Thanks but No Thanks

Submitted by Peter J. Herz (Taiwan), Jun 9, 2004 at 18:33

If you repeat the Shahada before Muslim witnesses, it makes you Muslim, and hence subject to execution for apostasy should you return to your original faith. So, thanks but no thanks.

Should I ever face the sort of situation faced by those poor fellows gunned down in Shoddy Arabia, I pray God would give me grace to face martyrdom, rather than leave me in my natural cowardice to lie by saying that I believe Muhammad was a prophet when, in fact, I am convinced that he was not.

The Bible says that God visits the sins of those who hate him down to the third and fourth generation. Perhaps a great part of the paranoiac malaise of the Islamic world may well stem from the fact that in its chief areas of strength between the Maghreb and the Panjab, are tens of millions of people whose ancestors quoted the shahada and fatiha only to save their necks.

Frankly, I will be comfortable sharing the globe with Islam when I hear its spokesmen saying taking responsibility for the Armenian and Assyrian atrocities; loudly condemning the persecution of Copts, Jews, and others; and admitting that many of the features of Ottoman rule may well have been the reason why the Balkans today are a cesspool of cross-cultural hatreds--i.e., Islam needs to hold out a few olive branches of its own. I hold as well that the day the grand mufti of Mecca, Istanbul, rector of al-Azhar, and other such luminaries make such admissions, the major Western media will owe it to their readers to faithfully and sympathetically report it. Otherwise, we're going to have to buckle down for an inter-civilizational war that I, for one, do not welcome in the least.

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