A Muslim learns through Bible, To kill stress

They had very little reason to develop a sense of being persecuted. All that happened in modern times is, it is dusted off and used for political purposes. By contrast, a sense of being done in by the world is something Sunnis have only developed in the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Back to the coins you showed us. Why did they make these coins? Who was reading them? Was that the way the religion was spread? How literate were people? My guess would be a substantial proportion of the political and military elite could read, and they could read these coins if they wanted to.

The crucial question, to my mind, is non-Muslims. This is obviously a message beamed at non-Muslims. Could they read these Arabic inscriptions on the coins? One definitive piece of evidence is Christian ecclesiastic canons saying that Christians are not to have their sons taught the Koran by Muslim teachers. The point is not that these teachers are converting the kids. The point is that primary education in the Islamic community consisted of learning to read the Koran, and if you wanted to learn proper Arabic and be able to move in elite circles, as many of these Christians wanted to do, you had to learn your Koran.

The church was getting worried about this and saying it has to stop. So those people — Christians — could definitely have read what was on the coins. Professor, I wonder if you could address a question this conference has wrestled with in the past — that very delicate question of whether violence, or evangelism by violence, is an inherent piece of Islam, which seems to boil down to the question of: What is the definition of jihad?

You could certainly minimize it. What I mean is this: There are two kinds of jihad. One is defensive, and the other is offensive. Defensive jihad is straightforward. If the unbelievers are attacking you, then you have to fight back. What does the law say about offensive jihad? It says that some Muslims somewhere ought to do it, but provided some Muslims somewhere are doing it, no other Muslims have to do it. In other words, yes, a certain element of offensive jihad is inherent in the religion.

But you can minimize it easily if you want to. You can also maximize it. Is it in the Koran that it [jihad] can be preemptive or offensive? There are certain passages the medieval scholars always cite, saying they show jihad should be offensive. On the basis of the Koran alone you could mount a decent argument for saying offensive jihad is never a duty. From things the prophet said or is said to have said, Islamic law develops the doctrine that it is a duty but, as I say, a duty you can minimize.

The other question here is that of coercion. Jihad means you go out and conquer people. The basic answer is no.

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This is straightforward in the case of Jews and Christians, because everybody recognizes that Jews and Christians, provided they submit to the Islamic state, can have a protected status in which they carry on being Jews and Christians. They still have to follow certain stipulations, and you could argue about the small print, but the basic conception is very clear. There is also a strong stream of Islamic law that says that you can give the same protected status to any unbeliever with the single exception of Arab pagans. So when you go and conquer India, you can give the Hindus protected status.

But the Muslims who actually conquered large parts of India adhered to the school that said no problem tolerating Hindus. Actually forcing people to convert is a different question. I can remember one medieval scholar who says forced conversions are the best thing ever: That view does exist.

Given how intimately and radically connected church and state are in Islam, is it just wishful thinking on the part of the West that we can impose, or at least lead, the Arab Muslim world into accepting our post-Enlightenment ideas of political structure — i. Would it not be the case that the Islamists are right: The more to which Muslim populations come to accept Western ideas of liberal democracy, the less truly Islamic they are? This is an argument that in principle would extend to Jews and Christians.

Let me give you an analogy. If you go back something like years and take Catholicism and Catholic anti-modernism — who was that pope in the first two decades of the 20th century who launched an anti-modernist crusade that said the church can have no truck with the corrupt values of the modern world? The Syllabus of Errors , exactly.

That was the last error on the list and the culmination of the list. When I tell this to my undergraduates in the early 21st century, and quite a few of them are Catholics, this sounds really bizarre. It corresponds to nothing in their experience. There are some questions about whether the Catholic hierarchy should be telling Catholics not to vote for certain people. For all I know, in another years, the idea of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy will be equally bizarre. Just how will they do it? But in your account, that was there from the beginning with Islam, and it is inherent to the nature of the religion.

