Jeb Koogler explains the obvious: Islamic law isn’t static. It changes over time. I also get a bit tired of people who say that the Koran preaches much more violence than the Bible and Torah do. I’ve read the Koran and I disagree; it doesn’t teach violence any more than the Bible or Torah. In fact, I’d say, the only way for people to defend terrorism or violence by the Koran is by quoting passages in it completely out of context and to ignore the spirit of the Koran, which is peaceful. As regards to Islamic law: Jeb’s completely right. Throughout the history of Islam there have been debates about what Islam means, what Islamic law should look like, etc. To Robert Spencer I would like to say one thing, one word: Mevlana.
In his response to Jeb Robert Spencer (whom Jeb criticized) writes: “I spoke of the oppression of their fellow Muslims by Salafists, and discussed at some length the fact that ‘the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t actually follow the passages that [I] cited’.” This, of course, sounds better, but it still ignores the larger point, namely that these Muslims don’t ‘ignore’ the passages in the Koran that speak about using violence against unbelievers, but that they interprete them in their context. In other words, they don’t just look at such a passage and say “ah yes, kiell the infidel!,” they look at the entire Koran and understand that they shouldn’t use violence but should preach and practice peace and tolerance.
This means that Spencer et al. should stop arguing that ‘pure Islam’ is such and so. That’s not up to them to say. Pure Islam is whatever you want it to be. Rumi’s supporters thought and think that they are living true “Islamic” (or Muslim) lives. Bin Laden disagrees and would kill them if he could. Ahmadinejad thinks that what he preaches is the ‘pure’ Islam, Ali Eteraz disagrees and offers ‘his’ ‘pure’ version of Islam.
Muslims should decide what ‘pure’ or ‘true’ Islam is and what’s not. And with regards to all religions, those who argue that it’s not about the letter but about the spirit usually have a stronger case than those who argue the opposite. We would do well to remember that.
For instance when Spencer talks about how Islamic law has condoned the stoning of women. Or how Islamic law has grown to oppress women, etc. All true. From a modern Western perspective that is. If you look at what life was like before Mohammed came to power and before he established the new religion, you’ll see that Islam actually meant progress for Arabic women. You will also see that Mohammed treated his wives with kindness and depended on them (for advise, etc.). That’s the spirit of the Koran and of Mohammed’s life. If you copy the spirit you’ll get an entirely different result today, then when you only copy the letter.
“Pure Islam is whatever you want it to be.”
Ummm… I’m not sure you want to say this to anyone who is actually a Muslim.
(Sounds like a humanistic postmodern westerner position to me.)
Yeah. I’m not sure you actually talk to any Muslims. My fiance is Muslim, as is her entire family. I know full well what I can and can’t say.
“Islamic law isn’t static”
Definitely true. However, the root of violence within Islam seems to be related to the relatively backward state of Islamic culture in general in our times. Something that is quite odd since Islam excelled the west for more than a few centuries in the past in almost all areas. Now Islam is reduced to the president of Iran making the laughable claim that some little girl in Iran developed nuclear power in her basement.
Furthermore, at present the Koran provides a justification to a small percentage of Muslims to engage in violence against anyone seen as a threat, viewed with jealousy, or just plain in the wrong place at the wrong time. Too bad that even a small percentage of Muslims equals tens of millions. Moreover, the problem isn’t that Islamic is inherently more or less violent.
The problem is that Islam is a much more “state” oriented religion which gives color to its attempts to completely wed state and religion. One would be hard pressed to find a Christian or Jewish state that implements the laws contained in Leviticus- or even significant fringe movements calling for such. Moreover, the New Testament provides only general outlines for how one might run a state. Yet within the Koran and Hadiths, taken together- as that is how Muslims view them- a much more complete system of government is provided to the practitioner than anywhere else in the three major religions.
Sadly, the extent of human misery and ignorance in the Islamic world is vast. Allowing the worst elements of hatred and indoctrination to run the show with little opposition. It doesn’t help that much of the wealth of the Middle East is so great yet derived from pretty much one source- oil. I guess I had a lot more thoughts on this than I anticipated. HA!
