US Gen. Petraeus Decries "Burn A Koran Day"

[Marcus Aurelius]

By "Islamic world", do you mean the Middle East and Central Asia? Because I think that Indonesia - the nation with the world's largest Muslim population - would take offence at being called a "theocratic state".

Personally, I put the shittiness of various Muslims down to the fact that they're poor people living in a desert/mountain/mountainous desert, rather than due anything intrinsically worse about their religion.

Repeat after me. "Islam is not a culture."

Don't forget Turkey, and Malaysia is hardly theocratic either despite having a Muslim majority and the religious Syariah Court system for Muslims. In fact about the only theocratic Islamic country I can think of is Iran, but ironically Iran is still also more democratic than any of the Arab countries, except perhaps Iraq under the current constitution and regime.

Poverty is no doubt a major factor for the recent rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but the authoritarian and corrupt governments in many Islamic countries, and in many cases ethnic oppression along tribal lines are perhaps even more important reasons. Of course the fact that the West has in most cases chosen to support the status quo in order to keep the oil flowing has not helped matters, either.

I also think that Akkleptos is at least partly right when he says that Islam is a culture. Islam has certainly strongly influenced the culture of all the countries where it's practiced by the majority, but of course that does not mean that there are no local cultures. You only have to go for example from Iraq to Iran and there is a noticeable difference in local culture. Even something like the Arabic language is far from uniform and in fact many Arabic dialects differ from each other so much that they are not mutually intelligible. Often they are compared to the various Chinese "dialects", or according to most linguists without a national agenda, languages.

[Simon_Jester]

Islam is a religion and a culture and a political system. As a political system it's mostly been outcompeted on its own territory by the "Third World military dictatorship" model; as a culture there's enough diversity within the lands of Islam to make for a lot of regional diversity. But there's definitely a 'political Islam' (as in Iran) still very much alive, one where secular leaders are strongly guided by religious leaders. And there's definitely a 'cultural Islam' revolving around institutions that the Quran dictates that people should have: the way sharia dictates the interactions between individuals, the types of charities and schools Muslims routinely set up within their communities, and so on.

Islam predates Western models in which religion, culture, and politics are separate phenomena, so it's no surprise it weaves the three ideas together.

[Master of Ossus]

How many here have acually bothered reading through the bloody thing?

*raises hand*
I did, and I found it really supports (and decrees) several forms of violence to "unbelievers" (read "infidels"), not to mention women.

Oddly enough, it does encourage believers to have special considerations with the "People of the Book" (the Jews).

Of course, nothing in it is more radical than what we could read from the Old Testament in any Bible. But we have to consider that Islam, as a culture, is waaaay behing Christendom, development-wise...

I also read hte Koran. Frankly, it's a shockingly offensive text and I'd be happy to be seen at a bonfire in its honor.

What makes the Koran different from the Bible in terms of intolerance, IMO, is two-fold. First, the Koran treats itself as being a quasi-legal document, prescribing specific laws and rules that obviously apply to governments as well as to believers. It's not like "Ten Commandments" by which believers are meant to live by.

Second, unlike the Bible, there really don't seem to be many "peaceful, tolerant" portions of the text to focus on if you're trying real hard to ignore everything else. It's almost like Muhammed decided to take Leviticus and make it into the foundation of a religious text, rather than a single book which followers of his religion could sort of ignore and cite only when it supported their specific points.

[Sarevok]

Why are you so full of hate MoO ?

[Simon_Jester]

I also read hte Koran. Frankly, it's a shockingly offensive text and I'd be happy to be seen at a bonfire in its honor.

What makes the Koran different from the Bible in terms of intolerance, IMO, is two-fold. First, the Koran treats itself as being a quasi-legal document, prescribing specific laws and rules that obviously apply to governments as well as to believers. It's not like "Ten Commandments" by which believers are meant to live by.

Second, unlike the Bible, there really don't seem to be many "peaceful, tolerant" portions of the text to focus on if you're trying real hard to ignore everything else. It's almost like Muhammed decided to take Leviticus and make it into the foundation of a religious text, rather than a single book which followers of his religion could sort of ignore and cite only when it supported their specific points.

...You do know how the thing was compiled, right?

