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Originally posted by mousethief:
Islamic extremism stems from ... CONSTANTINE!

Now going to read Steve's post to see if I'm right.

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Originally posted by Doc Tor:

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
I seriously want to know what other interpretations there are, why there is disagreement, etc.

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Well, yes. Of course you do. But if you have access to a computer, you also have access to enough information to inform yourself as to how wrong you are and how other people saying "but there are other interpretations" are really saying "how can you not know there are other interpretations?"

For example, how many Sufi suicide bombers have you read about?

Seriously: if you don't know about the difference between Sunni and Shia and Sufi and Yazidi and Druze, or Arab and Persian and Berber, then you need to do that asap. This is a starting point. It's not your end point.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
You are I think a bit exaggerating my position. I do indeed have a computer and I do use it. I just used it to check that my memory about Sufism was right and that actually they were more likely to be victims of suicide bombers than perpetrators. And because I have studied the stuff quite a bit, seems I was right....

I also used it to follow your link; being well into Christian non-conformity I was not too surprised by the variety of Islamic sects it revealed. But it also of course revealed that most of these are very minor and not very significant to the current discussion. The majority Sunni/Shia seem to be essentially teaching what I am critiquing.

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It's not so much a case of "how can (I) not know there are other interpretations?" I'm well aware of there being other interpretations!!!! After all I rather much belong to what many would see as an 'other interpretation' of Christianity myself! My objection was to people who, instead of producing solid issues to discuss, just make airy vague comments about 'other interpretations' and act as if merely by saying that they've somehow proved me wrong. Such an approach is not a legitimate argument.

I know there are variants of Islam which teach peace - so far I've yet to come across such a variant which convinces me they've a sufficient argument to counter the rather obvious and fundamental historic fact of Muhammad's own choice to establish an Islamic state and fight wars to establish and maintain it, or to counter the obvious interpretation of the Quran texts which support Muhammad doing so.

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Although the original Islamic sources (the Qurʿān and the ḥadīths) have very little to say on matters of government and the state, the first issue to confront the Muslim community immediately after the death of its formative leader, the Prophet Muḥammad, in 632 CE was in fact the problem of government and how to select a successor, khalīfah (caliph), to the Prophet. From the start, therefore, Muslims had to innovate and to improvise with regard to the form and nature of government.

Islam is indeed a religion of collective morals, but it contains little that is specifically political—that is, the original Islamic sources rarely convey much on how to form states, run governments, and manage organizations. If the rulers of the historical Islamic states were also spiritual leaders of their communities, this was not because Islam required the imām (religious leader) to be also a political ruler, but because—on the contrary—Islam had spread in regions where the modes of production tended to be control-based and where the state had always played a crucial economic and social role. The “monopoly” of a certain religion had always been one of the state 's usual instruments for ensuring ideological hegemony, and the historical Islamic state was heir to this tradition.

etc and so on

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It's not just "Are there other interpretations?" - it's also are they in fact credible interpretations or questionably stretched and strained interpretations. Merely that they exist doesn't make them right or even serious.

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Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naʿim argues that the coercive enforcement of shariʿa by the state betrays the Qurʿan’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, shariʿa should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Naʿim maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce shariʿa. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not shariʿa or the Islamic tradition.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

I also used it to follow your link; being well into Christian non-conformity I was not too surprised by the variety of Islamic sects it revealed. But it also of course revealed that most of these are very minor and not very significant to the current discussion. The majority Sunni/Shia seem to be essentially teaching what I am critiquing.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
My objection was to people who, instead of producing solid issues to discuss, just make airy vague comments about 'other interpretations' and act as if merely by saying that they've somehow proved me wrong. Such an approach is not a legitimate argument.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
I also used it to follow your link; being well into Christian non-conformity I was not too surprised by the variety of Islamic sects it revealed. But it also of course revealed that most of these are very minor and not very significant to the current discussion. The majority Sunni/Shia seem to be essentially teaching what I am critiquing.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
Islamic extremism stems from ... CONSTANTINE!

Now going to read Steve's post to see if I'm right.

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Made me smile!

I don't think Islamic extremism 'stems from Constantine' in any simple way. More it is another example of the bad way of linking religion and state which goes back beyond Constantine as well. The relationship with Constantine lies in (at least) two areas

1) When Muhammad came along, it was about 200 years after Constantine so the primary Christian example to influence him was the actually-not-so-Christian state church. The Quran includes at least one chapter related to a military operation against the Byzantines, ie Constantine's successors.

