First Muslim Migrants

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
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[quote]Mr. Zero wrote:
As it says in the Quran, God sends a messenger to every people, and the only way to God is through the messenger. [/quote]

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” - John 1:1

Work, or Logos (Gk.): “word,” “statement,” or “utterance.” The term is used 330 times in the NT. The background of this concept in John is both philosophical and biblical.

  1. Ancient Greek philosophers associated the Word with the order and design of the universe or with the intelligence expression of the mind of God as he sustains and governs it.
  2. In Biblical tradition the Word is the powerful utterance of God that brought all things into being at the dawn of time (Gen 1:3; Ps 33:6; Wis 9:1).
  3. Another biblical tradition links the Word of God with the Wisdom of God, who was depicted as God’s eternal companion (Prov 8:23; Sir 24:9), the craftsman who labored alongside God at creation (Prov 8:30; Wis 7:22), and the one who remains a source of life for the world (Prov 8:35).

John, it seems, has pulled these traditions together to say something entirely new: the Word of God is not so much an abstract principle or an audible power as it is a Divine Person: God the Son (Rev 19:13). This eternal Word, once a mediator of creation has now become a mediator of salvation through his Incarnation (JN 1:14; 3:17). [1]

[1] Scott, H., et al., The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, (SF, Ignatius Press 2010).

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I read the book The Closing of the Muslim Mind once, but it was on loan. I only got half way through, but I bought it for myself the other day. Thought I would share with those interested in Islam from someone who deals with foreign policy. http://www.isi.org/(X(1)S(mlca23y3w12g1w45l2zieo45))/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=6653cad2-bfd2-4730-bc8a-51318fe41ce7&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Some things the book answers:

  • why peace is so elusive in the Middle East
  • why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development
  • why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world
  • why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years
  • why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon
  • why Muslim media frequently present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution
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Here is an excerpt from a review of the book, I am excited to read it!

[quote]We can see an indication of such behavior in the way the press operates and reports news. In Muslim countries, news is generally rife with conspiracy theories and fantastic accounts of natural events. It does not mention causal relationships or have continuity, and there is little effort to place events and facts in a meaningful context. Rather, the news tends toward narration and description. It focuses on the partial, successive, isolated, immediate events and facts. Therefore, the news is generally weak in investigation and analysis, often distorted and without depth.

In other examples, Muslims have been known not to purchase car insurance or get polio vaccinations because they believed doing so would amount to acts of presumption against Allah’s will. In another example, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist and university professor, says it is not Islamic to say that combining two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom make water. Proper Islamic phraseology requires that you say water is created by the will of Allah when you bring these elements together.

As you can imagine, science and scholarship have not thrived in this environment. Reilly tells us that there has not been a major discovery in the Muslim world for over seven centuries. On average, there are only 8.5/1000 scientist in Muslim countries. The average is 40.7/1000 in non-Muslim countries. During the past 1000 years, approximately 10,000 books have been translated by the Arab world, while Spain approximates this many translations in only one year. Not surprisingly, the Arab world is near the bottom of the scale in all areas of development such as health, education, GDP, and productivity.

Such thinking also has serious political ramifications. Reilly says that the primacy of reason is a prerequisite for democracy and that constitutional government is based on metaphysical…[/quote]

http://www.catholic.org/ae/books/review.php?id=42386

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One last quote from the review:

[quote]As a result, some Muslims, like the Nazis before them, looked for an enemy to explain their declining status and power. The growth of radical fundamentalism and violence ensued. Once the will and power gain primacy over reason, Reilly says, violence is the only path left open. So he sees the Islamic upsurge as a force not meant to solve problems but to intoxicate and incite those who can no longer abide by their failure to solve them. But he does not believe that the violence can be fully explained within Islam itself. For this reason, he distinguishes Islam from “Islamism,” which is a particular view of Islam. To better comprehend Islamism, he says, it needs to be viewed in the light of 20th century Marxist and Nietzscheian philosophies.

As with the Nazis, the violent school of thought known as Qutb is derived from Nietzsche’s idea of the primacy of will. This directly connects Islamist violence and totalitarianism with the West. Certain modern Western ideologies, such as secularism and liberalism, assert that the primary constituent of reality is the will. Per Nietzsche, the instrument of will is force. And Karl Marx said that “In order to change humanity, one must use force.”[/quote]

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[quote]Mr. Zero wrote:
…
However, modern day scholars and their students can interpret the quran so long as they don’t contradict the “usool of tafseer” or fundamentals of interpretation. It is just unnecessary because excellent interpretations have already been written, such as “tafseer ibn katheer”.
[/quote]

YO! Mr. Zero… you are kinda fucking up here guy!

What I just quoted is the biggest error that has happened to Islamic Civilization. It is impossible to understand the world without taking the Quran and Sunna and interpreting how to deal with modern issues in a “unique” way. You must apply “ijtihad”!!

I know Sunni ulama, especially Wahhabis and the current version of Salafis (the origial Salafis were modernizers… look up Muhammad Abduh, Jamal al-Din Afghani, Rashid Rida) would tell you that you are NOT qualified to make ijtihad and must rely on taqlid. But that is not the case, you should never, never put barriers to understanding.

The result of relying almost exclusively on Taqlid by Islamic scholars has cost Islamic Civilization dearly. It reached its peach in the 11th century, right around the time when Taqlid became the norm. Since the 7th Century Islamic scholars used the knowledge found in Greek, Roman, and Persian sources and improved them.

The destruction of the Islamic Caliphates by the Mongols in the 13th Century, and the dissolution of the Mongol Khanates in the 15th Century ensured that Islamic scholars rarely used Ijtijad. In other words they rarely took on new things and new knowledge.

The center of Islamic Civilization shifted from the Baghdad, Mecca, Cairo, etc, to the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia. But that was because the House of Osmali, until the 17th Century, only cared about conquest, improving their empire, and improving the military.

A scholarly revival did not return to the Muslim world until the modernizing reforms of the 19th Century. But these reforms were the result of European pressure, not the creation of Islamic scholars. Actually, the vast majority of ulama opposed these reforms, except the original salafis. The original salafis looked to modify European modernity in an Islamic way, but these guys were overtaken by Socialist/Nationalists Arabs in the 1950’s.

–Note for those not familiar with these terms----------------------------

Rules in Islam (ei: Sharia laws) are based on a process of judicial review and jurisprudence, where the judging authorities/scholars use the Quran and the Sunna as their basis. The result is that rulings/laws vary depending on the context.
This is unlike the bone dry Commandments or Canon laws of the Christian legal tradition, where wrong-is-wrong no matter the circumstances.

Ijtihad = making independent interpretation of legal sources by your intellectual effort

Taqlid = following the decisions of a legal authority/source without examining the reasoning (scriptural and contextual) of that decision.

Ulama = legal experts and Muslim scholars

It is good that you are increasing your knowledge of Islam by contacting scholars, but you must not rely on Taqlid for all the answers. And based on your posts I can tell that you are. You seem to mention examples of a Muslim country that does not exists, in a context that is not today’s context.

And that my friend is a No-Go.