Thank goodness Obama didn’t choose to opine on whether the Holy Roman Empire was holy, Roman, or much of an empire.
Nitpick: Islam also had and currently has varying transformative effects on all those countries, it is not just one-way. This is also true for other religions.
True. But I think that Christian politicians explaining Islam to the public is patronizing and it does actually serve to send messages they might not want to send. Like, “The American government says these aren’t real Muslims.”
Back up a tick. ISIL doesn’t seem particularly interested in striking Western targets (at least, not beyond their geographical scope). No, twitting risk-free “we’re so coming for you !” .jpegs does not count.
[QUOTE=Novelty Bobble]
Well that’s an interesting stance, I mean…completely wrong-headed but interesting. Dawkins and Harris have disagreed before. I have no idea if they agree on any or all of these points.
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Again, Dawkins publishes Harris’ screed with nary a comment or dissenting opinion. Maybe they’ve disagreed before. In this particular instance, do you have any reason to suspect they do, other than contrarian-ness ?
I hear this a lot. What I don’t hear is any solid evidence that states what they’ve said and explains why it is wrong.
I do hear a lot about how they should stick to their own discipline but all of it seems to amount to one variation or another of the “courtiers reply”
So I’ll ask the same of you. What does Sam Harris say that is wrong and why?
I’m assuming you are joking here, just in case you aren’t. Islam is a worldwide religion with multiple interpretations and levels of adherence. Some of the countries you mention are similar, some are not. Most in the west are substantially different.
The interpretation of the koran varies from country to country and from culture to culture. In that respect it is no different from many other religions.
I agree that a lot of the criticism that gets hurled at them isn’t valid.
Still, their big problem is in their conceptual underpinning. They use definitions of religion that are arbitrary and heavily influenced by specific (usually Protestant) Christian intellectual traditions. Confronted with a diversity of religious expressions that challenge these assumptions, they instead tend to try to isolate interpretations that they identify as somehow more ‘true’ than others, and delegitimize real-life counter-examples by saying that they “don’t really know their religion” or “are just using modern values” or that they “are not serious about it.” Modern religious studies scholarship has largely moved beyond this approach, seeing it (rightly, in my opinion) as arbitrary prescriptivism rather than an open attempt to explore what is going on.
In the specific article, several examples of Sam Harris showing this mindset are evident. He compares Muslims not killing apostates to Muslims eating pork, as two examples of Muslims not following the clear commands of their religion, and calls the Muslims who actually attempt to justify their ‘moderate’ (another problematic word) positions in their religion as illegitimate, as if they don’t have the right to do that or that they don’t have any kind of case. His attribution of the West’s freedom from theocracy (sigh) to the “render unto Caeser…” verse advances a particular view of Biblical authority that is not universal or historical, and ignores the long history of Christian intellectual thought on the relationship between religion and government. And so on.
Like I said, I think he does do good as an advocate for a marginalized group, but his essentialized view of religion is unjustifiable and he generally fails to examine the sources of his assumptions and ‘modern values.’
Minor nit – it’s more like an implied “so-called” before the term; that is, not that it’s figurative but that it references what others have called them (and what ISIL have called themselves) and then refutes that label as inappropriate.
I agree, and as a number of others have said, this is absolutely essential in order to avoid characterizing this as some kind of holy war against Islam, one of the world’s largest religions. It’s also accurate in the intended meaning of what was said: ISIL are certainly “Islamic” in the sense that they invoke that religion as justification for their actions, and in a cynical attempt to portray themselves as representing the Islamic world, but certainly not in the sense that they even remotely do so.
What Obama was saying is that ISIL, like al Qaeda, is driven by entirely political goals.
Tongue firmly in cheek, I assure you.
Just to add to ñañi’s point, when Sam Harris say this…
It may be true that no faith teaches people to massacre innocents exactly—but innocence, as the President surely knows, is in the eye of the beholder. Are apostates “innocent”? Blasphemers? Polytheists? Islam has the answer, and the answer is “no.”
…he is guilty of a bit of hyperbole at the very least.
Does the Qur’an mandate death for apostasy? No. A few hadith do, but hadith are always disputable.
Does the Qur’an mandate death for blasphemy? No. Neither the Qur’an nor any hadith specify any punishments. Punishments for blasphemy are all over the map and always have been.
Does the Qur’an mandate death for polytheists? Well…maybe. There are certainly passages that talk about killing polythesits is they refuse to submit. However in context these passages seem to specifically reference folks Muhammed was at war with at the time, which brings into question the universality of such charges.
One can dismiss the context above, but then you have the odd issue of explaining why Muslims seemed so willing to extend ‘People of the Book’ status to multifarious religions, as the Qur’an only specifies Christians, Jews and Sabians. If you then argue that that was just un-Islamic moderate accommodationism, you run into the thorny problem of calling Umar I, the second ‘Rightly Guided’ Caliph and a close personal buddy of Muhammad a moderate un-Islamic accommodationist 
( he extended said status to the Zoroastrians ).
