It's not always true that the U.S. is to blame, but "retardist" enterprises like the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq give the Islamist bigots an excuse to shift the blame for their own crimes. Needless to say, they avail themselves of it.
Erdogan's purge in Turkey
- Thread starter GlennB
- Start date
Let's put it this way:
Invasion of Iraq? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Partial intervention in Libya? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
No intervention in Syria? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Intervention against ISIS? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
No intervention against ISIS? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Friendly relations with Saudi Arabia? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Hostile relations with Iran? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Treating Islamic terrorism as a police matter? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Treating Islamic terrorism as a military matter? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Ignoring Islamic terrorism? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Occupying Iraq? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
Withdrawing from Iraq? A reason for rise of Islamic extremism.
It would seem to me that Islamic extremism has little correlation about what is being done in the Islamic world.
McHrozni
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Who is also the same guy who told his followers not to execute someone who tried to poison him, so maybe your understanding of of the sira and how Muslims interpret it leaves something to be desired.
No, I think my interpretation is perfectly adequate. Conflicting information coming from Islamic holy sources is there for a reason: to allow Muslims to say and do whatever they please and claim they're following Mohamed. Following an ideology where the primary tenet is pure arbitrary chaos is bound to produce chaotic results at least some of the time.
Incidentally, if Muslims consider the problematic parts of Mohameds' biography faked, why do they include them in their holy texts?
McHrozni
Sideroxylon
Featherless biped
I'm sure there are other threads where you can push this cart. Don't detail this one thanks.
No, it's actually highly relevant. Turkish Islamist president has enacted actions that strictly go against democracy, rule of law and basically everything Turkey stood for since the country was formed in the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
Uncovering what motivated this destructive actions is highly relevant, especially since it might offer clues as to what comes next. My guess is he will continue by curtailing religious freedoms across the country, as mandated by the religion he follows.
McHrozni
Therefore the U.S. and UK can do whatever they like in the Islamic world? There is no good excuse for Islamic or other religious extremism. Extremists will always promote their religious bigotry. The question is, will anyone listen to them? The Iraq war made no difference to the extremism of extremists, just as you show; but it unquestionably gave an enhanced credibility to their condemnation of the West.
I didn't say that, but it's clear the growth of Islamic extremism has little to do with their actions (or lack thereof).
McHrozni
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Which means that even under your rather bizarre view above, Islam is a lot more complex and unclear than you've been trying to claim with your "ISIS' interpretation is the right interpretation" nonsense.
Because vary few hadith collections, even among the six canonical Sunni books, attempt to list only the traditions their compilers deem "authentic". Most, including the very book you got your cited hadith from above, Sunan Abu Da'wud, contain a mixture of ahadith of varying authenticity, for a variety of reasons (including because some compilers specifically set out to encyclopedically record as many ahadith as they could, regardless of the authenticity of the traditions).
There's a whole huge branch of scholarship in Islam, 'ilm al-hadith, dedicated to discussing (or, more often, arguing about) all this.
Henri McPhee
Illuminator
I can't quite see that this is good news for future students in Turkey, or university students now in Turkey.There seems to be a lack of freedom of expression and an independent judiciary and a free press and media. Turkish Intelligence with all their bugging has immunity from criticism.
I still think it was a mistake for Erdogan to support Isis, which is Al Qaeda and extreme Islam, and is at war with the West, though supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia and Blairite liberals, just because Erdogan wants a war of aggression against Syria, and also the mad mullahs in Iran and the Kurds.
It's a clash of cultures. When in Rome do as the Romans do.
It's the most straightforward interpretations with the fewest assumptions. Occhams' razor says it's the most likely to be correct (or the least flawed one).
This is what I said, yes. The question which you dodged was why is it like this? Why can't you guys just say "these stories are fake and will no longer be part of our sacred texts"?
It's not even unprecendented.
McHrozni
metacristi
Muse
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Occam's Razor is usually a heuristic methodology which is far from giving us sufficient reasons that we approach truth. But we do not need that in our case, happily one can argue rationally that in quite many cases there are more or less plausible interpretations of a text. No one can stop people from being genuine liberals whilst still claiming allegiance to Nazism and Mein Kampf for example (via very tortuous 're-interpretation') but this does not mean we cannot recover, at least approach, the initial meaning of Hitler. Sure there are situations when this postmodernist approach (used by the apologists of islam as well) does 'work' well. Unfortunately the interpretation of islam is not one of them, the 'sanitized' versions of islam have definitely much less support in both the history and theology of this religion.
