| FrontPageMag.com | By Robert Spencer | By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Jihad Watch | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog | Raymond Ibrahim | Robert Spencer |  |
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|
Often when I discuss issues related to dhimmitude in public forums or on radio, Muslims bring up verse 2:256 of the Qur'an, "There is no compulsion in religion" -- as if the existence of this verse proves that there could be no legal superstructure mandating the oppression of non-Muslims such as I have outlined. But 2:256 itself has a quite interesting interpretative history in Islamic tradition. In Onward Muslim Soldiers I detail how the influential radical Muslim theorist Sayyid Qutb insists that 2:256 means that dhimmis must not be forced to accept Islam -- but he does insist that they should be stripped of all political power and placed in a subordinate position in society. (He has no problem reconciling 2:256 with such measures.) Qutb was echoing traditional Islamic views. Now, in FrontPage this morning, Daniel Pipes has more about the curious interpretations of this verse, many of which militate against the meaning that Muslim apologists in America often abscribe to it:
What do Muslims believe regarding freedom of religious choice?A Koranic verse (2:256) answers: “There is no compulsion in religion” (in Arabic: la ikrah fi’d-din). That sounds clear-cut and the Islamic Center of Southern California insists it is, arguing that it shows how Islam anticipated the principles in the U.S. Constitution. The center sees the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) as based on concepts in the Koran’s no-compulsion verse.
In a similar spirit, a former chief justice of Pakistan, S.A. Rahman, argues that the Koranic phrase contains “a charter of freedom of conscience unparalleled in the religious annals of mankind.”
To a Western sensibility, this interpretation makes intuitive sense. Thus does Alan Reynolds, an economist at the CATO Institute, write in the Washington Times that that the verse signifies the Koran “counsels religious tolerance.”
Were it only so simple.
In fact, this deceptively simple phrase historically has had a myriad of meanings. Here are some of them, mostly premodern, deriving from two outstanding recent books, Patricia Crone’s God’s Rule: Government and Islam (Columbia University Press) and Yohanan Friedman’s Tolerance and Coercion in Islam (Cambridge University Press), augmented by my own research. Proceeding from least liberal to most liberal, the no-compulsion phrase is considered variously to have been:
· Abrogated: The passage was overridden by subsequent Koranic verses (such as 9:73 “O Prophet! Struggle against the unbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them”).
· Purely symbolic: The phrase is a description, not an imperative. Islam’s truth is so obvious that to coerce someone to become a Muslim does not amount to “compulsion.”; or else being made to embrace Islam after defeat in war is not viewed as “compulsion.”
· Spiritual, not practical: Governments may indeed compel external obedience, though they of course cannot compel how Muslims think.
· Limited in time and place: It applied uniquely to Jews in Medina in the seventh century.
· Limited to non-Muslims who live under and accept Muslim rule: Some jurists say it applies only to “Peoples of the Book” (Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians); others say it applies to all infidels.
· Excludes some non-Muslims: Apostates, women, children, prisoners of war, and others can indeed be compelled. (This is the standard interpretation that has applied in most times and places).
· Limited to all non-Muslims: Muslims must abide by the tenets of Islam and may not apostatize.
· Limited to Muslims: Muslims may shift from one interpretation of their faith to another (such as from Sunni to Shi‘i), but may not leave Islam.
· Applied to all persons: Reaching the true faith must be achieved through trial and testing, and compulsion undercuts this process.
Posted by Robert at September 28, 2004 5:57 AM
Print this entry
| Email this entry
| Digg this
| del.icio.us
"There's no compulsion in religion"......it reminds me of a supplier who once said to me " you can have any colour you want as long as its black"
"There is no compulsion in religion"......as long as there are NO other religions other than Islam, is how the Quran reads it and how Muhammad lived it.
Posted by: Joe Bananas...in Pyjamas![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 28, 2004 7:14 AM
I've just worked out what it is about the way muslim apologists constantly remind us that violence death and kidnapping is un-islamic, and the way the suck-up media mongs who give them their publicity parrot the same shit, that is so familiar :
Remember when we were kids and we used to have irrational fears like a terrible slimey,10-eyed, tentacled,green and purple monster living under our beds (oh right!!! Just me then!!!), or the boogey-man or ghosts, and our parents would reasurringly hug us and tell us that everythings alright and there are no such thing.
To be more exact the apologists are more akin to parents telling their children that ghosts don't exist, and then later that night the child actually seeing something with his/her own eyes that could only be a ghost.
That child for the rest of his life will remain skepticle of his/her parents reassurences, while still wishing deep down that they were right, others still not believing what they've seen (that would be liberals who see evidence of islamic terrorism escalating day after day, yet still refuse to acknowledge islam as the actual threat).
The people, like us, who are totally switched on to Islam/Jihad, are more like children that rather than turn to our parents for a comforting reassurence that ghosts don't exist, we find an explanation out for ourselves. And while many of the children in the playground may refuse to beleive us that ghosts are real, we know the truth, and it is therefore our duty to keep taking these unaware children to the haunted house where the ghosts live. Some will run away screaming, refusing to acknowledge what their own eyes have seen, others will join your gang and make their own judgements from that point on, but their parents will keep laying down the same lines as before, and unbeknownst to the kids, their parents have been possessed by the same evil spirits- huhuhuHAHAHAHAHA!!!.
Believe what you see!!!
Fact is fact, Islam=death!!!
at September 28, 2004 8:25 AM
IS ISLAM TOLERANT? DO PIGS FLY!
Posted by: Morgane at September 28, 2004 11:49 AM
I agree that Islam is something pre-programmed into children -- the younger the person, the more successful that programming is. Thus the suicide bombers as young as 9, 10, 11, 12 years old.
In the United States, the goal is to keep these Muslims far away from our children so that they cannot become indoctrinated into Islamofascism.
Posted by: abad at September 28, 2004 12:57 PM
The only people who can testify with confidence as to how Muslims, in this setting or that, believe the phrase "there shall be no compulsion in religion" is to be interpreted, are ex-Muslims. Such people, who grew up in Islam, who are familiar with the -- to non-Muslims -- absolutely flabbergasting ability of Muslims to present a constant stream of amiable apologetics based on the arts of obfuscation, distraction, misstatement, and seemingly innocent incomprehension, whenever such is deemed necessary to protect the faith from non-Muslim inquiry or investigation, even as, within the umma, they take quite a different position -- know exactly how to pinpoint the taqiyya/kitman. It is an element in which, having been made to swim in it all their lives, they are most successful at identifying. One trusts Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Azam Kamguian, and a thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand other ex-Muslims. One also trusts those, such as Habib Malik, who have grown up in societies that are half-Muslims and have, all their lives, been on the receiving end of Muslim "tolerance" and Muslim apologetics.
The very word "tolerance" should always be silently replaced by the word "dhimmitude." Western-style "tolerance" does not exist for non-Muslims in Muslim societies. Nowhere.
Posted by: Hugh at September 28, 2004 2:57 PM
We are always tolerant of those that do as we say. Thus Muslims will be tolerant of infidels that obey as good dhimmis....
Posted by: epg at September 28, 2004 5:36 PM
(Note: The Comments section is provided in the interests of free speech only. It is mostly unmoderated, but comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying stand a chance of being deleted. The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.)