Islam

Submitted by II (United States), Sep 25, 2010 at 22:38

hrishi: you mean, can one be a Muslim if one reduces religion to a social, historical or psychological construct and leaves transcendent truth and revelation out of it? Clearly not, in reality; of course, one can call anything by any name. I suppose the real question is, by what right or on what basis could one call someone who rejects the Shari'a a priori a Muslim? What, pray tell, is one 'submitting' to, precisely, if not towards God and, thereby, his commands and prohibitions?

The great difficulty with Mr. Pipes' view expressed above in response to my comment is its arbitrariness: who decides how to 'modernize' the Shari'a and by what standard? As Mr. Pipes knows, this attitude is the mirror image of the 'fundamentalists' who have ignored the corpus of traditional scholarship in their religion on the basis of 'knowing better' what is needed.

You hope that Muslims view their religious law as though it were man-made. Why? Why begin from the standpoint of doubt? If this is what you or Mr. Pipes would like to see - have you attempted the converse? Have you tried to begin from the standpoint of accepting Islam as though it were a revealed religion (or any religion as though it were revealed, for that matter)?

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