On June 5 in Brighton, Melbourne, at a spot I have driven past countless times, there was a terrorist incident. An armed Muslim, Yacqub Khayre, crying out support for the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, took a hostage, killed a hotel worker, and engaged police in a shootout, until he was shot dead. It is hard to imagine a less likely place for jihadist violence than affluent, Anglo Brighton, with its tidily quiet tree-lined streets of multi-million dollar homes. If it could happen in Brighton, it could happen anywhere.


Islamic terrorism has been a shock to the secular soul of the West. We have tried to address the security challenge, but are not across the intellectual challenge. Recently in the Australian, Jonathan Cole exploded three myths that hamper efforts to counter terrorism: the essentialist claim that Islam is a religion of peace; the idea that jihadists are political actors exploiting religion; and the idea that jihadists are deranged psychopaths. In response, Cole argued that the terrorism debate needs to engage with Islamic theology.

There is a fourth myth not canvassed by Cole, the ‘myth of the extremist’. This is the idea that the jihadist’s condition is a case of ‘extremism’, a state which transcends any particular religion, and which therefore has nothing particular to do with Islam. The myth is that the problem is not what jihadists believe, but the way they believe; not the content of their faith, but the blindness with which they pursue it. This was the view of Charles Wooley’s recent article ‘Blind faith breeds barbarity in Islam as it did in Christianity’.

Warnings against taking things to extremes are as old as Aristotle. In modern times, the idea of the extremist was popularised in The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, who claimed that mass movements are interchangeable, so an ‘extremist’ is just as likely to become a communist or a fascist. Hillary Clinton has been an advocate of the view that extremism is the problem behind terrorism. She has argued, without a trace of irony, that the primary challenge to religious freedom in the world comes from people who believe in their faith to the exclusion of all others, and identified religious certainty as the root of intolerance and terrorism.

Bertrand Russell called upon rational people everywhere to ‘Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it’. No doubt some disbelievers look at religious belief through the prism of the ‘extremist’ myth because they assume religions are driven by emotional needs, especially fear, and as such they are not amenable to rational analysis. However, now that we are indeed being assailed on every side by ‘terror from the world’, it is ironic that a dismissive attitude to religion helps sustain the great Cloud of Unknowing currently surrounding Islamic terror. The extent of the problem becomes apparent in the cognitive dissonance of advocates for the myth of the extremist. Proponents of the myth of the extremist suffer cognitive dissonance from the fact that self-styled jihadists perform the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the world today. The Religion of Peace website has documented 30,986 Islamic terrorist attacks in the world since 9/11. If the problem is not Islam, but extremism, where have all the non-Muslim extremists gone?

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people may go to considerable lengths to minimise the mental discomfort of holding beliefs inconsistent with reality. A famous example, documented in When Prophecy Fails (1956), was a Chicago cult, which believed that an alien spacecraft would land on the earth to rescue cult members from corruption. After the alien landing failed to materialise on the prophesied day and time, the cult countered with increased fervency and proselytism.
One of the means of countering cognitive dissonance is mis-perception, the misrepresentation of reality to satisfy the inner need for coherence. The greater the cognitive dissonance, the more grotesque the misperceptions become.

How do advocates for the myth of terror as extremism respond to the challenge of overwhelming contrary evidence? One tactic is to look back centuries for examples of Christian intolerance. Don’t forget the Crusades! Another is to scout around for contemporary examples of terror in the name of any religion but Islam.

Hillary Clinton’s example of present-day Christian extremism was The (Irish)Troubles: ‘We watched for many years the conflict in Northern Ireland against Catholics on the one side, Protestants on the other.’ Charles Wooley went the same route: ‘I remember Christians indiscriminately blowing up innocent civilians during the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland. They believed God was on their side, so any atrocity was justified.’

Clinton and Wooley’s cognitive dissonance shows in their blatant mis-perception. Although the Catholic-Protestant divide was the shibboleth for the Irish, in fact the conflict was not driven by religious belief. In the IRA’s Green Book, a handbook for armed resistance against British occupation, there is not a single mention of God, Jesus, the Bible, Catholics, Protestants or even religion. Instead, the crystal-clear goal was to end British occupation, and ‘create a Socialist Republic’. For this the IRA looked for guidance to Marx, not Christ. In complete contrast to the IRA’s Green Book, materials put out by Islamic terrorists are invariably jam-packed with religious references.

Charles Wooley’s misrepresentation is all the more striking because he holds an honours degree in history, and has half a century of experience as a journalist under his belt. By now he ought to know fact from fiction. Wooley’s citing of The Troubles was a misperception motivated by the need to minimise cognitive dissonance. Fifty years of training and experience did not prevent him from misperceiving the Northern Irish political struggle as religious, because the myth of the extremist needed it to be so.

