Perceptions of Islam

[Judgement Day]

As long as women are persecuted in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and other repressive Muslim nations, I cannot be silent.

I will not be silent.

Well you know what? ME TOO!

 

[DakotaGypsy]

Excellent!

 

[greatcalgarian]

Thanks for your kind words, i really aperciate it. I hope to hear anything, regarding to Islam, in case you have any question.

Thanks. I have no question about Islam, which I can learn easily from the Web and other sources. I have no question and no problem about any religion. I have problem with people interpreting the religion and imposing their view onto others. Questions regarding Muslim is not what you like to deal with. So, no question.

 

[Squirt]

And regarding your second question, does Islam teach to kill them? The simple answer is no. In Islam, killing one soul is the same as killing the whole humanity, and saving one soul is like saving the whole humanity (Quran 5:32).

Thank you, Judgement Day. This is good to know. I realize that there are extremists and fanatics in every religion, and that we can't judge all members of a religion by the actions of the minority. Do you know how the teachings of the Quran came to be interpreted the way some extremist Muslims interpret them. I would really like to be able to understand how they feel that their brutality is justified. Can you shed some light on this for me?

 

[TashaN]

Thanks. I have no question about Islam, which I can learn easily from the Web and other sources. I have no question and no problem about any religion. I have problem with people interpreting the religion and imposing their view onto others. Questions regarding Muslim is not what you like to deal with. So, no question.

You are most welcome, i know that you know well where to go when you need to know information about Islam but we must explain for those used to influnced and affected by anti-islamic sites.


Peace ...

 

[thinker_of_elves]

I realize that there are extremists and fanatics in every religion, and that we can't judge all members of a religion by the actions of the minority.

Strangely enough I 100% agree... But I have yet to see one single place on earth where Islam works. All Islamic countries have serious Human rights problems. Wether or not the people who are carrying out the terrorist activities seen in recent years are actually Muslim or not, THEY THINK THEY ARE.

The very meaning of the word is abhorrent to me - Submission. What a crappy way to live life. In submission.

 

[TashaN]

The very meaning of the word is abhorrent to me - Submission. What a crappy way to live life. In submission.

No comment !

 

[thinker_of_elves]

No comment !

Good answer.

Please will somebody tell me the answer to my question? Where on earth, can I find Islam working, in a decent tolerant, equal society?

 

[Ori]

The very meaning of the word is abhorrent to me - Submission. What a crappy way to live life. In submission.

Maybe you are just looking at the meaning wrong ( Although how you view it is entirely up to you), essentially it is the surrender of your spirit to God, to be the best that you can be and live a compassionate life.

 

[Booko]

Maybe you are just looking at the meaning wrong ( Although how you view it is entirely up to you), essentially it is the surrender of your spirit to God, to be the best that you can be and live a compassionate life.

The best of atheists submit too -- they submit to things like "truth" and "reality."

And I see no problem in that. It seems to work out rather well, actually.

 

[Peace]

Maybe you are just looking at the meaning wrong ( Although how you view it is entirely up to you), essentially it is the surrender of your spirit to God, to be the best that you can be and live a compassionate life.

Well said ori :clap

Peace

 

[DakotaGypsy]

Good answer.

Please will somebody tell me the answer to my question? Where on earth, can I find Islam working, in a decent tolerant, equal society?

There seems to have been a time, historically, when Islam was a fine, decent working form of theocracy, depending upon how you look at that era.

http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/ihame/Sec5.htm

<H3>ISLAM IN SPAIN:


By the time 'Abd al-Rahman reached Spain, the Arabs from North Africa were already entrenched on the Iberian Peninsula and had begun to write one of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history.

After their forays into France were blunted by Charles Martel, the Muslims in Spain had begun to focus their whole attention on what they called al-Andalus, southern Spain (Andalusia), and to build there a civilization far superior to anything Spain had ever known. Reigning with wisdom and justice, they treated Christians and Jews with tolerance, with the result that many embraced Islam. They also improved trade and agriculture, patronized the arts, made valuable contributions to science, and established Cordoba as the most sophisticated city in Europe.
By the tenth century, Cordoba could boast of a population of some 500,000, compared to about 38,000 in Paris. According to the chronicles of the day, the city had 700 mosques, some 60,000 palaces, and 70 libraries - one reportedly housing 500,000 manuscripts and employing a staff of researchers, illuminators, and book binders. Cordoba also had some 900 public baths, Europe's first street lights and, five miles outside the city, the caliphal residence, Madinat al-Zahra. A complex of marble, stucco, ivory, and onyx, Madinat al-Zahra took forty years to build, cost close to one-third of Cordoba's revenue, and was, until destroyed in the eleventh century, one of the wonders of the age. Its restoration, begun in the early years of this century, is still under way. . . .

Of course, perhaps they could have had more libraries, but maybe in those times 70 libraries was a lot.

