Can Islam be "fixed" and still be Islam?

[Jsbrads]

I don't think so. We can invent a new religion and keep it as similar as possible. You can sell it to Arabs, southeast Asians and jailbirds. But you would have to get rid of the pedophiliac savage. I guess you could keep his love of trees, but even that shouldn't be attributed, other nicer people love trees.

I suppose it could keep the bar to alcohol, and it can be sold to alcoholics too.

[Chauncey Tinker]

There is a lot of talk about reforming Islam these days.  Unfortunately it seems that all this talk is only taking place in the West, and its a subject that is much more popular among non-Muslims than Muslims, and indeed more popular among MSM pundits than people in the real world.

 

These non-Muslims rarely seem to mention two very real previous attempts at reform - the Ahmadi sect (or non-Muslim religion according to most Muslims), and the Bahai faith.  Neither of these attempts ever had much impact and both have suffered much persecution.  In Pakistan you have to sign a declaration that states that the Ahmadis are not Muslims in order to obtain your passport.   An Ahmadi shopkeeper was murdered in Glasgow a little while ago by a devout Sunni Muslim purely because of his faith.  There is much incitement against the Ahmadis in the UK today.

The only ways you could reform this religion would be to either take all the incitements out of the Koran (and hadiths), or to claim to be the messiah, the Mahdi (as in the Ahmadi faith).  To edit the Koran (and hadiths/sura) you would have to declare yourself to be a later prophet with new divine revelations.  The Mahdi's teaching of peace overrides/abrogates the warlike incitements of Mohammed, which is why in general you could describe the Ahmadi sect as a true reform movement.  Why these reformers never suggest to mainstream Muslims that they should become Ahmadis is a question worth asking.  In truth making such a suggestion is a very dangerous thing to do, which is why you can discount the reformers as not having serious intentions.

The idea of a reform of Islam is not only wishful thinking, it is also in fact an idea that lends weight to those who wish to abolish freedom of speech in favour of Islamic blasphemy laws.  Try arguing those points you made here against someone who is pushing the reform agenda, and they will often get quite verbally aggressive towards you - I am speaking from first hand experience here.  In one debate I was accused of wanting to deport all the Muslims from the West, an idea which I have in fact argued quite forcefully against.  In another I was accused of being a useful idiot of the jihadi groups like IS.  The argument goes that if you point out that Islam incites violence against the disbelievers, you are agreeing with the jihadis, and pushing "moderate Muslims" towards more extremist actions, and thereby undermining the "reform" movement.

It is also this kind of thinking that causes any truth-telling about the true nature of the religion to be blocked out of a large amount of media debates (especially in Europe).  It is those who would silence critical analysis of the religious texts in this way who are the true "useful idiots" of the jihadis, because the jihadis also want to stifle all criticism of the religion.  In reality they are partly motivated by cowardice, by fear of being physically attacked.

 

This is how Islam spreads, by instilling fear into people's minds.  The "reform" movement is just the advance guard of the intolerance, it must be opposed.  The best way to oppose it is to point out that there is already a true reform movement, the Ahmadi sect, and ask why these fake "reformers" are not urging mainstream Muslims to turn to the Ahmadiyya faith.

[aviet]

The best way to oppose it is to point out that there is already a true reform movement, the Ahmadi sect, and ask why these fake "reformers" are not urging mainstream Muslims to turn to the Ahmadiyya faith.

Good post. On the Ahmadi sect. Although they certainly deserve some credit. From what I've seen they are more about re-interpretation than reform. They still have a lot of anti-civilisation concepts like polygamy.

 

I think the best concept about the sect though is that they promote the idea of choice in religion and do not condemn apostasy. So there is an easier way out of the Ahmadi sect. It also seems they think homosexuality should be illegal.

