Quantcast
Channel: markdurie.com blog

‘A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross’

0
0
This post is a analytical explanation of a film produced by Al-Hayat Media of the Islamic State,  which portrays the ritual slaughter of 21 Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya, in the film “A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross”.  Words in blue are from the film, either in the form of titles or sub-titles, or as narration.  Text in red is for the words of Muhammad or the Qur’an.  This is Part 2 of a pair of posts about this film.  Part 1 is Bearing the cross: a letter to the Islamic State.  This post has also appeared on Lapido Media.



The Coast of Wilāyat Tarābulus [in the region of Tripoli] by the Mediterranean Sea

The people of the cross, the followers of the hostile Egyptian Church
The opening scenes show the 21 men being led along the coast towards the camera, each one held by a hooded captor.
All praise is due to Allah, the strong and mighty, and may blessings and peace be upon[1] the one sent by the sword[2] as a mercy for all the world[3].
[1] It is a standard Islamic text opening to bless Muhammad.

[2] In this case Muhammad  is identified as the ‘one sent by the sword.’ This phrase is taken from Muhammad’s own words:
I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and associate no partners with him. I command you to believe and subjugate those who disobey me.”  Subhi al-Salih, ed., Ahkam Ahl al-Dhimmah vol 2: 736.  Also cited by (Ibn Taymiyyah in Majmu’ Al-Fatawa (Vol. 28, p. 270).
[3] Sura 21:107 “We have sent you [Muhammad] as a mercy for the worlds.”
Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of as-Sham [Syria] and on Dabiq’s plain,[4] chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross delusion for a long time, filled with spiteagainst Islam and Muslims[5].
[4] Dabiq is a town in northern Syria. In Islamic eschatology it is believed to be a place of battle between Christians and Muslims.  For this reason Dabiq was chosen as the title for the Islamic State’s propaganda magazine.
[5] The idea that Christians have enmity against Muslims is from the Koran:
Sura 60:4 “...enmity and hatred have appeared between us and you forever until you believe in Allah alone”
Sura 86:15 “Surely, the disbelievers are your ardent enemies.”
Sura 3:119 “O ye who believe! Take not others than your own people as intimate friends; they will spare no pains to ruin you. They love to see you in trouble. Hatred has already shown itself through the utterances of their mouths and what their breasts hide is greater still.”
And today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message. “Oh Crusaders, safety for you will only be wishes,[6] especially when you are fighting us all together.[7] Therefore, we will fight you all together,[7] until the war lays down its burdens[8] and Jesus, peace be upon him, will descend, breaking the cross, killing the swine and abolishing jizya.[9]”
These few lines are packed with references to Islam’s canonical texts.
[6] Muhammad famously told the Jews of Medina aslim taslamconvert/surrender (to Islam) and you will be safe’.  By this logic, those who refuse to convert to Islam can never be safe.
[7] Sura 9:36 “fight the polytheists all together as they fight you all together”. This verse comes hot on the heels of 9:29 which is the key verse in the Koran to support the subjugation of Christians under Islam’s yoke.  The Arabic word for ‘fight’ here actually means‘fight to kill’.

[8] Sura 47:4 “And when you meet in battle those who disbelieve, smite their necks [i.e. behead them]; and, when you have overcome them, by causing great slaughter among them, bind fast the fetters - then afterwards either release them as a favour or by taking ransom - until the war lays down its burdens.

[9] Muhammad said “Isa (Jesus) ... will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizyah. Allah will perish [destroy] all religions except Islam.” (Sunan Abu Dawud, Book of Battles).  According to this well-known tradition of Muhammad, Isa the Islamic Christ will destroy Christianity, and kill anyone who does not submit to the sharia of Muhammad.  In Islamic law the abolition of jizya means the end of tolerance for non-Muslim religions. After Jesus’ return, all humanity will be given only two choices: Islam or death.  These Christians in Tripoli are being killed  in anticipation of this end-times principle.
And the sea you have hidden Shaikh Usama Bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah, we will mix it with your blood.
The principle of qisas or retribution is at play here: just as Bin Ladin was buried at sea, so Christians will have their blood spilled into the ocean.   Cf. Sura 2: 190-94 “fight in the way of Allah those who fight you … slay these transgressors wherever you meet them and derive them out from where they have driven you out … if they fight you, then fight them …  if they violate the prohibition, then you may do the same in retaliation” And also Sura 16: 126 “retaliate with an equivalent punishment”.
The same motivation influenced the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot: because his bombs had caused people to die in burning buildings, so it was considered permissible to burn him.  See here.
The principle of qisas also accounts for the standard Guantanamo Bay-style orange jumpsuits supplied to the beheading victims.  This is saying: “we are humiliating you as you humiliated us at Guatanamo.”
The worldview of qisas is not limited to the Islamic State. Jordan and Egypt cited the same principle when executing prisoners and launching bombing raids in response to IS atrocities.
Another theological driver at play here is the principle of collective punishment: if one Christian wrongs a Muslim, then all Christians should be punished, even if these particular Egyptian Christians had absolutely nothing to do with Bin Ladin or his death:  because of the manner in which the United States buried Bin Ladin at sea, Egyptian Christians’ blood is to be mingled in the ocean.  Likewise, because of the humiliating way in which the United States treated uncooperative Muslim captives in Guantanamo, Egyptian Christians are to be beheaded wearing orange jumpsuits.
They supplicate what they worship and die upon their paganism.
As the victims are being forced down, first to kneel, and then to lower their heads into the sand, the subscription declares that they are ‘supplicating’ i.e. down on their knees to worship, and dying for the sake of their religion, which is their pagan ‘worship’.  As they go down, a number of the men can be seen calling on the name of Jesus. 

This textual inscription is designed to humiliate the victims and make crystal clear to other Christians that these men are being killed for their faith.  The manner of their death is also an enactment of the false worship they are charged with: they are compelled to bow down, as if to an idol, but they are going down to their deaths.  This ritual is communicating, “Because you have bowed down to a false god, you will now bow down to your death.”
This filthy blood is just some of what awaits you, in revenge for Camella and her sisters.
Camilla Shehata is a Coptic woman, the wife of a Christian priest, who went missing.  Her husband reported her missing to the police fearing that she had been kidnapped by Muslim men, who regularly kidnap, rape and forcibly convert Christian women in Egypt, all too often with the collusion of the authorities.  Kidnappers are known especially to target the wives of priests.  Later Camilla appeared on national television to state that she had just gone to be with relatives after a domestic dispute and she had not converted to Islam.  However the Muslim public in Egypt was not to be placated.  It was incited by Muslim leaders with the idea that she had converted to Islam, and the Coptic church, having kidnapped her, was torturing her to force her back into Christianity. This libel against Egyptian Christians was also made in connection with other Coptic women. 

This is a case of projection. Muslims have captured hundreds of Coptic girls and women in recent years (see here and here) compelling them through threats and violence to accept Islam and give false testimony that the have entered Islam willingly.  There is normally no recourse for the families of the captive females. The families are simply told that the women have converted to Islam and are now married, and their new husbands can speak for them, in accordance with Islamic law. (See my book The Third Choice, p.163ff for a theological explanation of why non-Muslim women are especially vulnerable to rape and capture in Islamic conditions.)
The massacre of congregants in the Baghdad Catholic cathedral on October 31, 2010 was also claimed by the Al Qaida perpetrators to be retribution for Camilla.  
The idea of revenging Camilla by killing random Coptic men is another example of a theological tendency among Islamic radical to promote collective punishment for the People of the Book.  The Moroccan jurist Al-Maghili wrote concerning the dhimma pact of ‘protection’ for non-Muslims, “The fact that one individual (or one group) among them [i.e. the non-Muslims] has broken the statute is enough to invalidate it for all of them”.
We will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission, the promise of our prophet, peace be upon him.
This references a number of well-known hadiths of Muhammad in which he prophesies the conquest of Rome, e.g.: “You will attack Arabia and Allah will enable you to conquer it, then you would attack Persia and He would make you to conquer it. Then you would attack Rome and Allah will enable you to conquer it,…” (Sahih Muslim, the Book of the Torments and Portents of the Last Hour).
This boast signifies the final destruction of the fifth of the four original centres of the church. The others, already overrun by Islam, are Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria.
The film ends with a close-up of the blood-red water of the ocean: the signature in blood.

Challenging Islam’s Warrant to Kill

0
0
This post was first published by FrontPage Magazine.

Last week the Islamic State’s ‘Hacking Division’ released the names and addresses of one hundred US military personnel.  It urged the ‘brothers residing in America’ – i.e. American Muslims – to ‘deal with’ them, which is to say, it wants them killed. 

There is much talk these days of radicalization and deradicalization. At the heart of both processes are religious ideas: theological dogmas.  What are some of the key theological principles which might cause a Muslim to take this call seriously? What is the Islamic reasoning given by the IS Hacking Division in support of its call to kill non-Muslims?

The Hacking Division quotes two verses of the Qur’an:
  • Sura 9:123 ‘fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you’ and
  • Sura 9:14 ‘Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them, and satisfy [actually yashfi ‘heal’] the breasts of a believing people’.
The meaning of these two verses hangs upon the word qātilū, translated here as ‘fight’. The verbal root q-t-l from which qātilū is formed means ‘kill’, so the Arabic actually means ‘fight to kill’ (see discussion here). These Qur’anic verses truly are commands to kill non-Muslims.

The second quoted verse, from Sura 9:14, puts forward a view concerning what Muslims should do about emotional pain and anguish they may experience because of unbelievers.  ‘Allah’, the verse says, ‘will heal the breasts’ of Muslims, – and then the sentence continues into the next verse – ‘and remove the rage of their hearts’.

The key concept here is that if Muslims have strong feelings, including anger, against non-Muslims, their emotional distress will subside and be ‘healed’ as they kill, humiliate and triumph over non-believers. Strange therapy indeed for the human soul!  According to the Qur’an, peace within the Muslim soul can be secured by shedding non-Muslim blood.

These are stock-standard verses used to urge Muslims to go for jihad against disbelievers. However what most caught my eye in the Hacking Division’s call to arms against infidels in America was a reference to Muhammad’s teachings. The Hacking Division refers to hadith 4661 in a published English version of the Sahih Muslim (translated by Abdul Hamid Sidiqqi).