We live in an era where myths abound, many of which are failing in the face of radical Islamic violence. The sooner we jettison our comforting cognitive short-circuit devices and get on with the rational task of taking Islamic theology seriously, the better.
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Dr. Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology.

This article was first published by the Australian Spectator.

Follow @markdurie

Readers of markdurie.com blog posts may wish to connect with the resources of the Interface Institute.




The Interface Institute is a new resource which provides the public with resources to understand the nexus between society and religion, particularly in relation to monotheistic religions.

After a phase in western history when a dominant assumption was that spiritual influences were in decline, we find ourselves launched into what Richard John Neuhaus already in 1997 called ‘the approaching century of religion’.

It is becoming increasingly clear that multiple social and political challenges are being brought on by profound global shifts in religious identity and allegiance, yet many feel ill-equipped to respond to these challenges.  The Interface Institute assists people to understand global religious currents and their impact on areas such as public policy, human rights, security and conflict.

The Interface Institute curates a diverse range of published resources, both from Muslim-majority contexts, and also from nations of the Muslim diaspora, including the West.  It also welcomes original written contributions   Potential contributions can be sent to contact@interfaceinstitute.org

Readers can connect with the Interface Institute’s resources at:

Web:  http://interfaceinstitute.org/
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/interfaceinstitute/


From Mark Durie

In 2015 the Australian Parliament conducted an Inquiry into food certification practices in Australia.  Public pressure which led to this inquiry was the result of work by Kirralie Smith ofHalal Choices.

The report of the Parliamentary Inquiry can be read here. 

The Inquiry’s recommendations included the introduction of clear labeling of certified products, and greater  monitoring by government of halal certification.  However, the Australian Government has not yet acted to implement these recommendations.

A documentary has been produced by the Q Society which provides a good overview of this issue. Titled HALAL CERTIFICATION - The Unpalatable Facts, the documentary exposes the problems in the Australian halal certification industry. Produced by Debbie Robinson and presented by Kirralie Smith, the documentary includes contributions from Senator Cory Bernardi, George Christenson MP, Bernard Gaynor, Debbie Robinson and members of the Assyrian Community.

HALAL CERTIFICATION - The Unpalatable Facts from Q Society of Australia Inc on Vimeo.






Dr. Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology.

Follow @markdurie

Carolingian Miniscule

Today just about anything and everything may be objected to as ‘sending us back to the Dark Ages’, including restrictions on subsidies for renewal energies, growth in faith schools, acts of terrorism, destruction of art works, the popularity of right-wing parties in Europe, the rise of superbugs, and denial of global warming. The Dark Ages have become proverbial.




According to popular myth, modern Europe emerged through the Renaissance and Enlightenment from the ‘Dark Ages’, a period of cultural stagnation and superstitious obscurantism, poor hygiene and worse dentistry which set in after the decline and fall of Imperial Rome.  The popular narrative tells us that Europe was rescued from its illiberal, ignorant past by reason and science, which ushered in modern progress, emancipating humanity from the stranglehold of religious oppression. 

The idea of a dark period following on from Roman and Greek Antiquity was an invention of the Renaissance, and further promoted during the Reformation and the  Enlightenment. It was first put forward by Petrarch, the founder of Humanism, in the 1330’s, who believed that Italy was on the verge of entering a new and better age, of which his own contribution was an example.  Later, Protestant reformers adopted as their motto post tenebras lux‘after darkness light’, intended as a pejorative reference to the previous influence of Roman Catholicism.  At the start of the 17th century, the Italian historian Caesar Baronius was the first to use the term ‘dark ages’ to refer to the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the Gregorian Reforms of 1046. He called this period ‘dark’ for a technical reason, because it left behind so few written texts.  However in the Enlightenment, writers such as Kant and Voltaire used the phrase ‘dark ages’ to accuse the  Middle Ages of backwardness.

Today the term ‘dark ages’ is rarely used by professional historians, because it reflects a simplistic, pejorative and misleading understanding of the history of Europe.  The reality is that the thousand years between the decline of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment were anything but ‘dark’.

Major advances in intellectual culture took place during the Middle Ages, such as the development by monks of Carolingian minuscule in the 8th century, a efficient system of handwriting, which included standardisation of punctuation, use of upper and lower case and word spacing. Use of this script spread across Europe and made reading and writing more efficient.  Today most of our knowledge of classical Latin texts is based upon manuscripts copied by Charlemagne’s scribes using this script, which later provided the basis for the development of print typefaces.

