I'm not clear on the meaning of this "weapon" metaphor. When you say that Islam has been "weaponized", what exactly do you mean? That's not a very descriptive way of putting whatever you're trying to say about the differences between Islam's role in violence and the role of other religions in violence.Originally Posted by gwahir
THIS is what's naive. These incidences of violence aren't really founded in religion. The Crusades are a particularly obvious cause of conflicts with definite geopolitical causes underlying the surface-level coat of religious symbolism with which they were justified. The Crusades were initiated because the Byzantines requested military aid from Western Europe against the invading Seljuks, eagerly endorsed by the Popes for political reasons, and perpetuated by a combination of social and economic factors in Europe. The Spanish Inquisition is another easy one, it's political/social root causes are connected with the desire of Spanish Christian monarchs to weed out and remove elements within their kingdom that were perceived as politically/socially threatening or potentially undermining. They wanted a religiously homogeneous kingdom for political reasons, not because they were oh-so-devout and thought that it was what God wanted them to do.
With all due respect, you are calling other people naive, but you are making arguments based on notions that anyone who has seriously studied this issue would have been disabused of very early on.
Yes, without religious motivation, the Middle East would still be as messed up as it is today. Practically every conflict in the Middle East stems from root causes associated with things like land, mineral resources, water rights, mistreatment of one ethnic group by another, severe economic inequality, resentment of a population towards a corrupt political elite or non-democratic/repressive regime, and so on and so forth. The Iranian revolution and ensuing theocratic regime, plus the Iran-Iraq war? Check. Palestinian militancy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Definitely a check. The Arab-Israeli wars? Check. The Lebanese civil and subsequent violence? Double-check. Everything that's happened in Afghanistan since the Soviets invaded? Check. The violence that has afflicted Iraq since we invaded? Yes, you better believe it. These are only a handful of examples but like I said earlier, I practically guarantee you that you will not be able to come up with apparently religious conflicts that haven't had underlying non-religious causes.
I appreciate that these conflicts have become so wrapped up in religion and religious justification that it's hard to see past those things, and it's very easy for an uninformed observer to say that religion "obviously" causes them. That doesn't make it true.
You're not understanding me. I realize that the Qur'an is the source of Islamic law mandating death for apostates, and in some places, justifying warfare against 'unbelievers'. Pointing that out isn't the same thing as proving that the actions of violent Islamic groups/sects are caused by those passages. Those passages are the justifications they use for violence that is, at it's root, motivated by other factors. So you're not really making an argument at all, just saying "nuh-uh" in response to those of use who are arguing that Qur'anic content isn't the cause of Islamic violence.
Okay, sycld:
Yeah, I don't disagree that there are more violently-inclined Muslims (or at least more violent Muslim groups/organizations) in the world today than there are violently-inclined Christians or Christian groups. What I disagree with is attributing this to something that's intrinsic to the character of Islam itself, and saying that Islam is violent by it's nature.
This is a blanket statement and while I understand what you're trying to say, I don't agree with the way you've put it. There is no such thing as a unitary "Islamic culture". Islam accounts for about one quarter of the world's population, ~1.5 billion people. They have a shared religion but not a shared culture. The cultural diversity and diversity of thought within the Islamic world is immense, as it would be within any other group of that size, geographical distribution, and varied historical and ethnic background.
I'd be comfortable saying that there are severe cultural problems in many parts of the Islamic world; or that many Islamic societies/states/populations have such problems. I would avoid blanket statements, though, because they are practically guaranteed to be inaccurate in a case like this.
This is a statistical claim; what's your source? Most of the info I've seen on this topic (and I've seen a lot, since it’s a huge part of my field) seems to support the opposite conclusion, at least with regard to actual terrorism/violence. I can't recall ever having seen that much data about tolerance for other religions or similar issues, but at the very least I feel confident arguing that a majority of Muslims don't support terrorism/violence. Do your own research and see how many reputable studies you can actually find saying that a majority of Muslims believe the things you say they do.
And even insofar as Muslims do support violence, I’d be careful attributing that entirely or even largely to Islam. I feel pretty comfortable saying that if you put non-Muslims into the same historical/social/economic/political conditions that we see Muslim violence/terrorism emerging from today, plenty of them would similarly support or sympathize with the use of violence against their perceived oppressors. They wouldn’t dress their struggle up in Islamic religious trappings as Hamas and Hizballah and al-Qaeda do, but the basic effect upon them would be the same (they’d find another ‘vehicle’ for their violence instead of radicalized Islam).
