Is Islam really a peaceful religion?

[Slander and/or Libel]

You're not understanding my point with the Old Testament. Medieval Christians used that almost as much as they used the New Testament. In fact, if Wikipedia can be trusted, a few medieval chroniclers (some of whom were priests) equated the Muslims with the Amalekites (an Old Testament Caananite group), and advocated the destruction of Muslims in a similar fashion.

And you're not understanding my other point, that the scripture itself matters less than the actions taken by officially "Christian" or "Muslim" societies at given points in history. There have been Muslim regimes that were happily tolerant towards their own subjects, and there have been Christian regimes that were barbaric and zealous. Clearly, either set of scriptures were either ignored or used in support of those regime's policies. And yes, the Islamic regimes that were tolerant could have ignored some of the Quran. That's what most governments do. Or do you really think Christian or Jewish governments always made eating shellfish illegal, for example? Or, as Paul in the New Testament advocates, keeping women from speaking in church?

And do you think Judaism is a violent religion? After all, the Old Testament is quite violent. Or does the historical context outweigh the implementation of the scripture?

Yes, historical context surely matters, and actions taken within societal structures matter. I get your point, and I agree with it, at least up to the point where it leads to the conclusion that "each religion has violent extremists, generic fundamentalists, New Age types, Christmas and Easter types, and more. The specific religion doesn't matter nearly as much as people pretend it does."

Because there's a critical difference: those Christians who love their Muslim neighbors and promote peace are acting in accordance with their scriptures, and those Muslims who love their Christian neighbors and promote peace are acting in opposition to their scriptures. Or at least that's how it appears to me. And the real problem with Islam is that Muslims who question any aspect of their faith run the risk of being labeled an apostate, which in many portions of the Muslim world is still considered a crime, a sin, and an act of treason punishable by death.

Why don't you ask a moderate Muslim about their views on their faith rather than dictating it to them?

[dead0man]

And Malaysia, the world's most populous majority Muslim nation, seems to get along with it's neighbors fairly well.

That doesn't really disprove his point that nearly all conflicts on Earth going on right now involve Muslims on one or both sides.  Yes, you can point to a couple that don't and yeah, you can point to a couple of non-Muslim groups currently doing something horrible.  But for the most part, if you pick any random current conflict, you can safely bet that Muslims will be involved.  I don't think that's a coincidence, you're welcome to try and prove otherwise.

good luck!

[SillyAmerican]

Just saw this today:

Here's What Happens When You Compare Violence in the Quran to Violence in the Bible

http://news.yahoo.com/heres-happens-compare-violence-quran-210900952.html

Yes, but the problem with things like this is that the New Testament is violent, the question is to who is the violence directed. Christ suffered greatly, the crucifixion was no cake walk, and there's all the stuff that happened to Paul. Yes, the text is full of violence, but to my knowledge nowhere does the book exhort violence towards others.

[SillyAmerican]

Why don't you ask a moderate Muslim about their views on their faith rather than dictating it to them?

Okay, how about we ask this young lady?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGE2eBUdlQ

[Slander and/or Libel]

Why don't you ask a moderate Muslim about their views on their faith rather than dictating it to them?

Okay, how about we ask this young lady?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGE2eBUdlQ

She's a Christian. I'm talking about a practicing moderate Muslim, not a Christian anti-Muslim activist.

[Zioneer]

And Malaysia, the world's most populous majority Muslim nation, seems to get along with it's neighbors fairly well.

That doesn't really disprove his point that nearly all conflicts on Earth going on right now involve Muslims on one or both sides.  Yes, you can point to a couple that don't and yeah, you can point to a couple of non-Muslim groups currently doing something horrible.  But for the most part, if you pick any random current conflict, you can safely bet that Muslims will be involved.  I don't think that's a coincidence, you're welcome to try and prove otherwise.

good luck!

Perhaps they include Muslims, but are they centered around Islam? That's the key here. Not every conflict that includes Christians is a Christian conflict, after all.