None of this is too completely dismiss Harris’ concerns - in most times and places the Muslim response to apostasy has been the death penalty. That is an absolutely accurate observation. But to argue ( he more hints broadly on this one ) that liberal Islamic reform is impossible or that moderate arguments have no scriptural validity is erroneous as ñañi noted above. At least IMHO.
So the hadith are always disputable,
But the Qur’an is disputable only when it says things things that may shed an unpleasant light on the matter?
Most everything that is not disputable is interpretable ;). IME most major religions are endlessly malleable and can be made to dance to most any tune with enough work. Said work may twist everything in knots to get to the end goal, but it will get there. I’m pretty comfortable myself, reading in context, with the interpretation that the passages regarding polytheists are specific rather than general. Obviously many Muslims have been of similar mind as the history of Islam is absolutely replete with examples of accomodation with “polytheists” with contrastingly precious few examples of campaigns of extermination.
I am by the way I am already slightly kicking myself for responding to this thread, because I loathe the way certain types of threads tend to devolve into the same old fights all the time and I have long since lost my taste for being the water-carrier for Islam in these fights. I’m a pork-loving, strict rules-hating, Serbian Orthodox-descended live and let live atheist. It’s just my interest in history that has tended to get me bogged down in these usually tedious and tendentious arguments of how “evil” Islam is. So if anyone thinks they’re going to draw me into a 20 post hijack arguing about just how bad Islam is or isn’t - forget about it, I don’t do that shit anymore :D.
I think Islam is the most scripturally militant of the major faiths and in that regard perhaps the easiest to turn to violence. I would tend to regard Buddhism as the least. But other than organization there is little difference to me between those fuckstick Burmese Buddhists massacring Arakanese Muslims and ISIL. And contrastingly, I think those that argue in ‘No True Scotsman’ fashion against the validity of moderates of any faith, whether it be Christians, Muslims or whoever, are idiots. People are people at the end of the day and while we may mostly be jerks, we aren’t all assholes.
Not to speak for Tamerlane or drag him back into the thread, but I think disputable should be understood in terms of its applicability to specific new situations, rather than challenges to its more general authenticity. Hadith, even ones less sound, are very important (As has been said, “the Sunnah rules over the Qur’an, the Qur’an does not rule over the Sunnah”) but they are first and foremost tools of Islamic jurisprudence, which was traditionally a related-but-separate sphere from policy.
ETA: Addressed to bldysabba
My response was mostly tongue in cheek. I don’t think Islam is evil either, but I do think(and perhaps you would agree) that it lends itself more easily to a version that we would rather not have around. As you say, people everywhere are the same. We’re tribal creatures prone to acting like patriarchal jerks, but I think Islam provides an environment that reinforces some of those tendencies, and does so more than other religions. Like you say, it is scripturally militant. I think Sam Harris, for one, provides criticism that is largely along those lines, and Islam needs/deserves such criticism, until it reforms itself and becomes less able to be used as a tool of its substantial radical fringe. But that sort of criticism is rare. Mostly we get either the ‘Islam is evil’ crowd, or apologists, saying it’s not Islam, it’s just Islamic radicals.
I didn’t consider disputable to mean not authentic.
Ah, my mistake. Apologies.
phew! I thought so…but on this subject perhaps more than any you can’t be too careful!
[QUOTE=Tamerlane]
Does the Qur’an mandate death for apostasy? No. A few hadith do, but hadith are always disputable.
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One might even opine that the Qur’an goes strictly the other way. Al-Baqara 256 is probably the most quoted verse in all of the book, on par in recognition even among the unwashed masses with “render unto Caesar” or “blessed are the meek”. It says “There is no compulsion in religion”.
One might consider however that death for leaving the Din is somewhat akin, under a certain light and from a certain point of view, to be not entirely unlike a substrata of “compulsion” ;).
And, sure, Muhammed himself (possibly) said some shit about apostates; but then he also said not to write down anything he said or did because the Qu’ran was enough and enjoined his followers to destroy the works of anybody who quoted him because he was only one fallible man, so there ya go. Clearly *somebody *in the back of the class didn’t listen ! :mad:
There certainly are subsets of Islam that reject the hadith wholesale - with scriptural and scholarly backing. They’re in the minority, natch, but their interpretation is no less valid than that of the Sunnis or Shias. The same movements can be found in Christianism (sola scriptura) and Judaism (Karaites).
Sorry but…cite? He very, very carefully does not. I’ve re-read the piece and he simply does not say that at all. Come on, that really isn’t good enough.
He makes no claim regarding the legitimacy of moderate or hard-line muslims, none at all. Quote me where he says this.
Addressing the OP, I think that declaring that ISIS is not Islamic is problematic because it shields the rest of the Muslim community. The president has declared that these actors are aberrant and should not despoil the “good” Muslims.
While that is true, I feel that it is imperative that the “good” Muslims be heard declaring this for themselves. I would love to see throngs of peace loving Muslims marching on Washington (or anywhere) denouncing the actions of ISIS.
There are throngs of peace loving Muslims denouncing ISIS and their ilk all over. Spend three seconds on Google.