The Middle Ages was a period of developing scholarship, of advances in mathematics, science and medicine.  When cities declined in importance during this period, monasteries and convents became centres of economic activity, innovation and learning, social care and medicine. Hospitals proliferated, established and maintained by monasteries and churches and faculties of medicine were established. The monasteries also laid the foundation for universities. 

By the Late Middle Ages, Europe had grown prosperous. Agriculture flourished during the Medieval Warm Period from 950-1250. Populations increased, and people grew taller, a sign of good health and prosperity.  (Europeans would not grow to be as tall again until the early 20th century.) This was the era in which the great cathedrals were erected, paid for by the wealth of thriving economies. 

Popular misconceptions about the Middle Ages abound.  One is the view that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat, an idea which was promoted by some prominent 19th century authors. In fact there was never a ‘flat earth’ period among European scholars.  In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas had cited the roundness of the earth as an example of an accepted scientific truth. Stephen Gould has commented that “all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology”. It is ironic that thought-leaders who wished to promote the idea of a conflict between science and religion, in order to demonise religion and exalt science, found it necessary to invent ‘facts’ to support their thesis.

It is striking how popular understandings can distort and massage history to conform to a cultural bias about history as progress.  The great witch-hunts of Europe did not take place in the ‘Dark Ages’, which was a period when church authorities repeatedly rejected persecution of people for witchcraft. Rather they took place during the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the supposed period of ‘light’ after darkness.

In contrast to the idea that Roman Antiquity was a period of ‘light’ and the Middle Ages ‘dark’, the institution of slavery gradually declined throughout the Middle Ages, discouraged by the church, and it had largely disappeared in western Europe by the 11th century.  Before this the Vikings had been prolific slavers, selling hundreds of thousands into Islamic and Byzantine slave markets from the 6th into the 11th century and the rejection of the slave economy in Scandinavia coincided with the conversion of the Vikings to Christianity. It was only after the Middle Ages, in the Age of Discovery, that Europeans recovered an appetite for slavery.

Another popular myth is that the ‘Dark Ages’ were periods of violence and warfare.  In fact wars in the medieval period cannot be compared in terms of the sheer number of casualties to the wars of Antiquity, nor to the violence of centuries after the Middle Ages, including massacres of Jews which accompanied the Black Death, the horrific Thirty Years War in the 17th century, the Napoleonic wars of the 19th century, or the two World Wars of the 20th century.

The myth claims that science was oppressed by the church, but in reality reason and ‘natural philosophy’ were held in universally high esteem during the medieval period, and scholars had no reason to fear the interference of church authorities in their work. The so-called ‘Dark Ages’ was a time of scientific innovation and advance, particularly during the High Middle Ages.  John Heilbron has argued in The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories that the church invested more money and social support into the study of astronomy from the Middle Ages through to the Enlightenment, than any other institution.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the monastic system for the advance of science and culture across Europe. The monasteries, with their emphasis on training and learning, and continent-wide networks, provided a context for the steady advance of agriculture, which underpinned the growing prosperity of Europe. Many leading contributors to scientific inquiry were members of religious orders. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), a Benedictine abbess and mystic, is considered the founder of scientific natural history in Germany for her botanical and medicinal writings, which arose from charitable work caring for the sick in the convent hospice. Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253) and the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (c.1292) are considered fathers of the modern scientific method. Bacon’s work in optics laid the foundation for the mathematical advances of Newton and Descartes.  Copernicus (1543) was a Dominican and doctor of canon law who worked throughout his life under the patronage of his uncle, the Prince-Bishop of Warmia in Poland.   The Augustinian friar Martin Luther (d. 1546) was a product of the monastic education system. His translation of the Bible and apologetic tracts established a standard for modern German, which unified the very diverse German dialect regions into a single cultural community.  Luther's broadsheets, published to promote the Protestant Reformation, were forerunners to the development of the first newspapers in the 17th century.

It is sometimes alleged that Europe was held in the grip of the Dark Ages until writings of Greek philosophy, preserved in Arabic, were translated into Latin, triggering off the Renaissance. In fact the main works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes and Galen had been translated into Latin by 1200, for the most part directly from Greek. While translations from Arabic, particularly of commentaries, did make a contribution, it was the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the flight of refugee Greek scholars into the northern Italian states, bringing their manuscripts with them, that helped trigger the revival of the study of Greek as a core component of the Renaissance curriculum.

