Reforming the Koran???? C’mon.
by Jerry Gordon
Last Friday FrontPageMagazine published a symposium on reform of the Islamic canon, what Bob Spencer of Jihad Watch, a participant , called an ‘elephantine and disputatious” discussion on reform of Islam.
Included in the panel were Spencer of Jihad Watch; Bill Warner of the Center for the Study of Political Islam; an apostate Muslim, Abul Kasem, “an ex-Muslim who is the author of hundreds of articles and several books on Islam including, “Women in Islam”. a contributor to the book “Leaving Islam – Apostates Speak Out” as well as to “Beyond Jihad: Critical Views From Inside Islam”; a Kurdish Turkish human rights advocate for Qu’ranic Islam, Edip Yuksel; a Muslim commentator on human rights, counter-terrorism and Islamic affairs,Thomas Haidon; and the leader of a Islamic reform group, Khalim Massoud, the president of Muslims Against Sharia, an Islamic reform movement.
The net upshot of the FrontPageMagazine symposium was that reform of the canons of Islam is virtually impossible, because normative Muslims believe the Islamic canon, the Qu’ran, Sira-the biography of Muhammed and the Hadiths are ultimately the infallible ‘hearsay’ words of Allah.
Warner demonstrates in his comments and our prior posts about his ground breaking analysis, most of Islamic canon is political containing a doctrine of hate of the other, the kafir, and the imperative to fulfill the will of Allah by committing Jihad in whatever form. Kasem disagrees with Warner that adoption of the ‘golden rule’ of Western ethical philosophy will cure Islam. But then, Kasem has left Islam far behind. Spencer agrees with Warner analysis that the Islam canons are “kafir, dhimmi centric” documents full of hate.
Below are excerpts from the comments of Warner, the apostate Muslim Kasem and Spencer that corroborate one another.
The Koran, the Sira and the Hadith are of one cloth. They form an integrated and complete ideology. The logical perfection of the Trilogy is the reason that it has lasted so long.
The other basis for my logic is that the reform be comprehensive and logical. We must have principles, not beautiful opinions.
One of those opinions was stated by Mr. Massoud, “God is a loving God.” I don’t know anything about Allah, but I do know what the Koran says. While there are over 300 references in the Koran to Allah and fear, there are 49 references to love. Of these love references, 39 are negative such as the 14 negative references to love of money, power, other gods and status.
Three verses command humanity to love Allah and 2 verses are about how Allah loves a believer. There are 25 verses about how Allah does not love kafirs.
This leaves 5 verses about love. Of these 5, 3 are about loving kin or a Muslim brother. One verse commands a Muslim to give for the love of Allah. This leaves only one quasi-universal verse about love: give what you love to charity and even this is contaminated by dualism since Muslim charity only goes to other Muslims.
So much for love. Fear is what Allah demands.
propose a rational reform based upon how to treat the “other”–the Golden Rule: treat others as you wish to be treated.
The Golden Rule is centered on ethics, not god, and is universal to all cultures, except Islam. Indeed, the whole Islamic Trilogy denies the truth of the Golden Rule. Therefore, the Golden Rule reform has to be applied to the Koran, Sira and Hadith. Only then will the reform be comprehensive. Mr. Haidon says, “Muslims will never accept, on any level, removal of parts of the Koran.” To just reform the Sira and the Hadith is petty change. I want ALL of the ugliness towards the kafir removed. That means that the Koran must also be subject to analysis.
The Golden Rule removes the brutality, insults and prejudice directed at the kafir. The constant attacks would disappear. The Rule is very simple and logical to apply to the texts.
What is amazing is how much the Golden Rule removes from the Trilogy. About 61% of the Koran vanishes, 75% of the Sira and 20% of the Hadith also go away. As I said, I only care about Islam treats the kafir, but the Golden Rule also removes all of the dualistic rules about women. So the reductions will be even greater when the material about the treatment of women is removed.
The Golden Rule even changes Hell. Islamic Hell is primarily political. Hell is mentioned 146 times in the Koran. Only 9 references are for moral failings—greed, lack of charity, love of worldly success. The other 137 references to Hell involve eternal torture for not agreeing that Mohammed is right. That is a political charge, not a morals failure. Thus 94% of the references to Hell are as a political prison for dissenters. The Golden Rule would empty Islam’s political prison.
