Robert Spencer has a post up this morning about the possibility of reforming Islam:
Everyone is looking for Islamic reformers and attaching massive hopes to Islamic reform. The thirst to find such people is so great, and the ignorance of Islam so widespread, that Westerners are ready to embrace and trumpet anyone who says some reassuring things -- even if he has no following, or only a tiny following, in the Islamic world, or if he is hounded and hunted as a heretic by the adherents of various Islamic orthodoxies, or if his prescription for reform is self-contradictory and unworkable.
Chebel's other recommendations are excellent. I hope they are adopted. But will a return to the original Islam really result in an intellectual flowering and enable the idea of violent jihad to be discarded? The Qur'an considers death "not a noble thing"? Yet it instructs Muslims to "kill the unbelievers wherever you find them" (9:5), promises Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for Allah (9:111), and taunts the Jews that if they are really chosen of Allah, they will love death: "Say (O Muhammad): O ye who are Jews! If ye claim that ye are favoured of Allah apart from (all) mankind, then long for death if ye are truthful" (62:6).
And Muhammad, of course, was a warrior. He fought in battles, he ordered the assassinations of his enemies, and he blessed those who carried out his wishes by killing those enemies. This is all readily established from Islamic sources -- and you can't get any more "original" in Islam than the example of Muhammad himself.
I have discussed here before the fact that I am considering writing a biography of Muhammad. I set it aside for awhile, but now I have a proposal in with a publisher; they're considering it. More and more I think such a book is necessary, since we hear from good people like Chebel that a return to original Islam will solve the problems of the Islamic world, and yet we also hear from the jihadists that it is they who are following the mandates of true, original Islam. Accordingly this is a question that needs to be resolved, and has large implications for public policy.
4 comments:
Pas, I have a plan for reforming Islam. Replace Muhammad with Jesus, the Qur'an with the Bible and change the name of the religion to "Christian."
Or substitute the spiritual leader of your choice for Jesus and the holy scriptures you like for the Qur'an. I'm flexible.
Anything could be better than what it is, huh Stog?
Mohammed created Allah in his own image - a vain, usurping, deceitful, cruel, insecure, narcissistic, merciless, sex-mad, torturing, paranoid, attention-seeking tribal warlord pimp operating a brothel in the sky.
If this is your idea of G_d then go join the Dumma.
No good whatsoever can come from a doctrine originating from a perverted scumbag like Mohammed. It's no use bleeding-heart liberals trying to appease Islam with 'interfaith dialog' because Islam isn't a faith or religion - it's a pedophilic death cult.
Islam should be made as socially unnacceptable in civilised society as Satanism (from which it differs in only minor details) .
There's a Buddhist analysis of the Death Cult at
http://www.geocities.com/scimah/idols.htm which sums up why Islam isn't a relgion:
"By their fruits ye shall know them. A genuine spiritual path brings out the best in people. Islam does the opposite."
Think about it - Islam is an anti-religion - a sort of Satanic parody of Christianity. Islam appears to incorporate Christ as a revered prophet, but in fact completely traduces Him and turns His teachings upside-down.
They keep hoping for "reform" because a) in massive denial about the true nature of Islam, b) hopelessly ignorant, c) guilty of profound evasion of the obvious, and as a result, it will take the next attack on us to shake them out of their dream world.
Of course, the next attack will have to be big enough and widespread enough to affect them directly, or they will still have problems with a), b), and c) above.
I dunno what it takes for some people.
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