"But What About..."?
Responding to 'Moral Equivalence' When Assessing Islamicly Inspired Violence
I am constantly amazed by how often people react to any statement about the many passages in the Qur’an that mandate violence against unbelievers by trying to shift the focus to another faith or ideology (e.g., “Have you read the Old Testament?”). This work is not aimed at promoting any other faith or ideology, but merely to question the link between Islam and violence. I do think, however, that comparing the Qur’an to other religious texts on the issue of violence misses the point for the following reasons:
Lazy moral equivalence will get us nowhere. Even if it can be proved that the violent passages in other Scriptures are still in force, and that there are millions of people willing to act on them (which would be a tall order indeed), their existence will still not get the Qur’an off the hook. “Look over there, they’re also doing it” is a debating technique that belongs in the school playground and is discarded by most children when they learn that each action or conviction must be evaluated on its own merits, not simply in terms of how it compares with something else.
We need to honestly assess the impact of violent passages in the Qur’an vs. those in other religious texts in the here and now. It can be confidently asserted that Islam has a near monopoly on religiously inspired violence at the beginning of the 21st century. Consider the following:
Since 11 September 2001 (9/11), there has been, on average, 5 deadly terror attacks inspired by Islam every single day. This adds up to a total of more than 27,000 attacks in about a decade and a half, with a body count running into hundreds of thousands of lives lost.
To put the level of carnage into perspective, The BBC, in cooperation with King’s College London, carefully monitored jihadist attacks for November 2014. The resulting report lists 664 attacks in 14 countries resulting in a total of 5,042 deaths. Remember, those are the figures for just one single month, and the same level of killing goes on month after month.
So, it is all well and good to point to institutions like the Spanish Inquisition as past examples of how other traditions besides Islam engaged in religiously inspired violence, but Catholic authorities burning people at the stake is clearly not quite the problem that we are facing now, is it? So, yes, let’s have a debate about history, but let us also recognize that, in our own century, the overwhelming majority of those who commit acts of violence with scriptural quotations on their lips belong to the Muslim faith.
I can almost hear the “But, but, but…” at this point. “But what about the Klu Klux Klan?”, “But what about Westboro Baptist Church?”, “What about abortion doctors being killed?” Let us put matters into perspective. The global jihad killed almost as many people on a single day (11 September 2001) as the Klu Klux Klan did in its entire history. The Westboro Baptist Church, while certainly holding to a hateful ideology, has not killed a single person that I’m aware of. According to the National Abortion Federation in the U.S., a total of 11 abortion providers have been killed by pro-life activists since Roe vs. Wade. This is the equivalent of about 1.5 hours’ worth of killings by the global jihad during November 2014 during which, on average, 7 people per hour died due to Islamist violence.
Please understand that I’m not trying to justify the examples mentioned above. Klan members who are guilty of lynching, the Westboro Baptist Church and those who murder abortion doctors deserve our condemnation, but we should also be realistic and honest about the real source of the overwhelming majority of acts of religiously inspired violence in the 21st century.
Literalism reigns supreme within Islam. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Judaism all experienced a variety of reform movements that moved many of the adherents of these religions (in many cases a majority) away from literal understandings of their faith. Islam has never experienced such a movement, at least not a widespread and successful one. Literalism, therefore, reigns supreme in the vast majority of mosques and Muslim institutions of higher learning. In fact, anyone who would like to propose innovative interpretations to soften the hard edges of Islam’s teaching on unbelievers is, therefore, quite likely to be met with the serious charge of committing the ultimate theological sin, namely bidah (or introducing innovation). This can lead to the even more dangerous charge of apostasy (for which the penalty is death).
The challenges facing would-be Muslim reformers proposing non-literal interpretations of the Qur’an is exemplified by the life and death of the Sudanese scholar Mahmoud Mohammed Taha (1909-1985). Taha proposed that the standard interpretive framework (i.e., verses “revealed” in Medina supersedes those revealed in Mecca) should be overturned (so that the Meccan verses have precedence). This would have made for a somewhat more tolerant form of Islam since the Meccan verses date from the time when Muhammad led a persecuted minority. For his troubles, Taha was arrested by Sudanese authorities, declared an apostate, and executed on 18 January 1985. The fear of following in the footsteps of people like Taha means that calls for root-and-branch reform of Islam are almost entirely confined to the West, where Muslims making such calls can operate out of reach of religious authorities. Within the Muslim world itself, literalism in interpreting the Qur’an and the hadiths holds almost unchallenged sway.
The violent verses of the Qur’an carry immense theological weight. It has been noted again and again that the violent texts in the Qur’an are hugely important in the sense that they represent some of the last revelations that were supposedly given to Muhammad. In fact, the “newest” chapter of the Qur’an (Chapter 9) is also the most violent. There are, therefore, some Muslim theologians who argue that Qur’an 9:5 (the so-called “Verse of the Sword”) abrogates all preceding verses counseling peaceful coexistence with unbelievers. Because of this, the violent verses of the Qur’an are regarded not merely as historical curiosities, but as some of the most important and authoritative verses in the entire book. This is not necessarily the case with other Scriptures.
The violent passages in the Torah, for example, form part of an extended historical description with no indication that eternal commands are being given. They can, therefore, be seen as descriptive instead of prescriptive in an ongoing sense. In Christianity, any “violent verses” are disproportionally to be found in the Old Testament (i.e., the same descriptive passages mentioned above).
The New Testament contains several strong condemnations of using violent means to further the faith. See, for example, the rebuke that Jesus Christ gave to his disciple Simon Peter when he tried to defend him by force: “Put your sword back in its place, for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52, New International Version). The commitment to the pacific spreading of the Christian faith among early Christians was so strong that it took centuries for the Christian church to accept soldiers into membership without them resigning from the army first. Acceptance of serving soldiers as church members only happened on a large scale after the official edict legalizing Christianity in the Roman Empire promulgated by the Emperor Constantine in 313 CE. Some Christians obviously deviated from the ideal of non-violence in later phases of Christian history, but there can be no doubt that belligerent versions of the faith were significantly at odds with the abhorrence that the early church displayed towards violence in the name of God.
The difference between Islam and other religions in this area cannot be starker. It can be argued that in some other religions, violence represented a stage in their development that was eventually repudiated. For Islam, its violent passages, in many ways, represent the culmination of its development.For much more about the links between Islamic teaching and violence, please see my book ‘Nothing to do with Islam - Investigating the West’s Most Dangerous Blind Spot’.
Kind regards,
Peter
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