The Sahih Muslim is one of the most revered and authoritative sources for the teaching and example of Muhammad, whose life is considered exemplary and compulsory for Muslims to emulate.  This particular hadith can be found on page 1263 of Volume 3 of the English edition:
Chapter 789 (DCCLXXXIX)
About a man who killed a disbeliever and embraced Islam.
(4661) It has been narrated on the authority of Abu Huraira that the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: A disbeliever and a believer who killed him will never be gathered together in Hell. [See here.]
This is a most significant statement. It is saying that if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim, they cannot both end up in hell.  The alternative to hell is paradise, so in other words, killing a non-Muslim – who is destined for hell due to their unbelief – can provide a sure ticket to paradise for a Muslim.

This tradition is the authority for a view widely put about by jihadis, that if a Muslim personally gets to kill a disbeliever, the Muslim will gain paradise.  Put together with with the famous belief that for a Muslim to be ‘martyred’ in jihad opens the gates of paradise (see Sura 3:169-170; 9:111; and 22:58), fighting to kill non-Muslims can be a ticket to glory, win or lose. Either one kills and gains a get-out-of-hell free card, or one is killed and gains a get-into-paradise-free card. This is a win-win proposition for the jihadi.

Persuading Muslims to take the words of Muhammad seriously is the core strategy of radicalization.  This tactic works as well as it does because it appeals to a plain reading of Islam’s holy texts.

To be deradicalized, a Muslim needs to repudiate the theological authority of the teachings of Muhammad and the Qur’an. This is a hard call for pious Muslims. Ayan Hirsi Ali was surely correct in her recent essay calling for reform of Islam when she wrote that:
‘the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.’
Hirsi Ali also declared:
‘we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.’
Hirsi Ali was right: the West needs to engage with and repudiate the Islamic dogmas that killing or being killed in murderous attacks against non-Mulims is some kind of golden key which unlocks the gates of paradise. Until these beliefs and the canonical teachings they rely on are acknowledged and repudiated, the lives of non-Muslims will continue to be discarded as the ‘ticket to paradise’ of Muslim belligerents.

Hadiths such as 4661 from Sahih Muslim, and the Qur’anic verses cited here are a genuine part of the Islamic canon. Such verses remain unrenounced and unrepudiated by a great many Muslims and Islamic institutions today.

As long as such texts are not repudiated, the theological winds of Islam will all too easily continue to sweep pious Muslim hearts and minds towards radicalization, a process which exalts the idea that the lives of infidels are disposable.

Islam’s warrant to kill infidels is an idea which deserves to be exposed, challenged, thoroughly debated, and rejected.


Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, 
a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, 
and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. 

Sex Slavery and the Islamic State

0
0
This article appears first in On Line Opinion.

Jamie Walker, Middle East correspondent for The Australian, asked two critical questions in a recent article which discussed the involvement of two Australian citizens, Mohamed Elomar and Khaled Sharrouf, in Islamic State sex slavery. In 2014 Elomar purchased sex slaves, of whom four, all Yazidis, later escaped to a refugee camp where the ABC caught up with them and interviewed them.  Elomar had also boasted on Twitter that he had “1 of 7 Yehzidi slave girls for sale” at $2500 each.

Walker’s questions were:

“The uncomfortable questions for the Western world, including Australia, are why this debased appeal seems to be gaining traction with Islamic State’s target audience, which increasingly includes women, and why it’s not challenged more stridently in the public arena.”
The Islamic State has given its own answer to the first question. In the fourth edition of its magazine Dabiq it aggressively promoted sex slavery as an Islamic practice, arguing that the practice conforms to the teaching and example of Muhammad and his companions.

Does this argument have any wider appeal than among Islamic State recruits?

The reality is that many Muslim scholars have upheld the practice of enslaving captives of war. For example Islamic revivalist Abul A‘la Maududi wrote in his influential and widely disseminated tract Human Rights in Islam that for Muslims to enslave their captives was “a more humane and proper way of disposing of them” than Western approaches. Enslavement by Muslims, he argued, is preferable to the provisions of the Geneva Convention because of the value of this policy for fuelling the growth of Islam:
“The result of this humane policy was that most of the men who were captured on foreign battlefields and brought to the Muslim countries as slaves embraced Islam and their descendants produced great scholars, imams, jurists, commentators, statesmen and generals of the army.”
Islamic revivalist movements which look forward to the restoration of an Islamic Caliphate have repeatedly endorsed the practice of slavery in the name of their religious convictions. For example the (now banned) Muhajiroun movement in the UK announced in an article, “How does Islam Classify Lands?” that once a true Islamic State is established, no-one living in other nations (which it calls Dar al Harb ‘house of war’) will have a right to their life or their wealth:
“… hence a Muslim in such circumstances can then go into Dar Al Harb and take the wealth from the people unless there is a treaty with that state. If there is no treaty individual Muslims can even go to Dar Al Harb and take women to keep as slaves.”
It is a problem that the Qur’an itself endorses having sex with captive women (Sura 4:24). According to a secure tradition (hadith) attributed to one of Muhammad’s companions, Abu Sa‘id al-Khudri, this verse of the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad at a time when Muslims had been ‘refraining’ from having sex with their married female captives. Verse 4:24 relieved them of this restraint by giving them permission to have sex with captive women even if the women were already married.

Abd-al-Hamid Siddiqui, a Fellow of the Islamic Research Academy of Karachi and the translator into English of the Sahih Muslim, commented on this tradition, saying: “When women are taken captive their previous marriages are automatically annulled. It should, however, be remembered that sexual intercourse with these women is lawful with certain conditions.”

There have been many cases reported across the centuries of Islamic armies using captive women for sex slavery, but is this any different from all wars? It is different in one important respect, that the mainstream of Islamic jurisprudence has justified and supported this practice on the basis of Islam’s canonical sources, including Muhammad’s own example and teaching.  Islamic sex slavery is religiously sanctioned ‘guilt-free sex’.

This religious teaching is impacting our world today because the global Islamic community has been deeply affected by a grassroots religious revival, which seeks to purify Islam and restore it to its foundational principles, which include rules for war and the treatment of captives.

This leads us to Walker’s second question: why is the Islamic State’s ‘debased appeal’ not ‘challenged more stridently in the public arena’?

An obstacle which stands in the way of such a challenge is that it would require a sober evaluation of the Islamic character of sex slavery. However even suggesting a link between Islam and ‘terrorism’ has become taboo to those who are afraid of being judged intolerant. Not only do some impose this taboo upon themselves, but they are quick to stigmatise those who do not partner with them in this ill-considered ‘tolerance’.

The taboo attached to making any link between Islamic State atrocities and the religion of Islam was apparent in comments by Greg Bearup on his interview with South Australian politician Cory Bernardi. During the course of the interview Senator Bernardi linked the Islamic State with Muhammad’s example, to which the interviewer wrote “Kaboom!”, and called the comment a ‘hand grenade’, ‘inflammatory’ and ‘divisive’.

While it is a hopeful sign that some Muslims, such as Anooshe Mushtaq, have been willing to explore the Islamic character of the Islamic State, non-Muslim opinion-makers should show more backbone by engaging with the issue at hand.

It is not a sign of tolerance when free people deliberately silence themselves about the ideological drivers of sex trafficking. The same can also be said of acts of terrorism, such as the world has witnessed over the past week in France, Tunisia and Kuwait.

Until societies are able and willing to have a frank and free discussion of the ideological drivers which motivate acts of terror and abuse, they should not expect to be able to develop effective strategies to contain or wind back such atrocities.

A state of denial is a state of defeat.


Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church,
a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum,
and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.




Paris attacks were not 'nihilism' but sacred strategy

0
0
LEADING commentator Janet Daley's article in Saturday's TelegraphThe West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad.

It is a triumph of religious illiteracy.
Janet Daley has called ISIS a 'death cult'

The jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond encompassing in ‘coherent, systematic thought’ that no vocabulary can describe it: ‘This is just insanity’, she writes. Because the enemy is ‘hysterical’, lacking 'rational demands', 'negotiable limits,’ or ‘intelligible objectives’ Daley claims it is pointless to subject its actions to any form of historical, social or theological analysis, for no-one should attempt to ‘impose logic on behaviour that is pathological’.

Despite this, Daley then ventures to offer analysis of and explanations for ISIS’ actions, but in doing so she relies upon her own conceptual categories, not those of ISIS.

Her explanations therefore fall wide of the mark.

 

‘Civilians’

Daley writes: ‘We face a violent and highly contagious madness that believes the killing of civilians is a moral act.’  Here she appeals to Western concepts of war, reflected, for example, in the Geneva Convention, which provides detailed principles for the ‘protection of civilian persons’.

Yet the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own, is to describe it in its own terms.

ISIS does not subscribe to the Geneva Convention.  Its actions and strategies are based upon medieval Islamic laws of jihad, which make no use of the modern Western concept of ‘civilian’.

They do, however, refer to the category of disbelievers (mushrik or kafir).
ISIS believes that killing disbelievers is a moral act, in accordance, for example, with Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an, which states :‘Fight and kill the idolators (mushrik) wherever you find them'.

 

 Not nihilism

Daley writes: ‘The enemy has stated explicitly that it does not revere life at all’ and ‘Civilians are not collateral damage in this campaign: their deaths are the whole point.’  She goes on to lament that the latest French attacks lack any purpose, but are ‘carried out for the sheer nihilistic thrill of it’.

The claim that ISIS does not ‘revere life’ seems to refer to any number of statements by Islamic radicals, including an ISIS militant who vowed to ‘fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies’, and boasted that ISIS ‘loves death like you love life’ (see here).  This is a theological reference to a series of verses in the Qur’an in which Jews are criticised for desiring life (Sura 2:94-96, 62:6-8).

According to the Qur’an, loving life is a characteristic of infidels (Sura 3:14; 14:3; 75:20; 76:27) because it causes them to disregard the importance of the next life.  The taunt much used by jihadis, ‘We love death like you love life’,  implies that jihadis are bound for paradise while their enemies are hell-bound.

The point of these statements is that Muslims are willing to fight to the death, while their infidel enemies will turn back in battle. This is not about reverence for life, but about who has the will to win. This has nothing to do with nihilism, which is a belief that there are no values, nothing to be loyal to, and no purpose in living. In fact ISIS fighters have strong and clear loyalties and values, alien though they may be to those of Europe.

Daley’s claim that the deaths are ‘the whole point’ is also mistaken. While it is true that the jihadis consider killing infidels a meritorious act, potentially earning the killer a place in paradise (see here), and they consider being killed in battle against infidels a ticket to paradise, in fact the killings do serve a strategic purpose. This is to make infidels afraid, and thereby to weaken their will to resist Islamic dominance.

