The Islam thread

[Eamonnca1]

First things first: Kevin Myers is a plonker, a pompous ass, and the only times he's right is in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. His world view of dictated by his ideology, not facts.  I've noticed that factual accuracy isn't always his strong point.  Sometimes his ideology lines up with reality, and it mostly does in the article below but he misses a few key points.

For example he omits the fact that the "outrage" over that stupid youtube video is manufactured outrage, the result of a few politicians whipping up hatred to shore up their base.  Salman Rusdhie was talking about this the other week.  Cities like Beirut and Damascus and Tehran were cosmopolitan open societies not so long ago.  This radicalisation of Islam is a fairly recent phenomenon and is a side-effect of internal power struggles in those countries. I heard that the authorities in Pakistan even called a public holiday to encourage people to go out and protest.  There's still a substantial proportion of the Islamic world (probably most of it) that doesn't give a toss about a stupid youtube clip. Pan the camera away from the angry mob at the embassy and the view is of ordinary streets full of people going about their daily business.

But one thing that does get on my wick is the western media's recent infatuation with seeking "balance" even to the point of manufacturing it where it doesn't exist.  Fact: as bad as the christian fundamentalist wing of the American Republican party or the DUP are, there is no Christian equivalent of the Taliban or Al Queda.  Christians do not generally fly planes into buildings or ignite half the world in riots and deadly violence every time their religion is insulted. The worst you can expect is the population of Tunbrige Wells sharpening their pencils in disgust and preparing another broadside via the Letters to the Editor.

Fact: Islam is different.  Christianity went through its violent adolescent years around the time of the inquisition.  Judaism, the oldest of the desert religions, got that nonsense out of its system so long ago that the documented accounts of it are in the old testament.

And one other thing that Myers is missing here, in his usual "tar all pinko liberal leftists with the same brush" mantra, is that there are quite a few people on the left who are every bit as wary of Islam as those on the right.  The late Christopher Hitchens (on the left? maybe not, but he was no fan of the current GOP), Sam Harris, Bill Maher, these are people who have spoken up quite vocally about the fact that Islam is different and a lot more dangerous than other religions.

But anyway. I hope this thread stays on the topic of Islam and not Kevin Myers. I think we all know where we stand on him.

Kevin Myers: All sides are not equal in religious violence
Tuesday September 18 2012

AN interview on RTE Radio One last week between Pat Kenny and Robert Fisk proved to be a perfect distillation of the moral equivalence and factual imprecision favoured by the liberal left whenever Muslims start behaving irrationally.

The context, of course, was the homicidal hysteria which once again is sweeping the Islamic world over the childishly inept video that is supposedly about Mohammed, but really could be about anything. Early in the interview, Fisk referred to the "Christian version of al-Qa'ida", by which he meant the provocative idiots who deliberately insulted Muslims. But insulting people is not quite the same as flying planes into crowded skyscrapers, or beheading non-believers, or blowing up Shia mosques, or slowly scalding people to death, or cutting their throats, which is what al-Qa'ida regularly did to its victims in Iraq, and its affiliates still do in Afghanistan.

Referring to the murder of the US ambassador in Libya, he described the makers of the "rubbish video" as "two looneys" who had managed to "stir up otherwise quite reasonable people into besieging embassies in Cairo and Benghazi", leading to "deaths". So there we have it: the people who made the video are lunatics; but the people who murdered the US ambassador are usually reasonable people.

But how reasonable could they possibly be if a single video, of quite astounding banality, is able to transform them into a murderous mob? Pat Kenny did not ask that question. But he did ask about the freedom of expression that we in the West cherish. Robert Fisk replied that in many western countries, Ireland included, Jesus Christ, the holy family and the Christian church were still a no-go area. It wasn't so long ago, he continued, that a film was produced showing Jesus Christ making love to a woman. A cinema showing the film in Paris was burnt down, the culprit was a Christian, and a Christian was killed in the fire. "So it's not as if violence is solely and exclusively the territory of one religion."