I liked this post. You touch upon the diversity among those who call themselves Muslim. Obviously, any religion becomes cultural when embraced by a certain ethnicity. Turkish Muslims are diverse in their degrees as are African American Muslims, Asian Muslims, Arab Muslims, etc.
And yet, there is a lot of truth to what totaltransformation is saying. In so many ways (or in so many places) Islam has become a static relic, and what lacks dynamism ultimately stagnates.
He says,
“Sadly, the extent of human misery and ignorance in the Islamic world is vast.”
Oh yes. But is this human misery a reflection of a religion or a reflection of a cultural consciousness? If we want to talk about human misery from an Islamic perspective, the actual text (the Koran) is riddled with passages that these fundamentalists interpret as a basis for violence and choose to ignore the passages that highlight the concept of one being their brother’s keeper. Even though Islam preaches equality in theory, even though for ‘its time’ it was a step forward for women, however its inception was also riddled with violence and war.
I could go on ad infinitum but to keep it brief, this stagnation is a matter of social evolution as much as it is a spiritual one. So many acts (FGM, terrorism, subjugation of women, etc.,) done in the name of Islam have nothing to do with the religion. It is purely social and political. The problem with Islam is that it has not evolved, holistically with the times. Does wealth have something to do with this stagnation? I think so.
Rumi was awesome, I agree. I think the Sufis got it mostly right in their embodiment of Islam. This particular approach to Islam focused on the spiritual love and union with a higher creator not on ruling by the sword. But the mainstream perception of Sufism among Middle Eastern Muslims is one of mockery. Not so in Turkey, which was in many ways the birthplace and sanctuary of Sufism in its glory days. I’ve also seen many Sufi-oriented Asian Muslims too, as much as I have seen fundamentalists.
It sounds like your fiancée’s family are good folk, which is why you’ve been able to acquire insight into the more positive aspects of the religion, and I commend you, as a western man, for sharing the good you see in it- for nothing is purely good or bad in of itself, it is what we mold it into.
Sorry just to add, when I say that wealth has something to do with the stagnation in Islam I obviously meant specific Arabic countries. And when I say that Sufism got it mostly right, there is a glass ceiling in Sufism too. One example can be found in the Masnavi (the works of Jallaludin El-Rumi), where he says that ‘God tolerates the prayers of women who are menstruating.’ From a humanistic perspective, and as a woman, I found that discriminatory and without any basis.
Thanks again for letting me share.
Koogler is going to get his rear end kicked by Spencer.
Islamic law isn’t entirely static - no religious law can be entirely static in the face of things like technological change - but that doesn’t mean Islamic law is entirely flexible either. I would argue that it isn’t so much that individual Muslims purposefully “ignore” certain teachings or that Muslims have thoroughly looked into uncomfortable teachings and come to an informed conclusion that differs from that of people like Robert Spencer. Instead, I think individuals will emphasize the parts of their religion that most interest them and gloss over those parts that don’t catch their interest or dismiss uncomfortable teachings with personally satisfying (if often theologically weak) explanations. That is easy to do when the source of your teachings are as voluminous as the Bible or the Qur’an plus Hadiths (along with secondary sources like the writings of theologians and scholars).
The problem is that such explanations, by themselves, don’t get us any closer to seriously altering Islamic law. An individual Muslim may argue - and I’ve had some argue exactly this - the death penalty for apostasy was only meant for the time and circumstances in which Muhammad lived and has no validity today. They want to contextualize Islam. I would certainly support that. But such an explanation isn’t much good to anyone when it remains a personal opinion and not a serious theological position. Apostasy still carries the death penalty under all the major schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam (and probably Shiite Islam also). That is what has to change.
I also cannot emphasize enough that not all violence described in religion is equal. The fact that the Hebrews killed the Canaanites on God’s orders is of little practical consequence for all of us non-Canaanites living today. It’s close-ended violence. By contrast, open-ended statements like “slay all unbelievers” are much more troublesome things.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/018752.php
Hello Michael,
I took the freedom to post my comments on your text that I also posted on jihadwatch.
