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 This is the safe, standard, prepackaged rhetorical frippery that our elites effortlessly regurgitate whenever violent communal convulsions erupt in any part of the country. But this is getting insufferably trite. If the hypocrisy or intellectual laziness that actuates these thoughtless, simplistic sound bites didn't have far-reaching consequences for our continued existence as a nation and, in fact, our very survival as a people, one would simply yawn in silence and ignore them. But it so often happens that after these hypocritical, clichéd phrases are uttered, the nation will be anesthetized into a false sense of security and normalcy, the culprits will never be ferreted out much less punished, and everybody will go to sleep—until the next upheaval recrudesces and jolts us all out of our pigheaded complacence.
And then the predictably mind-numbing, mealy-mouthed banalities will be invoked again by the elites to explain away what happened, and so on and so forth. This rhetorical formula is safe because it absolves people in political and cultural authority from the triple burdens of thinking, confronting uncomfortable truths, and taking action. That's why politicians are often ironically the first to blame "politicians" for the episodic fits violence that now punctuate our national life. Well, "politician" is a floating signifier that encapsulates everybody in politics, and what refers to everybody refers to nobody. Case closed. To be sure, political manipulation, inept security and leadership, and poverty are all deeply implicated in the perpetual cycle of violence and recriminations that have become fixtures in our socio-political landscape. But a murderous pervasion of religious doctrines and violent, unthinking ethnic particularism are even greater culprits. People who are brainwashed into believing that those who don't share their faith deserve to be murdered, or people who are so wedded to their ethnicity that they lack the capacity to tolerate others, are just as dangerous and as culpable—if not more so— as the politicians who "manipulate" them. Poverty, in and of itself, does not predispose people to violence. There are much poorer countries in Africa than Nigeria that are remarkably peaceful. Take, for an example, Benin Republic, our western neighbor. Or Senegal, an over-90-percent Muslim country that elected a Roman Catholic as its first president. And, of course, security lapses become an issue only in societies that have a predisposition to senseless, unprovoked violence, such as ours. Now, a group which calls itself Jama'atu Ahlus Sunnah Lid Da'awati Wal Jihad has claimed responsibility for the deadly bombs in Jos. It also claims to have perpetrated its savage murder of innocents, some of whom may in fact be Muslims, on behalf of Muslims and Islam. But the preponderance of reactions to this unsettling revelation among our Muslim leaders and commentators, including security agencies, has been to impulsively dismiss the group's claim even when they have no contrary evidence—much like Goodluck Jonathan and his minions unthinkingly exculpated the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) of responsibility for the October 1 terrorist attacks even when the group claimed responsibility for the attacks. Same attitude, different personalities. That is the Nigerian story. One uncomfortable fact that our elites in northern Nigerian have been shy to confront meaningfully and fearlessly is that we do have a worryingly enervating crisis of noxious religious literalism. By religious literalism I mean lazy, literal, and de-contextualized reading of religious texts, which current Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi almost singlehandedly fought for several years in newspaper articles when he was an ordinary banker. I've heard so much thoroughgoing hate and blatant call to murder by local, often ignored, religious clerics in the name of sermonizing. These are unmentionable sermons that will curdle the blood of any sane person and cause them to wonder if they share the same humanity as these ignorant, homicidal clerics. Boko Haram's leader's video justifying and claiming responsibility for the Jos bombings is an eerie echo of these hateful sermons. But I know these sermons to be atrociously grotesque perversions of Islam's core teachings because I am the son of a Muslim scholar who knows as much about Islam as any educated Muslim should. My 80-something-year-old dad taught me to read and write in Arabic before I even learned to read in the Roman alphabet. And my dad's dad was a Christian. So were many of his brothers and sisters. Yet we lived in peace. My dad always took care to remind us, like all broadminded Muslim scholars do or should, that the references to "unbelievers" in the Qur'an are not to Christians or Jews; they are to seventh-century Arabian idolaters who launched unprovoked attacks against the emergent Islamic