Al-Huda
Foundation, NJ U. S. A
the Message Continues ... 5/127
Newsletter for March 2012
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The True, Peaceful Face Of Islam
BY KAREN ARMSTRONG
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the
world's fastest-growing religion. If the evil carnage we
witnessed on Sept. 11
were typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and
justified such violence, its growth and the increasing presence
of Muslims in both
Europe and the U.S. would be a terrifying prospect. Fortunately,
this is not the case.
The very word Islam, which means "surrender," is related to the
Arabic salam, or peace. When the Prophet Muhammad brought the
inspired
scripture known as the Koran to the Arabs in the early 7tb
century A.D., a major part of his mission was devoted precisely
to bringing an end to
the kind of mass slaughter we witnessed in New York City and
Washington.
Pre-Islamic Arabia was caught up in a vicious cycle of warfare,
in which tribe fought tribe in a pattern of vendetta and counter
vendetta.
Muhammad himself survived several assassination attempts, and
the early Muslim community narrowly escaped extermination by the
powerful city of Mecca. The Prophet had to fight a deadly war in
order to survive, but as soon as he felt his people were
probably safe, he devoted his attention to building up a
peaceful coalition of tribes and achieved victory by an
ingenious and inspiring campaign of nonviolence. When he died in
632, he had almost single-handedly brought peace to war-torn
Arabia. Because the Koran was revealed in the context of an
all-out war, several passages deal with the conduct of armed
struggle. Warfare was a desperate business on the Arabian
Peninsula. A chieftain was not expected to spare survivors after
a battle, and some of the Koranic injunctions seem to share this
spirit. Muslims are ordered by God to "slay [enemies ] wherever
you find them!" (4: 89). Extremists such as Osama like to quote
such verses but do so selectively. They do not include the
exhortations to peace, which in almost every case follow these
more ferocious passages: "Thus, if they let you be, and do not
make war on you, and offer you peace, God does not allow you to
harm them" (4: 90).
In the Koran, therefore, the only permissible war is one of
self-defense. Muslims may not begin hostilities (2: 190).
Warfare is always evil, but sometimes you have to fight in order to avoid the kind of persecution that Mecca inflicted on the Muslims (2: 191; 2: 217) or to preserve decent values (4:75; 22: 40).
The Koran quotes the Torah, the Jewish scriptures, which permits people to retaliate eye for eye, tooth for tooth, but like the Gospels, the Koran suggests that it is meritorious to forgo revenge in a spirit of charity (5:45).
Hostilities must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and must cease the minute the enemy sues for peace (2: 192-3).
Islam is not addicted to war, and jihad is not one of its
"pillars," or essential practices. The primary meaning of the
word jihad is not "holy war" but "struggle." It refers to the
difficult effort that is needed to put God's will into practice
at every level-personal and social as well as political. A very
important
and much quoted tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as
they go home after a battle, "We are returning from the lesser
jihad [the
battle] to the greater jihad," the far more urgent and momentous
task of extirpating wrongdoing from one's own society and one's
own heart.
Islam did not impose itself by the sword. In a statement in
which the Arabic is extremely emphatic, the Koran insists,
"There must be no
coercion in matters of faith!" (2: 256). Constantly Muslims are
enjoined to respect Jews and Christians, the "People of the
Book," who worship
the same God (29: 46). In words quoted by Muhammad in one of his
last public sermons, God tells all human beings, "0 people! We
have formed
you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another"
(49: 13)--not to conquer, convert, subjugate, revile or
slaughter but to reach out toward others with intelligence and
understanding.
So why the suicide bombing, the hijacking and the massacre of
innocent civilians? Far from being endorsed by the Koran, this
killing violates
some of its most sacred precepts. But during the 20tb century,
the militant form of piety often known as fundamentalism erupted
in every
major religion as a rebellion against modernity. Every
fundamentalist movement I have studied in Judaism, Christianity
and Islam is convinced
that liberal, secular society is determined to wipe out
religion.
Fighting, as they imagine, a battle for survival,
fundamentalists often feel justified in ignoring the more
compassionate principles of their
faith. But in amplifying the more aggressive passages that exist
in all our scriptures, they distort the tradition.
It would be as grave a mistake to see Osama bin Laden as an
authentic representative of Islam as to consider James Kopp, the
alleged killer of
an abortion provider in Buffalo, N. y ., a typical Christian or
Baruch Goldstein, who shot 29 worshipers in the Hebron mosque in
1994 and died
in the attack, a true martyr of Israel. The vast majority of
Muslims, who are horrified by the atrocity of Sept. 11, must
reclaim their faith
from those who have so violently hijacked it.
Karen Armstrong, the renowned British Author, has written
several books on comparative religion, including “History of
God”, “ Islam: A Short
History”, “Muhammad, A Prophet for our Times”, “Twelve Steps to
a Passionate Life and other titles.
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