Following up a discussion on the Middle East and some of the root causes of the ongoing situation.

Sunday September 16th. 2001. at 13.00.

This site has been compiled under Win98/XP with a simple sitebuilder. Any observations from the users of other OS are welcome. That means to ANY of the pages and content.   Does the Quran really contain dozens of verses promoting violence? This page PKM 8th July 2012 Edited that day. Any comments are appreciated. Please use the e.mail link on the Feedback page or the forum also on that page. The e.mail may not work with Hotmail or similar accounts, but mouseover the link will show you my e.mail address. If you want anything posting here, send it over or give me the link. http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Quran/023-violence.htm http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/Bible-Quran-Violence.htm

Summary Answer: The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called 'hypocrites' and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.

Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.

The paragraph above is FUNDAMENTAL. Memorising the Koran and reading it is part of Muslim education.

A response to the American Muslim article: Throwing Stones at the Quran from a Glass House Two examples follow below.

Their first try is a passage from Deuteronomy that might appear to command present-day believers to take a city by force and slaughter the inhabitants on order from God:

“When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you. Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes” ** (Deuteronomy 20:10-17 - As quoted by The American Muslim

Except for the part about sparing women and children, this sounds similar to a verse from the Qur’an:

And when We would destroy a township We send commandment to its folk who live at ease, and afterward they commit abomination therein, and so the Word (of doom) hath effect for it, and we annihilate it with complete annihilation. (Quran 17:16)

But, in fact, the Biblical passage is not an open-ended command to "kill anything that breathes", but instead, a story of history bound within the text. Having trouble seeing this? That’s because the author of The American Muslim piece cleverly left out this part of the passage:**

“Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you”

These are the discrete targets referred to in the last part of the quoted text. The rest of the passage is bound by context as well, given to "Israel" (verse 3) and those "brought out of Egypt" (verse 1). These would be specific instructions to the ancient Israelites, which is why today's Christians and Jews do not treat these verses as present-day imperatives.

Strategic omission is just one way that Muslim apologists manipulate Biblical passages. (In this case, The American Muslim editors did not even include an ellipsis in place of the omission, since it may have raised the suspicions of the reader). The next passage that The American Muslim claims promotes violence is from the apostle Paul, who writes:   “Hymenaeus and Alexander I have delivered to Satan* that they may learn not to blaspheme.” (1Timothy 1:20) The violence in the passage is not exactly evident from this reading. In the context of the previous verse, these two men “suffered shipwreck with regard to the faith,” but there is nothing to indicate that they were physically harmed as a result. It was the practice of the early Church to excommunicate* apostates, and there is every reason to believe that this was the “fate” of these two individuals. They were expelled from the Church by Paul. The Christian Church does not advocate killing apostates. Contrast this with the words of Muhammad:   "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'" (Bukhari 84:57) Not much ambiguity there. Abu Bakr, the first caliph and several other Muslims testified that Muhammad had indeed put Muslim apostates to death. For this reason, the practice is coded in Islamic law.

Most of today's Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book's many calls to violence according to what their own moral preconceptions find justificable. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.

Unfortunately, there are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or even balance out the many that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed. Muhammad's own martial legacy - and that of his companions - along with the remarkable stress on violence found in the Quran have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history.

Muhammad's failure to leave a clear line of succession resulted in perpetual internal war following his death. Those who knew him best first fought to keep remote tribes from leaving Islam and reverting to their preferred religion (the Ridda or 'Apostasy wars'). Then, within the closer community, early Meccan converts battled later ones. Hostility developed between those immigrants who had traveled with Muhammad to Mecca and the Ansar at Medina who had helped them settle in. Finally there was a violent struggle within Muhammad's own family between his favorite wife and favorite daughter - a jagged schism that has left Shias and Sunnis at each others' throats to this day.

The strangest and most untrue thing that can be said about Islam is that it is a Religion of Peace. If every standard by which the West is judged and condemned (slavery, imperialism, intolerance, misogyny, sexual repression, warfare...) were applied equally to Islam, the verdict would be devastating. Islam never gives up what it conquers, be it religion, culture, language or life. Neither does it make apologies or any real effort at moral progress. It is the least open to dialogue and the most self-absorbed. It is convinced of its own perfection, yet brutally shuns self-examination and represses criticism.

This is what makes the Quran's verses of violence so dangerous. They are given the weight of divine command. While Muslim terrorists take them as literally as anything else in their holy book, and understand that Islam is incomplete without Jihad, moderates offerlittle to contradict them - outside of opinion. Indeed, what do they have? Speaking of peace and love may win over the ignorant, butwhen every twelfth verse of Islam's holiest book either speaks to Allah's hatred for non-Muslims or calls for their death, forcedconversion, or subjugation, it's little wonder that sympathy for terrorism runs as deeply as it does in the broader community - even if most Muslims personally prefer not to interpret their religion in this way.

Although scholars like Ibn Khaldun, one of Islam's most respected philosophers, understood that "the holy war is a religious duty,because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force", many other Muslims are either unaware or willfully ignorant of the Quran's near absence of verses that preach universal non-violence. Their understanding of Islam comes from what they are taught by others. In the West, it is typical for believers to think that their religion must be like Christianity - preaching the New Testament virtues of peace, love, and tolerance - because Muslims are taught that Islam is supposed to be superior in every way. They are somewhat surprised and embarrassed to learn that the evidence of the Quran and the bloody history of Islam are very much in contradiction to this.

Others simply accept the violence. In 1991, a Palestinian couple in America was convicted of stabbing their daughter to death for being too Westernized. A family friend came to their defense, excoriating the jury for not understanding the "culture", claiming that the father was merely following "the religion" and saying that the couple had to "discipline their daughter or lose respect." (source). In 2011, unrepentant Palestinian terrorists, responsible for the brutal murders of civilians, women and children explicitly in the name of Allah were treated to a luxurious "holy pilgrimage" to Mecca by the Saudi king - without a single Muslim voice raised in protest.

For their part, Western liberals would do well not to sacrifice critical thinking to the god of political correctness, or look for reasons to bring other religion down to the level of Islam merely to avoid the existential truth that this it is both different and dangerous.

There are just too many Muslims who take the Quran literally... and too many others who couldn't care less about the violence done in the name of Islam.

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/Jesus-Muhammad.htm http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/09/the_political_violence_of_the.html

Also: The Political Violence of the Bible and the Koran by Bill Warner in the American Thinker. This article points out that about 67% of the Sira is devoted to Jihad. The Islamic trilogy (the Quran, Hadith and Sira) contain 9.6 times as much violence as the Hebrew Bible (there New Testament has none).

The difference, as we point out in this article is not just quantitative, but one of quality as well. As Warner puts it: "The political violence of the Koran is eternal and universal. The political violence of the Bible was for that particular historical time and place. This is the vast difference between Islam and other ideologies. The violence remains a constant threat to all non-Islamic cultures, now and into the future."

Comments on the "Holy Books" used in Middle East. Page set up 8th July 2012 Edited 9th July.