religion. Christians and Jews are properly called "ahlul kitaab" (translated as "people of the book") in the Qur'an. Although the relationship between early Muslims in the 7th century and Christians was not without problems, it was, for the most part, marked by tolerance as evidenced in several Qur'anic verses. Examples: "Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabians -- whoever believes in God and the Last Day and does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord. And there will be no fear for them, nor shall they grieve" (2:62, 5:69, and many other similar verses); "[A]nd nearest among them in love to the believers will you find those who say, 'We are Christians,' because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant" (5:82). In the second verse, you can almost mentally picture Reverend Hassan Matthew Kukah and many (Catholic) priests. But ignorant, hate-filled, and hidebound religious literalists have stripped adherents of other Abrahamic faiths of their status as "people of the book" and have dressed them in the borrowed robes of "unbelievers." And they are straining hard to make gullible people believe that all the scriptural verses about retaliatory aggression against "unbelievers" in the Qur'an refer to Christians and Jews. Unfortunately, these hitherto fringe perverts of the message of the Qur'an are beginning to enjoy a position of dominance in northern Nigeria's religious discourse, and many sane, thinking people are afraid to contradict them, lest they be tagged as "hypocrites" or "sympathizers of unbelievers" and then murdered by their sympathizers. I know I speak for millions of silent Nigerian Muslims when I say that these blood-thirsty, homicidal beasts who murdered innocent men, women, and children in the name of Islam don't represent us. But until enough Muslim leaders and commentators come out to openly denounce these people and the ideology of hate that animates them, they will continue to hijack and appropriate the mainstream, and we will all pay dearly for this--literally and symbolically. But, first, the perpetrators must be be made to face the consequences of their murders. Unfortunately, Goodluck Jonathan has robbed himself of the moral capital to bring these murderers to justice because he also publicly shielded his own MEND kinsmen from the consequences of their own savage terrorism against Nigeria. The question is: can we afford to go on like this, especially now that we are entering a really dangerous phase of mutual annihilation through bombs? Certainly, our elites' habitual, knee-jerk, platitudinous reactions to communal violence will hasten our collective ruination. But we need to always remember that the consequences of a violent break-up won't be pretty for everybody. Tolerance, understanding, and the acceptance of our diversity are the only values that can sustain us a nation. Author can be reached at farooqkperogi@gmail.com. He blogs at www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com |
Moses,
In Judaism, the eternal enemy is Amalek.
"It is a positive commandment to decimate the descendants of Amalek."
Quoting from "The Concise Book of Mitzvoth ( The Commandments which
can be observed today)" complied by The Chafetz Chayim) " "As
scripture says, " You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek
( Devarim /Deuteronomy 25:19). " However , we do not know who are the
people of Amalek, until Elijah the prophet will come and inform us
who they are; and then we will wipe out all remembrance of him from
under the heaven. May Hashem grant us to see the arrival of Elijah the
Prophet and our righteous Messiah, speedily in our time; Amen."
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Amalek
Since not everyone here is an Islamic scholar, for the layman I would
recommend Solomon Nigosian's easy read, " Islam: its history,
teaching, and practices" to redeem such people from having to be just
sitting on the sideline and watching this historical tennis match
being played between you and Abdul right in front of their eyes
http://books.google.com/books?id=my7hnALd_NkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Solomon+Nigosian+:+%E2%80%9C+Islam&hl=en&ei=2dDBTZ6VB4_vsgatvPHCBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
All that Abdul Bangura said was1, 2, 3.
I should think that Abdul Bangura would take you to task for saying
that "Christians simply set aside the idea of going to war in God's
name because it offended enlightened values not because they couldn'tfind verses in the old testament to justify it."
You are taking about Charlie Chaplain's "Modern Times" no doubt, so
where were you when Billy Graham was blessing the American troops for
war in Vietnam?
And what about George Bush ( "with God on our side ") and a hopeful
and perhaps more humble John Kerry facing al-Qaeda and evil "with
the US on God's side"?
"*after* Muhammed/Islam had triumphed over the Jews, Arab polytheists,
and Christians."?