This strategy is commended by the Qur’an, for example in Sura 8:12, 'I shall cast dread into the hearts of those who disbelieve. So strike above (their) necks and strike (off) all their fingers!', as well as by the successful example of Muhammad in fighting the Jews of Medina, referred to in Sura 33:26-27, ‘He brought down from their fortifications those of the People of the Book who supported them, and cast dread into their hearts. You killed a group (of them), and took captive (another) group. And he caused you to inherit their land, their homes, and their wealth, and a land you had not set foot on.’  A similar passage is Sura 59:2, which ISIS has in fact been quoting in its celebrations of the Paris carnage.

It may seem to Daley that ISIS’ often-stated intention of defeating the West is fanciful, but the point is to understand ISIS, and as far as it is concerned, these deadly attacks are instrumental in weakening the will of infidels and hastening eventual victory.

Daley wonders what possible point these attacks could serve. She speculates:  '… what is the alternative that is being demanded? Sharia law? The subjection of women? An end to liberal democracy? Are any of these things even within the bounds of consideration? What could be accomplished by national self-doubt or criticism at this point, when there is not even a reasonable basis for discussion with the enemy?'  It is hardly a secret that the ultimate goal of ISIS is to bring non-Muslims everywhere  to convert to Islam or live under an Islamic caliphate as dhimmis. Sharia law and the subjection of women are part and parcel of this.

It is odd that Daley laments having no reasonable basis for negotiating with the enemy.  ISIS is not playing by a Western-style negotiating rule book. It is following Muhammad’s instructions to his followers to offer three choices to infidels: conversion, surrender, or the sword.  Bin Ladin has explained that the West’s rejection of this framework is the whole reason for its conflict with what he calls ‘the authority of Islam’:
“Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue; one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice, and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: [1] either willing submission [conversion]; or [2] payment of the jizya, through physical, though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or [3] the sword, for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.” (The Al Qaeda Reader)
 It may seem unimaginable to European elites that ISIS is fighting for the goal of the surrender or conversion of Europe, but ISIS is thinking in time frames which extend to centuries, and their forebears conquered vast territories using such tactics.  A final act of conquest can be preceded by decades, or even centuries, of military raids.

While killing is currently the main mode of ISIS’ attacks inside the West, if they could they would use other tactics as well, such as taking booty and slaves or destroying infrastructure, as they have been doing in Syria and Iraq.

 

Grievances

Daley claims it is pointless to argue with people who have no reasonable grievances, for ‘the French people did not deserve this, just as Americans did not deserve 9/11’.  However the important question is how ISIS sees its own motivations.  Their ideology teaches them that infidels deserve death, simply by virtue of their unbelief.  This has nothing to do with France’s history of colonialism or its treatment of Muslim minorities.  ISIS needed no appeal to grievances to justify killing and enslaving Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, so why should they view the people of France any differently?  Their objection to Europeans is that they are not Muslims, and their objection to European states is that they do not implement sharia law.

 

Irresponsible

It is irresponsible and dangerous to claim that a tenacious enemy is insane and incomprehensible. To refuse to acknowledge the ideology of ISIS, and to deny its relevance is tantamount to a death-wish.
Like so many other revivalist Islamic groups, ISIS believes that it will be successful if it stays faithful to its divinely-mandated goals and tactics.  It believes the nations of Europe are morally corrupt, weak infidels who love life too much to fight a battle to the death with stern Muslim soldiers who have set their hearts on paradise.  It believes Europe stands on the wrong side of history.

To combat this ideology it is necessary for Europe to prove ISIS wrong on all counts. It must show strength, not weakness. It must have confidence in its cultural and spiritual identity. It must be willing to fight for its survival. It must show that it believes in itself enough to fight for its future. It must defend its borders.  It must act like someone who intends to win an interminably long war against an implacable foe.

There is a great deal Europe could have done to avert this catastrophe.  It could, long ago, have challenged the Islamic view of history which idolised jihad and its intended outcome, the dhimma.  It could have demanded that Islam renounce its love affair with conquest and dominance.  It could have encouraged Muslims to follow a path of self-criticism leading to peace.  This lost opportunity is what Bat Ye’or referred to in a prescient 1993 interview as the ‘relativization of religion, a self-critical view of the history of Islamic imperialism’.

Instead the elites of Europe embarked on decades of religiously illiterate appeasement and denialism.

There is still much that European states could do to defeat ISIS.  They could, for example, inflict catastrophic military failure upon it as a powerful counter-argument to its theology of success.  This will not deliver decisive, final victory against jihadism, but it will make the supremacist claims of ISIS less credible and hurt its recruitment.  Islam’s laws of war allow Muslims to suspend their battle with infidels temporarily if there is no immediate prospect of victory and the risks to their cause are too great.

Europe also needs to act to suppress incitement of jihadi ideology by its clients, including the anti-Israeli jihadism of the Palestinian Authority.  It must put more pressure on the militarily vulnerable Gulf states to stop funding Islamic radicalism throughout the Middle East and exporting jihad-revering versions of Islamic theology throughout the whole world.

One hope for Europe is that Islamic populations will get tired of the doctrine of jihad and all its bitter fruits. There are some signs that this is already happening, and many of the Muslims who are now seeking asylum in their hundreds of thousands will have come to this conclusion.  However it seems likely that Muslim communities now established within Europe will be the last to reconsider their dogmas and their take on history, because they have not had to suffer first-hand the harsh realities of life under Islamic dystopias such as the ISIS ‘caliphate’ or Iran’s Islamic Revolution.  A 2014 opinion poll found that among French 18-24 year olds, the Islamic State had an approval rating of 27%, which must include the overwhelming majority of young French Muslim men.  For Europe, the challenge from within will be more enduring and intractable than the challenge from without.

Nevertheless, European states could still do much on their own turf. They could ban Saudi and other Middle Eastern funding to Islamic organisations, including mosques. They could stop appeasing Islamists in their midst. They could, even at this late hour, demand that the large and rapidly growing Muslim communities now well-established across Europe engage in constructive self-criticism of their religion, for the sake of peace.

This article first appeared in Lapido Media.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

Love alone is not enough

0
0
Walid Aly is a well-known Australian media commentator.  This week on Channel Ten’s The Projecthe produced an impassioned and compelling speech about the Paris killings. This went viral, achieving 27 million views on social media within just a few days. That is more hits than there are people in Australia.



According to Walid Aly, ISIS is weak but it hides this because it wants us all to be afraid, very afraid. Its whole purpose is that our fear will turn to hate, and hate will ripen into ‘World War III’.

All people of good will who would stand against ISIS, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, must therefore come together in unity.  According to Walid Aly, love, and less hate is what we need.

Walid Aly is absolutely right that we do need love. But like the air we breathe, love by itself is not enough. It is not all we need.

We also need truth, and a whole lot more of it. John's gospel reports that Jesus came ‘full of grace and truth.’ Truth without grace becomes a police state. But grace without truth is every bit as dangerous.

Walid Aly himself rightly identified the Paris atrocity as an “Islamist terrorist attack”. It is not hatred to ask what this word ‘Islamist’ actually means.

He was also right to point out that ISIS wants to set non-Muslims and Muslims against each other.  But this is not all ISIS wants, and saying this does not explain why they want it. It is not enough to say “ISIS wants to cause World War III,” for war is but a means to an end.  This tactic is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.

Asking hard questions is not evidence of lack of love.  It is not victimizing Muslims to seek to understand the theology of the jihadis.  Asking how and why ISIS makes use of the Qur’an or the model of Muhammad is not vilification.

These points are important because the feeling of being unloved by itself is not enough to turn so many young people into killers.  There are many communities in the world which experience hatred, but this is rarely enough on its own to give rise to virulent, violent global ideologies.

No one could dispute that the tactic of intentionally using violence to incite fear and hatred is one of the weapons in the jihadis’ arsenal, but it is just that: a tactic. Hatred incited by violence is not the heart of the matter, nor the fundamental driver in this war.  It is but a symptom of deeper things.

Hatred can fuel this war, but love alone will not put it out.

Furthermore, a danger with Walid Aly's rhetoric is that it could work as a wedge to separate love from truth, treating the two as strangers.  It could be used as a pretext to censor those who ask the hard questions, on the grounds that this is unloving.  In this struggle it is wrong to privilege either love or truth, for we will need both.

Truth without love can cause endless heartache.  This is true. But love without truth can cause a naive blindness which meekly tolerates abuse and leads to suicidal submission.

This is likely to be a very long war.  Relationships will be  strained.  And yes, we will all need a lot of compassion.  But without truth to strengthen it, love alone will not save us. 

This post also appeared in Lapido Media.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.



Paris attacks: Islamic State sees its attacks as sacred strategy

0
0
This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted a few days previously on Lapido Media‘Paris attacks were not nihilism’.

As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week has situated these atrocities in opposition to values familiar to western people. Seen in this light the attacks appear senseless and even insane. US Secretary of State John Kerry called the killers ‘psychopathic monsters’. However the first step in understanding a cultural system alien to one’s own is to describe it in its own terms.

We can and must love our neighbour, as Walid Aly urged this week on The Project, but this need not prevent us from understanding our enemy, and to do this we need to grasp that this latest slaughter was shaped by religious beliefs.




In July a ISIS militant vowed on video to ‘fill the streets of Paris with dead bodies’, boasting that ISIS ‘loves death like you love life’.  Yet for ISIS these attacks were not pointless nihilism. Nihilism is a belief that there are no values, nothing to be loyal to, and no purpose in living, but these killings were purposeful. They were designed to make infidels afraid, to weaken their will to resist, and to render them self-destructive through fear. This strategy is made explicit in an ISIS celebratory post put out after the carnage, which quoted the Koran: ‘Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers’ (Sura 59:2). 

The taunt that ISIS jihadis ‘love death like you love life’ is not simply a life-denying death wish. This references multiple passages in the Koran in which Jews (Sura 2:94-96, 62:6-8) and non-Muslims in general (Sura 3:14; 14:3; 75:20; 76:27) are condemned for desiring life.  On this basis, ISIS considers Europeans to be morally corrupt, weak infidels who love this life too much to fight a battle to the death with stern Muslim soldiers whose hearts are set on paradise.

The ISIS post also referred to the French victims as ‘pagans’, by which it made clear that the victims were killed for being non-Muslims. Many commentators have rightly lamented ‘civilian casualties’, but the point is that ISIS rejects the Geneva Convention and has no use for the modern western concept of a ‘civilian’.  ISIS fighters are taught that non-Muslims, referred to as mushrikin ‘pagans’ or kuffar ‘infidels’, deserve death simply by virtue of their disbelief in Islam.  For ISIS, killing disbelievers is a moral act, in accordance with Sura 9:5 of the Qur’an, ‘fight and kill the mushrikin wherever you find them’ and Sura 9:29, ‘fight (i.e. to kill) the People of the Book’.