Basically, the Muslim society started out as a scattered cult of followers in one city. They got chased out and fled to another city where they became the local goverment. At this time, Muhammed was a charismatic religious leader, there was no formal holy book, and people would keep coming to him saying "what should we do?" about all kinds of wacky and very specific problems. Like how to lead an army in battle against the city-state's enemies, or how to make sure widows were cared for. And so he would, naturally, answer the question.

Meanwhile, he'd also opine on all kinds of random stuff, like what kind of foods were best or whatever. But at no point did he say "Oh yeah, write all this stuff down and follow it for the next 1500 years."

What happened was, after his death, his followers were all like "Fuck, now what?" because they couldn't come up and ask him questions about what to do anymore. The leaders immediately succeeding Muhammed decided to compile more or less everything he'd ever said into a book, to make sure that they'd have the Official Statement on as many things as possible. Which is where the Koran came from.

But Muhammed didn't intentionally write a holy book at any specific point. He was just a guy sitting around in a council hall in Medina saying "do this, don't do that, pigs are filthy animals so we shouldn't eat pork." Only after his death did some freaking genius decide it would be a good idea to obsessively compile everything anyone could remember him saying and turn it into a Levitical-style law code.

[Channel72]

But Muhammed didn't intentionally write a holy book at any specific point. He was just a guy sitting around in a council hall in Medina saying "do this, don't do that, pigs are filthy animals so we shouldn't eat pork." Only after his death did some freaking genius decide it would be a good idea to obsessively compile everything anyone could remember him saying and turn it into a Levitical-style law code.

And yet the Koran clearly spells out its agenda to proclaim a new Revelation with severe eschatological implications; a Revelation meant to overturn the previous revelations of the Jews and Christians. It clearly distinguishes itself as a Revelation from God, and goes as far as "correcting" previous revelations by e.g., explaining that God has no Son, Jesus was merely a prophet (not a divine being), and that God's true promise was to come via the line of Ishmael rather than Isaac. It's not just a compilation of political/practical/ethical decisions that Mohammad came up with in Medina. Mohammad truly tried to establish himself as God's mouthpiece.

So, saying that he didn't "intentionally write a holy book" is an incredible stretch. While there were certainly many political motivations behind the Koran, you can't divorce them from its blatantly religious nature.

[dragon]

What the muslims whould do is go to the burning area and burn the bible as the idiots burn the Koran. Hell I'll help burn a few bibles, and I use the bible, but I don't support bigorty.

[Vendetta]

What the muslims whould do is go to the burning area and burn the bible as the idiots burn the Koran. Hell I'll help burn a few bibles, and I use the bible, but I don't support bigorty.

Given that this event is a clear attempt to intimidate muslims (the website of the group even says that it is supposed to demonstrate to them their fate in the afterlife), I very much suspect that doing so would provoke physical violence.

[Channel72]

What makes the Koran different from the Bible in terms of intolerance, IMO, is two-fold. First, the Koran treats itself as being a quasi-legal document, prescribing specific laws and rules that obviously apply to governments as well as to believers. It's not like "Ten Commandments" by which believers are meant to live by.

The Koran is hardly a legal document. Its content includes ethical statements about living rightly as a believer, stories about various Biblical figures, cosmology and eschatology, and of course, fighting against unbelievers. The Hadith serves more as the inspiration for governments who implement Islamic laws.

Second, unlike the Bible, there really don't seem to be many "peaceful, tolerant" portions of the text to focus on if you're trying real hard to ignore everything else. It's almost like Muhammed decided to take Leviticus and make it into the foundation of a religious text, rather than a single book which followers of his religion could sort of ignore and cite only when it supported their specific points.

The Koran is also amenable to cherry-picking. It's just that the Bible has the advantage of including the New Testament, which, (eschatology aside) has very little of the brutality we find in the Old Testament.

Regardless, moderate Muslims can and do cherry pick their favorite verses, such as:

2.256: There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error;

or:

2.271: If you give alms openly, it is well, and if you hide it and give it to the poor, it is better for you;

[Darth Yan]

MoO, there is one thing I disagree with; The quran has actually said positivie things about jews and christians, plus a lot of the offensive parts are easily explained away by historical context. The quran and the hadith are complex to the point where muslims have been argueing for centuries. In all honesty, the new testement also has hateful and mysoginistic parts as well. The quran is not perfect, but it does have some genuinely positive aspects, and is not entirely hateful. to say that it's more offensive then the bible is an outright lie.

