A Response to Misunderstanding

My response to a Tulsa World article, Roger D. Williams: Questions For Muslim World:

I'm not Muslim, but I take issue with his arguments. Not being Muslim, hopefully my answers will carry a bit more weight to those people who think all Muslims lie (and you can Google me and find my blog on that subject).

"Having never read the Quran," - first mistake. You cannot debate an ideology without understanding it, and you cannot understand Islam without reading the Qu'ran. At least read quotes related to the statements you're about to make.

"this is a classic example actions speaking louder than words." You perceive that all Muslims are violent because ISIS and Al-Qaeda are/were violent. There are over a billion Muslims in the world, and the vast majority of them are not psychopathic killers.

"Why was there rejoicing and dancing in the streets in some Muslim-dominated nations when the twin towers went down with the attending loss of thousands of innocent lives?" I submit a few possible answers:

1. some people are jerks.
2. some news agencies are jerks who want to milk the story by showing a few dozen protesters and pretending it's the entire country.
3. all humans are inclined to make "us v. others" judgments that are necessarily reductive. There are certainly people in the world - and not just in the Muslim world - that believe that America and its policies are subjugative; that is, that we intentionally meddle into other countries' affairs and build up massive corporate institutions with unregulated power that are able to go into those countries and buy up the police and military and get away with literal murder. In "us v. others" beliefs, we see the entire nation as being collaborators in those policies, and the result may be a belief that bringing down massive icons of those policies would be a joyous occasion.
   Remember with that that just two years prior to 9/11, a movie came out in which the heroes brought down those very same buildings for the very same reasons, and we all cheered and still cheer, because we feel the oppression of those corporate regimes ourselves. (I'm talking, of course, about Fight Club).

"Can so-called 'honor killings' be defended?" Nope. We've had them in Christianity, too, though. In fact, India has a ton of them, and they're not Muslim.

"Also, explain fatwas from Muslim clerics..." Ok. We have jerks for Christian priests, too. Remember Terry Jones? Some people take attacks against their religion to unbelievable extremes, and Muslims are not the only ones who do that.

"Why are there death sentences, often by stoning, for such 'crimes' as adultery and abandoning Islam for a different religion?" You do know Christianity tells us we are to take adulterers into the middle of the city and drive a spear through both of them, right?

"Why do some Muslim schools and mosques teach that Jews are descendants of apes and pigs and should be killed at every opportunity and such humanitarian arts as suicide bombing?" Some. Not all. Not most. Few. Racism is everywhere, and as I noted above in the comment about "innocent lives," some people take that to extremes.
And should you think we're better, considering Jews in Christian history. I'm not even talking about the Nazis, here. Christians literally believed that Jews stole babies in order to drink their blood. The Shakespearean comedy "The Merchant of Venice" rigorously compared Jews to dogs (again, you can Google me to find out more about that topic).

"What is the Islamic justification for the general degradation, subjugation and virtual enslavement of women?" What is the Christian justification for the same? Women are still paid only 77 cents on every dollar that men are paid, so...

"It is my understanding that these things are not the exclusive domain of terrorists and radicals, but are fairly routine in many Muslim-dominated nations." You should have stopped with that first point. They are fairly routine all over the world. They are more famous in Muslim-dominated nations because we know more about those nations, but if you actually looked into other nations, you'd find some shocking realizations. Many Muslim-dominated nations are third-world countries that have large oil and mineral reserves, and as a result we have a vested interest in them. Third-world countries often have violent regimes, who use physical power over the body to reinforce their power. Consider how Christians behaved in the middle ages and renaissance - we committed capital punishment in ridiculously violent ways in the middle of town squares, in the hopes that people would see that violence committed on other bodies and internalize it and avoid violating the laws in the same ways. We *STILL* do that, calling capital punishment a method by which we might show potential murderers that they shouldn't commit murder, and I see comments on Facebook all the time that we should behave more violently and more publicly to other offenders in order to prevent more crime. Third-world regimes control women in the same way - because that control helps them maintain their control over the rest of the population.

"in today’s world almost all terrorists are Muslims." Now, see, the problem is in the definition of the word "terrorist." We seem to apply that word only to Muslims. A terrorist is someone who attempts to use fear to achieve political change or to hold onto power they already have, apparently, but using only that definition, everyone at Fox News would be a terrorist. It's not enough that they use fear, but that they must also be someone we're already afraid of; that is, there must be a chance for their use of fear to succeed in our own world. That can only happen with people we're irrationally afraid of. It is necessarily bound up in racism.

If we didn't have that racist filter on the word, we'd see that terrorism is part of all military actions in the world, regardless of who commits them. By bombing key ISIS locations and portraying those victories across the TV, the US itself is engaging in terrorism - striking terror into the hearts of the people in ISIS-held regions.

"Don’t use the standard dodge of justifying the misdeeds of the Muslim world today by pointing to the sins and misdeeds, of which there are many, of other cultures and religions in this or by-gone ages..." Why not? There's literally no reason not to be. History is the filter by which we understand the present.