For example, the Somali Civil War and the Kurdish-Turkish conflict involves Muslims on both sides, but neither conflict involves Islam specifically. Somalia's mess involves a bunch of different tribal groups jockeying for power in the complete breakdown of the Somali government, while the Kurdish-Turkish conflict involves and ethnic conflict about autonomy and independence. The Syrian and Yemeni wars are a Muslim conflict because they specifically involve different groups of Muslims whose hatred of each other is partially based in their interpretation of Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves a very prominent Muslim cause, so it could be considered a "Muslim-Jewish" conflict. But the Pakistan-Indian conflict over Kashmir is not a Muslim conflict because the fact that Pakistan is Muslim does not make it a religious war.

[Slander and/or Libel]

And Malaysia, the world's most populous majority Muslim nation, seems to get along with it's neighbors fairly well.

That doesn't really disprove his point that nearly all conflicts on Earth going on right now involve Muslims on one or both sides.  Yes, you can point to a couple that don't and yeah, you can point to a couple of non-Muslim groups currently doing something horrible.  But for the most part, if you pick any random current conflict, you can safely bet that Muslims will be involved.  I don't think that's a coincidence, you're welcome to try and prove otherwise.

good luck!

Perhaps they include Muslims, but are they centered around Islam? That's the key here. Not every conflict that includes Christians is a Christian conflict, after all.

For example, the Somali Civil War and the Kurdish-Turkish conflict involves Muslims on both sides, but neither conflict involves Islam specifically. Somalia's mess involves a bunch of different tribal groups jockeying for power in the complete breakdown of the Somali government, while the Kurdish-Turkish conflict involves and ethnic conflict about autonomy and independence. The Syrian and Yemeni wars are a Muslim conflict because they specifically involve different groups of Muslims whose hatred of each other is partially based in their interpretation of Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves a very prominent Muslim cause, so it could be considered a "Muslim-Jewish" conflict. But the Pakistan-Indian conflict over Kashmir is not a Muslim conflict because the fact that Pakistan is Muslim does not make it a religious war.

A point well made. I'd only add, to make it extra clear, that it's not at all apparent to me that the geopolitical factors fueling a lot of these conflicts would somehow not be present if the actors were predominantly some other religion.

[Zioneer]

And Malaysia, the world's most populous majority Muslim nation, seems to get along with it's neighbors fairly well.

That doesn't really disprove his point that nearly all conflicts on Earth going on right now involve Muslims on one or both sides.  Yes, you can point to a couple that don't and yeah, you can point to a couple of non-Muslim groups currently doing something horrible.  But for the most part, if you pick any random current conflict, you can safely bet that Muslims will be involved.  I don't think that's a coincidence, you're welcome to try and prove otherwise.

good luck!

Perhaps they include Muslims, but are they centered around Islam? That's the key here. Not every conflict that includes Christians is a Christian conflict, after all.

For example, the Somali Civil War and the Kurdish-Turkish conflict involves Muslims on both sides, but neither conflict involves Islam specifically. Somalia's mess involves a bunch of different tribal groups jockeying for power in the complete breakdown of the Somali government, while the Kurdish-Turkish conflict involves and ethnic conflict about autonomy and independence. The Syrian and Yemeni wars are a Muslim conflict because they specifically involve different groups of Muslims whose hatred of each other is partially based in their interpretation of Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves a very prominent Muslim cause, so it could be considered a "Muslim-Jewish" conflict. But the Pakistan-Indian conflict over Kashmir is not a Muslim conflict because the fact that Pakistan is Muslim does not make it a religious war.

A point well made. I'd only add, to make it extra clear, that it's not at all apparent to me that the geopolitical factors fueling a lot of these conflicts would somehow not be present if the actors were predominantly some other religion.

Let me put it this way, one of the conflicts listed in that link is the War in Donbass, the war with Russians and East and West Ukraine, and so forth. I'm sure that there's very devout Orthodox on both sides, and according to Wiki Ukraine has a decently sized Ukrainian Greek Catholic population, but nobody would call it an Orthodox conflict or even a Christian conflict, because that would be absurd, and not the point of the conflict at all. Or the Mexican Drug War, is that a Catholic conflict? After all, there's devout Catholics involved, no? Of course it isn't a Catholic conflict.