[Sarevok]

Nitpick :

The Koran is entirely the word of Allah as revealed to the prophet (pbuh). The hadith is what you guys are referring to, It was compiled after the prophets death based upon his sayings and life experiences.

That said the korans meaning to oneself entirely depends on ones interpretation. You can interpret it to justify evil as well as good. Like christian theological circles there is no lack of intense scholarly debates on what individual verses mean. Now I don't why MoO chose to interpret the verses as evil. He should go around and meet some the muslims in America - the people who drive cabs in NY, students at UCLA, shop owners etc. They are not from mordor as MoO would like to have you all believe.

[Kanastrous]

to say that it's more offensive then the bible is an outright lie.

Since 'offensive' is a matter of perspective it's less a lie than merely a disagreement with your assessment of the work.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Nitpick :

The Koran is entirely the word of Allah as revealed to the prophet (pbuh). The hadith is what you guys are referring to, It was compiled after the prophets death based upon his sayings and life experiences.

That's the traditional Islamic religious view. Nevertheless, even the Muslim tradition agrees that the entire Koran was written down after his death, although it maintains that it was perfectly preserved in the form the Prophet had his followers to memorize. Even the existence of some alternate versions is acknowledged by the tradition before caliph Uthman's standardization. What the truth is about that is anybody's guess...Some critical scholars maintain that there is no real hard evidence that the canonical text of the Koran actually existed even during Uthman's time, let alone earlier.

In any case from a historian's point of view the main difference between Koran and the hadith is that the former was compiled in a written form sooner after Muhammed's death (but how soon is not clear), and possibly in some parts already during his life (but then again possibly not), whereas the hadith was compiled literally centuries later and therefore contains more legend material.

[Kanastrous]

No answer necessary but whenever I see 'pbuh' (peace be upon him) after someone mentions Muhammad I always wonder if the writer is actually a Muslim or if they are adding it because they want to please Muslims who may be reading...

[Sarevok]

No answer necessary but whenever I see 'pbuh' (peace be upon him) after someone mentions Muhammad I always wonder if the writer is actually a Muslim or if they are adding it because they want to please Muslims who may be reading...

Its a personal thing. Not just the prophet (pbuh) but several famous muslim personalities including some alive today have some kind of honorific title attached to their names. Now most muslims are no more religious that the typical christian around you so they dont even care about proper honorific. Not that I am particularly religious, I just think its personally a neat thing to try and use the correct syntax.

[Kanastrous]

My personal favorite is Flying Jafaar (from the historic Battle of Muta, not the Disney character...)

[Rye]

Nitpick :

The Koran is entirely the word of Allah as revealed to the prophet (pbuh). The hadith is what you guys are referring to, It was compiled after the prophets death based upon his sayings and life experiences.

Actually it's not; the Quran was compiled from fragments people had heard Mohammed say, written down on cowhide and the like. It wasn't "entirely the word of Allah as revealed to the prophet" at all; it didn't exist until decades after his death. The idea that he said it in one go as Gabriel or whoever had referred it to him is a fiction.

[Kanastrous]

Well...where religious texts are concerned, once you start talking 'fiction,' where do you stop?

[Rye]

Well...where religious texts are concerned, once you start talking 'fiction,' where do you stop?

I doubt anyone could say "the Quran was written down" is a fiction. When and where and by whom can all be fictional, of course.

[Kanastrous]

Of course. All works of literature are written down. That hardly seems necessary to point out.

[Simon_Jester]

And yet the Koran clearly spells out its agenda to proclaim a new Revelation with severe eschatological implications; a Revelation meant to overturn the previous revelations of the Jews and Christians. It clearly distinguishes itself as a Revelation from God, and goes as far as "correcting" previous revelations by e.g., explaining that God has no Son, Jesus was merely a prophet (not a divine being), and that God's true promise was to come via the line of Ishmael rather than Isaac. It's not just a compilation of political/practical/ethical decisions that Mohammad came up with in Medina. Mohammad truly tried to establish himself as God's mouthpiece.

