible humans and translated by fallible translators. That would be a lot more difficult to admit if Jesus himself wrote the bible and current Christians were still reading it in the original language.
Yeah, but Jesus is God, while Muhammad is God’s messenger. Now, granted, there is a lot of holding Muhammad up as an exemplar of humanity, but it is far easier to say that Muhammad wasn’t perfect than it is to say that God isn’t perfect.
Nope. He is the claimed source dictating for God, but the Qur’an was created after his death. Basically multiple companions took notes on/memorized Muhammad’s pronouncements and then after his death these multiple sources were compiled by orders of the first Caliph. However even traditional sources agree that there were at least small discrepancies between the early written versions that were not fully hammered out until the third Caliph ~20 years after Muhammad’s death when it became standardized and differing versions were destroyed.
So the 2 or more offshoots of islam that are different enough to kill each other over…are 2 groups of people reading, word for word, the exact same book and set of medieval texts? Wow.
If I was making an eruv, I would put a little string loop around some far away flagpole and declare that the loop surrounds every place on Earth, except the flagpole. I would be being a smart alek, but not much more than the standard.
The basic schism between Sunni and Shi’ite is on the line of successors to Mohammed. It’s not too far from wrong to see the Sunni majority as like the Catholic Church, and the 10% or so Shi’ite as… Southern Baptists.
Emphasis added. No to the bolded part. The Qur’an is the same, but the supporting corpus of literature differs, as obviously do the interpretations of the core text as well. There is no single standardization of Hadith for example. That’s why you had multiple schools of even Sunni jurisprudence diverging fairly early and that is without getting into the rise of distinct Sunni, Shi’a, and Khawarij sects and the numerous sub-sects deriving from those.
The text of the Qur’an is the same (unlike Catholics and Protestants, who have slightly different Bibles), but Sunnis and Shias do have different books of hadith.
I find much of the modern interpretation of the Talmud awesomely hair-splitting and have to scratch my head to imagine the supreme being who approves of such elaborately extended interpretations…