What does Jihad really require of faithful Muslims

[bldysabba]

@Chief_Pedant

I assume you know India is not a majority Muslim nation…

You are missing the distinction, I think, between religion and political boundary affiliations. Perhaps there is not a distinction, but I think there is.

Where Islam is a majority religion, oppression at a political level for any alternate belief is very high, and oppression of women at a political level (that is, a practical political structure which limits their equality) is very high. The percentage of the populace willing to sanction killing for the cause of the religious tenets (suicide bombing, e.g.) is very high. It appears to me you want to separate that reality from “the religion” and blame it on some other thing such as historical climate, or culture or whatever.

In this you are incorrect. The association of this sort of extremism with the religion of Islam is so pervasive and so consistent that it is much more reasonable to draw the conclusion that Islam drives this sort of culture.

I agree with you on many points, in particular tomndebb’s line of argument where the “religion” is somehow not responsible for any of the ills in areas where it is dominant. I’ve been having this argument with him in another thread also. Perhaps the point of confusion is that he thinks he’s countering the claim that religion is solely responsible, since he does agree that it can be a factor.

However, I think it may be fallacious to say Islam “drives” a culture of extremism. I think there are just many elements within the religion that provide reinforcement for fundamentalism/extremism which can arise from other factors.

Islam is stuck where the Westboro Baptists are stuck, where Christianity was stuck a few hundred years back, and where Judaism was stuck in Joshua’s day.

Perhaps not all of it, but definitely more of it than other comparable religions.

Muslims are Muslims first, and all else second. That is to say, they actually put into practice what they believe. And so some extraordinarily high percentage of a majority Muslim country is “radicalized” (from our perspective).

Here I disagree with you. If this actually were true, we’d be in much deeper shit. There would be an actual clash of civilisations, instead of whatever weakass, few thousand people getting killed every year version we have now. It may be true that Islam encourages that sort of thinking, but I’m positive the majority of Muslims think of themselves as people first. Unfortunately, I think Islam lends itself easily to being politicised, and influential voices within it do provide more reinforcement to those who are more radical. This may not be very different from how other religions have behaved in the past, but I don’t think this is how they behave today.

It may be true that emigrants from Muslim majority countries take on the less violent and oppressive views of their new countries, but I suggest an alternative explanation: the less violent and less oppressively-inclined are the ones who emigrate.

This is certainly possible. On the whole, I agree with you most about the spectrum of people being fairly similar everywhere, only Islam(as it is today) provides more reinforcement to its nuts than other religions(as they are today) provide to theirs. To top it off, while most religions react poorly to criticism, Islam is particularly excessive in its response.

The biggest issue I have with Islam though, in particular the radical, politicised version, is how its success(so to speak) inspires the kooks in other religions to start behaving similarly. India and its current experiments with political Hinduism for instance, are in my view almost entirely responses to political Islam. “Fight fire with fire” I’ve heard the fools say, ignoring entirely the fact that setting your house on fire does not make sense.

[Hank_Beecher]

@tomndebb

So they all believe in exactly the same way

Can you please provide a citation of where someone has made this claim?

[Hank_Beecher]

[QUOTE=Ibn_Warraq]
(hank beecher)foolishly insisted on another thread, without a shred of evidence that hadiths claiming Aisha was nine when she married Muhammad were “genuine” and “accepted”** while insisting that hadiths which placed her age as being much older were “not accepted” **even though they were collected by the same person and both deemed “Sahih”(authentic) by most scholars.
[/QUOTE]

Still waiting on a citation for this repeated claim of yours. Since you are claiming that I insisted this, and you are doing so over and over, it should not be hard for you to find a quotation of me claiming that parts of Bukhari are “not accepted”.

You are not merely (repeatedly) mischaracterizing my position here. When you use mock quotes like that you imply that those are the phrases that I used. Let’s see the quotes.

If you are really going to keep trying to insist on arguing against the claim that, according to traditional and mainstream Islam, Prophet Mo had sex with a nine year old, then you are going to have a very difficult time, because you are simply wrong.