The idea of history-as-progress has so entranced the contemporary secular mind that the Reformation has been falsely recast as a progressive historical movement.  In fact reformatio was already a prestigious concept from the High Middle Ages, and it meant restoration by returning ad fontes to origins.  Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) was considered a reformer because he called people to emulate the example and teaching of Jesus as found in the gospels.  Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation sought to strip away accretions which the church had accumulated over the centuries, taking the Bible as the sole authority for belief and practice.  When Luther urged the German nobility to embrace their freedom in the face of papal claims, he argued his case from the Bible.  Likewise the Catholic counter-reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries sought to restore church institutions by returning them to their spiritual roots. 

During the 1960’s and 1970’s many western intellectuals eagerly anticipated the imminent disappearance of religion.  In 1966 eminent Canadian-American anthropologist, Anthony Wallis, wrote in his textbook Religion: An Anthropological View: “The evolutionary future of religion is extinction based on extensive empirical research I’m sure. Belief in supernatural beings and supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature’s laws will erode and become only an interesting historical memory.”  The desire for religion to have no future recruits the myth of the Dark Ages to advance its apology against religion. This reduces what was a rich and complex period of European history to a crude stereotype, and damages our society’s intellectual capacity to engage with and understanding the contribution faith has made to our cultural and intellectual history.

In 1967 British sociologist Susan Budd published a study of the reasons why people reject faith. She investigated 150 leading members of the British Secular Freethought movement from 1850 to 1950 and found that in the great majority of cases loss of faith could not be attributed to their acquiring scientific knowledge.  Only two reported reading Darwin or Huxley before losing their faith. The triggers for rejecting Christianity were mainly personal and moral, such as doubts about the nature of sin and punishment, concerns about the goodness of God in the face of personal experiences of human suffering, and disappointing encounters with church leaders. Charles Darwin himself lost his faith, not because his theory of evolution made God redundant, but due to personal issues, culminating in the the tragic death of his ten year old daughter Annie.

In the light of Budd’s findings, one might wonder whether the wholesale rejection of faith that began in Renaissance Humanism, flowered during the Enlightenment, and continues apace to this day, had more to do with the trauma of the Black Death in the 14th century and the Thirty Years War in the 17th century, than to the fabled ‘Dark Ages’ resistance of the Christian church to science.

PERIODS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
Late Antiquity 4th-8th centuries
Early Middle Ages  6th-10th centuries
Medieval Warm Period 9th-13th centuries
High Middle Ages  11th - 13th century
Late Middle Ages 14th - 15th century
Little Ice Age 14th-19th centuries
Renaissance 15th-16th centuries
Age of Discovery 15th-18th centuries
Protestant Reformation 16th-17th centuries
Enlightenment 18th century
Modern Period 19th-20th centuries
________

A version of this article was published by Lapido Media in Religious Literacy: An Introduction.


Dr. Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology.

Follow @markdurie

There is not a Bible, Jewish or Christian, containing such incendiary commentary as populates page after page of 'The Noble Qur’an', which for four years has preached to the faithful in Canberra Airport's prayer room. The ideology it promotes is violent jihad. It is a book to start a war.


The Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt recently cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed sanctions, accusing the Qataris of supporting terrorism. The Saudis have demanded that Qatar close Al-Jazeera and cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Islamic State. Qatar’s long-standing and well-known support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which aims to unify Muslim nations under an Islamic caliphate and has networks of supporters across the Middle East, is now perceived as a serious threat its neighbours.

 This is the pot calling the kettle black, for Saudi Arabia itself has a long record of exporting Islamic radicalism. Among its most notable exports are millions of Korans in translation, which, through commentary (mainly in footnotes) and accompanying materials, incite Muslims to wage violent jihad to establish an Islamic state.

Among the Saudis’ exported Korans is an English-language edition, TheNoble Qur’an, which can be found in mosques, prayer rooms and meeting places around the world. Anyone who applies to the Saudi embassy in Canberra will be sent a copy gratis.

The Noble Qur’an can be found in the musallah or prayer room of Canberra’s airport. What is apparently the same edition, with “AIRPORT MUSALLAH”written in black marker pen on the page ends, has been sitting there for the past four years, ever since the new airport was built. TheNoble Qur’an is also publicly available in other “multi-faith” spaces that have been springing up in institutions across Australia in recent years, in universities, hospitals and other public places.
Canberra airport’s Noble Qur’an was printed by the order of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who ruled from 2005 to 2015. It includes the Arabic text, and, side-by-side, the English translation by Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan. There is also an endorsement by Shaikh Abdul-Aziz ibn Baz, Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 1999, and a foreword by Shaikh Salih ibn Abdul-Aziz al-Shaikh, the current Saudi Minister for Islamic Affairs. After the Koranic text there are a hundred pages or so of appendices, and under the text there are footnotes, which offer a commentary. There are also frequent interpolations in brackets to help clarify the meaning in translation.