And so it's the same way with some, but not all of the conflicts that involve Muslims. That fact that one or more of the belligerent nations or groups happen to be Muslim does not mean it's a Muslim conflict, because Islam itself is not a major part of the conflict.

Some other conflicts on in that link: the Libyan Civil War; definitely a Muslim conflict because part of the war involves the Islamists in Tripoli and of course ISIS. Sinai insurgency, yep, because the conflict involves the secular authorities and Islamist bandits. Balochistan conflict is an intra-Islam conflict because of Sunni and Shia factions, but with a heavy ethnic element. Moro conflict, yep, literally Islamist rebels against a Catholic government. But say, Kurdish separatism in Iran? No, that's more of an ethnic and nationality conflict.

Sometimes circumstances can change an ethnic conflict into a religious conflict; the Tuareg/Azawad rebellion in Mali got hijacked by Islamists, for example.

[dead0man]

I'll agree that some of the conflicts involving Muslims don't have Islam to blame, but we can, and you just did, point to a more than a few that do.  Under that same criteria, are there any non-Muslim related religious based conflicts? No?  When was the last one?  The 30 Years War?  Maybe some Buddhist vs Hindu sh**t in India I don't know about because I'm a white dude from America and nobody teaches sh**t like that here?

[Oldiesfreak1854]

I think this is a stupid question.  Any religion is as violent or as peaceful as you make it.  Just as some people twist the Bible to endorse violence, so do some with the Koran.

[ingemann]

The idea that a "good Muslim" need to be a cartoonish evil sociopath and peaceful Muslims are just Muslims who doesn't follow their religion, are really not helpful or very insightful into what Islam is.

Of course at the same time people who begin to bleat about the wonders of Moorish Spain are a f**king joke. Moorish Spain was a dysfunctional disaster who depopulated much of Spain (with much of the population fleeing to the North) and was unable to set up a viable state. The reconquista may not have been nice, but it was no worse than the conquest of Iberia by the Moors.

As for Islam as the Faith of Peace(tm), it's a talking point and no more, Bush decided to use it to avoid unnecessary violence in USA against American Muslim, and that was a good thing, but you need to be blind, deaf and functional retarded to not have discovered 15 years after 9/11, that Muslims and Islamism are overrepresented in the world's conflicts, in fact they're more or less in conflict all places where they interact with non-Muslims...

...Well people, if you meet a asshole once a day, you have meet a asshole that day, if you meet ten asshole everyday, it's you who is the asshole. And it seems that Muslims keep being neighbours to people who don't like them, at some point that begin to say more about them than their neighbours.

It depends on what period of Moorish Spain you're talking about; there were periods of genuine toleration, and other periods of persecution and chaos. It depends on what family was in power in Al-Andalus. Same with the Ottomans, though regarding the Sultan and his Vizier rather than different families.

..And that's exactly the problem, you compare short periods of tolerance in Moorish Spain, which was followed with periodes of greater Islamic intolerance with Habsburg Spain at its very worst. There was also long periodes of Spanish tolerance toward Jews and Muslims, which was why their expellions happened so late.

Moorish Spain as some kind tolerant paradise are late 19th century propaganda, where the "savage" (the Moor) are hold up as a picture of greater virtues than the "knight" (the reconquistadors) as a way to sell a message of Europeans should be nice to religious minorities. They could sell that message because the Iberian moor no longer existed as a counter image and Europeans north of Pyrenees barely knew anything about Spanish history and barely saw the Iberians as Europeans.

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Indonesia not Malaysia and while I don't think they horrible, their history in East Timor and eastern Indonesia are not a positive history.

[Zioneer]

I'll agree that some of the conflicts involving Muslims don't have Islam to blame, but we can, and you just did, point to a more than a few that do.  Under that same criteria, are there any non-Muslim related religious based conflicts? No?  When was the last one?  The 30 Years War?  Maybe some Buddhist vs Hindu sh**t in India I don't know about because I'm a white dude from America and nobody teaches sh**t like that here?