Yes, he did, because he (by all available evidence) believed that he was.

So, saying that he didn't "intentionally write a holy book" is an incredible stretch. While there were certainly many political motivations behind the Koran, you can't divorce them from its blatantly religious nature.

I'm not trying to. My point is that saying "Muhammed wrote the Koran with intentions X, Y, and Z" is misleading, because it's not clear what parts of the Koran Muhammed would have wanted to be quoted on and had taken as eternal Holy Law by his followers. It's entirely possible that some of the more Levitical passages in the book are cases where Muhammed was confronted with a specific problem and improvised a specific solution*, with no intent that this would then become binding permanent policy.

Saying that Muhammed intended to establish himself as the mouthpiece of God is accurate, as far as I know. Saying that he intended the religion he founded to wind up with a massively detailed super-Levitical approach to its core texts is not accurate, because that didn't happen until after his death.

*As in "OK, rich guy dies, this much goes to his first wife, this much to his second wife, this much to his kids." A judgement call like that could easily have been informed by random specific details of the incident... and yet the Muslims might well have ended up faithfully transcribing it as the Word of God via the Prophet anyway.

[Kanastrous]

Salman Rushdie sure had some fun, with the concept.

[Darth Hoth]

I also read hte Koran. Frankly, it's a shockingly offensive text and I'd be happy to be seen at a bonfire in its honor.

What makes the Koran different from the Bible in terms of intolerance, IMO, is two-fold. First, the Koran treats itself as being a quasi-legal document, prescribing specific laws and rules that obviously apply to governments as well as to believers. It's not like "Ten Commandments" by which believers are meant to live by.

Second, unlike the Bible, there really don't seem to be many "peaceful, tolerant" portions of the text to focus on if you're trying real hard to ignore everything else. It's almost like Muhammed decided to take Leviticus and make it into the foundation of a religious text, rather than a single book which followers of his religion could sort of ignore and cite only when it supported their specific points.

The Torah (=Pentateuch, Five Books of Moses) does contain "secular" law as well (Covenant Code in Exodus; Holiness Code in Leviticus; Deuteronomic Code in Deuteronomy), so it is not entirely different in that respect. Although nowadays, or indeed even two thosand years ago, neither Jews nor Christians live by those literal laws any more.

Although I must say, my basic reaction to the Koran perfectly mirrored yours: "Hey, this reads like Leviticus, only instead of one especially boring and offensive book in the Bible it is the entire book written this way. " It is basically one guy droning on and on saying, "Prophet, I your God tell you, tell the people this, and then tell them that, and then something else," ad nauseum. Sometimes with a "Remember what happened to so-and-so in the past" added as an illustration.

(I hope that did not offend anyone.)

[Master of Ossus]

The Koran is hardly a legal document. Its content includes ethical statements about living rightly as a believer, stories about various Biblical figures, cosmology and eschatology, and of course, fighting against unbelievers. The Hadith serves more as the inspiration for governments who implement Islamic laws.

I suppose it would have been more accurate to say that it's both intended as a legal document forming the basis of a system of government and its associated laws and a religious text, but really I don't think that it's intended to draw such clear distinctions.

The Koran is also amenable to cherry-picking. It's just that the Bible has the advantage of including the New Testament, which, (eschatology aside) has very little of the brutality we find in the Old Testament.

My point is not that it cannot be cherry-picked, but that it's even harder to cherry-pick with the Koran than it is with the Bible. For instance, see my responses to the verses you cite as cherry-pickable, infra.

Regardless, moderate Muslims can and do cherry pick their favorite verses, such as:

2.256: There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error;

In order to cite this as a principle to live by, though, they have to completely ignore the next passage or to adopt an extraordinarily bizarre definition of the term "compulsion." (Indeed, your passage has been translated in any number of ways from the original Arabic. My translation construes it as Let there be no compulsion in religion because truth is distinct from error: whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things.) Meanwhile the next passage, 2.257, reads something like:

Allah is the Protecting Guardian of believers. He bringeth them out of darkness to light. As for those who disbelieve, their deities are false [or "deceivers"]. They bring them out of light into darkness. These are rightful owners of The Fire [Hell]. They will abide therein.