 

I spent some time reading about apostasy in Britain and on the Council of Ex Muslims Forum. From what I've read if you decide you are no longer a Muslim, something like half of Muslims will never tell their family and friends. I even read about a ex-Muslim secular debater who is married to a Muslim and raising Muslim children, but is petrified to tell anyone. Then of those that do tell their family they are no longer a Muslim, chances are the family will abandon the child. There is also a considerable chance that the child will be threatened with violence by their parents to stay in the religion. I read about one case where the child was told that they could remain in the family as long as they pretend to be a Muslim. This goes to show that in many cases the actual religion may be a complete sham and its only a very abusive and violent form of social policing. In another case a daughter of an imam has had to move 43 times, because her father keeps bringing mobs to threaten her life. If your not going to be thretened with violence by your family, there is a good chance that someone else in the community will. Most apostates have to leave their place of origin and never go back. Obviously this is a difficult decision and its why many people decide to say nothing. It will mean starting a new life. If you take the case of secular reformer and one of the few actual liberals about, Maajid Nawaz, after becoming a reformer, his life left him, he has nothign to do with his family and he is saturated for death threats. All for saying things like stoning people for their perceived sin and so on is backward.

 

There also seems to be a fairly common path to apostasy, which typically involves going to university (maybe the first time they have really been immersed in non-Muslim culture) combined with the levels of violence committed in the name of Islam. But with the average IQ of British Pakistani and Bangladeshi school children being 90, not many are going to go to university.

 

Maajid Nawaz knows that reforming Islam is a monolithic task and that many think it is useless, but I have seen him put it in the frame of other reform movements. If you go back to the 50s and 60s when gays were being electroshocked, it may have been quite difficult to envisage a President running on a platform of acceptance of homosexuality, which is generally mirrored in society. I hope he is right, though I think it is going to be a much bigger task; and I wish the battle ground of the reform was in Asia, rather than in Europe.

[Chauncey Tinker]

I agree that the Ahmadiyya faith is not free of problems, in fact I wrote a critical post at my blog about it a while ago in the wake of the tragic murder of Mr. Shah (I am not an expert and I may have made some mistakes in the details):

 

Ahmadiyya Islam

 

You are also right of course that the apostasy stance is a crucial step forward.  Its unfortunate as I suggested in that blog post that the Ahmadis often present their views about Islam as the truth about the religion in general, and many non-Muslims are thus deceived about Islam in general.  For example here in this article about Apostasy:

http://www.wikiahmadiyya.org/beliefs/apostasy-in-islam

They claim that the Koran allows freedom of religion but they quote very selectively, "cherry-picking" the good verses and ignoring the later abrogating verses.  In fact here they quote:
 

Whosoever killed a person - unless it be for killing a person or for creating disorder in the land - it shall be as if he had killed all mankind; and whoso gave life to one, it shall be as if he had given life to all mankind..

 

, without mentioning the exception made straight afterwards - the punishment that comes to those who "spread mischief in the land", a foot is severed from one side and a hand from the other.  It is very far from clear what exactly constitutes "mischief" of course.

I do not seriously expect that any significant numbers of Muslims would be encouraged to turn to the Ahmadiyya faith in any case, I think this is very unlikely.  I was really making the point to simply expose the fact that these reformers were not serious.  If they did succeed in turning Muslims to this sect however, it would surely be a step forward though anyway.  Why try to start a new "reform movement" from scratch when you already have one well established, with millions of followers worldwide (I understand it is approx. only 1 percent of the world's Muslims), but it is a start.

The reason of course is that this true reform movement is a little bit too well established already, and therefore it is perceived as a threat by mainstream Islam, and dealt with accordingly.  These new "reformers" are such a tiny group that they present no threat to mainstream Islam, in many cases it is mere virtue signalling and in some cases even a way of earning a dishonest living through book deals and the like.  Maajid Nawaz's Quilliam Foundation was at one point quite generously funded by the government, although I do tend to believe in his case that his intentions are genuine, much though I believe his mission is futile in its stated purpose.  What I do think though is that his voice is important in at least partially exposing the truth about Islam, that is the real unintended value of the Quilliam foundation.

I take your point comparing the progress of gay rights, but that was just a progression to a more tolerant treatment of a group.  It could be argued that tolerance was Jesus's message I think (I'm an atheist btw), so that movement was not going against the true nature of the dominant religion in the West, but rather going with it.  By contrast I see the new Islamic reform movement as an attempt to go against the very nature of the religion, it is swimming against the tide as it were.