Roman Catholic view of that era differs, of course.
</H3>

 

[thinker_of_elves]

There seems to have been a time, historically, when Islam was a fine, decent working form of theocracy, depending upon how you look at that era.

http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/ihame/Sec5.htm


Of course, perhaps they could have had more libraries, but maybe in those times 70 libraries was a lot.

Roman Catholic view of that era differs, of course.
</H3>

I am talking about now. Here and now. Luckily I live in a country where I do not get treated any differently because I am not religious. If I was gay, I would have near-equality in law. If I was female I would not be expected to cover myself for fear of driving my male peers into a sexual frenzy. I am not (overly) opressed by my government. I can have a beer, and if I wish, read some saucy magazines, or some slightly offensive comic books. I treat my fellow humans as equal. And I have no intention of trying to turn the whole world into non-believers. I don't believe the whole world is (our) land.


As for the misunderstanding of the word SUBMISSION - A quick look at dictionary.com gives me...

The act of submitting to the power of another: &#8220;Oppression that cannot be overcome does not give rise to revolt but to submission&#8221; (Simone Weil).

I do not submit to the power of another. I just live a decent life.

 

[Nehustan]

The best of atheists submit too -- they submit to things like "truth" and "reality."

And I see no problem in that. It seems to work out rather well, actually.

Ironically one of the names of Allah is Al Haqq, which means 'The Truth' and for the scientific brothers versed in the more mystical elements of the faith it is oft' heard 'The True Reality is Allah'

 

[YmirGF]

I do not submit to the power of another. I just live a decent life.

Last time I checked thinker_of_elves, when Allah initiates(ed) creation he simply commands "BE!" Curiously, he does not command... "Submit."

There would seem to be a tiny difference between the two. Looks like someone got it wrong, then again, what would I know? It is after all, merely my perception.
Allah knows best, doesn't he? :jam:

 

[Nehustan]

Last time I checked thinker_of_elves, when Allah initiates(ed) creation he simply commands "BE!" Curiously, he does not command... "Submit."

There would seem to be a tiny difference between the two. Looks like someone got it wrong, then again, what would I know? It is after all, merely my perception.
Allah knows best, doesn't he? :jam:

Ahhh YmirGF....you're learning :sarcastic....but seriously from our perception there is no difference between the original causation, with we are told the command 'BE' that came to support the creation (Al Quayyum) and thus the movement of even a quark, and submission. It is really only in our minds that free will exists (a good enough place for most), every atom in our biological structure and the physical world within which it is vectored is in submission, if our minds what to delude themselves (as they so often do) then who are we to argue. I think that actually your insightful use of tense shows a deeper knowledge of Islam than you admit to when you talk about Allah initiating. The fact you mix tenses hints to me that you may well understand our concept of the Infinite and Absolute, with no beginning and no end, not bound by dimesions.

 

[Ciscokid]

Dear Members,The title says it, I welcome you to criticize anything you think is wrong with Islam. But I have a request, if we discuss one point at a time, we can do justice with the topic...Thankyou, and regards, Mehrosh

What do I think is wrong about Islam? I think Islam suffers from the same thing that Christianity has suffered from at times...hijacking.

Unfortunately Islam is getting a pretty bad wrap from Muslim Extremists. To add to that, I don't see moderate Muslims up in arms in protest. What are followers of Islam doing to counter the ones who have hijacked their religion?

 

[Nehustan]

I'm sometimes called radical and othertimes moderate, sometimes practicing sometimes not practicing very well, some times not practicing at all. As to Islam being hijacked, it could only be hijacked by people from outside. To use the 'hijack' analogy, all our brothers whatever their persuasion are passengers on the plane of Islam for this journey called life, they may be noisy passengers who annoy the others, but they are not hijackers. We should be more worried by enemies on the ground taking potshots with SAMs.

 

[DakotaGypsy]

http://www.slate.com/id/2138731/nav/tap1/

<H1>What Clash of Civilizations?

Why religious identity isn't destiny.

By Amartya Sen
Posted Wednesday, March 29, 2006, at 6:02 AM ET
Essay adapted from his new book:

That some barbed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed could generate turmoil in so many countries tells us some rather important things about the contemporary world. Among other issues, it points up the intense sensitivity of many Muslims about representation and derision of the prophet in the Western press (and the ridiculing of Muslim religious beliefs that is taken to go with it) and the evident power of determined agitators to generate the kind of anger that leads immediately to violence. But stereotyped representations of this kind do another sort of damage as well, by making huge groups of people in the world to look peculiarly narrow and unreal.