The only possible incident that fits this description, and which is apparently the evidence that violence is not exclusively the territory of one religion, was an arson attack on a cinema showing Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. Nobody was killed. A dozen were injured, most of them firemen. One "spectator" received serious burns. The attack was roundly condemned by the archbishop of Paris. And far from it being "not so long ago", it happened in 1988: namely 24 years ago, about as much time as occurred between the Easter Rising and the Fall of France.

Moreover, anyone can find on the internet a pornographic cartoon of Jesus, Moses, Buddha and the Hindu god Ganesha engaged in a complex sexual congress. No one anywhere has been killed because of it. No one will be killed. So, far from Robert Fisk's unchallenged assertion that violence is "not solely and exclusively the territory of one religion" being correct, the opposite is true: internationally, almost all religious violence is by Muslims, often for the most frivolous and opportunistic of reasons. Indeed, one can only conclude that many Muslims are fretfully and obsessively searching for a reason to be insulted. Once they have found it, people will be murdered, and violence extolled. And not just in Muslim countries. In Australia, for example, last weekend Muslim protesters rioted in Sydney and at a rally, a little boy held up the placard 'Behead all those who insult the Prophet'.

We're not talking metaphors here: we know from hideous experience that beheading is precisely the fate that al-Qa'ida reserves for its "enemies", from the US journalist Daniel Pearl, to hundreds of unfortunates in Iraq, to the party of men and women recently decapitated in Afghanistan.

Yet the western media continue to indulge the intellectually inane and factually incorrect fantasy that one side is as bad as another in this endless saga of Islamic violence. It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

But this final absurd extrapolation (as if Israelis were blue-eyed Anglicans) is all the work of Robert Fisk. Moreover, it is not "racist" to say that one society is ahead of another. Is it racist to say that Renaissance Florence was ahead of 16th century Ireland? Or that 21st century Ireland is ahead of modern Malawi? Of course, Kenny did not dispute Fisk's many ludicrous and fantastical observations.

The unassailable fact is that almost every single Muslim society is behind Christian/ secular/Jewish countries; which is why Muslims migrate to them, and not vice-versa, but then, quite remarkably, often complain about the values they find there. But it is these very values -- the tolerance of free speech, artistic expression and intellectual enquiry -- which underlie the success of non-Muslim societies. Why are our media so reluctant to proclaim and defend this most obvious of truths?

[J70]

He's right. They've little to be worrying about if a ludicrous you tube video produced by some knob in California is the biggest concern in their lives and cause for mass rioting and murder. Although the line over here in the US appears to be that a lot of these people are projecting their own authoritarian, highly censored societies onto the US and assuming that these blasphemous acts are government endorsed/produced.

[mylestheslasher]

He is right about the riots, but of course Myers is a spiteful little bastard that uses this recent ridiculous over reaction as a justification for his own anti Muslim rants which he has been spouting for years now. Obviously to me anyway there are some sinister extremists whipping up hatred to get these riots to fever pitch. We should know about that in this country and last time I checked ireland wasn't a Muslim country.

[Syferus]

I watched that video and if it wasn't for the reaction it provoked it would be the most ridiculed attempt at trolling ever designed. Both sides are just fulfilling each's worst fears about the other. It's the very definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[Eamonnca1]

Film critics have more to get upset about than any Muslim I think.  I watched it myself and it's like a video version of a four-year-old's artwork.

[Arthur_Friend]

The violence in the world is most definitely one-sided. Christians like George Bush and Tony Blair cause more death and mayhem in the world than all Islamic fundamentalist groups put together. They don't fly planes into buildings cause they don't have to, they've got F-16s, Aircraft carriers, Nuclear subs, cruise missiles, drones......etc, etc, etc.

[johnneycool]

The violence in the world is most definitely one-sided. Christians like George Bush and Tony Blair cause more death and mayhem in the world than all Islamic fundamentalist groups put together. They don't fly planes into buildings cause they don't have to, they've got F-16s, Aircraft carriers, Nuclear subs, cruise missiles, drones......etc, etc, etc.