Here is what Kasem said about Warner’s analysis:
Nevertheless, I appreciate the efforts of Massoud and Thomas Haidon who sincerely want to reform Islam and bring it to conform to the current civilized world. They are genuinely appalled at the barbaric, cruel and inhuman aspects of Islam, largely emanating from the application Koran and ahadith. Unfortunately, history of Islam demonstrates that many such attempts in the past had been dismal failures, and there is very little prospect that such current attempts or future attempts will succeed. I might sound pessimistic, but Islamic history uncannily confirms that playing with Koran and a hadith is a dangerous game that is destined to failure.
I agree with Bill Warner when he says: The Koran, the Sira and the Hadith are of one cloth. They form an integrated and complete ideology.
This means if one edits the Koran he must also edit the other two sources of Islam. Is Khalim Massoud willing to do this job? Will the Muslims, by and large, will agree with Khalim Massoud’s versions of Sira and Hadith? I doubt they will.
What I disagree with Bill Warner is that, while he accepts that the Koran is reformable, I do not. I have already stated my reason/s why this is just not possible—the Koran completely forbids its reformation, and whoever attempts to do so will be murdered, Islamically.
There is only one choice left, to abandon the Koran, totally.
Spencer’s conclusions are spot on:
Nothing I have read in this elephantine and contentious exchange has led me to modify my view that, as Mr. Haidon has said, “Muslims will never accept, on any level, removal of parts of the Qur’an.” Not only are large numbers of Muslims ever likely to accept a drastically edited Qur’an, but they are also unlikely ever to flock to a wholesale reevaluation of Islamic theology involving the dismissal of the Hadith and Sira as “hearsay stories.”
Mr. Warner is correct: “And there is no mechanism for reform. Our results–good, bad or indifferent—do not make any difference. There is no body or group that could vote or agree on any change.” Many strange things have happened in history and I would never say that Islamic reform is absolutely impossible, but Westerners are extraordinarily foolish when they harbor any hopes of it actually happening on a large scale. We need instead to focus on efforts to defend ourselves both militarily and culturally from the jihadist challenge, and to continue to call the bluffs of pseudo-reformers who intend ultimately only to deceive Western non-Muslims – many of whom are quite anxious to be deceived.
Because of the entrenched nature of Islamic orthodoxy, and its willingness to commit violence to enforce conformity, I am skeptical of the claims put forward by both Mr. Massoud and Mr. Yuksel to the effect that Muslims are flocking to their reform efforts.
Mr. Warner’s insight is excellent — that “all scholarship in Islam is either from the viewpoint of the kafir (kafir-centric), the dhimmi (dhimmi-centric) or believer (believer-centric).” In a world in which dhimmi-centric and believer-centric studies dominate the universities and media treatments of Islamic issues, Mr. Warner and others have stepped into the breach and begun to provide kafir-centric analyses to help non-Muslims understand exactly what we are dealing with. I myself have tried to fill a gap in kafir-centric scholarship on Muhammad with my book The Truth About Muhammad, and on the Qur’an in my Blogging the Qur’an series at hotair.com. At this point, which such a fog of ignorance and propaganda enveloping us and impeding our understanding of the jihad threat, to be informed is an essential first step.
And Mr. Warner is also quite right, of course, that “for the believer, Allah is wise, forgiving, knowing, and so forth. But for the kafir, Allah is a hater, a torturer, a plotter, a sadist, and an enemy. Allah makes us kafirs. Then he goes ahead to tell the Muslims what filthy scum we are.” This dualism is deeply rooted in the Qur’an, which tells Muslims to be merciful to one another but harsh or ruthless to unbelievers (48:29), and tells them that they are the “best of people” (3:110) while the unbelievers are the “vilest of created beings” (98:6). Even worse, unbelievers have no control over their fate – while there are many verses in the Qur’an that assume that human beings have free will, early in Islamic history the proponents of this idea, the Qadariyya, were defeated, and human free will was declared a heretical infringement of Allah’s absolute sovereignty.
So what we have is not a muddle, but the clear and present problem that Islam and its canards do not lend themselves to reform, but rather to perpetuation of the core doctrine of Jihad against the unbelievers, the kafirs, us. We wonder about the Turkish effort to expunge the Qu’aran of this core hatred of the ‘other’. A veritable non-sequitur given the exchanges in this ‘elephantine’ and ‘contentious’ symposium.
April 20th, 2008 at 6:35 • opinion • FrontPageMagazine forum on Reform of Islam • Bill Warner of CSPI • Jamie Glazov editor • Bob Spencer of Jihad Watch • Abdul Kasem apostate Muslim • 0 Comments •
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