Presumably Hank also gets upset at people labeling Muhammad Atta a Muslim since, from his standpoint, Muhammad Atta can’t possibly have been a Muslim since he was caught on camera downing multiple cognacs at an airport bar before boarding the final airplane he’d ever get on.

Nor, I’m sure, does Hank think the other 911 hijackers who felt the need to get lap dances at a strip club before blowing themselves and three thousand other human beings were Muslims.

Or at least, based on the logic he’s been using they can’t have been.

This is another error you are repeating. I will set you straight, yet again: what we are talking about here is not your’s or my personal definitions of Islam. Our definitions matter very very little. I am talking about what Muslims consider the definition of a Muslim to be, or more specifically, the definition of people who consider themselves Muslim.

Of course with over a billion Muslims there are going to be all different varieties of beliefs. But we can still make statements that are generally true. For example, just like we can say with certainty that in America democrats generally support abortion rights, despite the exceptions, it is a fact that, to Muslims, a person is not a Muslim if they pick and choose which parts of the Koran are true. In fact there is a slang term for this type of la carte follower: a “cafeteria Muslim”, this is a derisive term that implies that someone is not a real Muslim.

So to address your claims about alcohol and strip clubs (and, again, we are using the definitions generally agreed upon by Muslims here): no, a Muslim who drinks or goes to a strip club has not left their religion, they have sinned, while a person who picks and chooses which parts of the Koran are true is not a Muslim.

[Valteron]

@truthSeeker2

Absolutely. When a Pakistani probably means to say ‘Be a good human being’, he will often say ‘Be a good Muslim’. Maybe their upbringing is such that it comes to them naturally. Rather innocuous examples which display their mentality : Their national cricket team’s captain, after losing a match, apologizedto all Muslims of this world. Another captain after another loss sayshearts of Indians are small and can never be as big as hearts of Muslims or that of Pakistanis. Sports and religion have no connection but when their National team captains speak such communal language, it gives an insight into the people’s psyche.

I particularly remember an exhibit by Saudi Arabia that came to Montreal about 20 years ago. This was long before people in the west realized that Islam is by no means comparable to other religions, and before anyone had coined the term “Islamophobia” to cover any criticism of Islam. The exhibit guides, all men, simply refused to answer questions of women who walked by their exhibits. One poor confused lady shouted as if she suspected the guide was deaf. The fact is they simply did not speak to women and believed Montreal women had no business speaking to a man.

But what really set me to understanding that Islam was something completely different was when a film about Saudi achievements mentioned that a Saudi astronaut who went into space on a US mission was the first “Muslim” in space. I remember thinking how bizarre that was,and how much it revealed about the Muslim mindset. Does anyone know or care what religion Neil Armstrong was?

[Valteron]

BTW, on Thursday I am participating in world-wide demonstrations (all of them in western countries) against Bangladesh’s persecution and proposed murder of bloggers who expressed their atheist, non-Muslim beliefs. Enormous mobs in Bangladesh have been demanding the arrest and execution of even more people for expressing atheist opinions. What religion is Bagladesh by the way?

I am certain that I and the other demonstrators defending the rights of atheists will be perfectly safe in our western cities. At the very most, some theist may yell an insult at us from a passing car, and we will smile and wave and agree with his right of free expression.

Would anyone, including Ibn Warraq, care to see what would happen if you held a similar march in defense of atheists in just about any Muslim country?

[Valteron]

@Hank_Beecher

Of course with over a billion Muslims there are going to be all different varieties of beliefs. But we can still make statements that are generally true. For example, just like we can say with certainty that in America democrats generally support abortion rights, despite the exceptions, it is a fact that, to Muslims, a person is not a Muslim if they pick and choose which parts of the Koran are true.

Hank, I agree with the points you are making. But you are being confronted by people like Tomndebb and Ibn Warraq with the eternal argument of Islamic apologists. Unless you can show that 100% of Muslims subscribe to a viewpoint, you cannot allege that violence, intolerance, violent fanaticism, anti-semitism, homophobia, sexism and a desire for world conquest by Islam are frequent, widespread, mainstream, and extremely dangerous features of the “religion of peace”.

