Joshua the Prophet

Submitted by jhubers (United States), Mar 17, 2007 at 16:04

So, Joshua, you are a prophet - able to see what no one else can see - the shape that Islam will take in the future. Many have walked this path before you only to find their predictions coming to nothing. Protestant missionaries predicted - with a note of certainty as you have done - that Islam would crumble in the face of modernist developments. Such ignorance could not stand up against the glaring light of western/Christian enlightenment surely! They were wrong. Others have made simliar predictions certain that Islam and its adherents would take on a shape they determined with your kind of certainty. They too were wrong.

The problem here is the same problem the early Protestant missionaries had - treating Islam as though it were a monolithic entity. In fact the late Edward Said was much more correct in his assessment that it is better to speak of "Islams" (plural) than "Islam" because it is and has always had a multiform reality.

BTW -- there is, unfortunately, in your rhetoric echoes of the worst kind of anti Semitic conspiracy theories which fueled Christian pogroms against Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. There, too, while people might have believed that individual Jews might be acceptible, they were convinced that the masses of Jews were an insideous force aimed at the destruction of all that was good in European society. Thus the need to keep them in check - and in ghettos. Are you, perhaps, suggesting the same should be done for Muslims before they live out their evil intentions??

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