Reply to Daniel Pipes

Submitted by ECAW (United Kingdom), Aug 1, 2016 at 14:21

I don't know whether it's protocol to reply to a reply by Dr Pipes, but here goes.

I immediately give way on the historical Mohammed. We can get no closer to him than what the Sira and Hadiths tell us (for my money the text of the Koran suggests no more than a provincial warlord/prophet with merely local ambitions). But within a couple of hundred years of his supposed death the image of Mohammed which Muslims still believe in had crystallised. The only point of interest to me, and I imagine to most of us here, about that Mohammed is his global and timeless supremacism to be pursued by fair means or foul.

Suppose that figure (probably largely fictional but believed in by countless Muslims) appeared in downtown Mecca today. I suggest that he would be looking for that uncompromising supremacism in his followers, expressed in various ways in the diverse societies they happened to live in, tribal, feudal, ideological, post-capitalist or whatever. I suggest that those groups waging military or civilisational jihad would meet with his approval and he would dismiss those quietist groups declining to answer the call to jihad as hypocrites, just as the Koranic Mohammed did when trying to motivate his troops.

So, to get to the point...no doubt the majority of Muslims today do not want to return to Mohammed's way of life but have they given up on the active ingredient in the Islamic tradition, the obligation to bring the whole world under Islam for Allah? I see very little evidence for that and increasingly evidence for the opposite view (polls, turnouts for protests against cartoonists as opposed to ISIS, the unmissable lack of action in combating jihadist sympathisers in their communities etc).

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