Some, like Australia’s Grand Mufti, have spoken in this past week of Muslim grievances.  However ISIS needed no appeal to grievances to justify its genocidal killing and enslaving of the Yazidis, whom it targeted solely because they were ‘pagans’.  It has the same fundamental objection to the people of France.

ISIS objects to Europeans because they are not Muslims, and to European states because they do not implement sharia law. Its goal is to dominate Europeans as dhimmis under a caliphate. It claims to follow Muhammad’s instructions to offer three choices to infidels: conversion, surrender, or the sword, or, as Bin Ladin put it, ‘The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit [i.e. convert], or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.’


It may seem fanciful for ISIS to set its sights on the surrender or conversion of Europe, but, mindful of the history of Islamic imperialism, it thinks in time frames which extend to centuries. It believes Europe stands on the wrong side of history, and a final act of conquest can be preceded by decades, or even centuries, of military raids.

To combat this ideology it is necessary to prove ISIS wrong on all counts. France – or any nation which believes in its own future – must show strength, not weakness. It must have confidence in its cultural and spiritual identity. It must be willing to fight for its survival. It must show that it believes in itself enough to fight for its future. It must defend its borders. It must act like someone who intends to win an interminably long war against an implacable foe.

There is a great deal Europe could have done to avert this catastrophe, which ISIS has declared is ‘just the beginning’. It could, long ago, have demanded that Islam renounce its love affair with conquest and dominance. It could have encouraged Muslims to follow a path of self-criticism leading to peace.  Instead the elites of Europe embarked on decades of religiously illiterate appeasement and denialism.

There is still much that can be done. European armies could inflict catastrophic military failure upon ISIS as a counter-argument to its theology of success. This will not eradicate jihadism, nor bring peace in the Middle East, but it would make the supremacist claims of ISIS less credible and hurt its recruitment.

Europe also needs to act to suppress incitement of jihadi ideology by its clients, including the jihadism of the Palestinian Authority. It must put more pressure on the militarily vulnerable Gulf states to stop funding radicalism throughout the Middle East and exporting jihad-revering versions of Islamic theology throughout the whole world.

For Europe, the challenge within will be more enduring and intractable than the challenge without.  A 2014 opinion poll found that among all French 18-24 year olds, the Islamic State had an approval rating of 27%.  While many of the millions of war-weary Muslims now seeking asylum in the west will have had enough of jihad, it seems likely that Muslim communities already established in the west may be the last to challenge Islam’s supremacist take on history, because they have not had to suffer first-hand the harsh realities of life under Islamist dystopias such as ISIS and the Iranian Revolution.

Nevertheless, European states could still do much in their own backyard. They could ban Saudi and other Middle Eastern funding to Islamic organisations, including mosques. They could stop appeasing Islamists in their midst. They could, even at this late hour, insist that the large and rapidly growing Muslim communities now well-established across Europe engage in constructive self-criticism of their religion, for the sake of peace.  If this fails then according to ISIS’s jihadi mindset the alternatives are conversion, surrender, or death.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-GinsburgWriting Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.

John Eibner on the Future of Syria

0
0
John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International and anti-slavery activist, shares his wisdom on the future of Syria on The Tablet blogs, including reflections on the collective desire of the West, Turkey and Gulf States to establish a Sunni Salafist state in Syria as a bulwark against Iranian power. 

This failed policy let the Sunni jihadi genie out of its bottle in Syria to create the ‘opposition’, which led to the creation of the Islamic State and disintegration of Syria and Iraq. The only rational solution, Eibner argues, is a return to a policy of supporting a secular state.

However the more likely outcome is a long and cruel proxy war which only finishes when the fighting-age manpower of Syria is exhausted – i.e. when a generation of young men has been killed or fled the region.

Along the way there are serious risks that tensions will escalate between the external powers whose proxy war this is. e.g. Iran vs the Gulf States, or Russian vs. Turkey (as we have seen this past week with the downing of a Russian Jet by Turkey).

This is what the post-American Middle East looks like.


Turnbull’s Islamic Howlers

0
0
Agility and innovation? Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s version of history is all that and more. Leaping facts in a single bound, he ducks and weaves though a thicket of politically correct cliches to land effortlessly upon the desired conclusion: the West owes everything to Mohammad.


Back in 2011, on 28 February, Malcolm Turnbull, now Australia’s Prime Minister, had this to say about Islam on Q&A(excerpted here):
Islam is an ancient religion, of great scholarship. I mean — for heavens sake — much of our learning and culture came to us from the Muslims, just like, you know, our whole system of numbers and much of the learning of the ancient Greeks only survived because of the Arab scholars and the Islamic scholars. So, you know, the idea that Islam is antithetical to learning or culture or scholarship is absurd. Now, you know, it’s a great tradition. It is important for us that we promote and encourage Islam and Islamic traditions which are moderate, which support freedom, which support democracy and which support Australian values — not in the sense of “Aussie values” — but in the sense of democracy, rule of law, tolerance, freedom. That's what we’re talking about and they are universal values.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull
Malcolm Turnbull made this statement in order to dismiss a suggestion he considered absurd, namely that Islamic schools in Australia promote extremism.  He intended the argument he put forward to be evidence for the inherent moderation of Islam.

The idea that Western people should feel indebted to Islam for keeping Greek and Hindu learning alive is common enough.  But does it make any sense at all?

Consider the case of the Hindu number system.  Muslim conquests of the Indian subcontinent commenced in the 7th century and by the early 9th century Muslim scholars had learned about the Hindu numbering system and adopted it.  Use of the system then spread rapidly across the Arab world, and by the early 10th century it had reached Spain.

The Hindus were quite capable of preserving their intellectual achievements without the dubious benefits of Islamic conquest. Indeed Hindu societies have preserved the use of the number system they invented right down to the present day.

The fact that this excellent system passed into Europe via Arab colonies stretching around the Mediterranean cannot justify a claim that the Hindu system of numbers ‘only survived’ because of Muslims or Islam.  Nor does it imply that the Arabs who passed on this numbering system to the West were – to use Turnbull’s words — ‘moderate’ or supportive of freedom and democracy.  It is not possible to work out whether a society is moderate from the numbering system it uses.  Even the Islamic State uses the same numbering system as Malcolm Turnbull.

Concerning Greek learning I had this to say in my book, The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom:
A repeated theme in ... school texts is that the West should be grateful to Islamic civilization for preserving Greek philosophy. The narrative offered to justify this gratitude is that during the Dark Ages the Islamic world underwent a golden age of cultural and scientific development, preserving Greek learning, which then kick-started the Western Renaissance.
Of course Greek civilization did not need ‘rescue-by-conquest’: in fact it continued in Constantinople all through the European (so-called) dark ages. It is true that when the Europeans translated Arabic texts into Latin, this did stimulate the development of Western philosophy and science. Many terms passed over from Arabic into European languages as a result, including sherbet, zero and zenith. However the fact that elements of Greek philosophy and science were transmitted to Europe via Arabic is not something for which Western children should be schooled to feel grateful. If Arab conquest had never happened, we can assume that Greek culture and philosophy would have continued to develop in Alexandria, Damascus and Constantinople to the present day.

In reality, as Crombie pointed out in The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo, the conquest of the heart of the Greek-speaking world by Islam, and resulting Arab control of the Mediterranean, stunted scientific progress in Europe:
… it was the eruption of the Mohammedan invaders into the Eastern Empire in the 7th century that gave the most serious blow to learning in Western Christendom. The conquest of much of the Eastern Empire by the Arabs meant that the main reservoir of Greek learning was cut off from Western scholars for centuries …
Islam’s disruption of Mediterranean civilization ushered in the so-called European ‘Dark Ages’, as historian Henri Pirenne concluded in his classic study, Mohammed and Charlemagne:
The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity. … The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer the thoroughfare of commerce and of thought which it had always been. The West was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources.
It is disappointing that today history books are teaching a dhimmified version of history, according to which children are schooled in feeling grateful to Islam for rescuing Western and Christian culture from Islam itself. This is exactly the dhimmi condition, and the essential meaning of the jizya payment ritual: to render gratitude to Islam for being rescued by conquest.
Malcolm Turnbull’s comment on Q&A illustrates the hole the West is falling into.  It risks being buried alive by the weight of bad ideas about its own identity and history.

In the face of escalating Islamic terrorism, it is reasonable to inquire into the contribution schooling may or may not make to the ideological formation of jihadis.  However the way to make that inquiry is by examining what people are saying and doing today, not by making grandiose appeals to a mythical history.

To learn from history is wisdom.  To abuse it is folly indeed.


This article first appeared with Quadrant Online.
Mark Durie is a Shillman-GinsburgWriting Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.





Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

0
0
 This article first appeared with Independent Journal. Originally published under the title “Anyone Using The Phrase ‘Islam Is A Religion Of Peace’ Needs To Read This”

Days after the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the threat of ISIS missed the mark. In fact, President Obama seemed at times to be more concerned with Americans ostracizing Muslim communities through “suspicion and hate,” than he was with protecting innocent American civilians from murder in the name of radical Islam.

It is high time for western political leaders to stop responding to terrorism by naming Islam as ‘the religion of peace’. It is time to have a hard conversation about Islam.


The West is in the throes of acute cognitive dissonance over Islam, whose brands are at war with each other. On the one hand we are told that Islam is the Religion of Peace. On the other hand we are confronted with an unending sequence of acts of terror committed in the name of the faith.

There is a depressing connection between the two brands: the louder one brand becomes, the more the volume is turned up on the other.

The slogan ‘Religion of Peace’ has been steadily promoted by western leaders in response to terrorism: George Bush Jr and Jacques Chirac after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7, David Cameron after drummer Lee Riby was beheaded and after British tourists were slaughtered in Tunisia, and François Hollande after the Charlie Hebdo killings. After the beheading of 21 Copts on a Libyan beach Barak Obama called upon the world to “continue to lift up the voices of Muslim clerics and scholars who teach the true peaceful nature of Islam.”

One may well ask how ‘the religion of peace’ became a brand of Islam, for the phrase cannot be found in the Qur’an, nor in the teachings of Muhammad.

Islam was first called ‘the religion of peace’ as late as 1930, in the title of a book published in India by Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi. The phrase was slow to take off, but by the 1970s it was appearing more and more frequently in the writings of Muslims for western audiences.

