There’s a new audio message that IS says is from its beloved führer Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Whoever it is has a charmingly blunt message for those of us who decline to submit to Allah.
The speaker says: “There is no excuse for any Muslim not to migrate to the Islamic State… joining [its fight] is a duty on every Muslim. We are calling on you either to join or carry weapons [to fight] wherever you are.”
He adds: “Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting. No-one should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State. It is the war of all Muslims, but the Islamic State is spearheading it. It is the war of Muslims against infidels.”
So if we give in because of our terror, then we become obliged to join that war of Muslims against infidels. Until every last human on earth has surrendered to the poison, the war will continue.
Their god is a hideous god.
Also, they’re only a mile from Palmyra. That’s terrible news.
Rising out of the desert and flanked by an oasis, Palmyra contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world, according to Unesco.
The site, most of which dates back to the 1st to the 2nd Century when the region was under Roman rule, is dominated by a grand, colonnaded street.
At the southern end of the 1.1km street is the great temple of Bel, considered one of the most important religious buildings of the 1st Century in the East and of unique design.
Syria’s director of antiquities, Maamoun Abdul Karim, said that if Palmyra were to fall to IS, it would be an “international catastrophe”.
I wish that some 19th century Western imperialist had taken the most significant structures back to Europe, where they would have been been safe.
Considering the increasing Islamisation of Turkey, the West is lucky to have the Altar of Pergamon, hopefully the Germans will never return it.
He adds: “Islam was never a religion of peace. Islam is the religion of fighting.”
Of course it is.
rjw1:
Except when it isn’t.
@2
When is that?
rjw1, I would find your concurrence with this Islamist extremist understandable if you hold that Islam is and always has been a single thing, and further hold that there isn’t now and never has been (and never shall be?) any milieu wherein Islam is not warlike.
Is that the case?
Every time a muslim gathering is peaceful, which happens to be most muslim gatherings involving most muslims.
@5 Holms,
“Every time a muslim gathering is peaceful, which happens to be most muslim gatherings involving most muslims.”
I don’t know whether that assertion is true, but even if it were, I wouldn’t regard that as evidence.
So by that criteria you would conclude that the Nazis were peaceful, or the Bolsheviks, or that a pride of lions lounging about on the savannah isn’t inherently dangerous.
@4 John Morales,
“Is that the case?”
You’re drawing a longbow, I’m sure there are peaceful Muslims, as there are (demonstrably) violent Buddhists.
rjw1 (#1):
Sigh. And of course there’s no reason why it can’t be a religion of one or the other or both, at different times, in different places, and according to different interpretations of the self-contradictory muddle comprised of the Quran and Hadith.
It’s interesting the way both Islamists and Islamophobes share this weird essentialist approach to religious identity – “Islam is essentially this”, “Islam is essentially that”, blah blah blah. Islam’s apologists, whether IS or the Islam-is-Peace crowd, I can understand – essentialism is one of the cognitive biases that both underlies and is encouraged by religious thinking. Coming from Islam’s suposedly secular critics, however, it always strikes me as somewhat incongruous. But then I have to remind myself that the religious don’t have a monopoly on lazy thinking, so maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised after all.
No reason at all? I think you mean something like no inherent reason or no absolute reason, as opposed to contingent reasons.
Iain Walker, if anyone is being a lazy thinker around here, it’s you, I’m afraid. Essentialism is a fairly universal tendency of seeing things as have defining qualities. Without some kind of essentialism it would be hard to distinguish one sort of thing from another. Science, for example, has its essentialists (indeed, the periodic table is based on essences), and no doubt the fans of football, cricket and hockey, chess, monopoly, and other games, have what they consider to be essential properties of their favourite games. Your claim, therefore, that “essentialism is one of the cognitive biases that both underlies and is encouraged by religious thinking” is really quite misleading. Wittgenstein, as you are no doubt aware, was opposed to this sort of essentialism, by pointing out that the meaning of a word is constituted by its use, and he used the example of games to make his point. There is no one essential feature of all games, he suggested, that determines the use of the word ‘game’. I think he was probably wrong. Games are almost always characterised by quite contingent rules and limitations, so that, playing a game is only possible if there are some things that do not constitute “moves” in the game. Otherwise, we have rather untstructured play, instead of a game.
So, of course, when we are talking about Islam or Christianity or Buddhism, or any other religion, we are going to home in on some of a religion’s most characteristic features. You want to let Islam off the hook, by suggesting that in picking out features of Islam that seem to characterise it (in some sense universally), we are being both arrogant (in claiming to speak thus about anything of which we are not believing members), and xenophobic (in this case Islamophobic).
But Islam does have fairly universal features. Not that every Muslims engages universally in these features, but in that historically, and in terms of its own doctrines, the practice of Islam has been so characterised. And violence, even aggressive warfare against non-believers has been one of those features. Not only is this an observational datum, this feature of Islam is deeply embedded in its doctrinal tradition as well. It is present in all the fundamental Islamic texts, including the Quran, the Hadith, the Sira, the Sharia, etc., which, altogether is called the Sunnah.