On the one hand this makes it understandable that Muhammad made the choices he did, and we Christians need to accept the past role of Christians in this (though also noting that this wasn't Christianity as Jesus taught it). On the other hand, I feel that if Muhammad had been a true prophet and really, as he claimed, correcting and improving Christianity, I'd be a lot more impressed by him if he had gone back to Jesus' position on religion/state relations instead of following the 'Constantinian' example which makes war and violence in the name of the faith pretty much inevitable....

2) The other aspect is that Islam has been much affected by the military opposition of 'Christendom' especially in the Crusades - which in a sense I think IS still see themselves as fighting - but also in European colonisation of Muslim countries all over the world. Christians need to be concerned about that and recognise the part of Christendom in forming Muslim thinking.

I think it was Eutychus who reacted to a mention of 'Christendom' with 'not again' or words to that effect - but seriously, in this case the involvement of Christendom as an opponent of Islam and forming their attitudes to the 'Christian' West is pretty undeniable.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
by Eutychus;

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The obvious answer is that you prosecute violent extremism regardless of religious practice, and leave alone religious practice that isn't violent.

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That is a good secular answer for a pluralist state. It's pretty useless in helping us to understand where the violence came from and how we can prevent it arising to begin with. And one of the lacks in your whole response there is any significant distinctively Christian view....

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Originally posted by Golden Key:

--Were the American revolutionaries traitors to England?

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Were the people in America who stayed loyal to England traitors to America?

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Worth pointing out also that Islamism is not simply religious, but also political. Therefore you have to calculate the political forces at work in the rise of AQ and IS.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Worth pointing out also that Islamism is not simply religious, but also political. Therefore you have to calculate the political forces at work in the rise of AQ and IS.

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And those have roots in the way the West has dealt with the Middle East since WWI.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Worth pointing out also that Islamism is not simply religious, but also political. Therefore you have to calculate the political forces at work in the rise of AQ and IS.

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And those have roots in the way the West has dealt with the Middle East since WWI.

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Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
The Roman Republic occupied much of the Eastern Mediterranean a century before Christ was born.

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Originally posted by mdijon:
It's a funny accident that Iran is Shia. I think the story is that although there were both Sunni and Shia overlords of pre/peri-Islamic Iran the Shia appealed more to the local population and it stuck.

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Originally posted by Callan:
My recollection is that as a territory conquered by the Arabs becoming Shia allowed them to be Islamic, whilst differentiating them from the (generally) Sunni Arabs.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:

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Originally posted by Callan:
My recollection is that as a territory conquered by the Arabs becoming Shia allowed them to be Islamic, whilst differentiating them from the (generally) Sunni Arabs.

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Checking with the source of all knowledge: Persia was Sunni until the Safavid dynasty, who had previously been a Sunni religious order but gradually became a Shia group, conquered/ reunified it in about 1501 under Ismail I.

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Even the points you make above are disputed by scholars. From the Oxford Islamic Studies website: quote: Although the original Islamic sources (the Qurʿān and the ḥadīths) have very little to say on matters of government and the state, the first issue to confront the Muslim community immediately after the death of its formative leader, the Prophet Muḥammad, in 632 CE was in fact the problem of government and how to select a successor, khalīfah (caliph), to the Prophet. From the start, therefore, Muslims had to innovate and to improvise with regard to the form and nature of government. Islam is indeed a religion of collective morals, but it contains little that is specifically political—that is, the original Islamic sources rarely convey much on how to form states, run governments, and manage organizations. If the rulers of the historical Islamic states were also spiritual leaders of their communities, this was not because Islam required the imām (religious leader) to be also a political ruler, but because—on the contrary—Islam had spread in regions where the modes of production tended to be control-based and where the state had always played a crucial economic and social role. The “monopoly” of a certain religion had always been one of the state 's usual instruments for ensuring ideological hegemony, and the historical Islamic state was heir to this tradition. etc and so on

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So there is at least one scholar who thinks your obvious conclusions are utter bunk.

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The “monopoly” of a certain religion had always been one of the state 's usual instruments for ensuring ideological hegemony, and the historical Islamic state was heir to this tradition.

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Worth pointing out also that Islamism is not simply religious, but also political.

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In other words, taking it back to the Qu'ran is too simplistic, and leaves out a huge amount of stuff. It's like blaming the IRA on the Reformation.

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Originally posted by Callan:

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
by Eutychus;

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The obvious answer is that you prosecute violent extremism regardless of religious practice, and leave alone religious practice that isn't violent.

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That is a good secular answer for a pluralist state. It's pretty useless in helping us to understand where the violence came from and how we can prevent it arising to begin with. And one of the lacks in your whole response there is any significant distinctively Christian view....