What does “religion of peace” actually mean?

Words for ‘peace’ in European languages imply the absence of war, and freedom from disturbance. It is no coincidence that the German words Friede‘peace’ and frei‘free’ sound similar, because they come from the same root.

While there is a link in Arabic between salam, a word often translated ‘peace’, and Islam, the real connection is found in the idea of safety.

The word Islam is based upon a military metaphor. Derived from aslama‘surrender’ its primary meaning is to make oneself safe (salama) through surrender. In its original meaning, a muslim was someone who surrendered in warfare.

Thus Islam did not stand for the absence of war, but for one of its intended outcomes: surrender leading to the ‘safety’ of captivity. It was Muhammad himself who said to his non-Muslim neighbors aslim taslam‘surrender (i.e. convert to Islam) and you will be safe’.

The Religion of Peace slogan has not gone uncontested. It has been rejected by many, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Melanie Phillips writing for The Times, who called it ‘pure myth’.

Even among Muslims the phrase has not only been challenged by radical clerics such as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, but also by mainstream Muslim leaders.

Sheikh Ramadan Al-Buti of Syria was one of the most widely respected traditionalist Sunni scholars before he was killed in 2013 by a suicide bomber. The year before he had been listed as number 27 in the ‘The Muslim 500’, an annual inventory of the most influential Muslims in the world. According to Al-Buti, the claim that Islam is a peaceful religion was a ‘falsehood’ imposed upon Muslims by westerners to render Islam weak. He argued in The Jurisprudence of the Prophetic Biography that when non-Muslims fear Islamic jihad, their initial inclination is to accuse the religion of being violent. However they then change tack, and craftily feed to Muslims the idea that Islam is peaceful, in order to make it so. He laments the gullibility of ‘simple-minded Muslims’, who:
“… readily accept this ‘defense’ as valid and begin bringing forth one piece of evidence after another to demonstrate that Islam is, indeed, a peaceable, conciliatory religion which has no reason to interfere in others’ affairs. … The aim … is to erase the notion of jihad from the minds of all Muslims.”
There does seem to be something to Al-Buti’s theory, for it has invariably been after acts of violence done in the name of Islam that western leaders have seen fit to make theological pronouncements about Islam’s peacefulness. Who are they trying to convince?

In the long run this cannot be a fruitful strategy. It invites mockery, such as Palestinian cleric Abu Qatada’s riposte to George Bush’s declaration that ‘Islam is peace’. Abu Qatada asked: ‘Is he some kind of Islamic scholar?’

We do need to have a difficult conversation about Islam. This is only just beginning, and it will take a long time. The process will not be helped by the knee-jerk tendency of western leaders to pop up after every tragedy trying to have the last word on Islam. This strategy has failed, and it is time to go deeper.

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

Open Letter to President Obama about Christmas Bells Falling Silent in the Middle East

0
0
Dear President Obama,

in your recent  statement on persecuted Christians at Christmas you stated:
In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent; this silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.
When you say that ‘church bells have rung for centuries’ you are not speaking the truth.  Bells have rung in Syria and Iraq for not much more than a hundred years, at most.

As determined by Islamic law, church bells did not sound throughout the middle East for more than a thousand years from the 7th century conquests until modern times (except under the Crusaders).  This was due to the conditions set by the Pact of the Caliph Umar, by which Christians of Syria surrendered to Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD.  In this pact the Christians agreed that “We will not sound the bells in our churches.”  Churches in regions controlled by Muslims used semantrons (also called nakos) instead of the forbidden church bells.  Examples of these are still visible in Jerusalem to this day, e.g. see here.

The pact of Umar is an example of what is known as a dhimma pact.  Christians living in regions conquered by Islam were known as dhimmis.  As dhimmis they were not permitted to display their religion in public.  The silence of the bells was just one of many restrictions imposed upon Christians by Islamic law.

Nakos (gong) outside St James Church in Jerusalem
Hamas, when it took control of Gaza, also re-implemented dhimma conditions over Christians, and ISIL has now done the same in regions it controls.

The silence of church bells for more than a thousand years across the Middle East bears witness to the conquest and long-standing suppression of Christian societies under Islamic rule.  Recent genocidal attacks on Christians by ISIL are sadly but the end-stage of a long series of abuses.  They are the culmination of an historical process, not a departure from it.

President Obama, it is good that you have desired to speak up for persecuted Christians, but when you do so, please speak the truth.  Please do not whitewash history, because to do so partners with abuse.

Sincerely,

Dr Mark Durie, BA, BTh, DipTh, PhD, FAHA
27 December 2015



Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.





Minister for Islamic Apologetics

0
0
Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells
This article was first published on Quadrant Online.

Other than the need to discredit her party’s former leader and push what might be termed the Turnbull Doctrine of warm-and-cuddly relativism, what could have possessed the Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs to present Islamic dogma as incontrovertible fact?
 Writing in The Australian, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has attempted to throw light on the challenge of Islamic radicalism. She offers a ‘reality check’ by injecting what she asserts are ‘basic facts’ into the public debate. However she only succeeds in promoting misinformation and multiplying confusion.

Why must the Australian assistant minister for multicultural affairs present Islamic dogma as incontrovertible fact? Fierravanti-Wells astonishingly declares the Koran to be ‘a collection of revelations from God to the Prophet Mohammed.’  Does she really accept it as a ‘basic fact’ – for the purpose of public debate – that Mohammed was God’s prophet, or that the Koran is a genuine revelation from God? Surely only a believing Muslim could make such a declaration and mean it?

Why can Fierravanti-Wells not show more sensitivity to disbelievers in Islam – the majority of her audience – by adopting an objective stance, for example by saying ‘Muslims believe the Koran to be a collection of revelations from God,’ or ‘Muslims believe Mohammed to be a prophet’?

Fierravanti-Wells also misrepresents other faiths.  It is not true that all ‘world faiths’ apart from Islam have intermediaries between God and the individual.  The majority of Protestants around the world do not recognise a hierarchy of clergy, and a great many Christians do not accept that there are intermediaries between themselves and God.  To project supposed attributes of Catholic Christianity onto all Christians as part of an apology for Islam is not ‘basic fact’, but propaganda pure and simple.

Why does Fierravanti-Wells not understand that many Christians will see her list of ‘basic facts’ as a crude distortion of what they believe?  Does she really mean to imply that the Christians of the world have a single overarching authority to ‘establish or forbid’ religious practices or interpretation of the Bible?  They do not.  In this respect Muslims are no different from Christians. Of course some Christians do recognise an authority for their own denomination, but so do some Muslims sects.

Many Christian groups do not recognise ‘priests’ and they believe that any Christian can fulfill a role of preaching or leading worship. Many would believe that any Christian can gather a flock, plant a church, or function as pastor to it.  The fact that not all denominations allow such license is beside the point.  All over this country Christian congregations are being started all the time by lay people. There is, moreover, no single overarching system for training Christian clergy in Australia, but a multiplicity of systems and training options.

Equally misleading is the claim that there is no overarching authority in Islam.  Many Islamic countries, such as Egypt, have a public official known as the mufti.  The mufti’s function is to pass authoritative rulings at a national level on religious matters. Moreover the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation – the UN of Islamic states – has established a peak religious body, the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, which is tasked with issuing authoritative rulings on religious matters. This academy draws upon the leading authorities on Islam from the nations of the world and is backed by the considerable political clout of the OIC.  It has been influential in several important areas, such as the international system of Islamic finance. Of course its rulings are not accepted by, or binding on, all Muslims, but there is no global Christian body which has that kind of authority either, and certainly no Christian organization has a claim to global legitimacy comparable to that of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy.

All these errors aside, the bottom line is that it is up to the Muslims of Australia who they choose to listen to and appoint as their religious leaders.  If what Fierravanti-Wells implies is true, namely that the vast majority of Australian Muslims want a ‘moderate’ form of Islam preached in their mosques, then let them take steps to ensure this happens. If they are unhappy with their imams, let them replace them, or else vacate those mosques to frequent other mosques they like better, with imams whose teachings they find more congenial.  This is how religious freedom works. It is precisely because Australian Muslims do have religious freedom that it is entirely reasonable for Australians to hold the Muslim community to account for the utterances of their leaders. 

Mark Durie is a theologian, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness

Do we worship the same God? Wheaton College, Larycia Hawkins and Miroslav Volf

0
0
The recent suspension of Larycia Hawkins by Wheaton College is a symptom of a fault line among evangelicals about Islam.  The question of whether the God of the Qur'an is the same as the God of the Bible is an important and complex one, but it is unhelpful to politicize inquiry into it by insisting that anyone who disagrees with one position or another is a bigot.

This article below is appearing in the February 2016 edition of Eternity, which is distributed to local churches across Australia. It is more an engagement with Volf than an exploration of the evolving, escalated situation at Wheaton, which seems to be not just about the 'same God' issue, but also about the use and impact of social media in the context of an academic dispute.  I would like to write more on this interesting topic of 'Do we worship the same God' and the situation at Wheaton but am very tied up with finishing a book project just at the moment.
Also readers may like to listen to a podcast debate between Miroslav Volf and Nabeel Qureshi:  http://rzim.org/global-blog/do-christians-and-muslims-worship-the-same-god-debate-with-nabeel-qureshi-and-dr-miroslav-volf

 Wheaton announced that one of their tenured professors, Larycia Hawkins, was put on paid leave while they ‘explore theological implications of her recent public statements concerning Christianity and Islam’.  In particular Wheaton wanted to know whether Hawkins’ statement that Muslims and Christians worship the same God is compatible with the college’s Statement of Faith. Larycia Hawkins was asked to clarify her views. (Wheaton College Council has subsequently confirmed that the college has commenced a termination process for her position.)

The decision led to protests on the Wheaton campus.  Miroslav Volf, Professor of Theology at Yale,  published an article in the Washington Post criticizing Wheaton. Volf suggests that Wheaton is motivated by hatred towards Muslims, dressed up in dogma. He argued that:
Those who claim that Muslims and Christians do not worship the same God base this upon Muslims’ denial of the Trinity and the incarnation.

However Jews deny the Trinity and the incarnation, and Christians down the ages have not claimed that Jews worship a different God.

Therefore those who do not accept the ‘same God’ thesis must be motivated by enmity, not reason.
There are problems with this reasoning. One is the premise. Wheaton had not itself stated that it objects to the ‘same God’ thesis on the basis of Muslims’ beliefs about the Trinity and the incarnation. However Volf appears to impute this thinking to all Christians who do not accept his ‘same God’ thesis.