What mechanisms could there be [in the Islamic tradition] for a reformation? If you look at the European and the Christian Reformation, it ushered in a period of extraordinary bloodshed and fanaticism. It was not nice in the ways we like a political system to be nice. It is true Islam is unlike Christianity in not having this fundamental church-state dichotomy written into the original scriptures.

Instead, if you look back to the beginnings, you have this unity of religion and politics. But for most of Islamic history, that unity did not exist. Let us make a distinction between two ideas being logically or doctrinally compatible, and two ideas being able to live together in the minds of messy, incoherent humans. For most of Islamic history, some degree of recognition of a distinction between church and state was present and, therefore, could be again. The problem seems that, in the present epoch, Islamic fundamentalism is on a high horse. That necessarily gives the moral high ground to the view that religion and politics are inseparable.

I would see a major change coming about not through people thinking up clever arguments. You can always think up clever arguments from a heritage that will get anywhere you want. But the fundamental thing that would have to change is Islamic fundamentalism would have to either be discredited or at least become much less appealing than it is at the present day.

We did have the French scholar Gilles Kepel speak here a couple of years ago on this very question. Will that be in 10 years or a hundred years? Do you think Kepel is right that radical Islamic fundamentalism is actually going down rather than up? He has made a case, and he may be right, but I would prefer to wait another 10 or 15 years — laughter — before saying something on the record. Kepel knows a great deal and is not a frivolous commentator. If he says that it is on the wane, then that is a serious possibility we have to consider.

Muslims Writing About Jesus: Reza Aslan’s Zealot

I bet in years Islamic fundamentalism will have gone way down. When you talk to Muslims in the Arab world, you quickly realize there is an awareness — from the lowliest peasant up to the political scientist — that there was once greatness. This seems to inform the anger and resentment and humiliation felt in the Arab world: That they were once great, they are no more, and clearly someone is to blame, and it is probably us.

You said Muhammad found a way to unify the Arabs, to pull them together and lead them to this greatness. Can you talk about how Muhammad did that, or how you believe this was achieved, since this is clearly an aim with Osama bin Laden, the restoration of the caliphate and Sharia law and an Islamic world?

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A while back I was reading a book about liberation theology in Venezuela and Colombia, and there was a chapter describing some particular village in Venezuela. This priest —was he a Jesuit? He starts to do social work in an environment where none of the locals trust each other but if they could get together, they could do great things.

By virtue of being somebody with a transcendental authority, this Jesuit — or whatever he was — was able to use his authority to create trust in the community. It may not have mattered much what liberation theology actually said. He got them together to organize social projects that actually worked and did things for them. Muhammad had a hard time getting his Meccans and Medinans to trust each other, but eventually they did. It is political engineering based on a transcendental mandate you can sell to people.

Do you think another figure could arise out of this crucible of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism around the world; another figure that might unify Muslims again, not in the same sense as Muhammad but in a similar way? I can imagine somebody acquiring immense moral authority, but to convert that into political authority is something else because you bump up against the geopolitics of the situation.

The only example I can think of in modern items is a bad example: He built up tremendous moral authority for himself in Iran, and he would have liked to project that authority onto the rest of the Islamic world. But the moment Khomeini tried to exert his moral and political authority in neighboring countries, the people in power in those countries got worried because Iran is a big country in that neighborhood. They have to think of him as the boss of a rival outfit. They have to think geopolitically.

At one stage, people had the sense it was one big movement. They were all together on the same page. Then the Russians and Chinese fell out, then the Chinese and Vietnamese; in other words, geopolitics took over.

Dark passages

My guess would be that geopolitics would take over in this case, too. I wanted to ask about the state of Islamic studies in American universities. At the time, I thought many universities were not prepared to deal with this and that the level of scholarship was not mature enough. Let me try to answer without taking swipes at the people I dislike locally in my own university. My sense is that level of demand has fallen off a bit but not drastically, so this was the window of opportunity for a small, rather despised field to get in there and be mainstream.