The Qur'an was revealed over a period of twenty-three years, most of
which can be considered a state of emergency ( from the early days of
plundering caravans..... etc...
Cf differences between the Mecca and Medina revelations – between the
lofty metaphysical poetry of the earlier Meccan period and the
later, terse legalistic surahs, when the nascent Islamic stater had to
be regulated, governed.....
endorsing of violence."
" The verses of this period tend to be more conciliatory, much less
I do not agree with you – and the evidence is heavy , is documented
and is irrefutable...the Charter of Medina notwithstanding.
There is a certain tangible correlation between Muhammad's hope of
being recognised as a Jewish prophet ( A prophet of the Jews) and the
gradual despair that this was not to be, and therefore the gradual
rise of anti-Semitic Statements made in the Qur'an. ( When the Jews in
Medina heard him ranting about Moses and Solomon they thought that
perhaps he was about to convert to Judaism.......when Muhammad
despaired of being recognised by the Jews, he turned against the Jews,
with a vengeance and over 600 Jews were lined up and slaughtered at
the town square in Medina.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Muhammad+and+the+Jews
Here are a few things for you to consider:
You say that, "he ( Farooq) is arguing that context should play a
centralwith Farooq."
role in the interpretation of Quranic verses, especially those
relating to
violence and peace because certain verses were clearly given for
certain
periods to serve the needs of Muslims in a particular era and that
applying
these verses across time and space and in contexts where the
conditions that
necessitated bellicose verses do not exist is a wrong way to interpret
the
Quran. Those who take this wrong approach, according to Farooq, do it
mostly
for misguided political, ideological, and pecuniary reasons. I agree
totally
1. The Q ur'an is not arranged in a chronological sequence that
corresponds with the historical narrative.....
2.True: therefore certain temporal specifics have been elevated to the
status of general principles.
3. There are the theories about abrogation in the Qur'an.
It should be worthwhile to quote relevant sections of the Quran , in
support of this understanding....
Since the Quran and Islam claim that with the advent of Muhammad
and the Quran, all Divine Revelations prior to Islam have been
abrogated, that the Quran is the final revelation and Muhammad is
the "last prophet" and even if that were true, there ought not be too
much confusion about the question of untangling/disentangling the
meanings and the injunctions that are obligatory on Muslims,
considering that al-.Islam says that no other religion is or will be
acceptable to " Allah"
Ibn Warraq makes some essential points about ethical relativism in his
"Why I am not a Muslim." ( those days and these days.....you ought to
take a look at some of Paul Eidelberg's conclusions about where
ethical relativism leaves Islam and the "Last Prophet"
Moving from theoretical foundations to flesh and blood reality. More
trouble ahead.
I just watched Stephen Sackur grilling the Deputy Foreign Minister of
Hamas. It was a-merry-go round in which Deputy Foreign Minister Hamad
did not even once refer to the unabrogated Hamas Charter. Is it not on
some of the aforementioned ( in that your painstaking rejoinder )
those inflexible Islamic premises that the Hamas Hamas Charter is
based – and on the premises of Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam , that
they say that the Holy Land of Israel should be theirs " until the
day of resurrection."?
Are not both Hamas and Fatah in deep mourning the loss of the al-
Qaeda leader, the "holy " Arab warrior?
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=Hamas+Charter
> obviously responding both to the article and responses from ...> Mensah, that's a good question to pose to Abdul. I hope he doesn't come back
> with the tired, insulting, Mazruist rhetoric of Arab slavery and violence
> against Africans being of the benign, integrationist type. He claims to be a
> student of history, but where does that history start? From the Crusades?
