Is Islam really a peaceful religion?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Atlas Forum R&P board: where pseudo-history and dubious theology battles mightily against pseudo-history and dubious theology...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You are all embarrassing yourselves. Please stop. Do it for Baby Jesus or the Prophet Mohammed or Great Aunt Doris, whoever.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Could we maybe avoid gross overgeneralisation? And not just about the present, but the past also? Admittedly this particular subject is a real noxious Internet Classic (and may be one of G.W. Bush's worst legacies, and that's saying something) so there was no reason to expect better...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well Islam as a political power (which it was as well as a religion at first) spread by military means, no doubt. And then, once ensconced in power, structures were established that encouraged conversion (and also out-migration from the Arabian peninsula) and so on and so forth. But the process established was not exactly rapid and huge tracts of the Middle East - less so North Africa where Christianity had been weakened greatly by internal conflict - were majority non-Muslim until surprisingly late in the day. And, much as is the case with Christianity in Europe, you'll search in vain for much evidence of conversion-at-swordpoint that doesn't turn out to be a later fabrication. And actually in one part of what became the Islamic World the Islamic conquest was very good news for Christians; Sassanid Persia was the worst persecutor of Christianity and Christians anywhere until the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Anyway, the ancient world was a violent place and so was the Mediaeval. Both the Bible and the Koran are considerably less 'violent' than a lot surviving broadly contemporaneous texts, many of which are generally regarded as entirely unproblematic; character building even. This sort of 'intellectual' venture is entirely pointless.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Few things are as elastic as Christian theology though. But anyway the current issues in the Islamic world and the rise of Islamism etc. are pretty clearly not that related to theology...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, I'm sure that all of the people who have joined ISIS and then committed various vile crimes as a result did so because they read a theological tract.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You don't think believing an act has divine sanction makes someone more likely to commit that act? Even if the desire predates the looking for justification, the fact that justification is so easily found helps pushes the person towards doing it, more than if there was no theological justification.

Kind of stretching the meaning of 'theology' to something so broad as to be almost meaningless (other than 'religion related') there. Its a bit like insisting that everything done by the weirder and more unpleasant Marxist groups in the 20th century was ultimately about philosophy.