Emphasis added.

In context, the statement is self-evidently one of intolerance. It could be reasonably paraphrased as "you don't need to compel people to believe in Islam; Allah has done it for you--non-believers will burn in Hell."

or:

2.271: If you give alms openly, it is well, and if you hide it and give it to the poor, it is better for you;

I will give the Koran credit for this: it's consistent in its advocacy of giving alms to the poor. To be clear, I'm not arguing that there is nothing in the Koran that you can interpret as tolerant, just as I'm not arguing that there is nothing in the Bible as tolerant and good. I'm just arguing that as tough as it is for Biblical apologists to claim that Christianity is a peaceful religion based on a wonderful, happy religious text, Islamic apologists must have an even more difficult time with it because their religion is even more violent and even more intolerant, and this is clear when you read the two texts in comparison. (Incidentally, if anyone out there has already read the Bible and is worried about picking up the Koran because they don't want to spend months or years going through another farcical religious text, the Koran is a much shorter work if not really any more concise or less repetitive--you can get through it in a week if you have a day job and something else to do in your spare time).

I'm not arguing that Biblical cherry-pickers can't often be corrected, but the ratio of instances of legitimately tolerant and peaceful instances in the Bible to intolerant or hateful passages is much better than that in the Koran.

As evidence, take a peak at Skeptic's Annotated, the ratios are completely incomparable. They list 74 examples of "Good Stuff" in the Koran. They list over 500 examples of intolerance and cruelty, each. So those are ratios of over 6.75:1 for both cruelty and intolerance to "good stuff."

To put these in context, the Bible lists "only" 400 instances of Intolerance and about 200 instances of cruelty. It has 287 instances of "Good Stuff" in it. So that's roughly 1.4:1 in terms of intolerance:good stuff and less than 1:1 cruelty:good stuff.

Frankly, these ratios aren't even close. I'm sure that you can go through the Bible and Koran that they have (obviously the translations of both books will vary greatly) and dispute a lot of their ratings for both, and maybe pick out some others in both books that you would add to "Good Stuff" or one of the other categories, but it still strikes me as a reasonable comparison since the same people are rating both texts. But taking these figures uncorrected and at face value, this suggests that the Koran is on the order of 5 times as intolerant and 10 times as cruel as the Bible, and I doubt that anyone here will defend the Bible as being some monument to tolerance to kindness.

[Master of Ossus]

I'm not trying to. My point is that saying "Muhammed wrote the Koran with intentions X, Y, and Z" is misleading, because it's not clear what parts of the Koran Muhammed would have wanted to be quoted on and had taken as eternal Holy Law by his followers. It's entirely possible that some of the more Levitical passages in the book are cases where Muhammed was confronted with a specific problem and improvised a specific solution*, with no intent that this would then become binding permanent policy.

Saying that Muhammed intended to establish himself as the mouthpiece of God is accurate, as far as I know. Saying that he intended the religion he founded to wind up with a massively detailed super-Levitical approach to its core texts is not accurate, because that didn't happen until after his death.

*As in "OK, rich guy dies, this much goes to his first wife, this much to his second wife, this much to his kids." A judgement call like that could easily have been informed by random specific details of the incident... and yet the Muslims might well have ended up faithfully transcribing it as the Word of God via the Prophet anyway.

So, to paraphrase, your position is that Mohammed tried to set himself up as the mouthpiece of God, but didn't intend for his statements to be recorded and used after his death? Frankly, that makes no sense to me. He obviously intended his life to have repercussions that would continue after he died. Large sections of the book make sense only as broad statements of law, rather than specific statements meant to refer only to particular circumstances. Moreover, whatever he intended, it's obvious that the Koran has been taken to have been accurate after his death by the followers of the religion he created (and I say this for good or for bad).

But to go back to my original post that seems to have sparked all of this, I never said that Muhammed had personally written down the text with the obvious intent to found a new religion. Rather I said it was "almost like," and then made a semi-satirical point about the actual contents and the writing style of the modern Koran by analogizing to a portion of the Bible to which I found it analogous. It's obviously meant in jest, guys, not as a literal statement that he wrote down the Koran because he was making a conscious effort to expand on Leviticus or to imitate its style of writing.