> From Alexander the Great? From Rome? From the 15th century period of
> European (Christian) imperial ascendance? From the beginning of Islam in 7th
> century Arabia? From the beginning of Islamic imperialism represented in
> succession by several Islamic Caliphates/empires in the Middle East and
> South Asia? From the brutally imperious Ottomon Islamic Empire? Where do we
> start the accounting in order to locate the original sin, offense, or
> provocation? This simplistic, politically correct and lazily repeated canard
> about originary Western provocation justifying or explaining Muslim
> terroristic response is both ahistorical and reductive. And since Abdul
> brought up the subject of Muslim and African victimhood, let me say that:
>
> 1. The imperial, "terroristic" (to stay faithful to Abdul's semantic
> template) expansion of Islam from the Arabian peninsula into North and
> Northwest Africa victimized millions of Africans--Christians and
> traditionalists.
>
> 2. The successive Caliphates, beginning with the Umayyads, brutalized and
> victimized peoples of many races and religions in Africa, Asia, and Eurasia
> BEFORE the often cited age of European imperial ascendance in the 15th
> Century. In other words, Arabo-Islamic imperial "terrorism" could be read as
> having provoked the age of Western imperial "terrorism" if we adopt this
> simplistic and pedestrian explanatory model of equating chronology with
> causality.
>
> 3. The Ottoman Empire, the most powerful, longest lasting, and biggest
> Islamic empire of them all was a brutal machine of mass murder, imperial
> "terrorism" forced conversions, genocide, and in some cases, and wanton
> decimation. The victims of the Ottoman Empire's imperial violence (or
> terrorism) included Africans--both Muslim and Christian, Europeans,
> Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Persians, Indians, etc. All empires--Christian,
> Muslim, secular--have victims. You can't have empires without victims. On
> the one hand folks like Abdul want to rave about the glorious achievements
> of the medieval "global" Muslim empires but they won't even acknowledge the
> multi-racial and multi-religious victims and victimhoods produced by those
> imperial accomplishments, preferring instead to construct a simplistic
> narrative of European imperials as villains and Muslim victims. It is the
> intellectual equivalent of eating your cake and wanting to have it too.
>
> My point is this: A rhetoric that justifies or explains the terrorist
> activities of Muslim extremists in the present by simply referencing the
> terrorist imperial activities of Westerners is at best incomplete and at
> worst an ahistorical and dishonest refusal to acknowledge other originary
> terrorisms perpetrated by Islamic imperial formations--which, like Western
> imperial terrorism, victimized a diverse group of peoples, races, and
> religions. To the extant that we cannot justify or explain the Crusades and
> subsequent European imperial adventures as having been simply a response to
> or a "fight back" against prior Islamic imperial adventures, this banal
> rhetoric of political correctness and of refusing to properly name and
> delegitimize Islamist terrorism is void. Bottom line: it is an unhelpful,
> dead-end exercise that illuminates nothing.
>
> On the related question of whether terrorism--however defined or
> practiced--is prohibited or not by the canons and revelations of Islam,
> Christianity, and Judaism, I disagree with Abdul's take that the Holy books
> forbid terrorism or acts that can be construed as terrorism, especially if
> he means that these texts conclusively, unequivocally forbid them under any
> and all circumstances. There are clearly verses in the Quran, the Hadith,
> and the Sunnah that call for violence, even unprovoked, nihilist violence,
> against unbelievers. The relevant question is whether or how these verses
> are weighted against other verses in the same cannons that unequivocally
> condemn gratuitous violence against unbelievers (Christians and other
> non-Muslims) and even urge love toward the "people of the book." Another
> question is who constitutes an "unbeliever" and in what circumstance is such
> a designation warranted? There are many issues to consider:
>
> 1. Can the verses calling for violence and "terrorist" activities be
> realistically or even theologically detached in interpretive terms from the
> circumstances in which they were revealed? Some interpretations disregard
> the modern applicability of these violent verses or interpretively
> contextualize them as reflecting the state of the Muslim Ummah in 7th
> Century Arabia at a time when Islam was persecuted and was under threat from
> the traditional religious establishment, necessitating a flurry of
> revelations that explicitly call for violence against unbelievers because
> rapprochement seemed impossible and only aggression could have saved the
> young faith. Fast forward to the later revelations given when Islam was on
> secure ground, and was growing and expanding through imperial conquest and
> conversions. The verses and injunctions become decidedly more conciliatory
> and less violent, urging the accommodation of subordinated peoples and
> respect for the religions of subject peoples who would not convert. That
> tells me two things: that the context in which these verses were given
> should be factored into any comprehensive effort to interpret them for
> today's Muslims and that the Quran, like all other holy books, has to be
> read with a sense of history, circumstantial transitions, and in light of
> the prevailing order in a given epoch. To insist on interpreting verses
> across time and space and without a sense of revelatory transitions as the
> extremists do is to adopt a literalist approach to exegesis in order to
> justify a prepackaged agenda.