Jihad, as offensive war against non-believers, is a duty of all Muslims to support, even though, as the Quran says, they may find it distasteful. And it is their duty to engage in it until the whole world is subject to Allah and his holy laws. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her most recent book, Heretic, speaks of this sort of Islam as Medinan. The “revelations” to Muhammad in Mecca are altogether more peaceful, but Muhammad’s stay in Medina produced very different “revelations”, in which a more warrior spirit prevailed, in which violence against unbelievers, and the murder of those who spoke critically of Muhammad became normative for the followers of Muhammad. Hirsi Ali thinks that Islam could be reformed by returning to the Meccan variety of Islam. I doubt this is possible, but it is not simply Islamophobia to point out that Islam has traditionally been spread by means of the sword. And being an honour-shame culture, Islam has almost always opposed anyone who calumniates Muhammad in this most savage and brutal ways (in order to restore its honour), even though the religion he devised was really nothing more than a protection racket, swelled in numbers by conquest, and the forcible conversion of people holding other beliefs. Europe was only spared Muslim occupation in the nick of time, just before the development of science and democracy in the West. Islam made incursions from both the West, where it was defeated (at the Battle of Poitiers or Tours, in 732), and from the East, where it was defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683, although it overran Greece and the Balkan states.
For a time Muslims dominated Sicily, and much of southern Italy, sacking Rome at least once. Greece was subject to Islamic conquest and occupation. The Greek war of independence began in 1821, and with the intervention of the Western powers, Greece became an independent state by 1832. Lord Byron (the poet) played a part in the revolt against the Ottomans (and the Egyptians, who came to the rescue of Ottoman rule) and is still recognised as a hero in Greece where a day is set aside in his honour.
So let’s not pretend that Islam is not a warlike force, and that it did not engage, as it still does, in violence against non-believers and apostates in its struggle to dominate the world. This is at least one of the essential aspects of Islam, which makes it a danger to everyone who does not share the Muslim faith. Islam has already made significant inroads into Western nations and their polity. Indeed, suppression of free speech (such as you endorse yourself, Mr Walker) is well on the way to becoming established in Western democracies.
Why aren’t Greenwald, Karen Armstron, Resa Aslan, and all the other apologists not flying to Iraq to explain that ISIS isn’t doing ‘real’ Islam?
They are saying, in small words, what their motives and intentions are. While it’s certain that there are strong authorities in Islam that SHOULD be able to counter at least some of this bile, they aren’t doing it.
Just as the mysterious ‘real Christians’ aren’t hitting the streets to oppose the dominionist lunatics in American politics.
The Turkish Islamists, the Tea Party, ISIS smashing statues, the Air Force Academy sponsoring fundamentalist recruiting…these are different in degree, but not in kind.
Ophelia Benson (#8):
Assuming this was a reply to me, I’m afraid I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. The point was simply that some Muslims cherrypick their scriptures and traditions to justify living peaceably and tolerantly with everybody else, and others cherrypick to justify being totalitarian theocrats. Both groups can claim that Islam is a religion of peace or a religion of war with as much (i.e., as little) justification as the other.
The reasons for this are, if you like, both inherent (the Quran and the Hadith contain ammunition enough for both approaches and everything inbetween) and contingent (individual or communal dispositions to cherrypick the nice bits or the nasty bits will depend on a number of cultural and historical factors).
@7 Iain Walker,
“And of course there’s no reason why it can’t be a religion of one or the other or both,”
Well (rolls eyes) There are two issues, one is the intrinsic nature of a religion and the other is its interpretation by the faithful. I’m open to argument, however I doubt that I could be convinced that Islam, is, like Christianity or Buddhism, doctrinally, a peaceful religion. As Eric MacDonald has already indicated, in detail, the historical evidence supports the idea that Islam is intrinsically violent—-it was invented by a bandit leader and his followers. The apparent ‘peacefulness’ of Islam since the 18th century, which is not so long ago, historically, is a result of the West’s overwhelming economic and military superiority, so, now the tactic is asymmetrical warfare and an alliance with the useful idiots of the “Left”.
Of course, believers ‘cherry pick’ their sacred texts, and particularly in the West, reinterpret them to be compatible with current mores, however that’s not relevant to the issue of Islam’s core beliefs.
So, are the members of ISIS devout Muslims?
rjw1:
Not according to other devout and ultra-conservative Muslims — for example:
Grand Mufti, Saudi’s Top Islamic Leader: Islamic State And Al-Qaeda Are ‘Enemy Number One Of Islam’
Eric MacDonald:
You might as well have written: ‘Evangelisation, as persuasive proselytisation towards non-believers, is a duty of all Christians. And it is their duty to engage in it until the whole world is subject to Christ and his holy laws.’
The very existence of Army Chaplains shows that Christianity is no less war-amenable than Islam; and if you want to go historical, then you should at least note that Christian conquest and hegemony exceeds that of Islam.
(Or: Your insinuation that Islam is singularly pernicious doesn’t cohere with my own perception)
[erratum]
Bad copy paste replace in my parodic paraphrase above, but I think the intent remains clear.
I don’t see what’s wrong with it, so can’t fix it…
Thanks, Ophelia. It should have read ‘Evangelisation, as persuasive proselytisation towards non-believers, is a duty of all Christians. And it is their duty to engage in it until the whole world is subject to Christ and his holy laws.’
@14 John Morales
“…then you should at least note that Christian conquest and hegemony exceeds that of Islam.”
Which is conceivably a consequence of the West’s far more advanced technology, rather than relative Christian ferocity.