Another is the leap from pointing out a supposed inconsistency in the reasoning of other Christians to making a severe value judgment about their motives.

In reality the best and strongest reason for rejecting the ‘same God’ thesis is not Muslims’ disbelief in the Trinity or the incarnation.  It is that the Qur’an projects a different understanding of God from the Bible.  As Denny Burk of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville put it ‘our books are very different’.

The theological differences involved are subtler and more fundamental than ticking or not ticking the Trinity box.

Eminent Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod observed that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation was grounded upon the fundamentally Biblical – and thoroughly Jewish – concept of the indwelling of God’s Shekinah presence with his people.  Christian beliefs about the Trinity and the incarnation developed out of Jewish incarnational theologies.

Unlike the Old Testament, the Qur’an completely lacks a theology of the presence of God. Although the Arabic term sakīnah– borrowed from Hebrew shekinah– appears six times in the Qur’an, it has been repurposed to mean ‘tranquility’, and the concept of the personal presence of God is not comprehended by Quranic theology.  It is not just that Islam rejects the incarnation of Jesus: in complete contrast to Judaism its scripture offers no basis for an incarnational theology.

Judaism differs from Islam in its organic relationship to Christianity in two key respects.

First, Christians and Jews share scripture. Judaism bases its understanding of God on what was the Bible of Jesus, the Tanakh or Old Testament. This is not the case with Islam.  Muslims do not base their theology on any part of the Bible.  Indeed mainstream Islam rejects the authority of the Bible, for reasons clearly stated in the Qur’an.

Second, Jesus was a practicing Jew, and so were his disciples, so it would be absurd to state that the God of the faith Jesus practiced is different from the Christian God.  This same observation does not apply to Islam. Muhammad was never a practicing Jew nor a practicing Christian, and, according to Muslim tradition, the large majority of his companions came to Islam out of paganism. This has deeply influenced the Qur’an and its understanding of God.

It is disappointing that Volf attributes fear-based enmity and loveless bigotry to Wheaton’s leaders.  He implies that Christians who disagree with his 'same God' thesis must want to fight Muslims. Such rhetoric incites hatred and contempt over a theological difference of opinion.

The question of whether the God of the Qur’an is the same as the God of the Bible is an important and complex one.  Christians do need to consider carefully to what extent the God of the Bible and the God of the Qur’an are the same or different.  This has far-reaching implications.   However it is not helpful to paint those who disagree with one position or another as haters.

It is a false step, in the name of love, to demand assent to the ‘same God’ thesis.  Christians are commanded to love others whether they worship the same God or not. Our common human condition should be enough to motivate solidarity with others. After all, Jesus never said to only ‘love those who believe in the same God’.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.  His book Which God? discusses differences between the understanding of God in the Bible and the Qur'an.

Obama doesn’t understand Jihadist doctrine

0
0
In his June 14 address to the nation, President Obama attributed Omar Mateen's attack on patrons of Orlando, Fla.'s, Pulse nightclub to "homegrown extremism," saying "we currently do not have any information to indicate that a foreign terrorist group directed the attack."

It is a terrible thing to misunderstand one's enemy so deeply.
While Obama acknowledged that the Islamic State has called for attacks around the world against "innocent civilians," he suggested these calls were incidental, emphasizing that Mateen was a "lone actor" and "an angry, disturbed, unstable young man" susceptible to being radicalized "over the Internet."

It is a terrible thing to misunderstand one's enemy so deeply. The doctrine of jihad invoked by terrorist groups is an institution with a long history, grounded in legal precedent going back to the time of Muhammad.



Militants who invoke the doctrine of jihad follow principles influenced by Islamic law. The point to be grasped is that the doctrinal basis of jihad generates conditions that can incite "bottom up" terrorism, which does not need to be directed by jihadi organizations.

When the Ottoman Caliphate entered World War I in 1914, it issued an official fatwa calling upon Muslims everywhere to rise up and fight the "infidels." In 1915, a more detailed ruling was issued, entitled "A Universal Proclamation to All the People of Islam."

This second fatwa gave advice on the methods of jihad, distinguishing three modes of warfare: "jihad by bands," which we would today call guerrilla warfare; "jihad by campaigns," which refers to warfare using armies; and "individual jihad."

The fatwa cited approvingly as an example of individual jihad the 1910 assassination of Boutros Ghaly, a Christian prime minister of Egypt (and grandfather of former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghaly), at the hands of Ibrahim Nassif al-Wardani, a Muslim graduate in pharmacology who had been educated in Lausanne, Paris, and London.

This Ottoman fatwa cited precedents from the life of Muhammad for each of the three modes of warfare. To support individual jihad, it referenced three instances when companions of Muhammad conducted assassinations of non-Muslims. Two of these involved attacks on Jews that were personally instigated by Muhammad.

When the Islamic State issued a call for Muslims around the world to rise up and kill their neighbors, it was invoking the individual mode of jihad. This mode relies upon the teaching that when Muslim lands are attacked or occupied by infidel armies, jihad becomes farḍ al-'ayn, an "individual obligation," which a Muslim can act upon without needing to come under anyone else's command.

This principle of individual obligation has been much emphasized by jihadi clerics. Abdullah Azzam wrote in his influential tract Join the Caravan, "There is agreement ... that when the enemy enters an Islamic land or a land that was once part of the Islamic lands, it is obligatory ... to go forth to face the enemy."

It was undoubtedly in response to this dogma that Omar Mateen went forth to kill Americans. In line with this, Mateen reported to his victims that his attack was in retaliation for Americans bombing Afghanistan. By this understanding, it was America's military action against a Muslim country — the country of origin of Mateen's family — that justified an act of individual jihad.

Preventing future "lone wolf" attacks requires the disruption of the Islamic doctrine that underpins these acts and legitimizes them in the eyes of many Muslims. Teachers and preachers in Islamic institutions across America must openly reject the dogma of farḍ al-‘ayn in relation to U.S. military action.

They need to teach their congregants that this doctrine does not apply, that anyone who uses it to attempt to legitimize his or her personal jihad is acting against God's laws and that no martyr's paradise awaits them.

At the same time, U.S. homeland security agencies need to closely watch and monitor any Muslim teacher who promotes this doctrine, which, once it is taken on board and applied against a nation, will lead to acts of jihadi terrorism as surely as night follows day.

 During his June 14 speech, Obama defended his refusal to use the phrase "radical Islam" in connection with terrorism, asking, "What exactly would using this label accomplish?"

The answer is simple. It will be difficult to elicit the cooperation of Muslim religious leaders in discrediting the Islamic doctrine at the heart of America's homegrown terrorism epidemic when President Obama himself is reluctant to acknowledge that doctrine matters — they can simply point to him and decline.

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.

This article first appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Guess who's coming to Iftar?

0
0
A widely-publicised Iftar dinner, intended to show that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gets what it means to be inclusive, ended badly after he was advised that one of his guests, Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, had taught that Islam prescribes death for adulterers, and homosexuals spread diseases. No rogue maverick, Australian-born Sheikh Shady is the elected national president of the Australian National Imams Council.

Although insisting that ‘mutual respect is absolutely critical’, Turnbull subjected this prominent Muslim leader to public humiliation. He regretted inviting him to dinner and counselled the sheikh‘to reflect on what he has said and recant’. In the middle of an election, wanting to limit fallout from the dinner-gone-wrong, held only days after the Orlando massacre, Turnbull stated that his no-longer-welcome guest’s views are ‘wrong, unacceptable and I condemn them’.


Well may Mr Turnbull deplore Sheikh Shady’s teachings, but the real challenge is that these were not merely his personal views. The sheikh’s teachings on homosexuality and adultery reflect the mainstream position of Islam, preached by many a Muslim scholar around the world today, and telling a sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.

Many Australian Muslims will be disappointed at the treatment meted out to Sheikh Shady. An event designed to honour the Muslim community ended up providing a platform to denigrate one of their most respected leaders for promoting Islamic doctrines. Several Australian Muslim leaders have since dug in their heels to affirm support for the sharia position on homosexuals. So much for recanting.

While Turnbull refused to pass judgement on Islam itself, saying ‘there are different views of different issues, as there are in all religions’, he also sent a message that he is prepared to disparage Australian Muslims’ religious beliefs. It was a bitter pill for Muslims to swallow that this came in the form of a humiliating invite-to-disavow game of bait-and-switch, conducted during a pre-election media storm.

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

On the one hand Mr Turnbull has stated‘I reject and condemn any comments which disparage any group of Australians, whether on the basis of their race, their religion, their sexuality, their gender’. On the other. he is willing to disparage one of Australia’s most prominent Muslim religious leaders on the basis of his religious teachings.

Turnbull has also said ‘It is vital in our multicultural society that every part feels included and that each of us gives to the other the mutual respect that each of them gives us’. A video response posted on Sheikh Shady’s Facebook page, and viewed more than 40,000 times, asks,‘But that statement also includes respect for people’s religious beliefs, doesn’t it?’

Turnbull appears to subscribe to the really bad idea that the same basic values are channeled by all religions. In 2011 on Q&A he praised Islam’s moderation in embodying ‘universal values’. This vacuous universalism has blinded him to the possibility that a religion might actually teach things which he would be duty-bound to disparage. No doubt the PM is also influenced by advice from ASIO not to alienate Muslims by criticising their religion. This policy is ultimately driven by fear of offending adherents of the one religion from which most terrorists are drawn; and why millions of dollars are directed to Muslim organisations, and not to Sikhs or Copts. Turnbull attempted to use a ‘shoot the messenger’ strategy to minimise the cognitive dissonance of his conflicted statements, directing attention away from the religion onto an individual.

The fact remains that, whatever the sheikh’s personal attitudes to gays, his teachings on adultery and homosexuality are not personal. Given his extensive training in sharia law, Sheikh Shady’s views could only be called personal if they had diverged from the mainstream Islamic positions. But they did not.

Turnbull’s staff might have googled the sheikh before they invited him to dinner. And as Sheiky Shady’s Facebook post put it, ‘the prime minister might have the same issue in future when inviting just about any other Muslim imam to any other function’. Rather than calling out the sheikh as a hater, what is needed is to challenge the religious doctrines which have determined his preaching.
As long as our political leaders pretend that objectionable Islamic teachings are merely personal faults, while insisting that the religion of Islam is above reproach, we will stay stuck in this unhelpful place; where we tell a highly trained Muslim imam that we respect his religion, but denigrate his religious beliefs as bigotry. The conversation needs to be about Islamic sharia, not those who preach it.

