Rishon Rishon

Simplistic about Islam

I'd like to thank all of you who keep coming by. I look at my stats and see a long line of zeros, and it makes me sad. (When the page has not been refreshed since the last visit, it sends a short "nothing changed" message instead of the whole page. Your browser then knows to redisplay the page from its cache.) The zeros mean that people keep coming by, but get nothing - kind of like having a visitor at dinnertime and not feeding them.

Amritas quotes David Frum:

We in the Western press often praise “moderate Islam.” But in practice, “moderate Islam” often turns out to be moderate in its actions only. As decent human beings, moderate Muslims will of course refrain from committing acts of oppression, cruelty, and terrorism. But intellectually, moderate Muslims have a difficult time explaining why these acts are “un-Islamic.”

I, too, am skeptical about the presence of a "moderate Islam" in any meaningful way. Yes, moderates exist, but they seem to have no following whatsoever. However, this is very different from saying that a moderate Islam cannot exist:

Socrates once posed a brain-twister to his disciples. “Is a good action good because it is approved by the gods? Or is it approved by the gods because it is good.” In other words – do the categories of right and wrong have an existence apart from divine will?

Islam’s answer to Socrates’ puzzle has been emphatic: An action is good because it is approved by Allah. There is no independent criterion of morality outside of the will of God. And since the Koran is an absolutely literal and accurate account of that will – since indeed in a deep sense the Koran itself actually incarnates that will – there is no independent criterion of morality outside the text of the Koran.

In other words: If the Koran says or teaches something that seems morally offensive, it is morality that is mistaken, not the Koran.

Intellectually, traditional Islam forms a closed system. You can exit the system (although the penalty for exit – apostasy – is death). But so long as you remain within it, the intellectual system forbids its own reform.

I would like to point out a few things. First, I don't believe that Islam takes the Qur'an (Koran) more literally than Jews or Christians take their holy books. After all, there are reams of Islamic discourse trying to figure out what it means. Note the wide differences among Jews and Christians (and between them!) - all of whom believe that they are following God's word. Second, there are already wide-ranging differences among Muslims, note particularly the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, but also wide-ranging differences among Shiites. Finally, I want to take issue with the phrase, "the intellectual system forbids its own reform". The same thing can be said about Catholicism, yet the Protestant reformation did happen.

UPDATE: The title of this post is a play on the Arabic root s-l-m, corresponding to Hebrew sh-l-m.

UPDATE: Thank you all for dropping by! I don't know when I'll be able to post next, but I at least plan on posting for Purim. So stay tuned.