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I aim for our majority to hold each Muslim among us accountable for clinging to unqualified Islam

Reader comment on item: Why the Paris Massacre Will Have Limited Impact
in response to reader comment: Islamic History and "Moderate" Islam

Submitted by Demsci (Netherlands), Dec 4, 2015 at 19:46

Michael S, thank you for good history (which I love). I enjoyed reading your post.

It is my hope one day I can be real clear. Whereas I judge the Quran-Hadiths-Sira as very unclear, incomplete, obsolete. That IS an insult to Islam and discouraging for Muslims, I think. Describing Islam as clear may be giving it too high status. Clarity is a quality and I daresay many Ideologies and Islam too LACK it, or are of low quality Clarity-wise.

But still, in the eyes of political correct people, this very vagueness, multi-interpretability of Islam may excuse and give "good" Muslims an honourable way out, because it does mean Muslims can twist and interpret multi-interpretable Islam enough to become declared "Democratic Muslims", like Majid Nawaz (Quilliam Foundation, UK), who does cooperate with Sam Harris now (in their new book).

Combine this with the idea that religion should not be totally free and followers of religions should be held accountable for their choices.

Now we finally can put the choice before Muslims; Either qualify your Islamic religion as being compatible with democracy and declare yourself a "democratic Muslim"

or don;t but then face consequences, like non-admittance as immigrants into democratic countries. The Reason; Islam without such qualification is simply too multi-interpretable, too often interpreted (demonstrably by hundreds of millions) as being violent or anti-democratic. And being a "neutral" Muslim is now to be seen as supporting that intolerant dictatorial interpretation too much. And democratic nations have the right to defend themselves against that.

I know Muslims may lie and dissemble, but to date I almost never heard of Democratic Muslim's Mosques. And the reason may be that for Muslims and Mosques to declare themselves thus makes them a target for radical Muslims, which they fear much more than that they fear "us".

But if a majority lets us, we can now ask Muslims to risk at least that they declare themselves "Democratic Muslims" (and not "Theocratic Muslims"). It is absolutely something the Mayor of Rotterdam implicitly has done. He could not do otherwise, for he is a prominent member of the socialist party and that party is unconditionally democratic.

I hope you catch my drift, but there is so much ground to cover on this topic, it seems. Still, if something simpler "had worked" we would have found it by now.

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Reader comments (98) on this item

Title Commenter Date Thread
5 P's [18 words]
w/response from Daniel Pipes
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