asier9
Member
Hi asier9,
And a friendly welcome to you too!
Actually, I've heard everything you just said before. My experience debating Muslims is that when I point out things said in the Sunna, I'm told that only the Quran is meaningful. So it's a bit of a shell game in my experience.
And again, the point of the OP is to determine what Muslims value and believe.
Yes, this is known as taqiyya a form of deception which is considered a sacred act in order to spread Islam. In other words Muslims are allowed to deceive you about Islam. So you are absolutely right it is a shell game.
Islam is a lot like Protestantism of which there are almost twice as many denominations today as there were even a generation ago. I believe we are up to over 30,000 denominations. In truth there are as many potential Protestant faiths as their are people willing to interrupt the Bible for themselves. They are only limited by their own creativity and intelligence. Islam also works like this as it has no central authority--we can say Islam was the original Protestant faith. Although historically there was the Caliphate. However no Caliph after Ali, who was the fourth one, has really spoken for the whole Muslim world. My point is you can legitimately get as many answers to what Muslims believe as Muslims you talk to. Now some will have more consistent beliefs in line with the Quran, but many will have never read the Quran. The most definitive general statement on Islam is the product of Muslim scholarship known as the Sharia, but even here there are different Sharia for different schools of Muslim thought. Although the differences mainly lie in highly technical points and they generally agree on a more superficial level. The 14th century book, I believed I mentioned in my original post, The Relience of the Traveller, has been certified by 5 of the greatest living Muslims scholars today. Although there is one more caveat to this and that is while a large part of the the Quran and the hadith deal with Kafir (people who conceal the truth of Islam by rejecting it and usually translated as the much more neutral term unbeliever) the Sharia most often speaks about what Muslims should do and has very little to say about Kuffar (plural form of Kafir).
So the good thing is that there are many different Islams in the world today and the Muslim world is actually incredibly intellectually diverse. The bad news is there is no way to really understand the dangers of Islam without reading the Quran, Hadith Sira and Sharia for yourself, which is not always easy to do even when you are willing.
The main point, from my perspective, is whether or not a particular Muslim accepts modernity or believes that political violence must be rejected as a means for spreading Islam, really all Muslims on some level must subscribe to the belief that if Islam is true then its destiny is to envelope the whole world; and in fact all the terrorist groups we see today had their start in movements to purify Islam whenever it faltered in its continual expansion and the Muslim world did some soul searching as a consequence of its crisis of faith. So one could argue that whatever Muslims may believe as individuals there will always be a violent avant-guard working someplace in the world with the goal of converting the whole world to Islam and subjecting all people in it to the Sharia. The problem especially for Muslims is that even in 100% Muslim countries such avant-guard movements still exist. Islam is always violent and the dar al-Islam as a dar al-salam (house of Islam as a house of peace) is an illusion. No matter what any number of individual Muslims you meet might believe, Islam as a movement will always be motivated in part by violence and the when that violence can't be directed outward it is directed inward.
The Jordanian pilot that was burned alive by ISIL and the people who burned him alive were all Muslims who disagreed about what Islam is and what their core values actually are. The reason in fact that he probably suffered a horrendous death was because simple beheading was really thought by ISIL members to be too good for him (ISIL is trying to restore the before mentioned Caliphate, btw, exactly so they can speak for the whole Muslim world). They believe that the Jordanian pilot was not truly a Muslim, but rather an apostate from the true faith of Islam. Kuffar can be tolerated as long as we are willing to live in submission and pay exorbitant taxes, but apostates must be killed.
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