But that's the price of democracy Arthur....

[seafoid]

"After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism there was a vacuum created by the loss of the enemy who threatens Western culture, a position that every culture and society must fill in order to define itself"

Islam filled the vacuum.

[stew]

First things first: Kevin Myers is a plonker, a pompous ass, and the only times he's right is in the same way that a stopped clock is right twice a day. His world view of dictated by his ideology, not facts.  I've noticed that factual accuracy isn't always his strong point.  Sometimes his ideology lines up with reality, and it mostly does in the article below but he misses a few key points.

For example he omits the fact that the "outrage" over that stupid youtube video is manufactured outrage, the result of a few politicians whipping up hatred to shore up their base.  Salman Rusdhie was talking about this the other week.  Cities like Beirut and Damascus and Tehran were cosmopolitan open societies not so long ago.  This radicalisation of Islam is a fairly recent phenomenon and is a side-effect of internal power struggles in those countries. I heard that the authorities in Pakistan even called a public holiday to encourage people to go out and protest.  There's still a substantial proportion of the Islamic world (probably most of it) that doesn't give a toss about a stupid youtube clip. Pan the camera away from the angry mob at the embassy and the view is of ordinary streets full of people going about their daily business.

But one thing that does get on my wick is the western media's recent infatuation with seeking "balance" even to the point of manufacturing it where it doesn't exist.  Fact: as bad as the christian fundamentalist wing of the American Republican party or the DUP are, there is no Christian equivalent of the Taliban or Al Queda.  Christians do not generally fly planes into buildings or ignite half the world in riots and deadly violence every time their religion is insulted. The worst you can expect is the population of Tunbrige Wells sharpening their pencils in disgust and preparing another broadside via the Letters to the Editor.

Fact: Islam is different.  Christianity went through its violent adolescent years around the time of the inquisition.  Judaism, the oldest of the desert religions, got that nonsense out of its system so long ago that the documented accounts of it are in the old testament.

And one other thing that Myers is missing here, in his usual "tar all pinko liberal leftists with the same brush" mantra, is that there are quite a few people on the left who are every bit as wary of Islam as those on the right.  The late Christopher Hitchens (on the left? maybe not, but he was no fan of the current GOP), Sam Harris, Bill Maher, these are people who have spoken up quite vocally about the fact that Islam is different and a lot more dangerous than other religions.

But anyway. I hope this thread stays on the topic of Islam and not Kevin Myers. I think we all know where we stand on him.

Kevin Myers: All sides are not equal in religious violence
Tuesday September 18 2012

AN interview on RTE Radio One last week between Pat Kenny and Robert Fisk proved to be a perfect distillation of the moral equivalence and factual imprecision favoured by the liberal left whenever Muslims start behaving irrationally.

The context, of course, was the homicidal hysteria which once again is sweeping the Islamic world over the childishly inept video that is supposedly about Mohammed, but really could be about anything. Early in the interview, Fisk referred to the "Christian version of al-Qa'ida", by which he meant the provocative idiots who deliberately insulted Muslims. But insulting people is not quite the same as flying planes into crowded skyscrapers, or beheading non-believers, or blowing up Shia mosques, or slowly scalding people to death, or cutting their throats, which is what al-Qa'ida regularly did to its victims in Iraq, and its affiliates still do in Afghanistan.

Referring to the murder of the US ambassador in Libya, he described the makers of the "rubbish video" as "two looneys" who had managed to "stir up otherwise quite reasonable people into besieging embassies in Cairo and Benghazi", leading to "deaths". So there we have it: the people who made the video are lunatics; but the people who murdered the US ambassador are usually reasonable people.

But how reasonable could they possibly be if a single video, of quite astounding banality, is able to transform them into a murderous mob? Pat Kenny did not ask that question. But he did ask about the freedom of expression that we in the West cherish. Robert Fisk replied that in many western countries, Ireland included, Jesus Christ, the holy family and the Christian church were still a no-go area. It wasn't so long ago, he continued, that a film was produced showing Jesus Christ making love to a woman. A cinema showing the film in Paris was burnt down, the culprit was a Christian, and a Christian was killed in the fire. "So it's not as if violence is solely and exclusively the territory of one religion."

