The New Face of Islam
A critique of radicalism is building within the heart of the Muslim world.
Back in the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden had a problem, and it was Islam. He wanted to say the Qur'an gave his followers license to kill innocents—and themselves—in the cause of "jihad." That was how he could justify his global campaign of terror. But that's not what the Muslim holy book says, and that's not the way it was interpreted by any of the great scholars and preachers of the faith.
So bin Laden set about spinning the revelations contained in the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, known as the Hadith, which provide much of the context for actual religious practice in the Muslim world. The Saudi millionaire wrote a diatribe that he called a declaration of war and then a fatwa, or religious edict, cherry-picking quotations from Islamic Scripture and calling on dubious scholars to back him up. The tracts were political propaganda, not theology, but for his purpose they worked very well. The apocalyptic notion of holy war he promoted—and the reality of it that he demonstrated on 9/11—became the dominant vision of Islam for those with little understanding of the faith, whether in the West or, indeed, the Muslim world. Even many religious scholars were intimidated.
Now that's starting to change. Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, "Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda's vision of the future." At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden's nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.
Intellectually and theologically, a lot of the most ambitious work is being done by a group of scholars based in Ankara, Turkey, who expect to publish new editions of the Hadith before the end of the year. They have collected all 170,000 known narrations of the Prophet's sayings. These are supposed to record Muhammad's words and deeds as a guide to daily life and a key to some of the mysteries of the Qur'an. But many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context, and those who told the stories or, much later, recorded them, were not always reliable. Sometimes they confused "universal values of Islam with geographical, cultural and religious values of their time and place," says Mehmet Gormez, a theology professor at the University of Ankara who's working on the project. "Every Hadith narration has ... a context. We want to give every narration a home again."
Mehmet Aydin, who first conceived the Hadith project four years ago, when he was Turkey's minister of state for religious affairs, says it is obvious that in the seventh century, the time of the Prophet, life was very different. One Hadith, for instance, forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia, this and other sayings are given as a reason women should not be allowed to drive. "This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security in a specific time and place," says Gormez. In fact, the Prophet says elsewhere that he misses those days, evidently in his recent memory, when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca. In its first three centuries "Islam was interacting with Greek, Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions," says Gormez. "They were not afraid to rethink Islam then."
Liberal Muslim thinkers have made similar arguments in the past, but they were outliers and often not theologians. The Turkish project, on the other hand, has the quiet backing of the ruling AK Party, the world's most successful, democratically elected party with Islamist roots. The professors involved are quick to deny that their work represents some sort of Islamic Reformation—there is no Martin Luther among them, no theses are being nailed to a door. They call what they're doing a "rethinking" or a "re-understanding" of the sacred texts "according to modern concepts like democracy, human rights, women's rights and universal values," says Gormez. Yet their work has far-reaching potential, given the credibility of the source.
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Member Comments
Posted By: James4Truth @ 09/27/2008 7:43:51 AM
Comment: The article is off base, the Koran does teach that killing infidels is ok, it does teach that a muslim cannot be a friend with a Christian or a Jew, and it does teach the killing of those who oppose islam.
What we see happening in the middle east is similar to what has happened in must of the western world with Christianity, as people become more "enlightened" they become less believing in a God who has interacted with His creation. The key here is that when you look at the most dedicated followers of Islam you see terrorists, because thta is what it teaches.
Posted By: intermedusa @ 09/03/2008 11:32:11 AM
Comment: WHAT IS ISLAM SUPREMACISM : PART 1
By
Larry Houle
www.godofreason.com
E-mail: intermedusa@yahoo.com
THE TRUTH OF ISLAM
Islam is all about Muslim men. It is an evil ideology created by a man - Muhammad for his male followers granting them unlimited sex, riches, and political power. Allah hates all Muslim women with a deep seated loathing. Muslim women are vile, dirty, stupid creatures. Muslim men can have multiple wives, unlimited sex slaves, can marry and rape Muslim baby girls, beat his wives, and murder them and his daughters if they dare impugn his honor. Whereas kafirs have zero humanity, Muslim women are only just slightly higher on the human evolutionary scale being half a human. This is the divine order of the universe ordained by Allah. This vision of the inequality of Muslim women to Muslim men, and the Eternal sub - humanness and lack of humanity of kafirs is FOREVER and can never be changed in any way.
It is the prime directive of Islam to conquer the nations of the world for Allah by whatever means necessary. Allah seeks the extermination of all kafirs. By refusing to convert to Islam, kafirs have declared war against Islam, are a grave danger to Allah and must be destroyed. Islam is a declaration of war against kafirs. The Koran is not a holy book but a book of war. A book of genocide. Allah is a god of war. This war is permanent until all kafirs convert to Islam or agree to pay a devastating Jizya (submission tax) or be murdered.
For Muslims, it is a holy religious duty to murder kafirs. The Quran is written in the language of terrorism. It is filled with numerous verses urging the Muslims to terrorize the non Muslims, kill them, and take possession of their lands and properties. The important points to remember is that whatever Muhammad did to terrorize the kafirs was actually the actions of God. Among the many verses which exhort Islamist terrorism, the following verses stand out as naked aggression of Allah/Muhammad on the unbelievers: 2:63, 3:151, 8:12, 8:60, 8:59, 9:5, 9:29, 9:55, 11:102, and 17:59 etc. These teachings are the Eternal Laws of Allah authorization murder and extermination as a holy duty.
Deceit, torture, murder, assassination, massacre, genocide, pillage, robbery, enslavement and rape are halal (legal) acts in Islam deserving of paradise, as long as they are perpetrated on kafirs. These evil, immoral teachings are the ETERNAL Laws of Allah. These ETERNAL LAWS OF ALLAH are divine and can never BE CHANGED.
Posted By: intermedusa @ 09/03/2008 11:31:14 AM
Comment: WHAT IS ISLAM SUPREMACISM : PART 2
By
Larry Houle
www.godofreason.com
E-mail: intermedusa@yahoo.com
Again as a kafir, you are not a human being to a Muslim. You have absolutely no humanity. A Muslim has the full right granted to him by God, to murder you, take your wife and young daughter(s) rape and gang rape them (no matter what the age of your daughter) take them as sex slaves or sell them into slavery to be breed like cattle for future sex slaves and profit. Your male children will be beheaded if they are young men. If there is any doubt as to whether your young son is a young man or a young boy, Muslims will pull down their pants and examine their genitals for the slightest growth of hair. Just the slightest hair growth is enough for him to be beheaded. All your property will be seized and whatever the Muslim does not want to keep as his personal property, sold.
If a Muslim kills or is killed murdering, raping, pillaging non -Muslims then they are guaranteed accession by God to a Paradise of full breasted, lustrous eyed virgins who regenerate as virgins after each sex act that they can sexually molest with external erections for all eternity. THIS IS THE EVIL INSANITY THAT IS ISLAM.