Well, you should probably look up international events for one thing.

But in regards to religious-based conflicts, in Myanmar, there's genuine oppression of the minority Muslim Rohingya by the majority Buddhists. And at one point in Myanmar in the 1990s, there was an extremist Christian religious rebellion called the Lord's Army that employed Christian child soldiers. And Kony with his Lord's Resistance Army in Central Africa. But many of the non-Muslim conflicts are ethnically-based.

[Zioneer]

The idea that a "good Muslim" need to be a cartoonish evil sociopath and peaceful Muslims are just Muslims who doesn't follow their religion, are really not helpful or very insightful into what Islam is.

Of course at the same time people who begin to bleat about the wonders of Moorish Spain are a f**king joke. Moorish Spain was a dysfunctional disaster who depopulated much of Spain (with much of the population fleeing to the North) and was unable to set up a viable state. The reconquista may not have been nice, but it was no worse than the conquest of Iberia by the Moors.

As for Islam as the Faith of Peace(tm), it's a talking point and no more, Bush decided to use it to avoid unnecessary violence in USA against American Muslim, and that was a good thing, but you need to be blind, deaf and functional retarded to not have discovered 15 years after 9/11, that Muslims and Islamism are overrepresented in the world's conflicts, in fact they're more or less in conflict all places where they interact with non-Muslims...

...Well people, if you meet a asshole once a day, you have meet a asshole that day, if you meet ten asshole everyday, it's you who is the asshole. And it seems that Muslims keep being neighbours to people who don't like them, at some point that begin to say more about them than their neighbours.

It depends on what period of Moorish Spain you're talking about; there were periods of genuine toleration, and other periods of persecution and chaos. It depends on what family was in power in Al-Andalus. Same with the Ottomans, though regarding the Sultan and his Vizier rather than different families.

..And that's exactly the problem, you compare short periods of tolerance in Moorish Spain, which was followed with periodes of greater Islamic intolerance with Habsburg Spain at its very worst. There was also long periodes of Spanish tolerance toward Jews and Muslims, which was why their expellions happened so late.

Moorish Spain as some kind tolerant paradise are late 19th century propaganda, where the "savage" (the Moor) are hold up as a picture of greater virtues than the "knight" (the reconquistadors) as a way to sell a message of Europeans should be nice to religious minorities. They could sell that message because the Iberian moor no longer existed as a counter image and Europeans north of Pyrenees barely knew anything about Spanish history and barely saw the Iberians as Europeans.

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Indonesia not Malaysia and while I don't think they horrible, their history in East Timor and eastern Indonesia are not a positive history.

So then the Moors in Spain were not any worse than the Christians; both groups had periods of oppression and periods of tolerance, no? As for the Catholics in Spain, the persecutions in earnest started as soon as the Spainards had complete control of the entire peninsula, like a year after they expelled the last of the Muslim emirates.

So if the Muslims were not perfect, they at least weren't any worse than the Christians, which defeats the point of calling Islam a violent religion and Christianity a peaceful one. It seems like you and some of the others are giving Christianity a free pass while criticizing Islam on every conflict it's been involved in.

As for Indonesia (apologies, I couldn't remember which was the most populous Muslim nation), that is a good point (as East Timor is indeed Catholic), but other than that, Indonesia (and Malaysia) haven't really taken part in religious-based conflict for a while.

[Famous Mortimer]

I think this is a stupid question.  Any religion is as violent or as peaceful as you make it.  Just as some people twist the Bible to endorse violence, so do some with the Koran.

This is just stupid. Religions are equally violent regardless of scripture? So if there's a hypothetical religion with scripture that says "love everyone, never kill" it's just as violent as a hypothetical religion with a scripture that says "kill nonbelievers"? Obviously that's not true but you are saying otherwise. Why? Do you think that just by calling something a religion, it automatically defaults to a certain level of problematicness? Again, obviously not true. Or do you think Islam and Christianity, two wildly different religions with wildly different histories and lots of different factions, just totally coincidentally happen to be the exact same level of violent?