I don’t necessarily disagree, I’m just disagreeing that many of these practices come from the teachings of Islam, rather than some other source.
This I don’t disagree with; the biggest single problem I do see with Islam is that basic Islamic scripture—Qur’anic scripture—makes zero distinction between church and state. This IS a problem with Islam (and Turkey’s solution, while I agree with it in principle, really just exacerbates the problem they’re trying to fight in some ways—they need to wise up and realize that banning political parties doesn’t do away with the social attitudes that caused those parties to emerge, it just strengthens them and the banned parties always reform within a few years, e.g. AKP and Felicity came out of Virtue Party, which itself came out of Welfare Party and the MNP/MSP before). Anyhow: Yeah, failure to separate church and state is a problem that most Islamic countries have to some extent—in cases like Saudi Arabia and Iran, it’s near-total.
At the same time, though, I think it’s rather unfair to entirely blame Islam itself for the failure of Islamic societies to adopt and internalize the Western invention of church/state separation. It’s definitely a problem within the Islamic world but its roots lie not only in Qur’anic scripture, but—like religious violence—in other factors. In other words, just as we have to ask why religious sects and groups form around violent ideas in the first place, we have to ask why Islamic societies haven’t embraced church/state separation nearly as readily as Western societies (or alternately, why Islamist political groups have been able to seize power in Muslim societies and create governments like that of Iran). The ayatollahs never would have been able to come to power in Iran, for instance, if a history of Western political/economic interference and the tyranny and ineptitude of the Western-backed Shah hadn’t created the social and political climate of 1979. The basic mechanism is the same one that I’ve been talking about this whole thread with regard to violence. Again, I don’t disagree that Qur’anic content shoulders some of the blame for Islamic societies’ failure to separate church and state, but it’s far from the only cause. A number of Muslim states would probably have much more secular governments and cultures today if not for various foreign policy decisions on the part of the US and Britain especially.
It’s also important, when discussing Muslim societies where there is no church/state separation, not to confuse the abuses of particular rulers with what Islam mandates politically. The fact that the Qur’an recognizes no church/state separation doesn’t mean it supports or advocates many of the things that go on in Islamic states—the repression, the terrible treatment of non-Muslims, the draconian legal codes, and so forth. Most of the Wahhabi dickery we see in Saudi Arabia, for instance, was invented by the Wahhabis themselves and not taken from the Qur’an. The same goes for most of the repression practiced by the Iranian government.
This isn’t at all accurate—who told you this? The Malaysian legal system is based on English common law with a parallel sharia system which is only applied to Muslims, usually only in non-criminal matters. There have been proposals that it be expanded to apply to all Malaysians regardless of religion, but currently it does not; the only set of laws that apply to all Malaysians is the country’s secular common law-based system. I don’t like Malaysia’s system and it does violate the principle of separating church and state, but not nearly as egregiously as you claim it does.
He might be doing it in the name of Islam but that doesn’t mean he’s actually adhering to anything in Islamic teachings. Ramzan Kadyrov’s rule has about the same relationship to Islam that Tomas de Torquemada’s activities had to Christianity. I appreciate that it’s example of the repression that exists in some Islamic societies but I don’t think there is much of good argument that this repression occurs because Islam says it should.
Honor killings especially are not advocated or called for in the Qur’an and have nothing to do with Islam even if the people committing them try to pretend otherwise. The fact that so many Westerners have come under the contrary impression is especially sad.
I think Pakistan’s situation is a lot more complicated than you are implying, though. It isn’t a convincing argument to suggest that just because Lahore was a cosmopolitan city before partition, Pakistan as a whole had same conditions and ‘potential’ as India at the time of partition and therefore should have developed in the same way, and Islam is to blame for the fact that it hasn’t. Pakistan was not in the same condition as India at the time of partition, and it did not go into the post-partition era with the same circumstances, prospects, and internal issues, and its history has been shaped by some very different external factors too.
If we want to get into a discussion about the specifics of why India and Pakistan have gone in different directions since partition, I think it should have its own thread. I’d be quite happy to participate in it. Here, let it suffice to say that I don’t agree that the blame for Pakistan’s problems can be laid at the feet of Islam, and that your argument to that effect is uncompelling. Lahore’s pre-partition character doesn’t mean much in regard to this question.
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