A Religion of Lies

When I was in high school, my parents and pastors taught me several things about other religions.  One of the things they told me was that it's considered a moral imperative in Islam to lie to Christians.  This 'fact' was then used as a method of denying any claim a Muslim made to the contrary - of course Muslims would say that their Qur'an says nothing of the sort, because they're supposed to lie!

I still see this today.  It's a belief about Islam that has persisted despite all of the world's attempts to answer it. Just in a brief search online, I found many sites making claims that support that belief:

On a site with an Orwellian name, MuslimFact.com, Don Boys argues that "Islam permits lying to deceive unbelievers and bring world domination," explaining that this right to lie is called "Al-taqiyya" and that it can be used in several fairly common-place scenarios, such as saving someone's life.

This is somewhat true, actually.  The Qur'an appears to be saying - although I'm no scholar of the Qur'an and do not speak Arabic to read it untranslated - that Muslims shouldn't lie in general but can do so in order to accomplish good things, such as saving lives and reconciling people together.  Boys acknowledges that Christians lie, too, but then brushes that under the rug by the argument that we're not given specific permission to lie, and will therefore feel guilt for it.  That's clearly working out for the vast majority of Christians. 

He then follows a slippery slope argument down to its most absurd conclusion, setting it up as follows:

"Muslims have no hope for eternal salvation without their good works, so they must keep working to advance Islam. If a few lies will accomplish that goal, then lying is not bad but good. If they can get good publicity for Islam by lying, then lying is acceptable, even desirable. The Muslim is earning his way to heaven by lying to a non-Muslim."

Wow... where to begin?   First, this assumes (and Boys acknowledges the assumption without apparently realizing what he's saying) that Muslims don't have Christ and therefore their salvation isn't guaranteed.  Well, that's true, except that as Beth Davies-Stofka on patheos.com explains, "Islam does not teach that humans need intercession."  That is, Christ is neither capable of providing a bridge between individuals and God, nor does He need to.  Muslims can go directly to God for their salvation, and receive forgiveness from their sins directly from that source by repenting.  For that moment of salvation, Davies-Stofka explains, "At the end of time, all people will be rewarded or punished according to how well they followed the instructions contained in God's revelations to his prophets."  Well, that kind of sounds familiar, like the idea of St. Peter standing at the pearly gates.  She goes on, "Each person's deeds will be weighed in a balance, and if the evil deeds outweigh the good deeds, the person will be condemned to the eternal flame. If the good deeds outweigh the evil deeds, then the person will be rewarded with paradise."

So basically, anyone, Muslim or not, can get into paradise simply by doing more good than evil.  And evil can be erased through repentance, so that doing more good than evil would seem to be a fairly easy thing to do.

Bonus: They also teach that God is merciful.  So... He might just show you mercy even if you've been a bastard.

So, what does it mean to do "good"?  Well, here Boys reveals his ignorance and his prejudices about what is Good in Islam.  He already believes Islam to require the conversion of the whole world, through violent means if necessary.  Dying in the service of that conversion is the ultimate good.

This is also what I was taught.

Davies-Stofka claims, however, that good means something different: "A person's ultimate destiny, whether it is heaven or hell, depends on the degree to which that person intended and acted as God desires, with justice and mercy toward others." 

On islamqa.com, a site intended for providing helpful support to Muslims from Muslims, they list 8 possible things you can do to be good, such as praying (3 different items on the list include prayer), reading the Qur'an, and "visiting the sick and giving charity."  Notably absent on the list is "strapping a bomb to your chest and running into a crowded arena" or "attempting to convert others by lies and coercion." 

So the "goals of Islam" include charitable works?  Yeah, I'm OK with Muslims lying to advance those goals.

Boys then connects those two highly disparate dots by proclaiming that as a result of their lack of salvation and their pursuit of the expansion of Islam, lying means getting into Heaven.  He's just made lying a "virtue" rather than a necessary evil.

Of course, then he goes completely off the deep end, proclaiming that the only sure way of entering Heaven is to die a martyr, and,

"Most Muslims will not have the 'opportunity' to become a martyr in this war between Islam and the rest of the world and make no mistake every true Muslim must be involved in making America (or the nation where he lives) a Muslim nation. Since Muslims are limited in their ability to die for the cause, they can help the cause by supporting terrorists with money, succor, and cover."

Wow.  Just wow.  First of all, this assumes the moral imperative to make America a Muslim nation.  I'm relatively certain the Qur'an never mention America, but hey, I've been wrong before.

But more importantly, it assumes that all Muslims believe that terrorists will be successful in their conversion of America by attacking it.

If Muslims really wanted to make America into a Muslim nation, the first thing they would do would be to blow up a small piece of it, because... uhm... you always attack countries when you want them to love you?

Where did Muslims in Boys' reality get their playbook?  The Republican War Room?