Except the Wahabi don’t do that. In fact, you can’t do that. The Koran is poetic, rambling, obscure at points, and pretty lacking in specifics. You need to interpret it. What the Wahabi do is say that their interpretion is the only correct one, and that followers of all other interpretations are polytheists or not Muslim, and force everyone to follow their interpretation.
This puts them outside mainstream Muslim thought. Ever since the Koran was written down, there have been differing interpretations of what it means, and there generally has been for its history, a consensus in Islam that the different schools of interpretation are acceptable and that everyone should be free to practice his or her interpretation or his or her school of Muslim thought. The Wahabi reject that, and in doing so, place them outside the Muslim mainstream.
Everytime I hear about this Orthodox version of Islam, I freak out, because I think they could be responsible for nothing less than WWIII or do a great deal of damage to our society.
I think it’s really wrong to single out any particular form of radical extremism as the threat. One falls, another rises. And some that fell rise up again. It is religious extremism itself, in any form, that is the danger. Wahhabism is just one manifestation of the disease. History has proven time and again that any religious tradition has within it the seeds of extremism, and the fact that we feel most threatened by Islamist extremists is little more than an accident of history. We could have been Jews in Spain during the Middle Ages. We could have been witches in Salem. Unquestioning faith in the righteousness of one’s mission empowers that person with the will to do unspeakable things; we’ve seen it before in Christianity, now with Islam, and in the future with something else. To focus on Wahhabi is to lose sight of the larger and much more troubling picture; and if we oversimplify our view of the real enemy, we run the risk of missing the enemies in our midst, who merely wear a different guise.
Faith can move mountains; and faith can bring terror. Unquestioning belief is the real enemy, at that virulent meme is a poison running through every religious tradition. Never forget that.
(I don’t know how it works there, but round here you can’t place bets on illegal things for obvious reasons, and also on things requiring a certain levell of human intervention. I find it hard to believe that’s going to be different elsewhwhere. But if it wasn’t I bet SOMEONE’d bet.)
Alas, that’s quite true altho I will say in C’nity’s defense that it took three centuries for the C’tian Faith to become militaristic (granted, it didn’t have opportunity till then), and that it’s a GREAT leap from the Sermon on the Mount to the Crusades & Inquisitions, whereas Islam was militaristic within a decade of its founding with full support of the Quran.
To show that I know that it’s not strictly relevant to the subject at hand, and an aside, but I thought it relevant to whoever asked the original. Probably just my confused mind again.
(shrug) The fact still remains that military conquest was crucial to the spread of Islam. And if the Arab imperialists weren’t motivated primarily by religion, they nevertheless frequently used that religion as an ideological justification for their conquests. It is therefore entirely fair to say that Islam was spread by fire and sword.
All too often, people who expound on freedom of religion forget about freedom from religion. Those who advocate the latter are just as remiss in forgetting to provide for the former.
Nitpick: They were fighting for a political ideology that assumes atheism, not for atheism as such. 20th-Century Communism, in fact, was not so much anti-religious as a sort of new religion in its own right – with rationality substituted for revelation, the Historical Dialectic substituted for God, and with its own canonical books, prophet (Marx), messiah (Lenin), eschatology (the Revolution), millennium (the future society of pure, stateless communism), ecclesiastical hierarchy (Stalin as pope, Party as church), army chaplains (commissars or political officers), schisms and heresies (Trotsky vs. Stalin), inquisitions and inquisitors, Wars of Reformation, etc., etc.
IOW, an unchallengeable dogmatic belief-system, that thinks it is the One True Way for the whole world, is a very bad thing regardless of whether God is in it or not.
Religion is no different from any other discipline in that regard. Government, business, science, the arts, and yes religion — they all are filled to the brim with politicians who abuse their power for the sake of personal gain. But that is the fault of the men, not the faith.
Incidentally, “the One True Way” pretty much describes any centralized planning scheme, and is why I reject certain political models that claim to do things for the “common good”. Whether such things are done in the guise of a magistrate or a priest is just window dressing.
Please provide a relevant citation.
Do you have one that shows how the beliefs of nearly a billion other Muslims are incorrect?
Or is this more of a IMHO sort of thing?
If there was no Wahhabi, then there’d just be something else.
People have realpolitik motivations to do what they do.
Rationalizations in the forms of ideology and religion etc are secondary- sales techniques.
If there was no Islam, then UbL would’ve found a different rallying cry.
Some practitioners of Wahhabi/Deobandi/whathaveyou have certainly shown themselves to be threats to humanity at large.
“Don’t judge Christianity by the Christians” – is that you are saying? (Not trying to put words in your mouth) I have heard that all my life and never really understood it. I do understand that individuals who call themselves Christian can behave in unChristian ways, but what I don’t get is how Christianity can be absolved of blame for for things such as the Inquisition.
Excellent summary of the analogies between what came to be Bolshevism and Stalinism and an organized faith like Christianity. I’ve rarely seen it spelled out so lucidly and concisely.