As for your point about the university route, I think there is something in that indeed, but unfortunately there are many hard-line Islamic preachers (bizarrely) being allowed to speak at universities (even while right-wingers are "no-platformed").  When Maryam Namazie went to speak at Goldsmith university, a group of young Muslim men from an Islamic society at the uni did their utmost to disrupt her speech, in quite an intimidating way (there is a video of this on youtube).  Fortunately their actions were well publicized and served more to expose their intolerance than to silence criticism.  The more Muslims there are at uni the less this route will be effective as well, and that is the trend of course, in line with the demographics.  The real way forward is to challenge the state, in particular the welfare state, which is fueling the dysgenic trend.  That is where the best hope lies in averting the death of Western civilization, we might as well forget about trying to reform the religion.

 

The Welfare State We’re In

[A4E]

I think back on movies like World War Z differently today.

[M.2]

What version of Islam are we talking about? And what is it about it that you find in need of fixing? What do you mean by "fixing"?

[HasMat]

If you draw a picture of Mohommed, or even criticize him, you can be murdered.

Mohommed murdered poets and took sex slaves.

 

Islam cannot be reformed without becoming a different religion. Rehabilitating Mohommed's image to something human or morally upright is not possible. His legacy is a seed-bed that justifies these actions today.

 

Any time Islam condemns murder or rape it does so hypocritically because that is the behavior of their unassailable founder.

 

Islam is an evil ideology that gets the 2 most important matters of ethics wrong (creating and ending life). Whatever they get right after that is irrelevant.

 

And these 2 points are the core essence of the faith, which is why it spreads by violence and sexual assault/breeding not proselyting.

[bhakta]

On 4/14/2017 at 7:16 PM, Chauncey Tinker said:

There is a lot of talk about reforming Islam these days.  Unfortunately it seems that all this talk is only taking place in the West, and its a subject that is much more popular among non-Muslims than Muslims, and indeed more popular among MSM pundits than people in the real world.

 

These non-Muslims rarely seem to mention two very real previous attempts at reform - the Ahmadi sect (or non-Muslim religion according to most Muslims), and the Bahai faith.  Neither of these attempts ever had much impact and both have suffered much persecution.  In Pakistan you have to sign a declaration that states that the Ahmadis are not Muslims in order to obtain your passport.   An Ahmadi shopkeeper was murdered in Glasgow a little while ago by a devout Sunni Muslim purely because of his faith.  There is much incitement against the Ahmadis in the UK today.

The only ways you could reform this religion would be to either take all the incitements out of the Koran (and hadiths), or to claim to be the messiah, the Mahdi (as in the Ahmadi faith).  To edit the Koran (and hadiths/sura) you would have to declare yourself to be a later prophet with new divine revelations.  The Mahdi's teaching of peace overrides/abrogates the warlike incitements of Mohammed, which is why in general you could describe the Ahmadi sect as a true reform movement.  Why these reformers never suggest to mainstream Muslims that they should become Ahmadis is a question worth asking.  In truth making such a suggestion is a very dangerous thing to do, which is why you can discount the reformers as not having serious intentions.

The idea of a reform of Islam is not only wishful thinking, it is also in fact an idea that lends weight to those who wish to abolish freedom of speech in favour of Islamic blasphemy laws.  Try arguing those points you made here against someone who is pushing the reform agenda, and they will often get quite verbally aggressive towards you - I am speaking from first hand experience here.  In one debate I was accused of wanting to deport all the Muslims from the West, an idea which I have in fact argued quite forcefully against.  In another I was accused of being a useful idiot of the jihadi groups like IS.  The argument goes that if you point out that Islam incites violence against the disbelievers, you are agreeing with the jihadis, and pushing "moderate Muslims" towards more extremist actions, and thereby undermining the "reform" movement.

It is also this kind of thinking that causes any truth-telling about the true nature of the religion to be blocked out of a large amount of media debates (especially in Europe).  It is those who would silence critical analysis of the religious texts in this way who are the true "useful idiots" of the jihadis, because the jihadis also want to stifle all criticism of the religion.  In reality they are partly motivated by cowardice, by fear of being physically attacked.

 

This is how Islam spreads, by instilling fear into people's minds.  The "reform" movement is just the advance guard of the intolerance, it must be opposed.  The best way to oppose it is to point out that there is already a true reform movement, the Ahmadi sect, and ask why these fake "reformers" are not urging mainstream Muslims to turn to the Ahmadiyya faith.

What most people miss is that Islam is a political movement with the clear goal of being the only ruler of the Earth. 

What philosophy or science is there in the teaching of Mohammed? 

