Tuesday 14 August 2007

The religion of peace

'Islam is in fact a religion that promotes peace and understanding among people of all faiths, and it strongly prohibits all forms of violence and aggression against all people regardless of their faith or race'. Read more here.

Here are a couple of examples of how some Moslems promote peace and harmony; by simply dealing with all those who would disagree.
Result? Nobody disagrees any more. Peace. Harmony.

Slavery:
Death Threats and intimidation:
And lots more.

I am not, of course, suggesting that all, even most, Moslems condone this behaviour. But they need to acknowledge that this strand exists among them and address it. Or are they afraid of their brothers in the faith, too? Or do they feel that it is disloyal to Islam to speak out, even if they are genuinely uncomfortable with the violence?

4 comments:

On the side of the angels said...

I have to admit a vast amount of ignorance regarding Islam; but wasn't Muhammad technically a terrorist/bandit for years ? Didn't he break a ten year truce two years into it by performing a bloodless coup and then slaughtering/banishing any adversary ?
not exactly saintly...

Anonymous said...

In the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul there's a letter purporting to be from Muhammad to the Coptic patriarch, inviting him to convert to Islam and threatening dire consequences if he refuses. Genuine or not, its display shows that it is not considered out of character. Unfortunately, they don't have the patriarch's reply!

WhiteStoneNameSeeker said...

Father
I have just blogged (badly I'm afraid) on my 3yr study of Islam when I was looking to convert.
My conclusion was that whatever I found attractive about the faith-it's simplicity for example-the revolting behaviour of the prophet more than put me off.

The excuses made for his killing sprees are basically 'it's okay because God says so' and 'well they made him do it'.

Please pray for a lovely muslim friend of mine going through a horrible time-because of her religion.

gemoftheocean said...

Thanks for the links -- I especially like the religionofpeace one. There's a comedian in the US you had a riff on different ethnic groupings in the US. What he said about Muslims was along the lines of:
"Okay, for all you Muslim out there, we know you're not all bad - but you know the ones who did it!" [9/11]

Getting back to your point of "are they intimidated?" Well, I think there probably are a lot of "unsung Muslim heroes" that do cooperate and help break up terror networks (I mean it would be as hard to slip a white person into a terror network as it would be to slip an extra kid into the British royal family.) But then you have CLEAR provocations as what happened some months back with the "Flying imams" situation. A bunch of Muslim "clerics" deliberately trying to set people on edge to see how far they could go. And I truly feel sorry for Muslim women. Imagine trying to break free from all that. Evangelicals that convert to Catholicism often speak of how "cast aside" they are by their families. Imagine what a Muslim women would have to go through.