RE: Is the ''Only a minority of Muslims are radical'' true?
June 17, 2015 at 9:56 am
(This post was last modified: June 17, 2015 at 10:06 am by Aaran.)
It's an important question. Is the extremists' literal reading of the Koran the authentic one, or can a better claim to authenticity be made by the moderates and their metaphorical reading? I think radical Muslims are reading the Koran in the only possible way it should be, given the context of its dissemination.
According to the fictitious narratives of Muhammad's life (which are of perilously unreliable provenance) the people to whom Muhammad directed his sermons were largely illiterate and uneducated, the prostrate plebeians of Arabian society. It is extremely difficult to believe that such unlettered people could have been capable of discerning allegories or alternate meanings in any of the things they heard (the Koran was transmitted exclusively by word of mouth in Muhammad's lifetime). All that they heard they would have taken literally, at face value.
Muhammad/ Allah would have been aware of this. If they had meant any of the things in the Koran to be taken for anything other than what they appeared to be, they would have elucidated these segments somewhat. But they didn't. So when Muhammad commands his devotees to 'Kill all the unbelievers', the only thing he could possibly mean by that is 'Kill all those fucking unbelievers".
That is why I can't help but feel irked when Muslim apologists insist that the Islam of Bin Laden and of ISIS, is but an interpretation of Islam, and moreover, a skewed one. Interpretation, literally speaking, is the action of discerning a meaning in something. But that isn't what the fundamentalist Muslims are doing. They're taking what they read simply at face value. The only ones doing any 'interpreting' are the so called moderate Muslims, who read a passage which enjoins them to 'destroy all the unbelievers wherever you may find them' and then sit around scratching their heads and asking "well, what on earth could be meant by that?”
Moderate Muslims aren't really Muslims in any meaningful sense of the word.
According to the fictitious narratives of Muhammad's life (which are of perilously unreliable provenance) the people to whom Muhammad directed his sermons were largely illiterate and uneducated, the prostrate plebeians of Arabian society. It is extremely difficult to believe that such unlettered people could have been capable of discerning allegories or alternate meanings in any of the things they heard (the Koran was transmitted exclusively by word of mouth in Muhammad's lifetime). All that they heard they would have taken literally, at face value.
Muhammad/ Allah would have been aware of this. If they had meant any of the things in the Koran to be taken for anything other than what they appeared to be, they would have elucidated these segments somewhat. But they didn't. So when Muhammad commands his devotees to 'Kill all the unbelievers', the only thing he could possibly mean by that is 'Kill all those fucking unbelievers".
That is why I can't help but feel irked when Muslim apologists insist that the Islam of Bin Laden and of ISIS, is but an interpretation of Islam, and moreover, a skewed one. Interpretation, literally speaking, is the action of discerning a meaning in something. But that isn't what the fundamentalist Muslims are doing. They're taking what they read simply at face value. The only ones doing any 'interpreting' are the so called moderate Muslims, who read a passage which enjoins them to 'destroy all the unbelievers wherever you may find them' and then sit around scratching their heads and asking "well, what on earth could be meant by that?”
Moderate Muslims aren't really Muslims in any meaningful sense of the word.