What's frightening to me, is how the people want to dream that the teaching of Mohammed is the same as the teaching of Jesus or Buddha, and the jihadis are fringe crazies only. 

I listen to Dr. Bill Warner, Robert Spencer, etc and try to learn more about the actual teaching and history of Islam. 

 

 

 

 

[Peregrine]

The first foreign war that the US fought after independence was against the Muslim pirates of North Africa, who were attacking America's maritime traffic at the time. The Barbary corsairs captured American merchant ships, enslaved American sailors, etc. and after attempting to appease, flatter, and pay off the Muslim despots the US, during Jefferson's first term, finally sent in the US Navy and a contingent of US Marines to do battle with Tripoli, which had declared war on the US when it wasn't paid the tribute it demanded in ever-increasing amounts. The US naval squadrons, and some clever diplomacy with the Ottoman governor of Egypt, had the desired effect and the first of the two Barbary Wars ended in a US victory.

The moral of the story: it often takes the point of a bayonet to deal with Islam. History is rife with examples of this fact.

[Erwin]

This has already been attempted in the Persian Empire.

When Rumi translated the Quran to old Persian, he translated it in a less extreme way and added in many Zoroastrian tenets to make it more palatable to the Iranians.

Arguably, if it weren't for this last ditch effort to preserve the white identity of Iranians, they would probably be fully miscegenated by now. Thankfully, a minority still survive and they may be the solution to the Iran problem.

[alt10]

I find the principle of abrogation from islam particularly odd; there is a common myth in many religions, where the hero is put to a test by his deity; if the hero passes the test then the hero is good and dandy, otherwise he is an anti-hero. In the verses that support abrogation, the deity acts as a liar and the hero accepts the truth of that claim. In other words, the hero accepts as a fact that his deity is immoral. Within religious bounds, I see only two possible conclusions: either the deity is actually immoral, or the hero has failed the test miserably. As far as I know, because the islamic deity first claimed to be the Judeo-Christian god, muhammad has to be a false prophet. On the other hand, muslims believe that the life of muhammad is the model for a perfect life. Another point is that all muslims are expected to go to Mecca.

To me, the only way to have some consistency is to look at the life of muhammad in reverse chronological order (ie. the part from Medina represents the state of the fallen man, while the part from Mecca represents what the man has to become).

That POV doesn't strike me as something original, so my question would be on why this hasn't already become the mainstream interpretation of the islamic texts. My best interpretation is that the political leaders, when confronted with this POV, preferred to repress it as a choice between having an army with no cohesion because everybody is expected to be a liar vs. having an army with no desire to fight against non-muslim neighbors. This interpretation would be consistent with the endless fights for the leading position within muslims.

Maybe i'm just over-generalizing here, but for many people the religious experience is the deepest form of self they are ever going to experience. If there is something that rejects universal ethics right at the core of a human soul, the tension should be pretty high and a unifying POV should spread quite easily.

[Jsbrads]

The Druze seem to have saved themselves, but I think their process was lost to history. 

[shirgall]

Any religion that has sects in alterable.

[ofd]

You can add two additional tires to a motorcycle, put some steel around, add a wheel, seats, a radio and what not. But then the motorcyle is a car.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Just found this yesterday:

 

 

[shirgall]

22 hours ago, ofd said:

You can add two additional tires to a motorcycle, put some steel around, add a wheel, seats, a radio and what not. But then the motorcyle is a car.

[ofd]

I rest my case. Islam can be fixed

[Crusader1986]

I was talking to my ex girlfriend about this about 7 months ago and she really thinks that Islam can still be Islam by ignoring all the instructions in the Quran and making up your own version of it. I told her this was stupid as it's like saying that someone who wants to learn Jazz can just ignore all the fundamentals, principles and theory that make up Jazz, can instead just play whatever they want and it'll still be jazz. Obviously if you want to follow the religion properly you follow all the instructions in the Quran like if you want to play Jazz you use the same theory and ideas that are common in Jazz music and explained in Jazz textbooks. Unfortunately that's just the way it is. People have tried reforming Islam away from the violence but unfortunately it's not possible as Jihad is an essential part of the ideology in the same way that the 12 bar blues is essential to blues. By taking away the violence away from the religion you'd take away its core principles meaning it's not Islam anymore.

 

[Johndash617]

Simple answer  No