100 years ago very few in the Islamic world would have denied for example that islam is at imposing the islamic law to the whole world* even via offensive jihad yet today we hear that modern islamists are those who 'perverted' islam in that way. How could this be possible? We deal with a fantasy of course, in reality a slightly modified version of the modern Islamism has always been close to the core of traditional islam. Jihad is no more central today of course, rather via mental gymnastics 're-interpretation', but unfortunately as far as much of the old Islamic infrastructure is left basically intact (it is sadly) and islam remains popular in the population there is little reason to think that important returns toward the past are unlikely.
Finally the future of islam still lie in the power of the very conservative Islamic religious leaders. Hurgronje, writing in another historical context when islam was in full retreat in the face of modernity and even muslims themselves doubted that islam can 'work well in the social sphere, was very optimistic that the power of the these forces will be defeated by the modernists. If I lived in such a time I would probably agree with that. Unfortunately that prediction failed and, even worse, the historical context has radically changed (also due to the very negative impact of postmodernist ideas in Western Academia after WW2). Islam is back, at least we witnessed an important step back toward its roots. I'm afraid History has consistently proved that a policy of modernization via small steps is unlikely to bring, once and forever, this religion in an age of Enlightenment. Turkey is the cherry on the cake here. No matter how magnanimous one can be (and I think I am so by the way) one cannot ignore this, we definitely need another approach in this problem.
* something which Western scholars at the time could only acknowledge; also it is clear that islam does play an important role in shaping the common muslim mindset, talking about the situation in the Islamic countries by using a vocabulary fit for the non muslim world (that is ignoring the theological dimension of the problem) could only lead astray. This is for example what Hurgronje had to say in around 1913:
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He's going the full Indira Gandhi route:
Turkey coup attempt: State of emergency announced
Any bets on how long the State of Emergency will last?
He says three months. A year or two seems a bit more likely.
Turkey coup attempt: State of emergency announced
Any bets on how long the State of Emergency will last?
He says three months. A year or two seems a bit more likely.
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A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Only if you don't know anything about how ISIS' interpretation compares with other interpretations, both classical and modern.
Because of the way hadith collections arose, their use as legal proof-texts by the various madahib, and the way 'ilm al-hadith developed to sort through the traditions recorded in all of these. The first collections, called musannaf (such as the Muwatta' of Malik ibn Anas), were basically transcripts of legal discourse, containing Prophetic ahadith, the reports of the Companions, the rulings of jurists, and the interpretations of scholars, all organized by specific legal topic or issue. Because of their nature as reference handbooks, these books were not concerned with proving the authenticity of the reports contained within, but merely documented the development of Islamic law as it was practiced in the early period of Islam.
However, each region had its own legal tradition that arose during this period and that was reflected in these musannaf, the early forms of what would become the Sunni and Shia madahib. As scholars from various regions interacted with each other, they naturally came into conflict regarding the primacy and accuracy of their respective legal rulings (and the legal basis thereof). This was exacerbated by the fact that each region often had its own hadith traditions that different from, and often contradicted, that of the others. This sparked a boom in hadith documentation, as the partisans of each madh'hab strove to prove the rightness (and righteousness) of their legal rulings by obtaining as many ahadith that they believed supported their position as they could.
These new collections were massive, encyclopedic works, sometimes consisting of hundreds of thousands of ahadith. The various schools all had no problem using weak or even forged traditions to back up their legal rulings. The first rules of what would become 'ilm al-hadith were developed as part of these legalistic polemical duels, as each school would call out the others for using these weak and/or forged traditions, while still continuing to make use of those traditions themselves that supported their positions.
As part of this, the musannaf were replaced by the musnad, collections organized not by topic but by isnad, or chain of transmitter, in an effort to "prove" that the ahadith used by a school were more authentic (and thus more trustworthy) than the ahadith relied on by any other school. This was accomplished by attempting to draw together every known hadith, regardless of its authenticity, since accusations that a hadith was inauthentic relied heavily on determining how often a tradition was transmitted and by whom, which necessitated searching through the vast corpus of reports in order to discern that.
Efforts were made to winnow down these colossal collections in order to extract just the authentic ones. However, by that point the heavy reliance of each school on problematic ahadith meant that even these musnad were not "pure". Ibn Hanbal's Musnad, for example, in which he purportedly distilled over 750,000 ahadith down to 27,700, contained weak traditions that ibn Hanbal admitted he knew were weak, but included because they were relied on so heavily by scholars in making their judgments. Even the attempts, pioneered by Bukhari and Muslim, to create definitive collections of only the most reliable traditions according to the most exacting standards (sahih) ran into the problem that there were so many different competing legalistic traditions relying on so many different ahadith that even the determination of which traditions were actually authentic and which were not differed from scholar to scholar and school to school. Complicating things was the fact that later Sunni hadith critics adopted what Jonathan Brown called a "Big Tent" position, taking a much laxer position on whether any given hadith was authentic or not than the earlier sahih-era critics did, accepting as authentic enough for legal rulings ahadith that were rejected by those early critics. For them, if a hadith expressed something that had been believed by centuries of believers (or, sometimes, even if it had been received by kashf, or "illuminated inspiration" - ie, seen in a dream), then it was authentic, regardless of what the rules of the early critics would have said.