1. You are repeating the same old “logical” thinking that muslims as well as apologists keep bringing up to defend Islam. It always amazes me that literally everybody tells the same thing to deceive people with little knowledge about Islam.
- Statement: “Islamic law is not static” or “Islam is not a monolitic bloc.” Obviously this is completely wrong. All major schools of Sunni and Shi’a Islam agree on most issues and principles of Islamic law. This is not a surprise because they use the same Quran and Hadith on which they base their shariah books. If you study Islam for 2 or 3 years based on Quran, Hadith and Sira, you will easily understand and trace back where each individual shariah law comes from. What you and others confuse is “the extent of application of islamic law” with “islamic law itself”. A number of islamic laws like :
- the death penalty for apostasy,
- the stoning of adulterers and
- the killing of polytheists who do not convert to Islam
are so barbaric that they are not applied anymore in most muslim countries. My point of view is that people are the same no matter which religion they follow and killing somebody who did not harm others is a serious matter and goes against the human conscience, no matter what.
However, this does not mean that those Islamic laws have gone away. Clerics all over the world keep repeating them. A muslim can proudly state that he follows the Quran and the Sunna of Muhammad which implies that he agrees with the above-mentioned barbaric islamic laws. And nobody will touch him. The absurdity is that you can find islamic lawbooks all over the western world calling for armed struggle against christians and jews until they submit and nobody seems to mind. You can simply order those books on Amazon.
- statement: “the spirit of the Quran teaches peace”. Those are statements that you do not prove, of course. It is left to the audience to prove the contrary which is as difficult. And it is assumeds that as long as the audience does not prove the contrary, you are right. If you see that throughout the Quran the unbelievers are threatened with hell over 200 times, you can see that the only peace that the Quran is implying is full submission to Allah.
- statement: “violent passages have to be seen in their context”. The assumption is that the context will make those passages peaceful and everybody is happy. However if you read the context in which the Quran is revealed, which means the biographies of Muhammad, you will see the opposite. The period of Mecca was characterised by the insulting by Muhammad of the gods and the religion of the Meccans, after which a hostile atmosphere grew between Muhammad and the early muslims on one side and everybody else on the other side. After fleeing to Medina, Muhammad started a non-stop war of revenge against the Meccans, his self-declared ennemy. The quran is just a mirror image of all those events. So the spirit of the Quran can be summarised as follows: muslims should try to convince people to convert to islam. They are free to attack the religion of all other people because the religion of those people is false anyway. If people show enmity, you can attack them physically and kill them if needed.
- statement: “before Islam the situation in Arabia was far worse. Muhammad provoked a revolution in the positive sense.” And everybody is happy. Again this is a statement that is uttered and supposed to be true unless you can prove otherwise. The claim of course is false in many respects:
+ when Muhammad was born, there was absolute freedom of religion and the Ka’aba was the religious center for everybody. There were 360 statues of all kinds of gods including Allah. Jesus and his mother Mary were there as well as Abraham and Ismael. From time to time, new prophets popped-up and disappeared. Nobody minded them. Shortly before he died, Muhammad gave the order to expell all remaining non-muslims from the Hejaz (now West-Saudi-Arabia), so until today no non-muslim can be a permanent resident of Saudi-Arabia and no non-muslim can even enter Mecca. The absolute climax of religious freedom in Islam is the death penalty for apostasy.
+ when Muhammad was born, some tribes practiced female infanticide, but that was limited otherwise those tribes would have ceased to exist in one generation. Muhammad stopped this practice and this is positive. However women had a lot of freedom, just take the example of Khadija who was a business woman and who did not need anybody to protect her or to pay for her expenses, at the reverse. Muhammad lived on her fortune otherwise he would not have had the time to receive and spread his new religion. Khadija gave him spiritual comfort when he was depressed after getting the first revelations and he thought he had gotten crazy. When islam was finally established, women were reduced to helpless creatures who cause trouble (fitna) for men and who are in need of a man to work for them and to protect them. Islamic law explicitly states that the dowry (mahr in arabic) that a woman receives on getting married is a payment for sex. One hadith transmitted by Aisha narrates how she complains to Muhammad that “no women are suffering like the women of the believers”.