>
> 2. This all brings up the question of who exactly is an "unbeliever" as
> contained in the many verses in the Quran, Hadith, and Sunnah urging
> violence against "unbelievers."
>
> 3. Understandably, extremists are drawn toward an interpretations that
> understand the "unbelievers" in these verses to mean Christians and
> non-Muslims in all ages and everywhere while pragmatic Muslims insist on
> interpreting "unbelievers" in much narrower semiotic and contextual
> purviews.
>
> 4. Is one interpretation more valid than the other? Not necessarily.
> Interpretive conventions shift along with intellectual, economic, and
> political events and certain interpretations gain or lose currency depending
> on the state of mind or state of being of Islamic societies and depending on
> the age in which Muslims live.
>
> 5. There is always an ebb and flow to how moderate or extreme or intolerant
> interpretive conventions increase or decrease in appeal. In moments of
> insecurity and crisis, literalist interpretations and interpretations that
> discountenance temporal and spatial contextual mitigations tend to find more
> appeal, and vice versa.
>
> Bottom line: It's all in the interpretation, who is doing the
> interpretation, and why they prefer one interpretive convention to another.
> The Bible, especially the Old testament, contains verses that can be read
> and have been read as a manifesto for terrorism, racism, and slavery, and
> violent imperialism. Even the ascendancy of Christian Europe to power and
> stature after the Enlightenment did not stop the proliferation of extreme
> Biblical interpretations. It took the convergence of multiple modernist
> forces and influences and the revulsion of Christians themselves for extreme
> interpretations to be discarded for moderate ones that are compatible with
> the realities and pragmatics of the modern and postmodern world.
>
> It is therefore infinitely more productive to focus on why and how certain
> extremist interpretations persist and gain currency and become ideological
> manuals for terrorism than to engage in the escapist, defensive, and
> politically correct game of repeating the empty statement that the holy
> books forbid terrorism, which fails to explain why and how terrorism in the
> name of God has found appeal through many epochs in history.
>
> Obviously the ability of Christians to disregard or impose moderate
> interpretations on the letter of the Bible and the relative inability of
> Muslims to do so is inflected by other factors, as some religious scholars
> have posited:
>
> 1. Muslims believe that the Quran is a direct revelation from God while
> Christians believe that the Bible is the inspired World of God--or that God
> inspired men to write it. This has a huge implication for how the faithfuls
> of both religions approach their faiths and the injunctions in their
> respective holy books. In short, it means that, for Muslims, contextualizing
> and imposing culturally specific interpretive imperatives on violent verses
> to arrive at interpretations that mitigate or release faithfuls from their
> obligations is a lot harder.
>
> 2. In Christianity there is the added interpretive alibi/leeway of the
> Old/New testament divide. This allows Christians to separate injunctions
> given during the time of Law and those given during the time of Grace, the
> time of Grace (the new testament) being the overarching spiritual
> dispensation governing the life of Christians. This does not mean that
> violent verses in the old testament cannot and are not still being invoked
> to justify evil. It means that Christians who do not want to engage in
> violence or evil in the name of their religion have a very good excuse
> because they can legitimately claim that the Law (old testament) does not
> apply to them. There is, as far as I know, no equivalent of this spiritual
> disjuncture in Islam.
>
> For what it's worth, below is a relevant post I made in a discussion on
> extremism sparked by Farooq Kperogi's article in another forum. I was
>
> read more »
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---Mohandas Gandhi
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