The current thread ranting about the latest bombing in Saudi Arabia, and it got me thinking about a subject I have been meaning to post about on here, but have been held back by lack of time. Seeing as I have nothing much to do tonight, I may as well try to tackle it.
I once was Muslim. I was raised Catholic, but by the age of 11 or so I had become an agnostic, occasionally dabbling in Neo-Paganism. The summer before my senior year of high school, I decided to learn what I could about Islam. I quickly became interested in what I was reading and hearing, and decided to convert. I suppose what attracted me to Islam was its uncompromising stance on monotheism, and the fact that it was a logical, orderly system of beliefs descending from the axiom that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. My Catholic upbringing had been largely a cultural thing (I’m of Irish-Italian descent), and I was never exposed to the heavy-duty theology and philosophy of the Church. Islam was the first religion I had looked at seriously, that both had a long tradition behind it and was more than a collection of folk beliefs and traditions. It was logical, and I liked it.
So I became Muslim. I was fairly devout, as new converts tend to be; I prayed 5 times a day, fasted in Ramadhaan, and hung out a lot at masjid. I started learning Arabic, in preparation for beginning Qu’ranic memorization studies. The masjid I attended was fairly small, compared to the other mosques in Houston, but the people seemed to be fairly laid-back, compared to the media portrayals of Islam I had grown up seeing (although I later learned from some Naqshbandi Sufis who had been mostly forced out of that mosque, though they still occasionally attended, that the leadership there and a large part of the congregation were hardline Wahhabis, although I never noticed any extremist behavior. I suspect that they may have held back a bit on their rhetoric, or at least kept it in Urdu, to avoid scaring me off, as I was both the only male of European descent, and the only male convert at that mosque. I never interacted with females there; that portion of the Islamic stereotype, at least in masjid and related functions, is accurate).
So I was a new practising Muslim, and I started to build up a decent library of every English-language piece of Islamic scholarship I could; I got the whole set of Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, every English-language translation of the Qu’ran, commentaries on the Qu’ran, studies on fiqh (jurisprudence), history of fiqh, The Reliance of the Traveller, etc. I knew some about the warfare committed in the name of Islam, the persecution of Jews and Christians in Islamic lands, “conversion by the sword,” etc. I knew that atrocities had been committed in Allah’s name, but, much like the atrocities in Christianity’s history, I believed that they were actions of misguided individuals, and a perversion of the ideals of the religion.
When I began my in-depth studies on Islamic jurisprudence (well, as in-depth as I could with the books available in English, which, while far from exhaustive, most likely went into far more detail on the specifics of Islam than most Muslims would ever know or care about), I quickly found that there was a key difference between the crimes committed in the name of Christianity, and those in the name of Islam. While Christianity has as some of it’s core teachings the ideas of “turn the other cheek” and “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” Islam taught at its core the the idea of spreading Islam by any means necessary. Islam has no conception of separation of religion and state; thus, I find somewhat dishonest the claims that such-and-such Islamic government that has committed atrocities wasn’t really representing Islam, when the government claimed it was, and (and this is the key point), according to the ideals of Islam, it was.
Regarding this last point, unfortunately the only cites I am currently able to give come from Umdat as-Salik, or The Reliance of the Traveller (with commentary by Umar Barakat and Sheikh Nuh `Ali Salman, translated by Nuh Ha Meem Keller), as the bulk of my Islamic texts are in a box in my attic. However, I believe that quotes from this book will suffice to provide basic evidence of my point, as the Reliance of the Traveller is one of the definitive statements of Shafi’i fiqh (Shafi’i being one of the four great schools of Sunni jurisprudence), and it was written in 1368, still in the later limits of the “Golden Age” in Islamic thought, and long before the rise of modern Islamic extremism.
From `Umdat as-Salik, section o9 (Jihad): (commentary by Barakat) “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims.”
o9, quoting a hadith reported by Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim: “the Prophet said 'I have been commanded to fight people until they testify thnat there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat.”
o9.8: “The caliph (theoretically, supreme religious and political leader of Islam) makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians … until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”
o9.9: "The caliph fights all other peoples [i.e. non-Christians, Jews, or Zoroastrians] until they become Muslim.
o9.15: “It is permissible in jihad to cut down the enemy’s trees and destroy their dwellings.”
Furthermore, according to `Umdat as-Salik, non-Muslims living under Muslim domination have restrictions placed upon them that constitute an extreme denial of religious freedom. These include (o11.5): being forced to wear distinctive clothing, having to keep to the side of the street, not being permitted to build higher than Muslim’s buildings, not being able to openly display symbols of their religious or to publicly celebrate their religion, and not being able to build new places of worship.
The concept of Dar ul-Islam (the land of Islam) and Dar ul-Harb (the enemy lands) is found throughout classical Islamic writings on Jihad, and despite the modern effort to rehabilitate the word, jihad has had the meaning, and still does, of war for the purpose of expanding Dar ul-Islam and diminishing Dar ul-Harb.
It was learning things such as this that, over the course of that year, drove a wedge between myself and Islam; I found that I could not follow a religion that claimed to come from God and yet officially endorsed what I felt to be despicable and evil behavior. It is my personal opinion that the actions of the current Islamic terrorists are not aberrations in interpretation of Islam, but fall square within the historical tradition of jihad. Rather, I think that it is the modernizers and liberals in Islam, calling for Westernization and crowing about how jihad means struggle against injustice, who stand outside the pale of historical Islam.
I will conclude by saying that I am not terribly interested in debating the merits of Islam; I’ve done more than my share of that, on both sides of the issue. I simply wanted to give my thoughts on the current trumpeting of Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance. I should also note that I have no special dislike of Muslims per se; I have known many Muslims who I felt were decent, moral and ethical people. I simply believe that the religion itself is, at best, not good.