[dead0man]

As for Indonesia (apologies, I couldn't remember which was the most populous Muslim nation), that is a good point (as East Timor is indeed Catholic), but other than that, Indonesia (and Malaysia) haven't really taken part in religious-based conflict for a while.

Yeah, just other than that one that's caused more deaths than Israel-Palestinian conflict.  Other than that....

[Famous Mortimer]

Zioneer keeps saying people don't understand his point. We do understand your point. It's not a good point.

Christian society in the middle ages: Horrible by middle ages standards, horrible by modern standards

Islamic society in the middle ages: Okay by middle ages standards, horrible by modern standards

Christian society today: Good by current standards

Islamic society today: Bad by modern standards

Islamic society has never been good by modern standards. Christianity is. Islamic might not be capable of it. If it is, it has yet to demonstrate that.

[Zioneer]

Zioneer keeps saying people don't understand his point. We do understand your point. It's not a good point.

Christian society in the middle ages: Horrible by middle ages standards, horrible by modern standards

Islamic society in the middle ages: Okay by middle ages standards, horrible by modern standards

Christian society today: Good by current standards

Islamic society today: Bad by modern standards

Islamic society has never been good by modern standards. Christianity is. Islamic might not be capable of it. If it is, it has yet to demonstrate that.

No, I really don't think you understand my point. Despite all the back-and-forth on what counts as an Islamic conflict versus what doesn't count, my main point is this: Islam may have violent passages in its scriptures, but that does not mean that it is inherently violent. Looking at history, it's clear that Muslims are not always a brutal aggressor, and Christianity has just as violent a history as Islam, despite a much more peaceful holy book. Muslims, both relatively secular and religiously devout, can peacefully coexist with other religions. And it really doesn't matter if it's ignoring its holy book to be peaceable, because religious societies are based more in history than in their holy book. It doesn't mean that peaceful Muslims are not "real" Muslims.

I'm simply demonstrating that the history of religions matters more than the theology when it comes to violence, and that both Islam and Christianity have a mixed bag. And yes, Modern Islam is definitely a mixed bag, but generally millions of Muslims do live in peace with most everyone, except when their governments get into fights. Yes, there happens to be a prominent violent extremist streak in Islam, but that should not define the whole religion. Just like a former history of polygamy and the FLDS nutters shouldn't get to define my faith of Mormonism.

[Zioneer]

As for Indonesia (apologies, I couldn't remember which was the most populous Muslim nation), that is a good point (as East Timor is indeed Catholic), but other than that, Indonesia (and Malaysia) haven't really taken part in religious-based conflict for a while.

Yeah, just other than that one that's caused more deaths than Israel-Palestinian conflict.  Other than that....

Well, I don't see Indonesia getting into fights with anyone else, do you? And as I said with other conflicts, much of it could be an ethnic conflict as well.

[Famous Mortimer]

It doesn't matter what their holy books say? The fact that a book is violent doesn't have any impact on how violent the people are who believe it's the infallible word of God are?

Again, that's just stupid. There's no other way to say it.

Let's not talk about violence because it's too controversial and it's making people overly cautious.

It would be like if there was a religion that said God wants everyone to wear green pants and you said "hey, that's got nothing to do with the fact that all their members wear green pants!"

[afleitch]

Initial Islamic and Christian expansion was violent (and was happening at roughly the same time). Wahabbism and strands of Christianity that are expanding outside of our western bubble are passive agressive. In isolated incidents that can turn violent. Whether you hurl gays off buildings or try to exorcise them both are acts of violence.

[SillyAmerican]

Initial Islamic and Christian expansion was violent (and was happening at roughly the same time). Wahabbism and strands of Christianity that are expanding outside of our western bubble are passive agressive. In isolated incidents that can turn violent. Whether you hurl gays off buildings or try to exorcise them both are acts of violence.