The post Guess who’s coming to Iftar? appeared first on The Spectator.


Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.
 



 

What to tell would-be jihadis

0
0
Malcolm Turnbull has warned Australians fighting with the Islamic State that they face 'almost certain death'.  He needn't encourage them.  The Australian Prime Minister has apparently not yet learned that jihadis seek death and despise those who don't (Sura 2:94-96). 

Instead of inciting jihadis in their mission to attain paradise through martyrdom, Malcolm Turnbull might try discouraging them.


They might be told that their leaders have deceived them, and the Islamic State has done great damage to the Muslim cause.

They might be told that many Muslims who know more than they do consider their jihad to be null and void, so they risk being condemned as hypocrites and relegated to the lowest  place in hell (Sura 4:145).

They might be told that with so many jihadi groups fighting each other to attain paradise, they have no sure way of knowing which group is on Allah's side, and they are playing Russian roulette with their eternal destiny. Not Smart. 

They might be told that they can expect to be captured and banished to some desolate place for the rest of their long lives, without friend or family to comfort them.

They might be told that they are dragging themselves down the path to failure and disgrace in the eyes of their own community.  (To be fair Malcolm Turnbull did almost say something like this, if accidentally.)

Whatever we say, let's not tell them they face certain death.


Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.
 




Violent Protests in Indonesia Blow an Ill Will for Religious Tolerance

0
0

Jakarta Riots against Christian Governor November 4, 2016
Source:
Reuters

In Jakarta violence between protestors and police broke out Friday night, November 4, 2016 when an estimated 200,000 Muslims emerged from Friday prayers in mosques to rally outside the Indonesian President’s palace. Clashes with police led to tear gas being used on demonstrators, and Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, had to postpone his planned visit to Australia to deal with the crisis.


Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, 'Ahok', the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta

Source:  VICE news
The crowd was calling for the arrest of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta, which is Indonesia’s capital and the largest city in the world’s fourth most populous nation. 

A video had gone viral showing Ahok referring in a speech to chapter 5, verse 51 of the Qur’an. He warned his listeners not to give credence to those who might try to deceive them with this verse or others like it.

Ahok has faced criticism before from hardline Muslims, who objected when he stood as Deputy Governor of Jakarta in 2012. Yet Ahok is very popular, and seems set to win the next gubernatorial election in February 2017. He previously took office as Governor in 2014 after Joko Widodo resigned his position as Jarkarta mayor to take up the Presidency of the nation.

Muslims opposed to Ahok had been citing verse 5:51 from the Qur’an to try to delegitimize his candidacy. The verse reads:
You who believe! Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies. They are allies of each other. Whoever of you takes them as allies is already one of them. Surely Allah does not guide the people who are evildoers. (5:51)

The word translated here as allies (Arabic) awliya, is ambiguous. It can mean ‘allies’, but also ‘patrons’ or ‘guardians’. The rejection of dependence upon disbelievers is emphasized repeatedly in the Qur’an (e.g. in verses 3:28 and 4:141, 144). In Indonesian translations of the verse 5:51 is rendered ‘do not take Jews and Christians as your leaders (pemimpin-pemimpinmu)’. 

Ibn Kathir, an authoritative medieval commentator on the Qur’an, explained this verse as follows:
Allah forbids his believing servants from having Jews and Christians as allies or patrons, because they are the enemies of Islam and its people, may Allah curse them.

The immediately preceding verse, 5:50, urges Muslims not to seek the ‘judgment of the time of ignorance’. In explaining this, Ibn Kathir denounces anyone who follows man-made laws instead of laws revealed by Allah. Such a person:
is a disbeliever who deserves to be fought against (i.e. to be killed), until he reverts to Allah’s and His Messenger’s decisions, so that no law, minor or major, is referred to except by His Law.

Ibn Kathir is insisting that the only valid form of legislation is the Islamic sharia, that only Muslims can rule, and any Muslim who looks to non-Muslims for political or legal direction is an infidel. According to verse 5:51, such a person is already ‘one of them’: in other words, they have to be considered an infidel too, and have apostasized from Islam, for which the penalty is death.

The admonition to Muslims not to take non-Muslims, and especially Christians or Jews, as allies or leaders is orthodox, mainstream Islamic teaching. In the light of this, it is disappointing that the Australian Age newspaper’s Indonesian correspondent, Jewel Topsfield, offers the following gloss:
“some interpret [verse 5:51] as prohibiting Muslims from living under the leadership of a non-Muslim. Others say the scripture should be understood in its context — a time of war — and not interpreted literally.

It may be true that a few contemporary moderate voices may say this verse should not be taken literally, but this is certainly not the mainstream view of centuries of Islamic jurisprudence. 

The Muslim aversion to non-Muslim political leadership has many outworkings around the world. In Egypt Christians make up around 10% of the population, but less than 1.5% of the parliament is Christian. For decades there had been no Christian governors for any of Egypt’s 27 governorates, until Mubarak appointed Major General Emad Mikhail as governor over Qena. However massive protests broke out after imams preached sermons in Qena mosques teaching that God does not permit Christians to have authority over Muslims. Demonstrators marched the streets crying, 'A Muslim governor in a Muslim country' and 'There is no god but Allah and Christians are the enemies of Allah' The protests led to the governor’s appointment being temporarily suspended in order to reestablish the order.

Ahok’s position is difficult. Since his opponents were unable to discredit him politically for being a Christian, they are now upping the ante by accusing him of blasphemy instead, demanding that the state launch legal proceedings against him. In Ahok’s speech, he had brushed aside those who were citing 5:51 against him, saying they were telling lies. In fact he made no comment on the Qur’an itself, apart from implying that a particular interpretation was false. His offense was to criticize the misuse of the text by others for political purposes. Yet this gave enough leeway for a vast crowd to be inflamed against him.

There is a famous hadith or tradition of Muhammad, which states:
Whoever sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.
This is interpreted by many to mean that a Muslim must use the highest level of force available to remove something evil. The protestors in Jakarta were exercising their religious duty by speaking out against a Christian being in political authority over a 95% Muslim city, using his alleged blasphemy as a trigger point. Some went further than just words, threatening action ‘with the hand’: former terrorist Nasir Abas, turned police consultant, carried a sign saying ‘Punish Ahok or our bullets will'.

The phenomenon of Muslims taking political or legal processes into their own hands is widespread. An example was the offer made by Pakistani Imam Maulana Yusuf of a bounty of $6,000 to anyone who would murder Asia Bibi, a young Christian woman on death row for a trumped-up blasphemy offense. Recently Muslim activists have been conducting mass public protests across Pakistan calling for Bibi to be lynched. 'It will be a war if accursed Asia escapes', said Mukhtar, one of the protestors in Lahore. 

Another example comes from the UK in 2009, when Geert Wilders was invited to a private meeting at the House of Lords in London. In response Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim peer, threatened to personally mobilize 10,000 Muslim protestors to physically prevent Wilders from entering the House. 

Muslims taking the law into their own hands to act against non-Muslims who rise to high political office is not a new phenomenon. Egypt’s only Christian Prime Minister was Boutros Ghali, who served from 1908. He was the grandfather of the former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He was assassinated in 1910 by a European-educated Egyptian Muslim, Ibrahim Nassif Boutros Ghali -Wardani.

An example from further back in history was the crucifixion of Joseph Ibn Naghrela, vizier of Granada, by a Muslim mob in 1066, as well as a pogrom against the Jewishpopulation.Although Joseph had been appointed to his high office by a Muslim king, Badis al-Muzaffar, local Muslims resented having a Jew in authority over them. The Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq wrote a diatribe to incite the violence, arguing that non-Muslims’ blood was no longer protected under the terms of their covenant (of surrender), since they had risen to a position of authority over Muslims:
Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them — the breach would be to let them carry on. They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators? How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent.

Indonesia is often held up as a model of a moderate Muslim-majority nation. Its constitution is not Islamic and many Indonesian Muslims espouse moderate views. However the global Islamist movement has nevertheless made strong inroads in this the most populous Muslim nation. Undoubtedly it will be a landmark test for Indonesia’s tolerance whether Ahok is permitted to continue in office. Those Muslims who are raising both their voices and their hands to protest against him will not be easily silenced. 

This outbreak of intolerance bodes ill for Indonesia’s future. Governor Ahok is being supported by significant Muslim leaders. GP Ansor, the former chairman of the largest Indonesian Youth organization called the complaints a ‘hoax’, and politician Nusron Wahid stated that Ahok had said nothing to insult Islam. For his part, Governor Ahok has apologized to Muslims, saying, 'To Muslims who felt insulted, I apologize. I had no intention to insult Islam'. He stated that 'Religion is a very personal matter and should not be mixed up with public discourse'.  However his Muslim opponents clearly hold a different view about the place of Islam in public life! 

Ahok is being questioned this week by the police, pending a possible charge of blasphemy. The thought that an Indonesian court might find Ahok guilty of such a charge is troubling. To do so would require proof that Ahok intended to incite hatred against Muslims, defame Islam or incite apostasy. The prosecution might argue that in pooh-poohing the legitimate and well-established Islamic prohibition against non-Muslims taking authority over Muslims, he was denigrating the religion. Even if no charges are laid, Ahok will certainly come under very great political pressure to withdraw his candidacy. 

In Indonesia today it is apparently unacceptable to some Muslims that a prominent Christian might express an opinion about what the Qur’an says. Yet the same Muslims claim the right to stridently disallow this Christian candidacy for political office, based on the very same Quranic passage. This is supremacist reasoning, which incites hatred while denying the object of hatred any voice in the matter. If this intolerance is given credence by the Indonesian police and courts, it bodes very ill indeed for the nation’s future. 

Yet the greater concern is a question for us all: Does the Islamic sharia permit non-Muslims to live alongside Muslims as equals in one world? This is a crucial question, not just for Indonesia, but for Europe, for America, indeed for every nation with more than a tiny minority of Muslim citizens. According to the hundreds of thousands protesting in the streets of Jakarta this week, the answer to this question is a resolute and loud 'No!'

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.




After Ariana Grande & The Manchester Attacks: Three 'Unrealities' Are Killing Britain's Children

0
0

An important article by Jenny Taylor


Three unrealities have collided in Britain, and they are allowing our children to die.  


The first unreality is hinted at in the very words of Ariana Grande, at whose concert in Manchester so many lives were destroyed on the night of May 22. Grande, a 23-year-old American singer, called this her Dangerous Woman Tour. In the hit song "Side to Side" she sings: "Tonight I’m making deals with the devil / And I know it’s gonna get me in trouble ... / Let them hoes know."