The only possible incident that fits this description, and which is apparently the evidence that violence is not exclusively the territory of one religion, was an arson attack on a cinema showing Martin Scorsese's 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. Nobody was killed. A dozen were injured, most of them firemen. One "spectator" received serious burns. The attack was roundly condemned by the archbishop of Paris. And far from it being "not so long ago", it happened in 1988: namely 24 years ago, about as much time as occurred between the Easter Rising and the Fall of France.

Moreover, anyone can find on the internet a pornographic cartoon of Jesus, Moses, Buddha and the Hindu god Ganesha engaged in a complex sexual congress. No one anywhere has been killed because of it. No one will be killed. So, far from Robert Fisk's unchallenged assertion that violence is "not solely and exclusively the territory of one religion" being correct, the opposite is true: internationally, almost all religious violence is by Muslims, often for the most frivolous and opportunistic of reasons. Indeed, one can only conclude that many Muslims are fretfully and obsessively searching for a reason to be insulted. Once they have found it, people will be murdered, and violence extolled. And not just in Muslim countries. In Australia, for example, last weekend Muslim protesters rioted in Sydney and at a rally, a little boy held up the placard 'Behead all those who insult the Prophet'.

We're not talking metaphors here: we know from hideous experience that beheading is precisely the fate that al-Qa'ida reserves for its "enemies", from the US journalist Daniel Pearl, to hundreds of unfortunates in Iraq, to the party of men and women recently decapitated in Afghanistan.

Yet the western media continue to indulge the intellectually inane and factually incorrect fantasy that one side is as bad as another in this endless saga of Islamic violence. It was typical of the adolescent level of this self-loathing that Robert Fisk referred to Mitt Romney's recent address in Jerusalem, in which, said Fisk, the US republican candidate "made the extraordinary racist comment that the Israelis were ahead of the Palestinians, i.e, the Palestinians were an uncivilised people, presumably because they had brown eyes and weren't Christian".

But this final absurd extrapolation (as if Israelis were blue-eyed Anglicans) is all the work of Robert Fisk. Moreover, it is not "racist" to say that one society is ahead of another. Is it racist to say that Renaissance Florence was ahead of 16th century Ireland? Or that 21st century Ireland is ahead of modern Malawi? Of course, Kenny did not dispute Fisk's many ludicrous and fantastical observations.

The unassailable fact is that almost every single Muslim society is behind Christian/ secular/Jewish countries; which is why Muslims migrate to them, and not vice-versa, but then, quite remarkably, often complain about the values they find there. But it is these very values -- the tolerance of free speech, artistic expression and intellectual enquiry -- which underlie the success of non-Muslim societies. Why are our media so reluctant to proclaim and defend this most obvious of truths?

These Muslims that go ballistic when their prophet gets slighted must be the dumbest fcukers on the planet, why would they give two shites what some eejit thousands of miles away draws or says about Mohammed?

To kill innocent people over this is disgusting, no doubt they will get away with it but I believe you reap what you sew and they will get theirs.

Bill Maher is a horrible bastard, a tr**p of the lowest order and heres hoping Romney gets elected, if he doesnt Obamanation is going to bankrupt the country, he is worse than W.

[seafoid]

Romney hasn't a hope of being re-elected. Imagine a senior irish politician telling 47% of the population they were tramps.

[stew]

Romney hasn't a hope of being re-elected. Imagine a senior irish politician telling 47% of the population they were tramps.

That was  a contextual issue apparently. 

He is trying to get elected, not re-elected and Obama has been a nightmare as President, again this country ahs not had a President of worth since Bubba and it appears they cant find a decent candidate anywhere.

[stew]

Where are all the USA haters on this thread, are they afraid to condemn the lunatic Muslim scum that rioted and killed non Muslim people because some ballix made something they didnt like about their prophet!