One of the reasons folks got so irritated by Jesus was that he didn't get into the politics of situations, and didn't distinguish who among us is worthy of being dealt with. (News flash: none of us are; all sin and fall short of the glory of God). If you can understand how the twelve closest first followers of Christ can include both a tax collector and a zealot, you begin to understand the power of Christianity. In general, I agree with you: many of those who call themselves the "religious right" need to re-read and consider the message of Mark 2:13-17, and ask themselves whether their thoughts/actions are in line with those of Jesus or the Pharisees.

[dead0man]

As for Indonesia (apologies, I couldn't remember which was the most populous Muslim nation), that is a good point (as East Timor is indeed Catholic), but other than that, Indonesia (and Malaysia) haven't really taken part in religious-based conflict for a while.

Yeah, just other than that one that's caused more deaths than Israel-Palestinian conflict.  Other than that....

Well, I don't see Indonesia getting into fights with anyone else, do you? And as I said with other conflicts, much of it could be an ethnic conflict as well.

Yeah, it could be, but since this was the "see, they ain't all violent" example, it kind of says a lot that they murdered more than 100,000 Catholics in a twenty year period.

[Zioneer]

It doesn't matter what their holy books say? The fact that a book is violent doesn't have any impact on how violent the people are who believe it's the infallible word of God are?

Again, that's just stupid. There's no other way to say it.

Let's not talk about violence because it's too controversial and it's making people overly cautious.

It would be like if there was a religion that said God wants everyone to wear green pants and you said "hey, that's got nothing to do with the fact that all their members wear green pants!"

Okay, I misspoke on that. What I mean is, what their holy books say matter less than their historical actions. Of course the holy books matter overall, but again, despite the New Testament saying "turn the other cheek" and "give all you have to the poor", medieval Christians weren't the greatest at that, and in several cases, were worse than Muslims. That isn't to absolve Muslims of all wrongdoing, they've certainly done a lot of terrible things, but the fact that a holy book says something doesn't mean a religious person always follows it. So I don't think it's fair to call Islam violent because its holy book has violent passages. And I really do think everyone in this thread has been giving Christianity a pass by equating them with just the New Testament. As I keep saying, the medieval Christians used the much more violent Old Testament almost as much as they used the New Testament.

And for that matter, are the Jews a violent religion because they use the Tanakh which of course includes what Christians know as the Old Testament?

But in any cause, I don't think it's fair to call Islam an inherently violent religion, just as it's not fair to call Christianity an inherently violent religion. Yes, Islam has more violent strands than Christianity now, but a lot of that has been exacerbated by events and trends that don't necessarily involve the theology itself.

Heck, much of the blame for much of the inward, and eventually fundamentalist and violent interpretations of Islam can be placed at the foot of the Mongols, who destroyed more than one Muslim-ruled nation that was known for intellectualism and tolerance. Yes, the attitudes and interpretations of some Muslims haven't helped, but historical and geographical trends also played a part beyond the theology.

[Zioneer]

As for Indonesia (apologies, I couldn't remember which was the most populous Muslim nation), that is a good point (as East Timor is indeed Catholic), but other than that, Indonesia (and Malaysia) haven't really taken part in religious-based conflict for a while.

Yeah, just other than that one that's caused more deaths than Israel-Palestinian conflict.  Other than that....

Well, I don't see Indonesia getting into fights with anyone else, do you? And as I said with other conflicts, much of it could be an ethnic conflict as well.

Yeah, it could be, but since this was the "see, they ain't all violent" example, it kind of says a lot that they murdered more than 100,000 Catholics in a twenty year period.

Fair enough. I just wanted to point out that Indonesia isn't exactly Saudi Arabia, Iran, or ISIS. Apart from a place that they considered theirs, they haven't really picked fights with their neighbors like the above countries have. And if I recall correctly, Indonesia has traditionally followed a less fundamentalist, more syncretic flavor of Islam.

[dead0man]

I agree, they are fairly tame by the standards of most Muslim nations.  And they murdered more than 100,000 Catholics in twenty years.