Link back to commentA dear! David accuses me of being ‘ahistorical’. What does that mean, exactly? Something to do with lacking historical perspective or context, I guess.
The profound insight that he offers is that, historically, professing Christians have sometimes acted violently despite the overwhelmingly pacific tenor of the New Testament and the example of Christ.
He could have added that many Muslims have been perfectly peaceable, despite the injunctions to conquer and subjugate the world and to ‘strike terror’ into the kuffars (unbelievers) that abound in the Islamic scriptures, and the example set by their Prophet, who participated in scores of military campaigns.
But is he saying that the stark differences in the attitude to violence and warfare between these two creeds is of no relevance to how their followers might behave? How to account for the fact that whereas there has always been a strong pacifist strain in Christianity, there is no normative tradition of pacifism in Islam.
This is particularly relevant in the present era, where there is a powerful resurgence of Salafist interpretations of Islam that demand a return to the principles that operated during the time of Muhammad and the early ‘rightly guided’ Caliphs.
The reality is that Islam’s creedal tenets play a central role in the thinking of terrorist groups like ISIS. Anyone interested in this issue should read the article What ISIS Really Wants by Graeme Wood that appeared in The Atlantic magazine, based on interviews and a close reading of ISIS documents https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
Here is a relevant excerpt:
‘There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.’
‘The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.’
‘To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)’
‘But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.’
‘The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.’
Got that? ISIS is guided by an understanding of Islam that is ‘coherent and even learned’. Not exactly unsophisticated numpties who can be easily set straight by a talk with the local Imam.