The portrayal of the prophet with a bomb in the form of a hat is obviously a figment of imagination and cannot be judged literally, and the relevance of that representation cannot be dissociated from the way the followers of the prophet may be seen. What we ought to take very seriously is the way Islamic identity, in this sort of depiction, is assumed to drown, if only implicitly, all other affiliations, priorities, and pursuits that a Muslim person may have. A person belongs to many different groups, of which a religious affiliation is only one. To see, for example, a mathematician who happens to be a Muslim by religion mainly in terms of Islamic identity would be to hide more than it reveals. Even today, when a modern mathematician at, say, MIT or Princeton invokes an "algorithm" to solve a difficult computational problem, he or she helps to commemorate the contributions of the ninth-century Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the term algorithm is derived (the term "algebra" comes from the title of his Arabic mathematical treatise "Al Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah"). To concentrate only on Al-Khwarizmi's Islamic identity over his identity as a mathematician would be extremely misleading, and yet he clearly was also a Muslim. Similarly, to give an automatic priority to the Islamic identity of a Muslim person in order to understand his or her role in the civil society, or in the literary world, or in creative work in arts and science, can result in profound misunderstanding.

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorientation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings, which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the champions of violence. . . .

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time, By Amartya Sen and Henry Louis Gates.

</H1>

 

[DakotaGypsy]

Holier Than Thou
By MASOOD FARIVAR
March 31, 2006; Page W11

The international uproar over the case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity charged with apostasy, has drawn attention away from a far more common and nefarious practice infecting religious practice in Islam: the accusation of heresy leveled by Muslims against fellow Muslims, a practice known as takfir.

Historically, little more than a rhetorical device, takfir has in recent years grown into a deadly weapon in the hands of Muslim extremists bent on purging Islam of just about anyone who does not subscribe to their views. Today jihadist terrorists in Iraq have begun to use takfir as a rallying cry for violence against the Shiites.

The concept of religious censure is not unique to Islam, of course, but under Islamic law the charge of apostasy may not only condemn the person to hell but require his immediate death, if he does not repent. Recognizing the danger of such charges to the peace of the community, the Prophet Muhammad went out of his way to discourage takfir. Muhammad's recorded sayings, known as hadith, are full of admonitions against takfir. In one famous hadith, the Prophet said: "If a Muslim accuses a fellow Muslim of unbelief, the accuser himself becomes an unbeliever should the accusation prove untrue."

Of course, Muhammad's warnings did not prevent the outbreak of the "wars of apostasy" waged against rebellious Arab tribes in 632, the year the Prophet died, or the emergence in the late seventh century of a radical group known as Khawarij, whose members argued that committing a simple sin constituted heresy.

Most Muslims today take a liberal view of who is a good Muslim and who is not. According to Muzammil Siddiqi, a prominent American Muslim scholar and a critic of takfir culture, it has become widely agreed upon that anyone who has simply declared that "there is no god but God and Muhammad is his Prophet" and who prays facing the holy mosque in Mecca is to be accepted as a Muslim.

But a small group of Muslims wants to revive takfir. The man many scholars identify as the father of modern takfir ideology was Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyyah, a 13th-century theologian whose edicts against the invading Mongols foreshadowed modern calls for a jihad against the rulers of the Middle East. Taymiyyah was a largely unknown figure until he was rediscovered by Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century. Qutb was an Egyptian lslamist who declared that all of Muslim society had effectively reverted to jahiliyyah -- or the state of ignorance that predated Islam -- and that the few enlightened Muslims left must engage in a jihad against the rest.

Until recently, mainstream Muslims dismissed the takfiris as a fringe group, the extreme of the extreme. But with wanton terrorist acts on the rise, a response seemed required. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan -- themselves targets of apostasy charges -- have denounced the takfiris. Last year Jordanian King Abdullah hosted a conference of 180 Islamic scholars from 45 countries representing all branches of Islam. It issued a declaration condemning takfir. Saudi Arabia, where the late King Fahd had long called takfir a root cause of extremism and terrorism, launched a counseling program for militants in prison. Both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have undertaken a vigorous campaign to clean their school curricula teachings that encourage takfir.

Mainstream Muslim thinkers have also started speaking up. In the U.S., Mr. Siddiqi has led a group of prominent Muslim religious scholars in issuing a fatwa denouncing extremist interpretations of the Koran and hadith. In Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abd al-Muhsin Al-Abikan, an eminent religious scholar, has given a series of high-profile interviews calling for a campaign to combat takfir culture among Muslims.

These scholars argue that the passion for takfir not only contradicts the teachings of the Koran and hadith but has no basis in history. The early doctors of Islamic law, according to Mr. Siddiqi, urged Muslims "to be very careful calling any person a heretic." Sheikh Al-Abikan has observed that the rise of takfir culture has been spurred by the recent tendency among Saudi scholars to ignore centuries-old Islamic jurisprudence in favor of a strict reading of hadith.

Whether these arguments stem the tide of takfir-inspired violence remains to be seen. The lack of a central synod or council to define Islamic orthodoxy makes it difficult to issue a broad pronouncement discouraging the practice. What passes for sound belief in one country or one historical period may be seen as a heresy in another.

That is not to say that there is no orthodoxy or, just as important, that religious leaders lack clout. They might want to remind the faithful, especially now, of the Prophet's tolerant teachings. As Sheikh Al-Abikan put it: "The authority to declare takfir is God's alone, and no man has that authority."
Mr. Farivar is a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires.