Category • History & Politics• Muhammad
The Beginnings of Islam–Muhammad and His Successors
Dr. Larson discusses the origins of Islam, providing a brief history of Muhammad and those immediately after him.
Dr. Larson discusses the origins of Islam, providing a brief history of Muhammad and those immediately after him.
So the two questions before us seem to be:
Actually I am being overly optimistic. Today the two sides rarely pose these two questions because to do so would assume that the issue is actually open for consideration. Those groups closed the discussion long ago and now unquestioningly declare their view as though it were fact.
I think a better approach would be to…
The answer to this question must be an emphatic NO! There are plenty of situations where Islamists do not resort to violence. But at the same time they face a real dilemma. They want their society to be more consistently Islamic; but how are they to achieve this goal? Are they to work for a gradual and peaceful Islamisation of the country, or are they justified in using force to win power? And what happens when violence is done to them? These dilemmas can be illustrated from the history of one particular Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood.
So as political alliances shift, form and reform, our ultimate allegiance must be to the messiah of peace and his peaceable Kingdom. To stand firm upon the rock of our crucified king amidst the shifting tides of regional politics – to hear his words and put them into practice in our lives and communities – is to eschew the mobilizing rhetoric of whichever country, faction, axis or alliance with which we might otherwise most naturally resonate. To believe at this point that Saudi Arabia is an ally in a new war on terror is a vulgar joke. To think that Iran and its client regimes have the best interests of Palestinians, or Lebanese, or Syrians, or even Iranians, at heart is likewise an extremely difficult notion to swallow. And, to think that the US (or Russia, or the West in general) can in any proper sense act as a viable mediator for regional peace is as equally preposterous, especially given the events of this past week. The report that Jared Kushner led an organization that funded illegal settlement activity and actively lobbied against the UN settlement vote prior to his most recent role overlooking the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is revealing.
There are typically two responses to ISIS. ‘ISIS has nothing to do with Islam’ or ‘ISIS are the real Muslims’. It’s easy to understand why so many Muslims—especially in western contexts—dissociate themselves from ISIS. They are thoroughly embarrassed to think that non-Muslims around them might assume that because they are Muslims, they must have some sympathy with ISIS and all that it is doing. They therefore argue that many of the practices of ISIS are completely un-Islamic, even anti-Islamic and cannot be justified by the legal traditions that have been developed over many centuries.
At the other extreme there are many Christians—and, dare I say, especially evangelical Christians—who believe that ISIS is much nearer to the spirit and practice of early Islam than moderate Muslims of today. They point to particular verses in the Qur’an (e.g. about beheading, crucifixion and slavery) and passages in Hadith literature, the biographies of Muhammad and legal texts to show the connections between the brutalities of ISIS and early Islamic texts.
Both of these approaches are thoroughly unhelpful and need to be challenged.