Marked “not for sale”, vast numbers of The Noble Qur’an printed by the Saudis are exported around the world. The King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Qur’an in Medina has printed over one hundred million Korans in thirty-nine languages since it was established in 1985. The handsomely gilded Noble Qur’an is distributed as part of the Saudis’ global da’wa or effort to propagate Islam. It appears to target two kinds of readers.

First, TheNoble Qur’an seeks to enlist Muslims in violent jihad against non-Muslims, to establish an Islamic caliphate. Second, it aims to engage with Christians. The longest essay in the appendices is an argument that Jesus was a prophet of Islam, and commentary throughout TheNoble Qur’an—in the explanatory footnotes, the interpolations in brackets and the appendices—challenges and “corrects” Christian teachings.

Sometimes it is said that when people use verses from the Koran to justify violence, they have taken them out of context. This criticism cannot be applied to TheNoble Qur’an, which follows a traditional Islamic method of interpreting the Koran in the light of Muhammad’s example and teachings, known as the Sunna. In keeping with this tradition, citations from the Sunna supply the great bulk of the explanatory footnotes.

On non-Muslims
The footnotes in TheNoble Qur’an are repeatedly derogatory of non-Muslims.

For example, a note to Sura 10:19 (p. 272, fn1) quotes Muhammad to say that human beings are born Muslims, and are “converted” away from Islam by non-Muslim parents. For Jewish or Christian parents to raise their child in their own faith is like mutilating them:
The Arabic phrase al-fitrah refers to the doctrine that the innate state of human beings is to be a Muslim.

The Arabic text of the Koran calls non-Muslims unclean (Sura 9:28), using a derogatory word (najas). The footnote to this verse explains about non-Muslims that:

Sura 3:85 states that “whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers”. In the footnote commentary on this verse, TheNoble Qur’an quotes Muhammad to explain that Christians and Jews who die disbelieving in Muhammad will end up in Hell:

Sura 4:47 warns Christians and Jews that they should believe in Muhammad, or else their faces will be taken away in hell, to which the translators add, in brackets,“by making them like the back of necks; without nose, mouth, eyes”. The footnote commentary explains further:

The Koran has verses which exhort tolerance of Christians and Jews. Yet TheNoble Qur’an takes pains to emphasise that such verses have been cancelled by later verses, following the Islamic contextual principle of abrogation (naskh). Here are two examples:

First, Sura 2:62 states that a Christian or Jew who “believes in Allah and the Last Day and does righteous good deeds shall have their reward with their Lord, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve”. This could be taken to imply that Christians and Jews will be accepted by God if they follow their faith properly. However, the commentary on this verse clarifies that:
What this footnote is actually asserting is that Christians and Jews will go to Hell unless they accept Islam, because earlier verses which seemed to counsel tolerance have been superseded and cancelled by later verses.

Second, Sura 2:109 states that Muslims should “forgive and overlook” the Christians and Jews, “till Allah brings His Command”.Yet the footnote makes clear that “the provision of this verse has been abrogated” (p. 21, fn 1)by Sura 9:29. The later verse commands Muslims to fight (that is, kill) Christians and Jews unless or until they surrender to Muslims and pay tribute:
Here again, a more tolerant verse is claimed to have been abrogated by a later verse which commands violence against non-Muslims.

The meaning of jihad
Some Muslims have proposed that the basic meaning of jihad is peaceful struggle. In contrast, TheNoble Qur’an defines jihadas waging war against non-Muslims to make Islam dominant in the world. This jihad is obligatory for all Muslims, and rejecting this obligation will lead to hellfire.
This interpretation is made clear in the glossary, where the entry for jihad is:
The footnote referred to is a comment on Sura 2:190, “And fight in the Way of Allahthose who fight you …” This footnote reads:
Here TheNoble Qur’an is saying that the purpose of jihad is to make Muslims dominant over non-Muslims, and Islam dominant over other religions; Islamic warfare against non-Muslims is a kind of missionary enterprise to spread the faith, and any Muslim who does not fulfil this obligatory duty is a “hypocrite”.

What is bad about being a “hypocrite” is made clear by TheNoble Qur’an on page 906 of the appendices: a hypocrite will end up in the lowest depths of Hell, the place of worst punishment. TheNoble Qur’an is teaching here that any Muslim who does not engage in and support warfare to establish the dominance of Islam is destined to occupy the hottest place in Hell, worse even than that occupied by non-Muslims.