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If your response to violence emerging from, among other things, religious difference is to announce that everybody must convert to Anabaptism forthwith, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
And, wadderyouknow, here is another scholar who argues that Islam should be separated from the state:

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Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naʿim argues that the coercive enforcement of shariʿa by the state betrays the Qurʿan’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam. Just as the state should be secure from the misuse of religious authority, shariʿa should be freed from the control of the state. State policies or legislation must be based on civic reasons accessible to citizens of all religions. Showing that throughout the history of Islam, Islam and the state have normally been separate, An-Naʿim maintains that ideas of human rights and citizenship are more consistent with Islamic principles than with claims of a supposedly Islamic state to enforce shariʿa. In fact, he suggests, the very idea of an “Islamic state” is based on European ideas of state and law, and not shariʿa or the Islamic tradition.

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link to book blurb

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the coercive enforcement of shariʿa by the state betrays the Qurʿan’s insistence on voluntary acceptance of Islam.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
The problem is, on the face of it...

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Originally posted by Callan:
With all due respect to your good lady wife/ Orac/ Wikipedia (delete as appropriate) I think that there were ebbs and flows and that the Iranians/ Persians were always attracted to Islamic 'heterodoxy'. This is a good account of the complexities involved.

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In contrast to Zoroastrianism, Islam did not regard women as the property of men

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Originally posted by mdijon:

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
The problem is, on the face of it...

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The problem is indeed on the face of it. You have a superficial view of Islam and what you have written about your superficial view probably far outstrips the word count of what you've read Muslims saying about their Islam. Go read and listen, then form a view.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Actually no, there is one scholar saying pretty much what I said myself. Just he's spelling out some of the complexities which I avoided to make the basic point.

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During Muhammad's life you had a de facto Islamic state which didn't need a great deal of formalised 'politics' because of the living presence of the prophet and the revelations of the Quran to guide things. A somewhat similar though not identical situation existed in the early days of Mormonism and its prophet Joseph Smith.... But you certainly had the basic realities of an Islamic state established by war and continuing to use warfare to establish and defend itself.

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Given the limited nature of political stipulations in the Qurʿān and the ḥadīths, Muslims have had to borrow and to improvise in developing their political systems. These systems, however, have been inspired by sharīʿah (Islamic law), as represented in the Qurʿān and the sunnah; by Arabian tribal traditions; and by the political heritage of the lands Muslims conquered, especially the Persian and Byzantine traditions.

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Why do you think this makes my views "utter bunk"??

It essentially is my view just from a slightly different viewpoint!

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

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Originally posted by mdijon:
The problem is indeed on the face of it. You have a superficial view of Islam and what you have written about your superficial view probably far outstrips the word count of what you've read Muslims saying about their Islam. Go read and listen, then form a view.

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Given how voraciously a hyperlexic Aspie like me can read, that sounds unlikely.

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You will note that having been pointed to a book with a promising different view, I'm about to spend my money on it and read it (and I'm wondering whether the person who found the book will actually be doing that himself, or whether it just served his purposes to use the blurb to get at me....)

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You keep stating that it is a fact that there is only one way to read Muhammad and then when I show you that scholars say that the Islamic states were the way they were due to a range of factors (ie not just a "plain" reading of the Koran) you then change the argument saying that is what you said all along.

The fact is that Muhammad's words in the Koran were open to a whole load of interpretations with regard to violence - leading some to say that it is a religion of peace and others to go down the route of extreme violence.

You are the one saying that violence is the only possible reasonable reading of the Koran,

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The fact is that Muhammad's words in the Koran were open to a whole load of interpretations with regard to violence

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leading some to say that it is a religion of peace and others to go down the route of extreme violence.

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the one saying that violence is the only possible reasonable reading of the Koran

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scholars say that the Islamic states were the way they were due to a range of factors

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...the Islamic states were the way they were due to a range of factors (ie not just a "plain" reading of the Koran)...

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Precisely because Muhammad puts both angles and so presents an incoherent view, and because he himself clearly did the 'Islamic state' and the war on its behalf thing himself, it is at least unsurprising that the majority of Muslims through history seem to have chosen the warfare option and too many have "(gone) down the route of extreme violence".

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I AM the one saying that the conflicted and contradictory readings pretty much guarantee that the violent route will be followed, especially given the rather indisputable action of establishing an Islamic state which (the religious state thing) also causes violence when foisted on the essentially truly peaceable Christian and Buddhist teachings.

