1. Violent acts by Muslims have political and cultural rather than religious motivations.
2. The Koran is no more of an inhibiting factor preventing Muslim societies from being modernized than the Bible was before the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the emancipation of women.
3. Radical Muslims who wish to impose shariah in their communities in open societies are a fundamentalist minority not unlike their Christians counterparts and orthodox Jews.
4. Courts in open societies do not accept religious belief as a defence to a first-degree murder charge in the case of honour killings. But judges may choose to take it into account when determining the sentence.
5. If the Koran’s many incitements to violence against infidels had been taken literally there would not have been five centuries of relatively good relations between members of the three faith groups in Spain before the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in 1492. Jews and Muslims also lived reasonably well together in many parts of the Ottoman Empire. Before the twentieth century, for Jews, Christians were more of a problem than Muslims.
6. Zionism is seen by Muslims as a manifestation of western imperialism. In the near future, as western political, economic and military positions weaken in relation to the non-western world, the Koran will not prevent modernization, the gradual emancipation of women, progress towards peace in the Middle East nor an improvement in Muslim-Christian-Jewish relationships everywhere.
1. Violent acts by extreme Muslims have political, cultural and religious motivations.
2. The real schism in the world is not between Islam and the West, but between fundamentalists and liberals.
3. Each group has more in common with its counterparts of all faiths than with its opposite even of the same faith. All liberals are more comfortable with other liberals than with fundamentalists, and all fundamentalists are uncomfortable with liberals.
4. Which school of thought will prevail in the world? Too early to tell.
Excellent.
Reason will prevail over Unreason.
Eventually, it always has.
I had a professor long ago, who predicted that fundamentalism (he didn’t specify a religion but I think he was including all of them) would become our biggest social/political challenge.
He may have been right.
When I was younger, honour killing was killing one’s wife’s lover and maybe one’s wife. There may still be European societies where that crime is punished very lightly if at all. Religion didn’t come into it, except to the extent that it supported patriarchy in all its forms.
Christianity does not have any official texts saying that Christians should go out and kill people who differed from them in matters of faith. Somehow Christians over the years found their way to that kind of activity anyway.
The Christian religion or the Bible was a barrier for several centuries to the reformation and renaissance and emancipation of women, and still plays a role against the latter. So Islam may eventually have a reformation, and maybe a renaissance (since it had a very high point culturally 1000 years ago), and even the emancipation of women (some Muslim countries have had successful women politicians), but it may take hundreds of years, and only Eric will be around to see it.
I am looking forward to it
I am very impressed by the comments from Eric as well as the responses. I admit I always considered religious fundamentalism as anathema. But I am anxiously looking forward to Muslim reform. In the US, Christian fundamentalism of the Protestant variety is actually more of a problem than Catholic fundamentalism. How did that happen?
Nobody has ever heard of Catholic fundamentalism. Protestant fundamentalism has developed in the U.S. as an aspect of the indigenous American religion and is practised in certain regions and among certain groups mainly of disadvantaged people who seek in religion what they cannot find in non-religious social movements (such as socialism, which is European). This is well described in Harold Bloom’s The American Religion.
Fundamentalism in any religion (including socialism) arises from a desire for the simple answer. Don’t offer the fundamentalist situational ethics (except when it’s convenient – to operate in the real world, fundamentalists often have to be hypocrites, or at least sinners). That’s why the evangelicals are filling up their churches while the Anglicans and Lutherans are not.
I don’t care as long as they read my blog.
EK