In its footnote on Sura 27:59, TheNoble Qur’an quotes a tradition of Muhammad which refers to jihad (p. 512 fn 1). (Here again jihad is defined as “holy fighting”.) The footnote emphasises that fighting non-Muslims is the best possible pious deed for a Muslim, second only to becoming a Muslim.

The caliphate and universal war against non-Muslims
Sura 2:252 (p. 55, fn2, running on to p. 56) refers to Muhammad as a messenger of Allah. The footnote to this verse reports that Muhammad’s prophethood was distinguished by certain characteristics. Three of these are:
The implication of this third point is that everyone, everywhere is obligated to accept Muhammad as their prophet, and the first two points show that he was uniquely commissioned to wage war against disbelievers, by terrorising and looting them. Muhammad is considered to be the best example for Muslims to follow, including, it becomes clear, in these aspects of his prophetic career. TheNoble Qur’an emphasises these aspects of Muhammad’s mission to activate them for jihad.

In its footnote on Sura 3:55 (p. 76, fn 1), TheNoble Qur’an states that when Jesus returns he will impose Islamic law and break the cross (that is, destroy Christianity). At that time Jesus will do away with toleration of non-Muslims, so that “all people will be required to embrace Islam and there will be no other alternative”. In other words they will be compelled to convert by force if required.
This teaching about Jesus’s return is repeated in a commentary on Sura 8:39 (p. 236, fn 1), and a comment on Sura 61:6 (p. 761, fn 2), which states that this tradition is intended as “a severe warning to Christians who claim to be the followers of ’Isa (Jesus) …” In essence TheNoble Qur’an tells its Christian readers that when he returns Jesus will compel them to embrace Islam, and all people on the earth will have to choose between Islam and death.

In its commentary on Sura 9:29 (p. 248, fn 2) TheNoble Qur’an cites a tradition of Muhammad about the Jews, which states, “The Hour (i.e. the final hour) will not be established until you fight against the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’” So, at the end, creation itself will cry out for Jewish blood.

In an interpolation in Sura 8:73, TheNoble Qur’an states that Muslims of the world must not ally themselves with non-Muslims, but join together “to make victorious Allah’s religion of Islamic monotheism” (p. 242).It is explained in commentary that if Muslims do not do this, there will be terrible disorder and tribulation in the world, with wars and battles and calamitous breakdown of civil society. This is because of the deleterious effects of non-Muslim rule. Moreover, it is also wrong to have “many Muslim rulers”, because Muslims should unite under one ruler, the caliph: “it is a legal obligation … that there shall not be more than one Khalifah for the whole Muslim world …” Furthermore, anyone who works to divide Muslims into different groups under different rulers should be killed, according to Muhammad, who is reported to have said, “When you all [Muslims] are united … and a man comes up to disintegrate you and separate you into different groups, then kill that man” (p. 242, fn 1). This can be taken to imply that anyone who upholds the division of Muslims into distinct nation-states, which is the international order today, stands under a death sentence.

TheNoble Qur’an paints a supremacist vision of an ultimate Islamic victory over non-Muslim religions, in which all non-Muslims will be converted to Islam or killed. The text of Sura 3:110 reads:
The footnote commentary on this verse explains:
This footnote is a reference to a tradition of Muhammad which states that Allah is pleased to see people entering Paradise in chains. This justifies making war on non-Muslims, and forcing them into Islam through enslaving them; enslaving non-Muslims is a kindness to them, because it enables them to attain Paradise.

This interpretation of Sura 3:110 is based on Muhammad’s teaching. Could it have any application in today’s world, or is it just a dead letter?

The very same tradition was cited by the Islamic State in the October 2014 edition of its magazine Dabiq, which included an article titled “The Return of Slavery Before the Hour”:
The same sentiment was also expressed by a Dutch Islamic State fighter, Israfil Yilmaz, who blogged about the correct Islamic motivation for sex slavery:

The translators who crafted the commentary in TheNoble Qur’an, and the Saudi leaders who endorsed the text, no doubt desired that readers would take to heart the teachings they had laboured hard to present. The evidence is that many have done so. The investment by the Saudis of billions of dollars to spread the kinds of ideas found in TheNoble Qur’an has not been in vain, and the Islamic State provides the proof.

Evidence for their success is found in Israfil Yilmaz’s justification for sex-slavery. This not only aligns with official ISIS propaganda: it also is fully in line with the teachings of TheNoble Qur’an. Another sign of the influence of TheNoble Qur’an’s ideas has been the river of thousands of ISIS recruits flowing from Western nations to join the jihad in Syria and Iraq.

