Is Islam Violent?

Carrying on from a thread that got a tiny bit sidetracked.

My contention is that Islam can be validly interpreted in many ways. It is the nature of poetry to be the language of metaphor. A good analogy is Jesus' saying "I have come... to bring the sword" not being taken literally usually, because Jesus deliberately spoke in parables and paradoxes.

This is made more complex in the case of Islam for two reasons. First, because much of the poetry is not designed to be universalized as the teachings of Jesus were. And second, because the Qu'ran changes its mind a couple of times (which Muslims actually don't have a problem with). But I'll come back to this later.

Let me analyze the story of the prophet as I understand it (quoting from gree0232

Only reluctantly does he take up his duty, in a hostile religious environment where he earns converts, but also scorn and oppression. He is stripped bear, impoverished, and thrust into the desert to die.
Not quite. The prophet was not left in the desert to die, he ran there for his life because the Meccans wanted to kill him (he survived because one of his more important followers cried about it greatly), which was largely because he mocked the Pagan gods, and also partly because he had just received a revelation from God that sounded a lot like "kill all non-muslims" to everybody else (the well-known so-called "Order To Fight" - although arguably this may have been because another follower of Muhammed may have been taken captive by the Meccans on account of Muhammed's mocks). The Meccans told him several times to show a little more tolerance and respect towards other faiths, and Muhammed refused. At this time he actually had very few converts and was only poor because he'd been preaching for 13 years with almost no income. Previous to this he had been a merchant married to an exceptionally wealthy woman (Khadija) who gave all her huge inheritance to him.

Rather than die, he is adopted by perpetually warring tribes and ... unites them through wisdom and sound judgement.
Two important details are missing here. First, Muhammed didn't unite the warring tribes. And second, Muhammed killed his opposition. For example, Asma bint Marwan was a poetess who mocked the pagans of Medina for accepting Muhammed. Muhammed asked for an assassin to kill her and, when he succeeded, the people of her tribe feared for their lives and converted to Islam. Over 800 Jews were killed by the Muslims in Medina because they refused to convert (this is according to Ibn Ishaq). Other Jews were only freed because Ubay Salul, a pagan leader, made Muhammed exile them after they were deceived by Muhammed and he wanted them killed.

Seeing this, his oppressors raise an army, and (depending on the historical account its anywhere from 3 to 1 to 10 to 1 odds) only under threat of the complete annihilation of his people does the Prophet reluctantly defend his people.
Not quite. More like "nobody wanted to trade with Medina now that it was known as a state run by a cruel dictator who murders his opposition (the prophet), so Medina robbed the trade caravans of Mecca". Mecca convinced other tribes who had seen the cruelty of the prophet to join them and set out to retrieve their rightful property. What is more, Muhammed had timed his attacks during the so-called "sacred month" in which the Gods forbade war under the old pagan system, and which every tribe had always kept to until then for as long as anybody could remember. Muhammed had another convenient revelation from God at this time, saying that anyone who refuses to fight during the sacred months will go to hell forever. It's in 2:217. Another, similar, revelation allowed Muhammed to break his peace agreements with other tribes to wage war on them, which is in sura 9. So it was him that declared the war by initiating the fighting against the trade caravans of Mecca.

With an Army coming out to kill every man woman and child in your community, would you not defend yourself? Your family? Your children?
Personally - no, I wouldn't fight them. But each man to his own I guess. Most people aren't quite as extremist about peace as I am, and I do understand that.

Does he slaughter his oppressor as they would he?
He did, in fact, slaughter two people out of hand (poets who had mocked him in the past), taken no prisoners during the battle, and killed everyone who did not submit to his doctrine. Also, hardly his oppressors.

He makes Mecca rather than Medina the center of the new religion, cementing is power and prestige for eternity rather than burning it to the ground as any victor under the circumstances would do.
Really? So when the US conquered Baghdad or Kabul, they razed the city to the ground, right? The reason he didn't do this was mostly practical. Mecca was an important trade site. It's like when the Mongols conquered China and settled down in their grand palaces.

He then promulgates a legal and administrative code that is so far ahead of its time that Muslim Armies venturing into lands ruled by warlords find populations desperate fore the Rule of Law of uncorrupted religious figures who judge on merit not politics of loyalty.
Funnily enough the same code was based mostly on loyalty to the prophet and meritorious poets, artists and statesmen were slain for refusing to show loyalty.

Does that sound like a narrative that can be reduced to simply, "Kill everyone?"
First, the prophet's life does not necessarily equal the prophet's doctrine. Unlike Christianity, the view of Islam is that the prophet was not God, and thus, to some extent he was fallible. On some occasions, particularly in battle, he made downright idiotic calls and was mostly saved by the wisdom of his military advisers. Second, even if it did, I never said Islamic doctrine was as simple as "kill everyone". I was simply saying that Islamic doctrine is more open to interpretation than some other doctrines in the world. The prophet's interpretation is quite authoritative in Islam, of course, but I've seen people twist the qu'ran for anything from total peace to total war.