At Princeton we now have about three or four times as many undergraduate students who are interested in taking Arabic. Persian, Turkish; forget it. I had one student who announced as a freshman she planned to take Arabic so she could become a spy. Many people change their minds. That could be her cover.

Then there is the analytical side of the field. The beginnings of Islam, yes, that can get hot, but all those centuries in between, nobody gets that excited about them. There you find a real tendency towards polarization in the field. On the philo-Islamic side, you have two categories of people. But you do get academics who feel in this very American way they have to represent an ethnical religious constituency. For example, I can refer to NYU. At the other extreme you have a few neo-cons and people inclining towards that end of the spectrum.

But neo-cons are a sparse phenomenon in the academic world in general.

Violent passages in the Koran and the Bible - The Boston Globe

In terms of who persecutes who, my own experience is it tends to be the leftists who persecute the neo-cons in the academic environment. There are two fundamental problems of the field as I see it now. One, this boom of interest is different from the boom in East Asian or Japanese studies 15 or 20 years ago.

That is a healthy combination. Instead there is oil and a lot of poverty. This is not a solid basis for a buildup of interest. And of course China is a rising star. The other problem, as I see it — and I spend enormous amounts of time sitting on search committees — is that good people are scarce in the field, particularly under current market conditions. Can you tell me three scholars who study Islam in America whose work you respect? I find a tremendous amount of both politicization and scholarly un-readiness.

If I had a question about Salafis — the Saudi strain of Islamic fundamentalists and also Salafis in other parts part of the world — the first person I would go to would be Bernard Haykel who is currently at NYU. He combines knowledge of the pre-modern tradition and history with hands-on research on Salafis of the present day. When you were showing the coins, you were focusing on one aspect of it — the coin bite, how they spread religion. But the other thing I was struck by was: It replaces the picture with words. Did the cartoon riots have their origins that far back in Islam?

They have two origins that go pretty far back. One is a prohibition of images. Are they all prohibited or just some? The consensus is if any image is forbidden, it is images that depict humans.

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Depicting a human is already extremely questionable, and depicting the prophet is a whole lot worse than depicting any other human. Let me back up here. Why are images prohibited? Is it an anti-pagan thing? But the underlying anxiety is idolatry; that once you have images, people are going to worship them.

To come back to the previous question: Defaming or slandering the prophet is a very serious offense; in Islamic law it incurs the death penalty. The cartoons, in addition to depicting the prophet, were clearly insulting. The cartoonists did a pretty good job of covering all bases there. What did he do? What his life like? Were there signs he would be a leader?

Was he a charismatic person? In spite of the prohibition on images, do we have any sense of what he looked like? To take the last point first: Yes, of course, the tradition tells us he was handsome. In addition, we get detailed descriptions of his features and body build. There are stories about his birth that explain how at the moment when he was born supernatural events took place.

His mother saw the castles of Syria by magic illumination. You have a lot of supernatural dimension to the birth of the prophet, and later on, various things happen. Did any of that really happen? Your guess is as good as mine. The other part of your question: Do we get a credible sense of his character as opposed to just the fact that he had all virtues? I think I read his biography of Muhammad. I have never had any doubts about his existence.

I have held some heretical views in the past about what he did —. There are some early non-Islamic sources that suggest that, in its origins, Islam was closer to Judaism for longer than the traditional account indicates. That essentially was the nature of my heresy. Let me preface my question by saying that among Jews, although Moses is the highest and most nearly perfect prophet, there are still extensive discussions of his imperfections and his errors, at least one of which was serious enough to deprive him of his ultimate objective.

It is a matter of some cultural significance that Moses is depicted as an imperfect human being, although the highest prophet. That raises some interesting questions: Are there, in the Hadith, for example, any stories pointing towards his imperfections or serious errors of judgment? But my larger question has to do with the monotheistic triad. You pointed out that the Constantinian tradition was a latecomer in Christianity.