What does all this mean?
Ahmed Farouk Musa, a graduate of Monash University medical school in Melbourne, told a forum on Muslim extremism in Kuala Lumpur on December 7, 2014, that TheNoble Qur’an incites violence against Christians and other non-Muslims: “I believe that propaganda such as the Hilali-Khan translation and other materials coming out of Saudi Arabia are one of the major root causes that feed extremist ideas among Muslims, violence against Christians and other minorities.”

There is not a Bible in print, anywhere in the world, Jewish or Christian, which contains such incendiary commentary as is found on page after page of TheNoble Qur’an. This is a book with which to start a war. The ideology it promotes is primed to light the fuse of violent jihad.

Given its contents, it might seem surprising that a copy of TheNoble Qur’an has been sitting in the Canberra airport prayer room for the past four years. The theological characteristics of this edition of the Koran are not a secret. Yet it seems no Muslim who used the musallah has objected, or if they did, the Canberra airport authorities paid no attention. Canberra’s politicians and their many advisers also regularly pass along the corridor where the musallah is located, but none of them seems to have thought to check what version of the Koran was being used in their airport’s prayer room.
Earlier this year the Public Health Association of Australia asked the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade to reject the “notion” that there is any inherent link between Islam and terrorism. It seems that Public Health Association of Australia officials have also not visited the Canberra airport musallah to read its Koran.

There has been much discussion and sometimes puzzlement about how young Muslim men have become radicalised enough to fight for ISIS. Reading and believing the messages implanted in TheNoble Qur’an in the Canberra airport prayer room would be sufficient to convert some people to the key points of the ideology of ISIS.

The message of TheNoble Qur’an is no marginal phenomenon. It is not an opinion from the extremities of the Islamic world, but from its heartland, presented as a gilt-edged free gift from the Saudi king, the Guardian of the Two Holy Mosques. The political theology of TheNoble Qur’an aligns with the official dogma of Saudi Arabia, and it has been endorsed by the Saudi king and the nation’s chief justice, the Grand Mufti.

It is necessary to grasp the authenticity of TheNoble Qur’an and its message to the world. Those behind TheNoble Qur’an manifestly believe that justice will be served only when Muslims rule the world, and that warfare necessary to achieve this goal is not only justified: it is a divinely instituted, inescapable obligation incumbent on every Muslim, because Muhammad and his Koran are, as Sura 21:107 puts it, “a mercy to the worlds”.

One sometimes hears the view that it is not up to non-Muslims to express opinions about Islam or its canonical texts, such as the Koran. But TheNoble Qur’an’s running commentary on the text, because it has so much to say about non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians, therefore gives non-Muslims, especially Jews and Christians, every right to form their own opinions about it. If a book talks about you, you have a right to make up your own mind about what it has to say.

In 2002 Christopher Hitchens fielded a question from Tony Jones on ABC’s Lateline as to why young, mostly well-educated men committed the 9/11 atrocity. Hitchens’s answer was, “Well, it could be they believe their own propaganda.” We have to assume that those responsible for TheNoble Qur’an believe their own propaganda too, and that some who have read it have been influenced to believe it too.

What should Australians make of the fact that the Saudis have been presenting an open and unashamed apology for violent jihad, even commending the practice of enslaving enemies, in our own backyard for years, not to show Islam in a poor light, but to glorify it?
The fact that TheNoble Qur’an is in the Canberra airport musallah is no accident.This edition of the Koran and the teachings it promotes can be found in Islamic bookshops, public libraries, prayer rooms and Sunni mosques all over the English-speaking world.

The British historian Tom Holland recently produced a documentary on ISIS called The Origins of Violence. A scathing review by the English journalist Peter Oborne was published in the Middle East Eye. Oborne excoriated Holland for suggesting that the problem with ISIS lies with Islam. Oborne found it repugnant to suggest that there is anything about Islam that might be considered a “threat”, and he railed against Holland’s suggestion that there could be anything in the example and teaching of Muhammad (whom Oborne respectfully calls “The Prophet”) which could have guided the actions of the Islamic State.

Such ignorance is the fruit of religious illiteracy. Or might fear be the issue? Has Muhammad, praised in the pages of the Koran for being “victorious by awe”, now extended his reign of fear, not just for the distance of one month’s journey as Muhammad declared he had achieved in seventh-century Arabia, but across fourteen centuries to Australia and the rest of the world?