+ When Muhammad was born, there were tribal wars but there was a four month period where fighting was forbidden (the sacred months). Muhammad abolished those cease-fire months when they were not suiting him. He united the tribes, or better, he subdued them by war and instead of tribal wars, he started a worldwide war against all people with other beliefs that replaced the tribal wars.
+ At the time there were some practices that we find barbaric now and instead of abolishing them as a Prophet, he just continued them and put them into a religion. Examples are slavery and the rape of female slaves and captives of war (4:24).
2. The problem with Islam is that it is a religion that is so well-documented by very early sources and all those sources are quite consistent with each other so that it is difficult to escape from the truth of “real islam”. There is so much confusion as to what islam is because muslims are only taught the “convenient truth” and not the “inconvenient truth” that you only discover when you read all sources.
cheers,
Jan
[...] 2007 by Michael van der Galiën Robert Spencer wrote a highly insightful and respectful post to this post I wrote last week. I encourage you all to head on over to Jihad Watch in order to read [...]
[...] van der Galiën posted on Islamic Law and Violence last week, arguing that “Islamic law isn’t static” and that the Koran [...]
The problem with Islam is that it means whatever its followers want it to mean. This sounds like a postmodernist’s dream come true, and I suppose it is… on paper. In practice, however, it creates a culture that is every leftist’s nightmare… authoritarian, violent, racist, and deeply, intractably misogynistic.
It’s not unlike communism or fascism, and very much unlike Judaism or Christianity, in that respect. In the real world, it is the results that matter, not the intentions. No doubt readers will assume that this is a problem with the real world, rather than with the carefully controlled laboratories and universities where these social systems are researched and tested.
I only wish you would all go and live in the results of your social experiments, and leave the rest of us alone.
The “spirit of islam” as exemplified by Mohammed?
As exemplified by a warlord who beheaded all the men of a Jewish tribe and took their wives and daughters as slaves, and had poetesses murdered for writing uncomplimentary verses. A person so thoroughly exemplary that he commanded the death of anyone leaving islam? That he commanded war on non-muslims, commanding their conversion, death or subjugation? I suppose you have a point when you say islam could mean anything to anyone. This is rather the problem, humans being what they are: the violent interpretation is far too easily attainable.
Two goats shall not butt their heads together about your answer.
GeoffP
LMFAO: you’re amusing. Look at my website. Look at the right sidebar. Read some other posts. Postmodernist? Leftist?
I’m a freaking European conservative. And you sir are hilarious.
Sorry, I’m an American, so I use the terms “postmodernist” and “leftist” to mean their American definitions. You may substitute “moderate” and “conservative” for them.
Also, isn’t islamic law actually quite static? “The gates of itjihad are closed” and all that? What difference exists in the treatment of apostates under any mainstream islamic legal school?
GeoffP
admin: don’t drag other people’s family into your debate
The bigger question is why are the intolerant aspects of Islam so widely practiced? Both the Torah and the Bible contain some bizarre statements but where is Talion(eye for a eye) being practiced? Moderate Muslims can quote examples of Mohammed (PB&J) being tolerant, but many more Islamists can quote far more examples of Mohammed (PB&J) leading armies, fighting battles, executing people in cold blood, assasinating critics, etc. So which Islam is it?
A European Conservative you may be, but truth-sayer you aren’t.
Wow! You’ve been noticed, Michael.
Robert Spencer,
You may want to advise your readers that Michael van der Galien is a European conservative just so we don’t have to put up with knee-jerk reactions from some of your more impassioned readers about MvdG being a Marxist or leftist. He is most certainly not.
As I mentioned previously, I strongly disagree with and Koogler’s and MvdG’s analysis and essentially agree with Spencer, but please Jihad Watch readers refrain from ad hominem. This is a much more civil forum than some other sites you may frequent and such arguments are unbecoming even if it were one of those sites. Stick to reasoned, rational debate around here.
[...] here is one of MvdG’s breathtakingly dumb-ass remarks: “Pure Islam is whatever you want it to [...]