So WHAT if there are nice, non-violent Muslims? When over 80% of a country as populous as Egypt believes it is ok to kill apostates, you worry. But since Islam has so many sects and different currents of opinion, apologists can always insist that “this dosn’t happen in Indonesia” or “sect XYZ does not believe this.”

For that matter, I am willing to bet that there were Nazis in the Third Reich who were nice, decent people. At one point, FIVE MILLION Germans belonged to the Nazi party. Millions joined just to protect their public sector jobs. I simply cannot believe that every one of the five million German Nazis was a murdering, racist monster. There were even Nazis like Oscar Schindler who actually protected Jews. And no rational historian can deny that the Nazi government did SOME good things, such as the Autobahns, for example.

Even the leading Nazis did not agree 100% with Hitler.

But Naziism was and is judged as a package deal. And as a philosophy, its concepts of “master race” and conquest simply were not acceptable in the 20th century.

[Marley23]

The thread topic here is Islam and the meaning of the term jihad. It’s not intended to be yet another broad-based discussion of Islam and geopolitics and terrorism and everything else.

[Valteron]

@Marley23

The thread topic here is Islam and the meaning of the term jihad. It’s not intended to be yet another broad-based discussion of Islam and geopolitics and terrorism and everything else.

“Herr Modertor hat immer Recht”, of course, but it seems to me that it is pretty hard to discuss the meaning of “jihad” without spilling over into those subjects. Unless we want to allege that “jihad” is just kind of like a Roman Catholic novena with a few bombs and bullets for good measure.

[Marley23]

@Valteron

“Herr Modertor hat immer Recht”, of course, but it seems to me that it is pretty hard to discuss the meaning of “jihad” without spilling over into those subjects.

I’m hoping it’ll just be hard to make huge generalizations that drag the thread off topic.

[Valteron]

I just noticed how in an earlier posting, Hank asked Ibn Warraq what he thought of the high level of support for the killing of apostates in Muslim countries.

Ibn answers:

"You’ll notice that traditional Judaism and traditional Christianity are equally harsh as to what happens to those who deny the existence of the one true God. "

Notice the subtle shift in the time frame with the use of the word “traditional”. Do you know of any western country or of any western religious leader who proposes that apostasy from their religion should be punished in ANY way? Has the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury called for any punishment for ex-RCs or ex Anglicans that I am unaware of?

We are not talking about 200 years ago. We are talking about NOW in the 21st century. Atheist blogggers in Bangladesh are being arrested and will be executed NOW. In the friggin’ year 2013, man! And in 2010, over 80% of Egyptian Muslims said to PEW that they agreed with the killing of apostates.

GET A GRIP ON REALITY! There is no comparison. You can’t just fire out “tu quoque” arguments that skip over centuries.

[Magiver]

@Dissonance

This is more than just massive goal post moving, which it is as well, it’s a blind denial of reality on your part. That you posted other things later does not mean that it wasn’t what you said. You said it, everyone can see it, and it’s absurd for you to try to say that it wasn’t what you said. It is exactly what you said. Regarding your later post, you were also incorrect as you tried to frame it as “whining” over the definition of the borders of the Middle East. Most Muslims live in South and Southeast Asia, which is not part of the Middle East by any definition of where the exact boundaries of the Middle East are.

Your arguments might (and I stress might) hold more water if you would have simply admitted your error rather than repeatedly trying to deny that you said what everyone can see clear as day is exactly what you said.

I misspoke and clarified it. get a life. I used it to refer to a region where Islam is the majority population. Do I really need to have this argument? Does the clarification change what I said or reinforce it?

It’s what is now referred to as the Near East:
Middle East:
Geographic region where Europe, Africa, and Asia meet. It is an unofficial and imprecise term that now generally encompasses the lands around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea—notably Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria—as well as Iran, Iraq, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. Afghanistan, Libya, Turkey, and The Sudan are sometimes also included. The term was formerly used by Western geographers and historians to describe the region from the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia; Near East is sometimes used to describe the same area.

