Re-reading your question, I realized I may not have fully addressed it.

I believe that people are inherently good. And we want to believe others are good as well.

Despite islamist claims of racism when someone exposes islams warts, there's no racism there. What race is a Muslim, anyway?

Just as there are Catholics and Protestants who pick and choose, so too do Muslims. It violates the dogma of their religion, but they do it anyway. Just as Catholics are required to attend mass every Sunday and Holy Day of obligation, yet regularly skip this requirement....so too do some Muslims skip parts of the requirements of their faith. This really isn't that complicated, is it?

Many Muslims don't know their own faith in the level of depth that we have already discussed in the numerous threads here. I never studied Catholic Canon or Jewish Law. Why would an average practicing Muslim study islamic law?

Yet, it is that level of understanding required before the full extent of the problem is exposed. Before studying the black and white of the letter of islamic law, I didn't get it. I never put any credibility in comparing the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. I thought they were endless, unwinnable debates. "My God is better than your God."

It wasn't until it was a case of studying our Constitution and islamic law, that it became apparent that there was an actual way to evaluate this situation. That there is a way to compare them.

David Yerushalmi said it better than I could in his letter to Suhail Khan:
http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=32710

__________________________________________________ ____________
Before I forget, did you know the Koran is not arranged in chronological order?
Have you ever read it in chronological order? There are at least three different versions of the chronological order of the Koran (Jalalud-din, Rev. J.M. Rodwell, and Sir W. Muir). Yet all of them agree that Surah 9 is either 113 or the last surah chronologically. When you put that together with the idea of progressive revelation and abrogation, it means Surah 9 holds more "weight" than almost if not all of the other surahs.

Here's a quick guide that appears to be in accordance with Jalalud-din:
http://www.wikiislam.com/wiki/Chrono...r_of_the_Quran

Now when you read Surah 9:28, you can see that there's a reason that the "extremists" are cherry picking from the back of the book.

Two cents from a back bencher.
 

"Simple answers are not possible."* Or so concluded Ian Kershaw <<LINK>> when he addressed the place of Hitler, and by extension, Mein Kampf, in the history of Nazism. This is to say that professional historians of all stripes working on both sides of the Atlantic for over sixty years still don't know what it was all about.

Three small points.

• "Stockholm Syndrome" is not recognized in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR [2000]). It remains to be seen if that syndrome will be recognized when DSM-V is published in a few years.
• Even if Stockholm Syndrome were recognized, the application of a modern psychological diagnostic protocol without an actual examination in a professional clinical environment (an examination that would include, among other things, a living person in the same room with the clinician) would be of questionable intellectual value and reflect, at best, questionable professional conduct. (FWIW, such an exercise would be very bad form among polite company.)
• The introduction of psychological concepts to a discussion centering around religious faith is problematic. Generally, psychologists frown on concepts of divine beings.** Case in point. I once asked a training analyst (a clinical psychoanalyst who trains aspiring psychoanalysts) if he believed in God. He smiled kindly at me, tilted his head back, laughed, and laughed some more. After a while, his face drained of all humor and said he didn't. Outmoded practices from the sixteenth century, he explained. (The laughter was appropriate--he was mentoring me, not analyzing me.)

A (rhetorical) question. Or three.

The first question academic historians--and others in the Ivory Tower--ask when assessing discussions/interpretations of primary source materials is this.

• Are the viewpoints based upon a reading of the documents in their original languages or weretranslated versions used?

This is a vitally important question. Translating a document is a form of editing. Editors make editorial decisions. Editorial decisions change the nature of a work. Hence, the second question is:

• What decisions did the translator make and why?

And from there comes a third question.

• To what extent do those decisions shape a discussant's experience with (and understanding of) a document, text, or tome?

How an individual addresses these questions often plays a vital role in establishing his (or her) credibility on a given topic. For this reason, Americanists often experience the reproachful glares of Europeanists who have more diverse language skills. John Lewis Gaddis abandoned his plans to be a historian of Russia in favor of American foreign relations because he had difficulty mastering Russian.** More recently, a prominent naval historian took a major professional risk by offering a new interpretation of Clausewitz after reading that theorist in English alone.***

This isn't to say that reliance on translated works is automatically frowned upon. The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, remains the foundation of the study of psychoanalysis in America. Most students are going to encounter The Iliad of Homer as translated by Robert Feagles (so far, I'm still not convinced his translation is superior to Richard Lattimore's, but who asked me?) But the viability of these works rests on the fact that the translations have been vetted by professionals who themselves have been vetted.
__________________________________________________ _____
* Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol. 1, 1889-1936 Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. xxi.
** This information comes from an interview I had with R.A. Divine at the University of Texas at Austin on 22 April 1992. Divine was Gaddis's dissertation adviser. Always the paragon of humility, when asked what Divine did to train Gaddis, he would always respond "I got out of his way." (During his time at the Forty Acres, Gaddis was considered hands down the most skilled graduate student in the faculty's collective memory. Lewis L. Gould, introductory remarks, George W. Littlefield Lectures for 1992 given at the University of Texas as Austin, 30 March- 1 April 1992, lecture of 31 March 1992.)
*** John Shy, review of Jon Tetsuro Sumida's Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War, Journal of Military History, 73:2 (April 2009): 642-644. MOO, Shy's questioning of Sumida's ability to read German makes for a devastating review as devestating as Larry McMurtry's broadsides against Patricia Nelson Limerick (and others) in his, “How the West Was Won or Lost: The Revisionists’ Failure of Imagination,” The New Republic (22 October 1990):32-38. YMMV.

"Are the viewpoints based upon a reading of the documents in their original languages or weretranslated versions used? This is a vitally important question. Translating a document is a form of editing. Editors make editorial decisions. Editorial decisions change the nature of a work."

With respect, this is a cop out to me. It is saying that, you can't comment on Islam because you don't read Arabic. What naturally follow is that you can't understand the Arabic you read unless you understand Arab culture and you can't REALLY understand Arab culture unless you are Arab. Therefor no one but an Arab can comment on Islam. Nice position to be in.

However, regarding translator word choices, I would agree that the original language is important for scholarly understanding, but the English lang version of the Qu'ran that I have was translated with the intention of spreading Islam to the non-Arab, and yet it says the things that WM mentioned. So if it was edited to cast Islam in a favorable light.... it is an epic fail.

With respect, I believe your analysis overlooks a subsequent point in my post. IMO, there is at least one other way to address these questions. To use the parlance of the private sector, this approach is doing one’s intellectual due diligence.

To use an off topic example, I am not going to learn Russian. Nor am I going to invest a significant amount of time or effort doing any additional reading in Russian history. However, I am going to leverage the research that I have done on the translation of Russian literature into English if I decide to read any Tolstoy. Then I’ll being able to explain why I eschewed translations by Constance Garnett in favor of one’s by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky or by Louise Maude and Aymer Maude in the unlikely event I end up at some mixer hosted by a department of Slavic Languages and Literature and I want to make extended small talk with an Ashkenazi graduate student who spent her youth perfecting her take off for the Fosbury Flop. (Hey, I know what you’re thinking. You laugh now, but it could happen.:p)

Ultimately, attempts at intellectual due diligence may yield frustration. Any translation of War and Peace may be a ticket to the Land of Nod. Her sport of choice may be the shot put.:eek: Moreover, no one really understands anyone, especially the self. This uncertainty is magnified when one seeks to comprehend something as amorphous as culture or to bridge the gaps between modernity and that that is not. And then there are the gendered differences.

Sometimes, it one’s willingness to embark on this journey that makes the difference. You pound your head against a wall trying to understand something, you feel inadequate. Then you bounce your thoughts off someone who and they say “Yes,” or “Close enough,” or “Needs more thought” or “too much garlic” or “You were the only one who understood my point” or “I'd never thought of it that way...so, what do you think about....”

That is to say, one does the best one can to learn what one needs to know and then goes from there. (As long as the immediate destination is a locale that has some comfort food.)

• Do we non-QPs not place ourselves in a similar position when we come to this BB?
• Do we stay in our lanes by observing threads related to SF in silence simply because we know what will happen if we don’t?
• Or do we observe those threads in silence because we realize we have a rare opportunity to learn a small portion of a vast body of knowledge, experience, history, and culture?
• Should the fact that we like one domain of knowledge more than another domain shape how we approach either?:confused:

I appreciate the time you put into your post, but you really don't answer the question I posed. Do you believe there are such things as moderate Muslims that the US can deal with to reach our goals? Or are all those whose practice Islam inherently against what the US stands for, and thereby there are no means of dealing with them other than getting rid of them or marginalizing them to such a point that the religion becomes irrelevant?

Everything you have stated to this point leads me to believe that you see there may be moderate Muslims, but they may be worse than the fundamentalists in your eyes because they do not practice their religion to the letter of the Koran, and are thereby heretics. On the other hand, there are the fundamentalists who can never be dealt with other than through military might. That leads me to believe that your views would support the concept of eradicating Islam, or marginalizing it. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me.

I didn't get that....
 

I didn't get that from his post.

They are the sea of Islam that the Islamist swims in. It is not us but the Islamist who have their eye on them.

Kind of a "We'll deal with you once we take over."

It is the "moderates" that allow the preaching of Islamist Immams and then are amazed that the young run off to train at Jihad.

WM has tried to point out the importance of how the Koran is written and what a believer of Islam must believe.

To a Muslim you can not pick this and that from the Koran. You take it as a whole.

So to remain Islam Islam can not be reformed.

Yes. The problem is, we aren't collectively smart enough to recognize there is a difference and who's actually helping and who's not.

Naziism is dead. But it's still not irrelevant. What you are proposing (making the religion irrelevant) is not realistically possible. And oil wealth prevents marginalizing them right now. Saudi Arabia's main export isn't oil. It's the violent wahhabi ideology.

Yes - there are moderate Muslims. No - they are not worse by any Western moral standard - they still have compassion for their fellow human.

You are right, there are fundamentalists who will never reform and must be dealt with militarily. If there were a magic wand or a time machine and we could prevent islam from being invented by Muhammed...that would be great. Just not going to happen.

Here's the challenge. We went through this in Western governments when we dis-established or separated church and state. Islam cannot be disestablished. The doctrine epitomizes antidisestablishmentarianism.

Sigaba,

Full answer is to get a copy of Ibn Warraq's Leaving Islam:
http://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Islam-.../dp/1591020689

Read the back of the book - the Appendix A if I remeber correctly (I have it a work).

The short answer is "Reliance of the Traveller" was written BY MUSLIMS for MUSLIMS. and it's a certified true translation as verified by the Syrians, Jordanians, Fiqh Academy at Jedda, President of the IIIT (Islamic Institute of Islamic Thought), Al-Azhar Islamic Research Academy.

This wasn't translated by some lone-wolf and it can't be accused of "orientalism."

Moderate Muslims?
I keep hearing the above words in the press and in this thread. Where are they. I keep hearing excuses for what the Koran is really saying. Where is their voice when a Car Bomb kills 36 civilians in Iraq. When I see thousands of them in the streets protesting the killing of innocent civilians and not chanting death to the West. Then ill take the words Moderate Muslims serious. Until then spare me the political correctness. Until they show some real support in fighting the so called Minority of Radicals. Ill still lump them all in the same Pool.

Moderate Muslims
 

We have a LOT of members of the Ismaeli sect in our area. In conversations with some of them they truly do seem to be moderates. As one of them told me, "if you think YOU hate the radicals, I hate them more. They are not true followers of the prophet. Plus, we are at the top of their kill list." When their leader (they do have a central authority figure) visited Houston several years ago I swear 80% of the convenience stores were closed so they could go hear him speak. Reading his comments in the paper he does speak out against the Islamists very forcefully. Seemed like a very good and decent person. They are admittedly a small percent when compared to the Sunnis and Shias.

Also, I have a question. The current regime in Iran excepted, have Shias traditionally been less prone to radical violence than the Sunnis? It seems like all the historical radicals have been Sunni but I don't know if I have a misperception. Thank you

[QUOTE=Dad;286027] They are not true followers of the prophet.
But according to the Qu'ran, they (extremists) ARE true followers. they are doing/living according to the book.

That's the rub, and IMO, the point of this thread. I appreciate that there are Muslims against the mayhem and mindset of terror groups, but there are also Catholics that are pro-abortion, jews that are agnostic, and protestants differ greatly amongst themselves on doctrinal issues. All of this "true follower" stuff can be resolved in one's own mind by picking up a copy of the qu'ran and seeing what "the prophet" said. Its not mysterious, but it is troubling.

[QUOTE=jw74;286031]So what do we do? If so called moderates are in fact not true followers of the prophet how do we deal with them? Ignore their existence? Or use them as a wedge against the fundametalists and hope that with our support they will be the lynchpin in calling for a "Islamic Reformation" against the fundamentalists. As has been stated by others, all the Muslims I know and have worked with believe the fundamentalist have hijacked their religion and turned it into something it was never meant to be. They have a voice, regardless of whether we believe a whisper is not as good as a shout in combatting the fundamentalist.

If the fundamentalists are the true followers of the prophet how do we deal with them? Call for their irradication, and appear in the eyes of the world to be no better than them?

The problem as I see it is the true interpretation of the Koran. I understand WM points in that there is only one true interpretation, but that is only true in academic discussions. There are obviously many interpretations of the Koran, in reality, because if there wasn't EVERY Muslim, EVERYWHERE would be a fundamentalist calling for the annihilation of everything not Muslim. And that is not reality.

Reality is the Muslim family that has children that attend the same high school as my children. They are not calling for death to America. Reality is the exchange officers from Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan, that I spent the last 18 months attending Naval Post Graduate School with, none of which were calling for death to America.

Once we recognize that Muslims practice many different forms of Islam, and not all are fundamentalists (whether that means they are true Muslims or not) we will get a better handle on who we can leverage, and who just needs to be removed from the face of the earth.

Not sure this is a valid comparison.

I worked with a lot of foreign military personnel over the years. The ones sent to the US were the ones who either believed that we were friends, or could pretend that we were. I doubt that too many radicals were selected for our programs.

Many of them said things in their own languages that they would not want translated. I am sure that many of our people do the same thing.

Every country I have been to, one of the most asked questions was always how I liked their country. No matter how big a cesspool it was, I always found something nice to say.

Appearances can be deceiving.

TR

Sir,

I agree with you, and I have to say that many of my dealing with them, while at school, were with this in mind. But I also got to know quite a few of them on a personal basis, out of school. I met their wives and their children. I was invited into their home for meals. I still speak with many via email. Call it naivete on my part, but those folks I call my friends, and they call me the same.

Do I believe that some of the students came to get what they could, and learn as much as they could for us, for nefarious purposes in the future? I would be a fool if I didn't.

Not like that...
 

I don't think it's like that. For the most part the people who you interacted with were exactly like you say. Friends and still are. People just doing what people do.

The rub comes when they have to start making choices. Choices can be big or they can be small. At some point they will be faced with my friends, my country - or Islam.