Islam and history

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), May 27, 2013 at 09:08

Hi Will

I think that we agree more than disagree as you shall see

I wrote

And yes Islam and its theology and its history are not pretty but the way Muslims view Islam is not static and the evidence is indeed the liberal age! And yes I cannot speak for Dr. Pipes but what he is saying and it makes lots of sense.

And this was your reply

You agree that Islam is "not pretty". But isn't that just a reflection of Muslims themselves?

Islam is a human creation (sorry books do not drop from the sky and they are all man/woman made mistakes and all) not unlike communism of fascism and like all human creations it has serious fault lines just like communism and fascism

1) Islamic theology is a product of Muhammad, Ali, and more recently Ibn Taymiyya, Wahhab, and Syed Qutb - all of them muslims!

Well Islamic theology is based on what a book (the Qur'an) is supposed to be saying and even Muslims themselves do not agree on what the Qur'an says or does not say

And let us not forget that the majority of Muslims cannot even read the Qur'an in Arabic as most Muslims are not Arabs. Even among the Arabs let us say take the case of Egypt where illiteracy is about 48% this means that 48% of Muslims in Egypt cannot read the Qur'an even when Arabic is their mother tongue. The rest of Egyptians that happen to be eduacted have great difficulty in reading the Qur'an and not just because their spoken language (Egyptian Arabic) is different from Quranic Arabic, but also because the Qur'an is a confused and confusing book that does not make sense most of the time and the only way to undersatnd it is to ask the clerics to tell you what the Qur'an is really saying

So what we are left with is that Muslims are told by their ulama what the Qur'an is really saying or not saying

And we know that it is easy in places like Egypt to tell the clerics what to say or not say to their flocks because the government pays their salaries. This means that those in charge in Egypt should tell these clerics to stess the tolerant verses in the Qur'an at the expense of the violent ones and in the case of the west as they do in France: deport any cleric who espouses violence

Sounds too simplistic? Not really as this is the reality

2) Islam's history is merely the history of the actions of Muslims.

Well the truth is historians have a great question: why does the barbarian invade the land of the civilized? Any guesses because this is indeed the heart of the matter!

Frankly I don't care to read that book which is Islamic apologism if it argues that Islam had a "liberal" age. Islam is the opposite of liberal...it makes the Salem witch hunts look progressive!

You do not have to read it but you cannot really escape the fact that islam, believe it or not, indeed had a liberal age and it existed

The truth is that books and most academic institutions have a liberal bias and cannot be trusted for the truth.

I agree with you here and this is why we are far behind the Germans and the British in the study of Islam and its history after all our clueless leaders tell us that the Arabic word jihad does not mean holy war

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