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bounty44 -> RE: What happened in Denmark? (2/16/2015 4:11:07 AM)
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a little bit long but to the very point:
"The new issue of Dabiq, the Islamic State English-language magazine, is officially out... One area where ISIS profoundly disagrees with Obama is his characterization of them as 100 percent non-Islamic, would-be extremist hijackers of a pastoral faith. “Islam is the Religion of the Sword, Not Pacifism,” one Dabiq article declares, helpfully including a picture of a sword, just in case anyone does not get the point... They are quite picky about the proper definition of “Islam” as meaning “submission,” not “peace.”"
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/02/12/religion-of-the-sword-isis-magazine-heavy-on-crusades-propaganda/
"Islam: Religion of the sword?
"Unlike Christianity or Judaism, Islam's religious history is inseparable from its conquests -- which is why the concept of holy war lives on today.
"The unfortunate truth of the matter is that Muslim violence against the civilian populations of other religions goes right back to the origin of Islam in the 7th century A.D. According to Islamic holy texts, Muhammad himself presided over the extermination of the Jews of Khaybar in 629, an event that the Quran calls a “glorious victory” (48:1). (To be fair, some historians have questioned the historicity of this massacre.) In addition, despite the later evenhandedness of rulers like Saladdin, the original Islamic conquest of Jerusalem was a bloody affair, as was the introduction of Islam to North Africa and India.
"… jihad is historically and textually ambivalent. It could be interpreted as a simple struggle with oneself, like wrestling with your conscience. It could also, however, be interpreted as acts of physical violence against non-Muslims. There might be rules regarding civilian noncombatants — and then again, there might not be. The idea of jihad, like many ideas in the Quran, is a Janus-faced idea with two or more possible interpretations, all supported by scripture. Historically, numerous interpretations have been drawn from the Quran in relation to jihad by different groups with different agendas. A Rorschach test.
"To an extent, this ambivalence exists in many religions, including Judaism and Christianity. Muslims are not the only ones to have waged wars in the name of religion. So have Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists. The validity of the comparison ends there, however. It seems plain that Islam is confronted by the problem of religious violence in ways that other religions are not. In the world today, the locus of most religious violence is the Muslim world. And Islam is the only religion that has spawned a wandering group of holy warriors, traveling from conflict to conflict fighting the enemies of Islam wherever they see them —
"There are some who say that the real antagonists are fundamentalism and modernity, that the real conflict is between a medieval mind-set and a modern one. In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Andrew Sullivan stated, “This surely is a religious war — but not of Islam versus Christianity and Judaism. Rather, it is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity.”
"There is some truth to this, but it does not fully explain the situation. Fundamentalism, as a literal and nonhistoric approach to religious scripture, exists in every tradition, but only in Islam does it go hand in hand with widespread violence…
"The fact of Muslim military might is the rock on which the entire community of the faithful is erected. The Muslim state, with Muhammad at its head, predates the collection of the Hadith (narrations about the life of Muhammad) and the writing of the Quran itself. In Islam, it is not the religious message that promotes the faith into the halls of political power as in Judaism and Christianity, it is an original state of political and military strength that promotes the religious message.
"Looked at this way, jihad is not a secondary concept in the development of Islam — something grafted onto the original religious message — rather it is the very origin of Islam, the sine qua non of the faith."
http://www.salon.com/2001/10/11/sword/
the question of “is islam truly of god” is another question, but a very related and an absolutely essential one. or put another way, does the Koran have historicity? is it an historically authentic document?
put in an absurd way for illustration purposes, I can claim I have relevations from an angel, put them in writing, find some people to follow those writings, and 1400 yrs later, have a billion people believing it on faith alone. does that suffice?
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