Funny, they can wax lyrical about the USA and Israel, not a peep out of the hoors when it is the Muslim doing the killing. 

[seafoid]

Romney hasn't a hope of being re-elected. Imagine a senior irish politician telling 47% of the population they were tramps.

That was  a contextual issue apparently. 

He is trying to get elected, not re-elected and Obama has been a nightmare as President, again this country ahs not had a President of worth since Bubba and it appears they cant find a decent candidate anywhere.

Romney and Ryan would bring the States back to 1932, Stew. It's very hard to see many independents voting for him. Sure he'll get the base but he needs way more than that to get elected. The selection of Ryan showed how desperate he is.

Ryan is a liar.

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/11/the_lyin_king/

His budget plan is all about unfunded tax breaks for the rich and shafting the poor. Not a hope of balancing the budget with him.

[deiseach]

The violence in the world is most definitely one-sided. Christians like George Bush and Tony Blair cause more death and mayhem in the world than all Islamic fundamentalist groups put together. They don't fly planes into buildings cause they don't have to, they've got F-16s, Aircraft carriers, Nuclear subs, cruise missiles, drones......etc, etc, etc.

Nicely put. The scum orchestrating these riots are purely opportunistic, they couldn't care less about Islam or the prophet. But their actions are finding fertile ground in the Islamic world. If I had my village reduced to rubble by the drone of freedom, I know where my sympathies would lie

[seafoid]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/birth-islam-different-view/?pagination=false

The Birth of Islam: A Different View

April 7, 2011

Malise Ruthven
.

Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam
by Fred M. Donner
Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 280 pp., $25.95                                                   

Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East
by Bernard Lewis
Oxford University Press, 208 pp., $24.95                                                   




What do we know of Muhammad? Can we even be sure that such a historical personage existed? For the vast majority of believing Muslims the question simply does not arise. The Prophet lived in Arabia from the time of his birth in approximately 570 CE till his death in 632, during which time he received and transmitted the revelations from God contained in the Koran, while forging the warring tribes of that region into an all-powerful movement under the banner of Islam.

Building on this formidable religious and political achievement, his immediate successors, the Rightly Guided Caliphs, led the triumphant tribes beyond the bounds of Arabia, inflicting almost simultaneous defeats on the two most powerful Near Eastern empires, the Persian Sassanids, who collapsed completely, and the Byzantines, who lost two of their richest provinces—Syria-Palestine and Egypt. Despite having reservations about the reliability of the oral traditions underpinning the Muslim narrative, most Western scholars have tended to accept its basic premises. There was such a person as Muhammad and it is his utterances—divinely dictated or otherwise—that make up the 114 "suras," or chapters, of the Koran. According to the generally accepted Muslim account, the holy text acquired its present form under the Caliph Uthman, Muhammad's son-in-law and the third of his successors as leader of the Islamic community; he reigned from 644 to 656.

There are, however, a number of skeptics, mostly in Western universities, who question the Muslim narrative. Even when accepting that the text of the Koran represents the authentic utterances of Muhammad, they have cast doubt on the details of the Prophet's life, as recorded in the oral literature known as Hadiths ("traditions" or reports) passed down by the generations following his death. Many of these details, based on stories conveyed through "chains of transmission" of varying reliability, were intended to elucidate the meaning of Koranic passages by reference to "occasions of revelation" in the life of the Prophet.






The earliest written biography of Muhammad, by Ibn Hisham, who died in 833, contains parts of the missing work of an earlier scholar, Ibn Ishaq, who lived from about 707 to 767. The dating of Ibn Hisham's work, composed nearly two centuries after the Prophet's death, may be contrasted with that of Mark's gospel, considered by most New Testament scholars to be the earliest of the three synoptic gospels and to have been written some four decades after the death of Jesus. The story of Jesus has long been subjected to the rigors of form criticism, with scholars such as Rudolph Bultmann claiming that almost nothing can be known about his life or personality, as distinct from the "message of the early Christian community, which for the most part the Church freely attributed to Jesus."1 Yet despite widespread recognition of the unreliability of oral traditions, most scholars have tended to accept the Muslim narrative.

