Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
I haven't read the books, so I can't directly comment on them, however, I would point out that there is a flaw in your comparison. Islam is by definition defined by what its followers believe. Obviously that is not true of black people and in practice isn't true of Jewish people either (I know plenty of agnostic and atheistic Jews, while the very concept of an atheistic Muslim makes no sense).
Certainly one can say that modern Islam is not the same as it was in the past just as you can say that Modern Christianity is not the same as it was in the past. I think though we find that the many right wingers dispute whether Islam has really changed (and certainly in some parts of the world it appears not to have) and many left wingers dispute that Christianity has changed.
--
Bill
|
I take your point, but the Islamophobes do not define Islam by what muslims actually believe. They define it by what they think Muslims ought to believe based on an extremely skewed reading of a selection of the source texts. When confronted with this discrepancy, the Islamophobes tend to adopt one of two tactics. The more paranoid adopt the stance that all of these moderate (or even liberal!) Muslims are simply being deceptive about what they really believe. The remainder simply dismiss the majority of muslims as having a real commitment to Islam. Ironically, this echoes the views of the jihadists themselves. The greates irony is that groups such as Alqaeda are not throwbacks to the 7th century; they are fundamentally postmodern in methodology and ideology. They do not adhere to the traditional readings of the classical texts but instead deconstruct them to support a militant ideology structured around a few key terms (jihad, tauheed, shirk, etc.).