[Valteron]

[quote=“Ibn_Warraq, post:51, topic:656166”]

Would you mind giving me the name of any 8th Century countries where the government fully funds transgender operations and grants full rights and protections to transexuals.
QUOTE]

If you are referring to the governement of Iran and how it uses compulsory sex reassignment surgery on homosexual people whether they want it or not, I DEMAND that you retract your homophobic statement. Iran’s program of turning gay men into women by force of law is NOT some sort of enlightened program, but a crime against humanity.

Because Islam depends heavily on sexism, the existence of gay and lebian persons is a threat to their religious fascism. I have been working with members of the Iranian gay underground railway, whose activities I help finance, who help gays flee from Iran before Islamic fanaticism has a chance to hack their privates.

Educate yourself abvout this homophobic program before you go praising the liberal government of Iran! Your comments are a bloody insult to the gay Iranians victimized by this Islamofascist program.

[Marley23]

@Valteron

If you are referring to the governement of Iran and how it uses compulsory sex reassignment surgery on homosexual people whether they want it or not, I DEMAND that you retract your homophobic statement.

Again, Valteron, pay attention to the original thread topic. That’s an order from Der Commissar.

[Valteron]

@Marley23

Again, Valteron, pay attention to the original thread topic. That’s an order from Der Commissar.

Okay, if you insist. But it hurts me to let Ibn Warraq get away with his apologist outrage by pretending that Iran is not a homophobic hell-hole that forces gender reassignment on gays. His contention that Iran is some sort of liberal-minded paradise for transsexuals should be responded to. Should a I start another thread? Would Ibn defend his outrageous comments on it?

This is me shuttin’ up, boss!

[bldysabba]

Here’s an excerpt from a very recent news article in India that has some bearing on the topic. It shows how some Muslim leaders in India have used the concept of Jihad as a call to violence for other Muslims over many centuries.

From the sixteenth century historian Sheikh Zainuddin Mab’ari, we know the jihadist political tendency in southern India isn’t of recent vintage. In 1498, the Portuguese arrived off the Malabar coast—tearing apart the prosperous Muslim community which until then enjoyed a monopoly of the spice trade with the Persian gulf. In Maba’ri’s view, the Muslims had invited this on themselves, their prosperity leading them to “deviate into sinful living, forgetting the blessings of Allah”. He also condemned Islamic rulers, “who loved this transient world more than the next and would not struggle in the path of Allah or spend their wealth in his cause”.

Portuguese colonialism was shaped—as all colonialism is—by the sword. Ma’bari chronicled its murderous impact: “They killed innumerable Muslims. Those who were caught, bound and confined were countless in number. Many were forcefully converted to Christianity. Kidnapping Muslim women and raping them in custody to produce Christian children was rampant”.

Ma’bari thus wrote with the declared intention intention of “giving inspiration to the believers to wage jihad against the cross-worshipping Portuguese”. In his view, jihad against unbelievers living in their own lands was not an individual obligation: “if nobody undertakes to do it, the entire community will be held responsible for committing the sin”. In the face of invasion, though jihad was the “responsibility of every able-bodied individual adult Muslim, male or female”.

This kind of jihadist ideological motif, the historian Ayesha Jalal has shown, runs through South Asia—though, it bears mention, generally at the fringes of Muslim politics. The eighteenth century cleric Shah Waliullah, for example, wrote to Muslim rulers and notables calling for measures against Hindus and followers of the Shia faith. He also wrote to the Afghan warlord Ahmad Shah Abdali, calling on him to invade India. In a manifesto released after its 2008 bombings in New Delhi, the Indian Mujahideen had specifically invoked the memories of Sayyid Ahmad and Shah Ismail, two iconic jihadists killed who were killed at Balakot in May, 1831, while waging an unsuccessful jihad against Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s empire.

[Marley23]

@Valteron

This is me shuttin’ up, boss!

No, it isn’t. But in case this wasn’t clear I also meant that people who were engaging you or Hank Beecher on thread hijacks also have to let those subjects go or open a new thread.