A startling exception to this record of scholarly complacency appeared with two landmark studies by the American linguist John Wansbrough (1928–2002), who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In Quranic Studies (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu (1978) Wansbrough trawled through a substantial body of the earliest manuscript sources and concluded that "Islam" may not have arisen in western Arabia, as the traditional narrative holds, but in a "sectarian milieu" of Christians, Jews, and monotheistic Arabs in the same lands of the Fertile Crescent (modern Israel-Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq) that saw the emergence of Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity. "Both the quantity and quality of source materials," he cautiously suggested, "would seem to support the proposition that the elaboration of Islam was not contemporary with but posterior to the Arab occupation of the Fertile Crescent and beyond."2 Far from being finalized under the Caliph Uthman, the text of the Koran as we now have it, in Wansbrough's view, may have emerged over some two centuries in the course of religious polemics with the older traditions of Judaism and Christianity.

Wansbrough was careful to avoid drawing firm historical conclusions from his studies: his method was strictly textual and literary. But two young scholars influenced by him, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, endeavored to put historical flesh on the bones of his literary analysis in their highly speculative and controversial book Hagarism.3 Setting aside the Islamic accounts, they examined a number of the earliest non-Muslim sources that treat of the Arab invasion with a view to constructing an alternative version of Islamic origins. On the basis of what they admitted was rather thin evidence, they hypothesized that the original Islam was a messianic movement of Jewish refugees from Palestine who went to the Arabian deserts and joined forces with Arab tribesmen to recover the Holy Land.

The messianic union of Jews and Arabs was short-lived and afterward the Arabs—known in these sources as Hagarenes from the Arabic muhajirun, or emigrants—contrived to preserve their distinctive identity by adopting Samaritan scriptural positions (rejecting prophetic writings outside the Pentateuch) and moving toward a position of equidistance between Judaism and Christianity. For Crone and Cook, Muhammad emerges as an Arabian Moses recapitulating the Mosaic themes of exile and the dispensing of laws received from God on a holy mountain.

The Crone-Cook theory has been generally rejected, and Patricia Crone has since refined her views, accepting that Muhammad definitely existed as a historical personage, and that most of the Koran is a record of his utterances. Andrew Rippin, a Canadian scholar and leading Wansbrough disciple, argues that although Cook and Crone

successfully draw attention to the problems involved in the study of Islam, they have not been able to get beyond the limitations inherent in the sources, for they are all of questionable historical authenticity and, more importantly, all are treatises based in polemic.

Nevertheless, although Wansbrough's studies are far from being conclusive, they do address some of the difficulties facing the traditional view of Islamic origins, including the fragmentary and allusive character of the Koranic discourse—with its assumption of prior knowledge of many of the stories to which it alludes—as well as some archaeological and numismatic issues, such as the fact that the qibla (direction of prayer) in some of the earliest mosques points not toward Mecca but to a shrine much further north, and the appearance of Christian and other figurative images on coinage with Arab inscriptions. (The consensus of modern scholarship, however, attributes the wrong orientation of early qiblas to simple miscalculation.)

One of the most contentious theories, originally advanced by the Protestant theologian Günter Lüling, and elaborated more recently by the pseudonymous scholar Christoph Luxenberg, suggests that the Koran may have originated in the strophic hymns of Aramaic-speaking Christianized tribes. These may have been adapted by Muhammad, or retrospectively projected onto him, after the original messianic movement fell apart. Volker Popp, a numismatist working in Germany, argues—with Luxenberg—that the name Muhammad, which appears on coins and on the interior of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (alongside some of the earliest written examples of Koranic texts, dating from the 690s), may actually refer to Jesus: the word "muhammad" can be read as a passive participle meaning the "praised" or "chosen one," raising the possibility that the original Arab conquerors might have been Arian Christians opposed to Byzantine rule. Readers interested in exploring these issues will find articles by Popp, Luxenberg, and other skeptical scholars in The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into Its Early History, edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd R. Puin.