The Americanization of entertainment has no contact at all with English traditions of modesty and the protection of children against forces they cannot possibly withstand alone. Yet the Grande event has been sentimentalized in the days since the attack as a magical rite of passage - even  being called "the most memorable event of their lives" by the prime minister.

That the dark excess stalking such entertainment events contributed to a moral and social atmosphere in which wholesale sex grooming was able to take place without public comment for two whole decades seems to have escaped the sentimentalists' notice. Sexuality was something that used to be held to need the constraints of parents and guardians and society as a whole. Now parents ferry their children to these spectacles.

The new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy. -Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs.

A quick glance at the top video posted on Grande’s website reveals a couple simulating sex on the hood of a taxi cab, with a shocked driver behind the wheel. There are simulated sex scenes on an office photocopier, sex between a gray-haired couple in a bus, brief cutaways to anal sex and lesbian sex in a busy launderette that tilts toward orgy as others are almost dragged in. And all with Grande smiling sweetly and coquettishly in cutaways that link the whole affair together.

It’s called "raunch culture," which Ariel Levy described in her angry book Female Chauvinist Pigs. It is intended to encourage a sense of girls being able to have consequence-free sex like men wherever they want it.

"This is a world," says Levy, "in which young women attend lap-dancing clubs – as patrons – [and] simulate sex on shows like Girls Gone Wild ... as a symbol of liberation. They see these post-feminist antics as a short-cut to cool."

Raunch culture has spread to Britain from the U.S. as something perfectly normal. While the rest of us do not even notice, ordinary Muslims are angry and worried. "Our values" seem to them – I know this because they have told me - to include an encouragement to prostitution that heaven knows has caused enough anguish in Rotherham and elsewhere. Levy is right when she says: "The new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy."

Sure, if you lock girls away, you destroy society itself. But who is talking about locking girls away? Just restoring some sense of what’s at stake will do. - Dr. Jenny Taylor

Yet journalists, who are no doubt good parents, have been completely suckered by it. Here’s just one example from pop music critic Alexis Petridis, who wrote for the Guardian a reflection on the Dangerous Woman Tour: "I take [my daughters aged 10 and 7] because I think those big pop gigs do something incredibly important ... it gave her a first glimpse of a world that was previously outside her experience ... it can provide the kind of indelible, empowering experience ... giving people their first taste of freedom and independence: that strikes me as something at the top of the chart of Incredible Things Music Can do. It is also something that the kind of people who manipulate others into blowing themselves up in public places hate."

There is something so reminiscent here of the statements of little girls groomed for sex by the Pakistani "uncles" in Rotherham and Oxford and elsewhere who gave them sweets and then drugs.

"Children were initially flattered by the attention paid to them, and impressed by the apparent wealth and sophistication of those grooming them," says the Home Office report on the Rotherham grooming. "Boys gave me drink and drugs for free… I was driven around in fast cars," one child told the inquiry. Yet Petridis expresses no sense of irony at the manipulation for gain of his own little girls at concerts like this one, or the "normalization" of sexual responses to adults by children depicted in Grande’s films, which is part of the actual definition of "grooming."

Emily Munro of the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre says that "Children and teenagers with behavioral issues such as 'high attention seeking' have a much higher risk [of grooming] than others" – behavior that is of course being affirmed and supported at pop concerts such as Ariana Grande’s.

Sure, if you lock girls away, you destroy society itself. But who is talking about locking girls away? Just restoring some sense of what’s at stake will do. Thus, people can make better decisions, and avoid waving a red rag in the faces of the unhinged, and the otherwise incomprehensible "others" onto whom we all too easily load what we cannot face about ourselves.

I have heard perfectly decent Muslim academics marvel from public platforms that God has given them such access to the “land of war” – the dar-al-harb. This supremacism is part and parcel of Islam and it is fueled by their sense of Western degeneracy. - Dr. Jenny Taylor

For it is when this first unreality confronts the second that the tinder box is ignited. The second unreality is the belief by Salafi jihadis that they are here to win Britain for Allah and that their callous killings are deeds of righteousness against a godless people they have been drilled to hate.

Aspects of this variant of the faith make it obligatory to spread the religion and to triumph. It will not stop. Being in Britain at all, for the first time in history, is regarded as Allah’s gift to the faithful. I have heard perfectly decent Muslim academics marvel from public platforms that God has given them such access to the "land of war" – the dar-al-harb. This supremacism is part and parcel of Islam, and it is fueled by their sense of Western degeneracy. It is taught by the vast and influential Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) group of Muslims – a group hailing from India who are not Salafi jihadists like Salman Abedi, nor are they even "Wahhabi" – the strict Saudi variant of Islam.

Their type of training, which views the world as "a toilet" and secularization as the second most serious threat to their way of life, has been adopted by the majority of Deobandi mosques in Britain. They see their job as to "combat Western and Christian cultural influences." According to the Muslim-run website Muslims in Britain, the TJ have ten mosques in Manchester, including a huge center in a former industrial unit. The TJ provide the tonic to the Salafi gin.

The third unreality, and perhaps the deadliest because it plays host to the other two, is the kind of political grand-standing by religiously illiterate senior politicians like Andy Burnham, former Labour leadership candidate and now mayor of Manchester. Burnham publicly opposed the government’s "Prevent" scheme, which targets Muslim radicalization, and he said on TV earlier this week: "To describe Salman Abedi as an extreme Muslim is like describing Jo Cox’s killer as an extreme Christian."

He could not be more wrong.

-----

Photo credit: Ariana Grande photo from Wikipedia Commons.

This article was first published by the Media Project.


Excuse me, but your cognitive dissonance is showing

0
0
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.
-----
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.





Introducing The Interface Institute

0
0

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


http://interfaceinstitute.org/


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

Documentary on Halal Certification in Australia

0
0
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.







Were the 'Dark Ages' Really Dark?

0
0

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.




Calling for Violent Jihad in Australia

0
0
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:
Every child is born on al-Fitrah, but his parents convert him to Judaism or Christianity … An animal gives birth to a perfect baby animal. Do you find it mutilated?
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:
Their impurity is spiritual and physical: spiritual because they don’t believe in Allah’s Oneness and in his Prophet Muhammad … and physical, because they lack personal hygiene (filthy as regards urine, stools and [menstrual] blood). [p. 248, fn 2]

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:
there is none from amongst the Jews and Christians … who hears about me and then dies without believing in the Message with which I have been sent … but he will be from the dwellers of the (Hell) Fire. [p. 84, fn 1]

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:
This Verse is a severe warning to the Jews and Christians, and an absolute obligation that they must believe in Allah’s Messenger Muhammad … and also in his Message of Islamic Monotheism and in this Qur’an. [p. 115, fn 2]

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:
This Verse (and Verse 5:69) … should not be misinterpreted by the reader … the provision of this Verse was abrogated by Verse 3:85 “And whosoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter, he will be one of the losers” (i.e. after the coming of Prophet Muhammad … on the earth, no other religion except Islam, will be accepted from anyone). [p. 13, fn 2]
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:
Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad …) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. [Sura 9:29, p. 248]
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:
Holy fighting in the Cause of Allah or any other kind of effort to make Allah’s Word (i.e. Islam) superior. Jihad is regarded as one of the fundamentals of Islam. See the footnote of (V.2:190) [p. 873]
The footnote referred to is a comment on Sura 2:190, “And fight in the Way of Allahthose who fight you …” This footnote reads:
Al-Jihad (holy fighting) in Allah’s Cause (with full force of numbers and weaponry) is given the utmost importance in Islam and is one of its pillars (on which it stands). By Jihad Islam is established, Allah’s Word is made superior, (His Word being La ilaha illallah which means none has the right to be worshipped but Allah), and His Religion (Islam) is propagated. By abandoning Jihad (may Allah protect us from that) Islam is destroyed and the Muslims fall into an inferior position; their honour is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligatory duty in Islam on every Muslim, and he who tries to escape from this duty, or does not in his innermost heart wish to fulfil this duty, dies with one of the qualities of a hypocrite. [p. 39, fn 1]
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:
(i) Muhammad was victorious through fear or terror for a distance of one month’s journey: “Allah made me victorious by awe (by His frightening my enemies) for a distance of one month’s journey.”
(ii) He was the first prophet from Allah given permission to take booty from his enemies: “The booty has been made Halal (lawful) to me yet it was not lawful to anyone else before me.”
(iii) Unlike previous prophets, he was sent to all mankind, not just to a specific group: “Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only, but I have been sent to all mankind.”
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:
You (true believers in Islamic monotheism …) are the best of people ever raised up for mankind; you enjoin al-Mahruf (Islamic Monotheism and all that Islam has ordained) and forbid Al-Munkar (polytheism, disbelief, and all that Islam has forbidden), and you believe in Allah. [Sura 3:110]
The footnote commentary on this verse explains:
You … are the best of people ever raised up for mankind” means, the best of the people for the people, as you bring them with chains on their necks till they embrace Islam (and thereby save them from the eternal punishment in the Hell-fire and make them enter paradise in the Hereafter) … The people referred to here may be the prisoners of war who were captured and chained by the Muslims and their imprisonment was the cause of their conversion to Islam. So, it is as if their chains were the means of winning Paradise. [p. 89, fn 1]
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”:
[Muhammad] said, Allah marvels at a people who enter Jannah in chains. The hadith commentators mentioned that this refers to people entering Islam as slaves and then entering Jannah [Paradise]. Abu Hurayrah … said while commenting on Allah’s words, You are the best nation produced for mankindYou are the best people for people. You bring them with chains around their necks, until they enter Islam.”
The same sentiment was also expressed by a Dutch Islamic State fighter, Israfil Yilmaz, who blogged about the correct Islamic motivation for sex slavery:
People [who] think that having a concubine for sexual pleasure only have a very simple mindset about this matter … The biggest and best thing of having concubines is introducing them to Islam in an Islamic environmentshowing them and teaching them the religion. Many of the concubines/slaves of the Companions of the Prophet … became Muslim and some even big commanders and leaders in Islamic history and this is if you ask me the true essence of having slaves/concubines.

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.






An Update from Mark Durie

0
0

CC BY-SA 4.0
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.


-----
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.






Pre-Ordering the Qur'an and its Biblical Reflexes - an update

0
0
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 Qur'an Origin Story

0
0
Linguistics and theology scholar challenges origin story of Qur’an.
Mark Durie interviewed by Andrew Bolt on Sky News Australia:

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_5996240671001




Latest Images