[Hank_Beecher]

Fromt the introduction of Understanding Jihad by David Cook

Jihad, like other words taken from a religious context, has a long history and a complex set of meanings. Conventionally, it is translated as “holy war”, but this definition, associated with the medieval Crusades, is usually rejected by Muslims as too narrowly Christian. In Arabic, the words literal meaning is “striving” or “exerting oneself”, with the implication, on the basis of its usage in the Quran, “with regard to one’s religion”. Many contemporary Muslim writers, recognizing the negative connotations that jihad has acquired in European languages, maintain that the word means nothing more than “striving”. Yet this position, predominant among Muslim apologists writing in non-Muslim (primarily Western) languages, is disingenuous. To gain a sense of the words true meaning, one must begin by looking at it’s usage in classical Muslim literature, primarily in Arabic, but also in other Muslim languages, as well as it’s function in Muslim history and historiography.

To complicate matters further, there are different types of jihad. The terms complexity is not surprising given the centrality of the concept of jihad for Islam and the length of time–fourteen centuries–that Muslims have had to work with it. “Warfare with spiritual significance” is the primary and root meaning of the term as it has been defined by classical Muslim jurists and legal scholars and as it was practiced by Muslims during the premodern period. This meaning is sustained in the standard definition given in the new addition of The Encyclopedia of Islam: “In law, according to general doctrine and historical tradition, the jihad consists of military action with the action of expansion of Islam and, if need be, of its defense.” This terse summary of Muslim law and history is the standard, scholarly one.

Nonetheless, many Muslims, seeking to distance themselves and their religion from associations with violence and conquest, maintain that the word’s significance is exclusively spiritual. According to some of the most prominent Muslim leaders in the United States, jihad is entirely peaceable and represents the exertion of spiritual warfare waged by the faithful against the lower, or evil, soul. This definition of jihad has considerable precedent in classical sources, although it is not the word’s primary meaning.

[tomndebb]

@bldysabba

Ok good. That is a fact I’ve had a lot of trouble isolating from your posts in various threads. Further then, today, as things stand, do you think Islam (including as parts of the whole its extremist Salafist strains, its Deobandi strains, its more moderate Ismaili strains, the Islam-inspired Islamist political party strains) a more negative factor than other religions or less? Measured against other religions today, mind you, not Christianity in the medieval ages, or the Jews of the old testament?

I think that talking about “Islam” as if it is some sort of monolithic structure that is the same in all times or in all places at a particular time factually wrong and foolish. If someone wishes to express concern about Salafists or Wahhabists or political Islamists and the ways in which they have created a variant of Islam that is unhealthy for its practitioners and dangerous to others, I have no problem with that. When people go off on “Islam” and express ignorant beliefs about it and then play No True Scotsman with all the exceptions to their imaginary construct, I find that attitude and its promotion of ignorance to be just about as unsettling as the Islamists.

[Hank_Beecher]

@tomndebb

I think that talking about “Islam” as if it is some sort of monolithic structure that is the same in all times or in all places at a particular time factually wrong and foolish.

You just called a mainstream Islamic belief factually wrong and foolish. I agree with you. I wish more Muslims agreed with us.

If someone wishes to express concern about Salafists or Wahhabists or political Islamists and the ways in which they have created a variant of Islam that is unhealthy for its practitioners and dangerous to others, I have no problem with that.

Please defineSalafist, because you seem to use a different definition than the people who use it to describe themselves. Salafists by definition follow the religion as it was practiced by it’s originators and early propagators, and sosee themselvesas the only ones not “creating a variant of Islam that is unhealthy for its practitioners”.

When people go off on “Islam” and express ignorant beliefs about it and then play No True Scotsman with all the exceptions to their imaginary construct, I find that attitude and its promotion of ignorance to be just about as unsettling as the Islamists.

Example? Specifics?

[tomndebb]

@Hank_Beecher

You just called a mainstream Islamic belief factually wrong and foolish. I agree with you. I wish more Muslims agreed with us.

I was hardly talking about the imaginary Islam of your creation, (or the one you have borrowed from other haters). You would recognize that if you had bothered to note that Islam is NOT monolithic.

Beyond that, I will respect Marley’s instructions to avoid further hijacking this thread.