This all resulted in the situation, which persists today, that there a multiple of hadith books out there, each of which declares, on the authority of various and assorted scholars, that some ahadith are reliable and some are weak and some are outright forgeries. And they unfortunately don't all agree with each other as to which are which. As with most things in Islam, it all depends on which particular scholar you want to believe.
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Actually, just over a hundred years ago, that was exactly the position of the Grand Mufti of Egypt.
FenerFan
Illuminator
CapelDodger
Penultimate Amazing
It clearly does have a lot to do with the actions of the US and UK, and of another major player - Russia. Islamic extremism emerged from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and got a post-Soviet boost in the Caucasus. Both of these housed the most atavistic, unruly and casually violent Muslim populations in the world (if we include the tribal areas of Pakistan), none of them Arabs, of course, nor deeply given to theological niceties. Typical mountain people, frankly, and no threat to the outside world before that.
The Soviet invasion provided the initial space and cause for Sunni extremism to exploit. US policy in Afghanistan, in concert with the Saudis and Pakistan, only encouraged that. The 2003 invasion of Iraq provided far more space and another cause. That spilled over into Syria and yet more space was created.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a very different beast; the irony is that Iran is now a bastion of stability in the region. It's not that pretty but, considering the places around it, it's not that ugly either.
metacristi
Muse
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There were exceptions among the Islamic religous leaders no doubt. Still Muhammad Abduh (who you probably have in mind) was considered at the time as being very controversial. On the other hand Muhammad Bakhit, who was grand mufti 100 years ago, seems to have been very conservative (he argued that the Caliphate is an indispensable part of a true Islamic order, rebutted the idea that islam does not have a political nature etc). There were some reformers but the same Hurgronje explains the situation:
The very conservative forces among religious leaders were having a considerable influence at the time but their impact was curbed by the colonialists and British backed modernist Egyptian rulers. Finally at work it was the same pressure of the Europeans (especially after Napoleon's expedition in Egypt) which gave a chance, otherwise very improbable, to the modernizers to make their voice heard. Crucial was the fact that the colonialists made jihad basically impossible practically.
Bernard Lewis
The very conservative forces among religious leaders were having a considerable influence at the time but their impact was curbed by the colonialists and British backed modernist Egyptian rulers. Finally at work it was the same pressure of the Europeans (especially after Napoleon's expedition in Egypt) which gave a chance, otherwise very improbable, to the modernizers to make their voice heard. Crucial was the fact that the colonialists made jihad basically impossible practically.
Bernard Lewis
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Childlike Empress
Banned
That's not entirely correct. Zbig admitted to have lured the Soviets into invading with his support of the crazies starting half a year earlier, and was mighty proud about it in 1998. Don't you know the famous interview?
Le Nouvel Observateur said:
A'isha
Miss Schoolteacher
Yes. Islam encompasses many different interpretations, even among two people who successively held the same position.
Abduh, interestingly enough, was a salafist: his interpretation was an intentional attempt at restoring the original Islam of the salaf as he saw it. Bakhit was a staunch anti-salafist.
The British didn't care about curbing conservative forces, they cared about curbing challenges to their rule. That's how Bakhit was made Grand Mufti in the first place.
Yes, you've posted this quote before, and again you don't cite it. It's from Lewis' 2012 memoirs Notes on a Century.
Lewis appears to be the only source for that story, too. It's certainly not mentioned in Middle East Remembered, the 1983 memoirs of John Badeau, the former US ambassador to Egypt who was dean at the American University of Cairo while Jeffery was teaching there and researching for his book and later was on the faculty at Columbia University with him after World War II. He does relate a story about how Jeffery's assistant, a scholar from al-Azhar, tried to tear up their notes for Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’an while Jeffery was distracted by a phone call in another room, and that this incident is why he left AUC, shortly after the book's publication. Badeau also related how Jeffery would complain about how the Muslims he would run into weren't practicing the medieval Islam that he was studying.
Considering that Badeau's recollection is thirty years closer to the events in question than Lewis', Badeau's is probably more accurate.
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