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An Interesting Letter
A very interesting letter at Pajamas Media, written by Salim Mansur who is Muslim, in response to a non-Muslim writer.
It’s the third letter, also read the first and second one.
12 Responses to “An Interesting Letter”
Koran’s message is very simple . It says it is guidance for those who can differentiate between right and wrong.
Religious precepts followed by militant Jihadists are wrong.
The author, scholar Salim Massur, blends a poetic sensibility, philosophy and sharp observation of human nature through history. This kind of thinker once flourished in the Muslim world, including some remarkable women.
We could take this as a warning regarding what happens to society when scholarship and aesthetic appreciation become subservient to political ideology.
Islam will only come to terms with the Jihadists when they go through the same trial that Christianity did with the Protestant revolt. Only when Muslims see that the Jihadists will not deliver on their promise of Utopia but only create a never ending cycle of violence will Islam change, like Christianity did. Unfortunately this might take decades of warfare and millions of casualties.
Christianity is still changing, not always for the good. Jim Crow, miscegenation laws and Prohabition(sp) are modern examples of modern blemishes on the supposed modern religion.
Thank you, Michael, for directing our attention to these letters. They are truly inspiring. We have spent for to much time blaming religion for our problems and not enough time blaming people. It is people who contaminate religion, not religion contaminating people.
Many of the storms engulfing our part of the world can be attributed to the fact that the movements practicing politics in the name of “political Islam” are still governed by a coup mentality, still acting as underground movements rather than as modern political institutions that respect and observe the law. Tareq Heggy
Islam Between Copying & Thinking
The Future of The Moslem Mind
Disastrous “Steadfastness”
Munaeem: thanks for those links to very interesting articles.
MvdG – thanks for the link to the Munameem blog. Looks very interesting and moderate, but why no links to MEMRI (snark
).
Also no links to Ann Coulter, FrontPage or Dan Pipes.
Munaeem, this sounds a lot like the great anti-intellectual movement the West had to suffer through, Fascism. As you know the movement started with the social turmoil of the world wide depression and seeds of the destruction of that movement was in its philosophy of the destruction or subjugation of the weak and inferior. Could the Fascist movement have been stopped before it caused the conflagration of World War Two? I don’t know, I think at times war was inevitable once things were set in motion. I fear that the same is true for the Wahhabi movement, that the intolerance of the religious beliefs will lead inevitably to a regional war that will finally seal the movements destruction.