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You're slightly mixing cause and effect here. Yes, Muhammad will have set up his Islamic state due to a range of factors including some naivety on his part about the likely consequences of setting up such a state. And yes, further factors will have caused the continuance of what he started. The point remains that he did as a historical fact set up an Islamic state in every way that matters for the current thread, and via the 'plain reading' of the Quran (which you seem to agree with me was in real terms Muhammad's words) purported to have God's support for what he did - a FACT on which the later rulers built.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Precisely because Muhammad puts both angles and so presents an incoherent view, and because he himself clearly did the 'Islamic state' and the war on its behalf thing himself, it is at least unsurprising that the majority of Muslims through history seem to have chosen the warfare option and too many have "(gone) down the route of extreme violence".

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Precisely because Muhammad puts both angles and so presents an incoherent view, and because he himself clearly did the 'Islamic state' and the war on its behalf thing himself, it is at least unsurprising that the majority of Muslims through history seem to have chosen the warfare option and too many have "(gone) down the route of extreme violence".

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Could you clarify something for me? What's the distinction between "extreme violence" and the ordinary kind violence typically associated with states? I'm kind of working from a Weberian understanding of the state as inherently violent, so the distinction seems useful.

For example, if we compare the initial Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 638 and its re-taking by Muslim forces during the Second Crusade (both negotiated surrenders after a siege, with no exceptional atrocities afterwards) with the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christian forces of the First Crusade (city taken by storm, followed by a series of massacres considered excessive even by the standards of Mediæval warfare), most people would class the last as much more "extreme" than either of the first two. How do you arrive at the opposite conclusion?

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Actually as an Anabaptist I pretty much agree with you about the violence of states.

In this case I was quoting somebody else in a context where much was being made of the difference (though nominal as I see it) between what Islamic states mostly do and what organisations like IS do.

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That is utter rubbish. The "majority of Muslims throughout history" have not "chosen the warfare route".

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No, they don't "guarantee that the violent route will be followed" as the long list of different opinions as to how to apply the Koran shows. You're just talking shit.

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I'm saying nothing of the kind and would not presume to agree with you about something that you clearly know absolutely jack shit about.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Actually as an Anabaptist I pretty much agree with you about the violence of states.

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Originally posted by mdijon:
I, mdijon, am seriously disputing that that's a profoundly inferential point in a coherent argument.

Tell me about your great reading of Islamic scholars again when you've got beyond the "about to buy" stage.

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I, mdijon, am seriously disputing that that's a profoundly inferential point in a coherent argument.

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Actually as an Anabaptist I pretty much agree with you about the violence of states.

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Then you do not get it. It is not state or religion, but people. If the world were naught but Anabaptist anarchists, there would be war, rape, murder, etc. Religion is sometime the excuse, but people are the cause.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
Actually as an Anabaptist I pretty much agree with you about the violence of states.

In this case I was quoting somebody else in a context where much was being made of the difference (though nominal as I see it) between what Islamic states mostly do and what organisations like IS do.

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Why specifically Islamic states? Is the Russian bombing campaign in Syria (to pick one example) notably less extreme than the Syrian government's own bombing campaign (conducted with Russian support)?

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And I'm still not clear on what you're arguing regarding the proper role Christians and the state. Is it that Christians should never concern themselves with the doings of the governments under which they live, even in democratic systems where such is expected of them? Or is it that if everyone adopts your particular form of Christianity there will be a "withering away of the state" (that sounds vaguely familiar) to be followed by some anarcho-utopian paradise? Considering the persistence of the state compared with other forms of human organization, this seems a bit naïve.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:
Why specifically Islamic states? Is the Russian bombing campaign in Syria (to pick one example) notably less extreme than the Syrian government's own bombing campaign (conducted with Russian support)?

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In this case, context again - the discussion was about the difference between different manifestations of Islam. I actually did originally leave out the word 'Islamic' there but realised that I'd be widening a bit beyond the original context. Anabaptist pacifism isn't exactly happy about any war. Syria is a mess; the only distinction I can see is that Russia may be trying a bit harder to appear civilised than the Syrian government itself.

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Also briefly – and I could expound this at greater length of course – the Anabaptist view in general is not about “How we would run the state”, and we basically don't want to. It's more about how we live as yes “God's holy people”, but with a status in this world almost of 'resident aliens'; it's how we live, peaceably if we can (but 'turning the other cheek' rather than fighting back if the state won't let us live peaceably), among a 'world' (and I may not interpret that quite as you expect) which is likely often to be hostile, and how we do good for our neighbours as much as possible, which certainly includes sharing our views, but should include a fairly conscious effort not to be what Peter calls 'allotriepiskopoi', which roughly translates as “bossy-boots in other people's business”.

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Originally posted by Steve Langton:
I expect states to go on till Judgement Day. I'm trying to change the relationships between state and church back to the NT model.

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