Combating evil: What Islam and the Qur'an are really all about

Guest post by Hamid M. Khan 

Hamid M. Khan, an Adjunct Professor of Islamic Law at the University of Colorado Law School, is a Rule of Law Adviser with the U.S. Institute of Peace in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project in Washington D.C.

(Ed. note: This is Hamid's sixth guest post at The Reaction. You can find his previous posts here (on Pakistan), here and here (on Obama's Cairo address), here (on revolution in Iran), and here (on being Muslim in America). Yes, he's becoming a regular. -- MJWS)

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Last Friday's heinous attack on U.N. workers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan, which was prompted by the burning of a Qur'an by Florida Pastor Terry Jones, serves as a stark reminder that is all not well within Islam. As an American Muslim working to promote peace and stability in Afghanistan on behalf of the United States, I am appalled by the senseless violence instigated by those claiming to share a religious faith and once again leads to question how Muslims choose to uphold their own faith. 

Few Muslims quibble with the notion that the Qur'an is the word of God. Moreover, it is generally accepted that the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad some fourteen centuries ago. While the Qur'an is found in book form today, it began as an oral tradition and hence, even to this day, millions of Muslims follow that tradition by memorizing lines from the original Arabic. Coincidently, the content of the Qur'an (which is about the size of the New Testament) largely remains a mystery to most believers since the original version is in sixth-century Arabic and more than 85 percent of Muslims today are not Arabic speakers. Moreover, even if one could begin to grapple with the Arabic, the Qur'an is filled with allusions, allegories, puns, and an unmatched poetic style. Consequently, Muslims will often turn to religious leaders to understand its content, leaders who often know little more than their fellow believers. Nonetheless, every believer bears personal responsibility for understanding what the Qur'an truly says. 

The Qur'an's contents, like other religious tomes, is varied. Despite notions to the contrary, less than five percent of the text is devoted to legal matters. Moreover, the most mentioned person in the Qur'an is the patriarch Moses, followed by Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary is mentioned more in than the Qur'an than she is in the Bible. In fact, the Qur'an takes pains to codify the tolerance of other faiths and repeatedly recounts how struggling for "true" faith has always been measured by those who have withstood ridicule and derision and remained steadfast. The reality is that most of the Qur'an is dedicated to the principles of mercy, compassion, grace, salvation, and love. However, this message is not for the edification of Pastor Terry Jones but for Muslims as a whole. 

During my lifetime, I have witnessed in horror as Muslims have taken to the streets in fits of rage to attack anyone and everyone, all in the name of "defending" Islam. Whether it's violence spurred by cartoons of the Prophet or publication of The Satanic Verses, or physical attacks on those who would disagree with Islam and its practices, the reality remains: not only have these Muslims willfully ignored the Qur'an, they have betrayed the faith they claim to uphold.

Islam, a faith comprised of over 1.3 billion followers, has endured for fourteen centuries and influenced the course of history itself. Islam's "golden age," where it was seen as a force for intellectualism, philosophy, science, and understanding, has today been eclipsed by puritans bent on reducing the faith to a series of simplistic notions, turning the Qur'an into an irrational legal code that promotes violence, authored by a bloodthirsty God.

Muslims need to accept that, inasmuch as they believe in the Qur'an and Islam, they would do best to uphold the Qur'an by living up to its central tenets: compassion, mercy, and tolerance. They need to accept that the best "defense" against the calumny of others is explained by the Qur'an itself: combat evil with good. Muslims need to demonstrate that Islam is found in more than just the Qur'an, that it is expounded by steadfastness and acts of goodness and love. And it should be remembered that, no matter what, evil cloaked in faith is never acceptable, especially to God.

Passion play

By Capt. Fogg

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

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If you managed to get through grade school, you've read this many times, but it never seems to influence the way Americans act or feel: a syndrome that seems more influenced by mob psychology and sectarian chauvinism than anything else. Of course, it's long been this way and we've long been a xenophobic and gullible nation, but with the advent of round-the-clock swineherds like Fox News, the grunting and squealing of feral-hog America is drowning out the voice of our founding fathers and of decent men and women everywhere. 

[E]ven if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service. (Ben Franklin) 

The same folks who want to persecute Muslims for their religion and prohibit the free exercise thereof will assert, without twitching their nostrils at the smell of hypocrisy, that this is a Christian nation and that Christian laws, whatever they might be, supersede our national laws about abortion, birth control, spending government funds on Christian activities, and browbeating children into theological submission. It's not okay that a Muslim man doesn't want to drink alcohol or a Jew doesn't want to eat pork, but it's fine that a Christian pharmacist refuses to dispense condoms. Damn the Constitution, we're a Christian nation. The laws of other religions need not apply, and, in fact, although there is no chance whatever that the United States will adopt the Qur'an as a replacement for the Constitution and its body of laws, it's not enough for the grunting pigs of God who would like to make the free exercise of Islam illegal. 

He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. (Isaiah 53:3) 

The latest crusade seems to be about portraying every comment by every Muslim as an example of Sharia, from a cabby in Detroit asking that he not be forced to transport alcohol to someone praying in Arabic in front of the White House. According to one witness, he was asking for a blessing on those "Christians" who seemed oblivious to the staggering irony of a mob mocking and cursing a bearded man, bent in prayer, forgiving them for persecuting him. None of this has anything to do with any effort to replace our laws and courts with Islamic laws or Islamic judges, nor can it since no effort exists. As to the rules of private observance, let's let only Christians do that! The only credible attempt of theocratic pretenders to the throne is of course by self-styled Christians, as the porcine squeals of the glossolalians Palin and Huckabee would prove. 

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen... (George Washington) 

Perhaps it's fortunate that such people are stupid enough to hoist themselves with their own petty petards. You'll recall, and perhaps with a smile, Oklahoma's attempt to thwart the non-existent Islamic takeover by attempting a tin-foil-hat law banning all religious commands -- which in effect banned the Jewish commandments they had been trying to insert into American life, but we can't afford to depend on their congenital stupidity when so much is at stake. And yes, it takes a stupid man to think that somehow Americans would decide to write Sharia or Islamic tribal practices into American law in open defiance of the Constitution or that the tiny percentage of Muslim Americans would somehow magically or accidentally do it by themselves.

The courts have decisively ruled that the establishment and free exercise clauses forbid the federal and state governments to prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion or atheism. The Torah, the Bible, the Qur'an, the Gita, the works of Nietzsche: state or federal government may not adopt any of them as preferable, much less mandatory. But we're a little people, a silly people -- greedy, barbarous, and cruel people, if I might borrow from T.E. Lawrence -- and a cowardly, ignorant, and hateful people as well. "Conservative" legislators continue and will persist in thriving on our traditional sins by inventing threats that must be countered by measures to accelerate our inexorable descent into loserhood. They'll continue to demonize the way their predecessors demonized German, Irish, Italian, Mexican, African, Catholic, Jewish, Chinese, and Indian immigrants, and history will continue to prove them wrong.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Something to renew faith

By Greg Prince

It's been an interesting weekend, following an exhausting week on many fronts.

Here's a story from Egypt that brings a smile to my face, and goes far toward reminding us that humanity really is worth saving.

Remember this story next time a wingnut tries to tell you there is no such thing as moderate Muslims:

Egypt's majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as "human shields" for last night's mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

"We either live together, or we die together," was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the "human shield" idea.

Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular Muslim televangelist and preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

"This is not about us and them," said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly Street. "We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together."

(Cross-posted from Greg Prince's Blog.)