Current Events: September 2006 Archives

I decided to pop in and pay a visit to alt.religion.islam. a.r.i. is a Usenet newsgroup, and for those of you unfamiliar with it, Usenet is what we had to discuss stuff before we had Internet mailing lists and web forums. (You can check it out if you go to Google Groups).

Usenet is of a free-wheeling nature, and as it is open to anyone, tends to devolve into flamefests. I used to frequent soc.religion.christian many years ago, and it was replete with Christians bickering over minor points and discussions of various minutiae. It had its share of kooks, "personalities", trolls (people who lob clearly inflammatory questions just to get a rise out of people), and so forth.

I had expected to see the same sort of thing on a.r.i. Certainly there had to be no lack of "infidels" attacking Islam and inciting flamefests, not to mention arguments among Muslims. But I reviewed a few dozen posts and saw none of this. It was surprisingly placid. Neat and tidy and peaceful.

I thought about it a while, and concluded maybe the people in a.r.i. are so docile because they've been pummelled so badly by the trolls and other anti-Islamic posters (which I am sure they get in droves). Perhaps the first time your religion is attacked you fly off into a rage and respond harshly. After 100 attacks you're a bit more circumspect; you simply don't have the emotional energy to get worked up about it anymore. Maybe the problem with the Muslims in Muslim countries is they are so isolated, so accustomed to being unchallenged in their smug thinking that they are right, that they go off at the slightest provocation.

I also suspect that they don't want to reveal their disagreements in front of "infidels". This is a classic behavior in Islam: Few want to condemn Islamic violence because it will appear to divide Islam, and the "Prophet" says that Islam will never be divided.

So they've done a good job in keeping a.r.i. clean. Maybe I'll check out soc.religion.islam to see if it is any different. I'd like to see someone arguing over whether "infidels" should be forcibly converted.

A lot of Muslims are upset that the Pope suggested they coerce people into embracing Islam, but here and here are good examples of this now and throughout history.

Now it would be one thing if Muslims merely exercised forced conversions throughout history. After all, so have Christians. One could certainly argue that they still do and we do not, and that would be an effective argument, but the Paleologos' controversial statement is that Mohammed was the source of this practice. It would be hard to defend the pope without proving this.

But yet, we can. One of the interesting facts about the Koran is that it tends to have contradictory elements that believers are apparently free to choose between. (Not to say that the Bible doesn't have an appearance of contradiction, but those verses, when examined seriously, don't affect what people do in the way the Koran verses do.) For example, moderate Muslims will offer the iyat (verse) "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). However, there is also "the verse of the sword": "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the jizya (poor-due), then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful." (9:5)

There is a fascinating discussion of this. First, he notes that some more radical deal with the contradiction by saying this is a later iyat, and so it overrides the earlier one. Second, he points out it is basically a consistent modus operandi of Islam: Threaten a people with military force, and relent if they convert to Islam (if pagans or Christians) or submit to a heavy tax and second-class citizenhood (dhimmihood, if Christians). This would be considered coercion in our language but apparently it is not to Muslims. (Probably because it would contradict the Koran.) "Dhimmi" means "protected people" — just like when Guido the Sicilian approaches your business and offers to protect it.

When Muslims are a little more honest about their practices, they claim that Christians are exempt from coerced conversions (in the sense of convert or die). What they fail to see is that dhimmihood — second-class citizenship and non-believer tax — might be better than death, but it is still coercion. Any time you punish someone for not converting, you are exercising coercion, because they may be motivated for reasons other than free acceptance and conscience to convert.

The subject of these two journalists who made a videotaped profession of Islam in a forced conversion is an interesting study. I saw one Islamic defense of this (which, by the way, the Hamas-led Palestinian government condemned, to their credit) which said that they "freely" chose of their own accord to convert to Islam because it would get them out of captivity. Yet that's precisely the point: If you are doing it to escape captivity, it is not a free choice. It's not sincere, it's a lie designed to avoid violence.

This is also discussed well on the Free Republic website. Some excerpts:

Muhammad instructed his followers to call people to Islam before waging war against them—the warfare would follow from their refusal to accept Islam or to enter the Islamic social order as inferiors, required to pay a special tax (Sahih Muslim 4294). There is therefore a threat in this “invitation” to accept Islam. Would one who converted to Islam under the threat of war be considered to have converted under duress? No; from the standpoint of traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence, such a conversion would have resulted from “no compulsion.”

Muhammad reinforced these instructions many times during his prophetic career. Late in his career, he wrote to Heraclius, the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople: “Embrace Islam and you will be safe” (Bukhari, 4.52.191). Heraclius did not accept Islam, and soon the Byzantines would know well that the warriors of jihad indeed granted no safety to those who rejected their “invitation.”

So Mohammed, and even the Koran, endorses coercing people to accept Islam, despite what the moderates are saying.