So let's look at what exactly the qu'ran does say.

There are over 100 verses in the qu'ran commanding muslims to go to war to impose the law of Islam on others. There are two different interpretations of "war" that the prophet encouraged. Intellectual war (greater jihad) was basically mocking other religions. This was the prophet's first interpretation as he practiced during his earlier time in Mecca. The second, war of arms (lesser jihad) was what Muhammed practiced from Medina onwards. Some (like 9:123) are general commandments, while others (like the parable in 18) are more specific. That the qu'ran commands some violence is beyond question - what is not clear is when lesser or greater jihad is more appropriate, and to what extent such passages can be classified as allegory. Most of the detail I gave above is found only in hadith.

There is a strong consensus in Islam today that jihad is justified against oppression. What exactly constitutes oppression is another matter. Are Palestinians being sufficiently oppressed as to warrant a theological imperative for war against Israel, for example? Or should not following the Sharia law be so extended? I take the following from the Wikipedia article on offensive Jihad:

Islamic scholars have differed on the issue of offensive jihad, to pursue non-Muslims in their own lands without any aggression on their part. Some scholars have even gone so far to say that it is illegitimate, while others say it is legitimate and even required. Most scholars agree that offensive jihad cannot be totally prohibited, since two schools of Islamic jurisprudence have ruled that offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure the borders of the Islamic lands, to spread the Islamic religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it, and to remove every religion other than Islam from the Arabian peninsula. Classically and in the modern era however, a large number of jurists have upheld Islamic ideas, concepts and texts to justify offensive jihad against non-Muslims.

Is that really reading something into the text that isn't there? Or is the text designed to be poetic and vague in its details?

First, the prophet's life does not necessarily equal the prophet's doctrine. Unlike Christianity, the view of Islam is that the prophet was not God, and thus, to some extent he was fallible.
This is false. Muhammad was given divine doctrine, and was backed by the power of god. He wasn't fallible in the sense you're referring.

Blackflag: But not everything he said was a revelation directly from God himself. He was fallible in the sense that it was possible for him to make a bad decision (because God did not always speak to him). Like if the prophet said "Yum, I think I'll have toast for breakfast this morning" that doesn't mean that God himself revealed in some dream to the prophet that he had to have toast for breakfast. If Jesus had said that in Christian doctrine, then that's actually God himself saying that Jesus should have toast for breakfast. By contrast stuff like moral rules and such that the prophet said are generally considered to be of God unless otherwise stated.

Just bumping this thread because I miss this discussion.

No of courrrse vee arrre not viiolent... Just kinky es all.

Blackflag: I get the impression this is a close variation of the kind of last-commenting that Rebecca used to do.

admin: The thing with religion is. It's only violent if you are actually practicing it to the written word. The non-violent forms of it are the people who are not even following the scripture to the letter so in essence the way for peace and harmony with religion is to ignore the actual religion and create morphed versions of it to blend in with society.

Blackflag: This - sort of belongs in the thread that this spun off from. The other one was about whether religion was inherently morally violent, and this is about Islam specifically.

But it's worth pointing out that in that thread, the general consensus was that the words of religion can be twisted to make them MORE violent as well.

admin: yes but if a religion says literally to stone adulterers and then u go all like 'omg that's so outdated, yo' it's just stupid...

Religion is fine if it's malpracticed for the sake of desperation of lonely people to form a community feeling. It's when ti's actually taken to be truth that it becomes dangerous.

admin: also circumcision is brutal as fk. if i cute ur foreskin off you'd scream (unless you don't have it anymore). babies literally are being mutilated against their will because of what a damn book says

Blackflag: Yeah - and let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Blackflag: That's not really an Islamic doctrine.

admin: it's wrose when the female circumcision, which sitll happens, goes on.

Blackflag: That still doesn't make it Islamic.

admin: This is the problem with religious people. They will evade the attacks on their religion by deeming all the bad parts as non-religious.

Then when you ask what they base it on they say "that's culture, not religion". So what the heck is religion then?

Blackflag: By that logic one could justify any arbitrary attack against anything! If you say I'm not stupid then the response is "so what the heck are you then?" Islam is a culture and a religion and a doctrine, and more, but still it's not an unqualified set of beliefs.

It's basically up to the person making the claim (in this case, that islam supports circumcision) to show evidence of that claim. That's called burden of proof, and in this case, you have it. If somebody fails to fulfill that burden, then evasions on that attack are justified and have my full support.

I thought this was good.

sea_shell: Bill Maher and me agree on a lot of things, but some of the Islamaphobic crap he advocates contradicts itself, and doesn't make sense.

Blackflag: I don't think any thoughtful people can find any other thoughtful person that they agree with all the time. Even me and nzlockie disagree every few years or so...

admin: I assume you'll get rid of Ratonal Madman's inappropriate comment there admin.