... Islamic Reform (Daniel Pipes, "Islam's Future")

Submitted by Michael Altherr (Switzerland), Oct 23, 2013 at 01:07

Dear Mr Pipes,

Your argumentation/comparison in answering John Leo's comment of your article on Islam's potential to reform itself - in spite of and contrary to Islam's very foundation, Mohammed's example, as transmitted in the Hadith, and the Quran, "ideal man" and "eternal truth" - very obviously is faulty:

"Anti-Nazi-Germans" clearly were/are no Nazis, but Muslims clearly are Muslims, however different their inherently restricted interpretations of the explicitly "eternal", "divine", "unalterable", "ultimate" and "sealing" "prophetic relevation" and islamic "truth".

Your misunderstanding - to a moderated degree also in your answers to Harold B. Reisman and Mindy G. Alter - surprisingly is on a level so basic as to make me wonder if Islam's debilitating, tautologistic "logic" has rubbed off onto you.

In another context, what made me feel hopeful or at least less a little bit less disgusted by Islam recently, was Michael Obert's observation (http://www.obert.de/medico/sinai/) that Islamists, shaming us, were the only ones earnestly counteracting the torture and extortion of African refugees and their families, by Bedouins on the Sinai peninsula: Maybe belief in a divine supreme power, however arbitrary, perverted, retrograde, suprematist and debilitating it may be, still preserves some dignity, compassion and courage somewhere within the believers, where it may all have been replaced by egoistic opportunism in the atheistic zynic. You never responded to my message, asking you to comment and spread Michael Obert's report, or did you?

Cheers anyway to your continuous effort in "shedding light" onto Islam, with every good wish,

Michael Altherr

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