Of course many Australian Muslims would, like Ahmed Farouk Musa, find the messages promoted through the footnotes and glosses of TheNoble Qur’an utterly repugnant.It is disappointing that these well-meaning Muslims have not been able to determine which version of their own scriptures is to be placed in a public prayer room designated for their use. They could have lobbied Canberra airport to have this version of the Koranreplaced by another, but if they have done so, their attempts must have failed.

The message contained in TheNoble Qur’an and its widespread public distribution are matters Australians have every right to be concerned about. Its message has been promoted in public for years with hardly a whisper of objection coming from those who should know better.

It would be inappropriate, and indeed irrelevant if our leaders were to respond to the message of TheNoble Qur’an with statements like “True Islam does not promote terrorism” or “No true religion supports violence”. For Australian officials to dare to instruct the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia or the Guardian of the Two Holy Mosques on what is true Islam would be ludicrous and offensive. But the leaders of our nation, against whose non-Muslim citizens TheNoble Qur’an incites such undisguised enmity, have every right to say, “Not in our backyard!”

Dr. Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology.

This article was first published by the Quadrant in November 2017.

Follow @markdurie

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Over the past ten or so years I have blogged around 150 times on issues to do with religion, mostly to do with Islam.  The challenge of Islamic resurgence continues all around, and will do so for many, many years to come.  The Islamic Awakening may be faltering in places, such as Iran or Syria, but its impact is deep and wide, all over the world, and it has a great deal of momentum, including in Western nations.

Over the past year or two I have been blogging less.  This is not because I lack things to write about. On the contrary.  The truth is, for years I have been working on a book on the Qur'an and its origins, and it has all come to a head and will soon be released. The book is called The Qur'an and its Biblical Reflexes: Investigations into the Genesis of a Religion.  It's listed on Amazon as to appear on October 15 2018.  I hope it will make a useful contribution, even if it is not wildly entertaining. 

 Here's the publisher's blurb:

The Qur’an is a book which throws up obstacles to anyone who would delve into its secrets. One puzzle is its relationship to the Bible. Why are there so many Biblical references in the Qur’an and how did they get there? Another puzzle is why there seem to be two Qur’ans: the “Meccan” and “Medinan”? And can we rely on the traditional account, handed down by Muslim scholars from generation to generation, that the Qur’an was first recited by Muhammad in Mecca? This path-breaking book sets aside the traditional story of the life of Muhammad, and inquires into the internal history of the text itself. Drawing on fresh insights from linguistics and theology, Durie puts forward a new and very different explanation for the “Mecca-Medina” division, attributing the internal division to a theological crisis which arose in the Qur’anic community. Through careful investigation of theologically charged topics such as prophecy, Satan, sin, the oneness of God, covenant, warfare, divine presence, and holiness, Durie questions whether the Qur’an and Bible really do share a deeper connection. He invites the reader to set aside the frames through which the Qur’an has been viewed in the past, whether Biblical or Islamic, and invites us to attend to the Qur’an’s distinctive and unique theological vision, in its own terms.

Re the price, USD$120 may seem a lot, but at 380 or so pages, it's not too bad for academic books in Qur'an studies.  At least it's not USD $240, like Boisliveau's sumptuously produced Le Coran par Lui-Mème.

When I'm not writing I lead a 'normal' life as the vicar of an Anglican church. This keeps me busy, most of the time.  However, in the coming months, once I've washed that book right out of my hair, I'm going to be redoing my websites to make my writing and audiovisual resources more available, and getting back to more regular blogging and webinar-ing. Stay tuned! I haven't gone away, just temporarily faded out.

Finally, I understand that all sorts of people read my blogs: of all faiths or none. Perhaps you love my writings, or perhaps you subscribe because you hate them.  I don't know. If you are of a Christian persuasion and could make use of a weekly Bible study, you could do worse than subscribing to my weekly study, which I send out to my flock, and to anyone else who wants it. The link to these studies, including a way to sign up to the weekly emails, can be accessed here.


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Dr. Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at Melbourne School of Theology.


Follow @markdurie

Dear friends,

I received a few emails from people who had tried to pre-order The Qur'an and its Biblical Reflexes from Amazon.  Apparently Amazon no longer delivers to Australia.

You'll get a better deal from the Book Depository:

https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Quran-and-Its-Biblical-Reflexes-Mark-Durie/9781498569453

The Book Depository offers free delivery worldwide, and for a better price than Amazon.  I buy most of my books from them. You can choose the currency you want to pay in.

Regards,

Mark Durie

PS For Australian buyers only, you can check out online prices available on any book via booko.com.au.

Linguistics and theology scholar challenges origin story of Qur’an.
Mark Durie interviewed by Andrew Bolt on Sky News Australia: