{"id":7809,"date":"2014-08-27T08:04:11","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T15:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7809"},"modified":"2014-08-27T08:04:11","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T15:04:11","slug":"nothing-to-do-with-islam-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/nothing-to-do-with-islam-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Nothing to Do with Islam, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
by\u00a0Bruce Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

To read Part I,\u00a0click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\"Photo
Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: \u201cSo ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over at the\u00a0New York Post<\/i>, a columnist rightly took the president to task by saying, \u201c<\/span>You can\u2019t divorce the Islamic State from religion.\u201d Unfortunately, the column is full of numerous misstatements that perpetuate the illusion that there is some peaceful, tolerant version of Islam that has been distorted and twisted by \u201cextremists\u201d or \u201cfundamentalists.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

According to the writer, adherents of any faith can misread sacred texts literally in order to justify violence: \u201cThe problem isn\u2019t just literalist interpretations of the Koran: The New Testament, the Jewish Torah and many other religious books contain explicit calls for disproportionate punishments and killing of nonbelievers.\u201d Forget the false assumption that we are supposed to read all sacred texts allegorically rather than literally. I\u2019d like to see the verses from the New Testament that\u00a0explicitly<\/i>\u00a0instruct Christians to kill non-believers rather than try to convert them. On the contrary, Jesus preached, \u201cDo not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also\u201d (Matthew 5.38),\u00a0and \u201cLove your enemies and pray for those who persecute you\u201d (Matthew 5.43).<\/p>\n

Concerning other interactions with non-believers, Jesus instructed his disciples, \u201cAnd if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town\u201d (Matthew 10.14). \u00a0Because there are no\u00a0explicit<\/i>\u00a0commands to kill non-believers in the New Testament, over the ages Christians who have justified violence with scripture have had to engage in tortuous interpretations and misreadings that over time have not been able to gain traction among all the faithful.\u00a0That\u2019s why despite widespread persecution across the world today, there is no major Christian terrorist movement.<\/p>\n

Compare, in contrast,\u00a0the Koran\u2019s\u00a0explicit<\/i>\u00a0calls to violence against non-believers, such as\u00a0Koran 4.76: \u201cThose who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil: So fight ye against the friends of Satan.\u201d This is consistent with the famous command in 9:29: \u201cFight those who believe not in Allah.\u201d If someone wants to argue that \u201cfight\u201d is intended metaphorically in these verses, and has been \u201ctwisted\u201d by a \u201cliteral\u201d reading to serve some fringe interpretation, consider 4.74: \u201cLet those fight in the cause of Allah Who sell the life of this world for the hereafter. To him who fights in the cause of Allah\u2013\u2013whether he is slain or gets victory\u2013\u2013Soon shall we give him a reward.\u201d\u00a0Obviously in this verse and numerous others \u201cfight\u201d means physical battle in which people are \u201cslain.\u201d Contrary to Christian scripture, in traditional Islamic doctrine non-believers who are invited to convert and refuse\u00a0the call are not left alone, but killed or, if they are Jews or Christians, sometimes allowed to live in humiliating submission under a treaty that Muslims can break at any time for any reason.<\/p>\n

As for the Torah, the list of verses allegedly commanding death for non-believers that crop up on anti-Biblical and atheist websites has nothing to do with gentiles. A favorite is Deuteronomy 17, which commands death for those who, \u201ctransgressing his covenant,\u201d have \u201cgone and served other gods and worshipped them.\u201d But this is clearly a reference not to gentiles, but to Hebrews\u00a0who have betrayed the covenant between God and the Jewish people by violating the first Commandment. So too with numerous other verses produced to prove that the Hebrew God ordered the Hebrews to kill gentiles. On the contrary, all these verses describe capital punishment for crimes committed by Jews, such as apostasy, witchcraft, adultery, fornication, and the like. Nowhere is there a verse commanding, like Koran 9.29, wholesale warfare against\u00a0all gentiles who refuse to become Jews.<\/p>\n

As for the orders given to Hebrew kings\u00a0in the Old Testament to destroy another town or tribe, these are specific to that particular time, place, and people, and reflect the brutal warfare universal at that time. They are history, not theology. We may find such draconian punishments or collective violence distasteful, but they certainly do not comprise the sort of theology of violence against all non-believers that is found throughout the Koran and Islamic doctrine.<\/p>\n

Obama is half-right that killing innocents, more specifically women and children, is forbidden in Islam. But there are conflicting traditions of interpretation about this prohibition going back centuries. The most famous Muslim philosopher, the 12th<\/sup>\u00a0century Ibn Rushd, known in the west as Averro\u00ebs, discusses this controversy in his treatise\u00a0Bidayat al-Mudjtahid<\/i>. In contrast to the prohibition against killing women and children, Averro\u00ebs writes, some interpreters quote Mohammed\u2019s famous statement, \u201cI have been commanded to fight the people until they say, \u2018There is no God but Allah,\u2019\u201d which is consistent with Koran 9.5: \u201cThen when the sacred months have slipped away, slay the polytheists wherever you find them.\u201d As Averro\u00ebs summarizes the controversy, \u201cthe source of their controversy is to be found in their divergent views concerning the motive why the enemy may be slain. Those who think that this is because they are unbelieving do not make exception for any polytheist,\u201d including women and children. But even those who take the contrary view that only those able to fight may be killed make an exception for women who fight or who aid the enemy in some way, such as speaking against Islam or spying on Muslim warriors.<\/p>\n

In short, many Muslims over the centuries have disagreed with Obama\u2019s bald assertion that \u201cno faith teaches people to massacre innocents.\u201d Modern jihadists like ISIL, al Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah, and the numerous other groups thus have a foundation for their actions in a long tradition of Islamic theology. They see the outsized power and influence of the West, and the people who support it economically or politically, as a mortal threat to Islam. Thus destroying them is acceptable as a defense of the faith, for they are not \u201cinnocent\u201d of aggression against Islam.<\/p>\n

Many other practices of the jihadists likewise have justifications found in Islamic tradition and history, even if there are disagreements among Muslims about their validity. The jihadists\u2019 penchant for beheading has its precedent in Koran 8.12: \u201c<\/span>I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.\u201d We have acted as though the filmed beheading of reporter James Foley is some unprecedented act of savagery by a Manson-like cult. But as Ian Tuttle\u00a0reminds<\/span><\/a>\u00a0us, early in his career Mohammed beheaded the some 700 Jews of the Banu Qurayzah. In the 11th<\/sup>\u00a0century Yusuf ibn Tashfin\u00a0beheaded 24,000 Spaniards and, in a primitive version of YouTube, sent the heads to cities in North Africa and Spain. In the 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century the Mahdist jihadists in Sudan beheaded their enemies, including the British war hero Charles \u201cChinese\u201d Gordon. And Saudi Arabia today continues to publicly behead malefactors, 23 so far this August. There are few better ways to \u201ccast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve\u201d or, as Obama said of Foley\u2019s beheading, \u201cshock the conscience of the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, the indiscriminate bombing of people including women and children, whether through rockets or highjacked airliners, is argued as licit based on the fact that Mohammed used mangonels, a type of catapult, at the siege of al-Taif, even though such bombardment\u00a0endangered women and children. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has written an essay justifying al Qaeda\u2019s terrorist attacks of 9\/11 based on this tradition. So too with the prohibition against suicide, used by some apologists to argue that so-called \u201csuicide-bombers\u201d are contrary to Islamic doctrine. But in the Koran and hadith it is clear that killing oneself as an act of martyrdom while fighting for the faith is acceptable. For example, according to one hadith, Muhammad said, \u201cI would love to be martyred in Allah\u2019s Cause and then get resurrected and then get martyred, and then get resurrected again and then get martyred and then get resurrected again and then get martyred.\u201d That\u2019s why for 14 centuries jihadists have said they love death the way infidels love life.<\/p>\n

Groups like ISIL or al Qaeda do not embrace \u201cextreme religious views,\u201d or \u201ctwist the overall message of religious texts,\u201d\u00a0as the\u00a0New York Post\u00a0<\/i>has it. They act on a venerable tradition within Islam, one based on writings\u00a0some Muslims have construed differently because of inconsistencies among various texts. But that doesn\u2019t change the fact that the jihadists have within the faith long-established precedents for their actions, a tradition with millions of Muslim adherents worldwide, including the leaders of Turkey and Qatar who finance the vicious terrorist group Hamas, and the Mullahcracy in Iran, the world\u2019s foremost supporter of Islamic terrorism.<\/p>\n

We in the West correctly find such views \u201cextreme,\u201d or \u201csavage\u201d and \u201cbarbaric,\u201d but they are not \u201cfringe\u201d anomalies conjured out of textual misreadings by an extremist cult. They derive from the\u00a0history and sacred texts of Islam, the clear meaning of which\u00a0is illustrated on page after page of Muslim history. And they are being acted upon today across the Muslim world, as evidenced by the nearly 24,000 violent attacks perpetrated by Muslim terrorists since 9\/11. Contrary to Obama, ISIL does speak for a religion. It\u2019s called Islam.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2014 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Bruce Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine To read Part I,\u00a0click here. In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: \u201cSo ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[28,225,59,842,22,102,230],"tags":[1061],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-21X","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7787,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/nothing-to-do-with-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":7809,"position":0},"title":"Nothing to Do With Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 20, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The war against jihadism has been chronically misunderstood because of our failure to acknowledge the religious motives of Muslim jihadists. This failure began in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Trapped in our Western secularist paradigms, we interpreted the uprising against the Shah as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/QuranRifle3.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8182,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/more-delusional-apologetics-for-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":7809,"position":1},"title":"More Delusional Apologetics for Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 4, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine It\u2019s pretty embarrassing when the on-line comments about an article are more logical and knowledgeable than the article. Such is the case with a Wall Street Journal\u00a0op-ed last week that argued Muslim violence does not reflect traditional Islamic doctrine, but is merely a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Turkey"","block_context":{"text":"Turkey","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/turkey\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Koran-cover-300x225.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8260,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bad-ideas-breed-bad-foreign-policy\/","url_meta":{"origin":7809,"position":2},"title":"Bad Ideas Breed Bad Foreign Policy","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 4, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Barack Obama\u2019s foreign policy will go down in U.S. history as one of the most dangerously inept ever. Created by equal amounts of ignorance, arrogance, and partisan politics, the president\u2019s policies have left behind a world in which rivals and enemies are on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/201113jobs.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":342,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism\/","url_meta":{"origin":7809,"position":3},"title":"The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9\/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama\u2019s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8296,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-not-just-islam-its-the-tribal-mentality\/","url_meta":{"origin":7809,"position":4},"title":"It\u2019s Not Just Islam, It\u2019s the Tribal Mentality","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The \u201cnothing to do with Islam\u201d mantra took a hit recently in one of the premier organs of liberal received wisdom, The Atlantic. Many have greeted as a revelation Graeme Wood\u2019s article on the Islamic doctrines behind ISIS\u2019s atrocities. Regular readers of FrontPage\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/fft-500x281.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7926,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/still-getting-jihadism-wrong\/","url_meta":{"origin":7809,"position":5},"title":"Still Getting Jihadism Wrong","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 15, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine President Obama\u2019s recent claim that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam was nothing new. Since 9\/11, we have heard from both ends of the political spectrum that jihadist terror has material causes and psychological conditions created by social, political, or economic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/hg.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7811,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7809\/revisions\/7811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}