Rabbinic Judaism, and in particular Jewish law, developed in circumstances of political marginality and powerlessness. Therefore, Jewish law is not really public law. When the issue arose, in the founding of Israel, as to whether Jewish law should be the law of the state, there were people who took that position, but the realists won out; namely, that it is impossible to turn this into a body of public law.

That decision has created the basic structure of legal argumentation in Israel ever since. What strikes me as so important about Islam, and so distinctive, is that it is law that developed in circumstances of political majority and political power and not political marginality. That re-raises the question of whether Islamic law, authentically understood, can be private law, or does it inherently tend to be public law backed by the coercive power of the state?

Let me raise two examples here for you to comment on. The first is the idea of religious liberty, out of which liberal democracy developed; namely, that you may change your religion, and the state may not intervene to prevent you. As I understand it, Islam has a different view of the matter. It is not clear to me that Islamic law can accommodate the core of what the West believes to be non-negotiable on that question.

When I was responding on the character of the prophet, I should have addressed that issue you raised about perfection and prophethood.

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The prophet in the earlier sources — the Koran and early biographical accounts, and also in the Hadith — is not depicted as a perfect human being. There are clear passages in the Koran where God is telling off his prophet: You did this wrong and undo it. In that sense, our starting point is similar to the biblical account of Moses: Muslims say they honor Jesus more than Christians who claim he was crucified by the hands of cruel men. They reject the cross for these reasons: As someone succinctly put it: We have a message of hope for Muslim friends.

Missionaries among Muslims often testify that the most effective apologetic the Christian worker has is the power of the simple gospel, rooted in Old Testament prophecies. Thus, when Jesus faced the cross, he appealed to Scripture. In talking to Muslims, Christians must stress that the cross was not a mistake, or a defeat, but the redemptive act of Almighty God, planned before the world began Gen.

Prior to the cross, Jesus said to his mystified disciples: They will mock him, insult him, spit on him, flog him and kill him. In witness, Christ must never be left in Galilee, when he set his face toward Jerusalem. After his passion, Jesus asked a penetrating question of two disciples on the way to Emmaus: This is the same question we must ask Muslims.

Do Muslims & Christians Worship the Same God?

In conclusion, Christians have much in common with Muslims, but in the end, we must focus on the message of Easter. The cross is central to the Gospel I Cor. I will never forget a Pakistani Muslim villager who gave three reasons why he thought Jesus was greater than Muhammad: Last night my church held a Seder a special meal during Pesach—Passover. Over people showed up to have a rabbi lead us through the Haggadah a booklet containing the prayers and actions comprising the Seder and explain the symbolism in the celebration.

The attendees were Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The conversation at our table was very interesting. We agreed that we would all share a typical prayer that we offer up before a meal began. The rabbi mentioned how hand washing was an important part of the initial ceremonies and the Muslims were able to tie this to the ritual ablution Muslims perform before their daily prayers.

All of us were able to relate to the Passover theme of God rescuing people from oppressions of all sorts as well as His faithfulness in the presence of our repeated disobedience. The rabbi said that this is exactly how Judaism saw it. Does a belief in God or the supernatural make people more or less likely to take care of animals and the environment? It is easy to make up stories to answer this question. You might say that many religions push the idea that the world will soon come to an end, in which case surely they encourage a "let it burn" ethos: But just as plausibly, you might point out that many religions are big on kindness, and some such as Jainism even forbid killing animals.

This should nudge their followers towards caring for the natural world. View image of Christianity is one of the most popular religions Credit: Let's start with Christianity. Writing in the high-profile journal Science in , historian Lynn White proposed that Christian religions undermine wildlife conservation by advocating a domination ethic over nature.

Because the Bible talks about "dominion" over nature , White argued that Christianity teaches its followers that "it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends". Christian fundamentalists were less willing, and Catholics more willing, to financially support the environment. This was, to say the least, controversial. Other historians and theologians have argued that White was misreading the Bible , and that the text actually implies that we have a duty of care towards nature. Perhaps more to the point, White offered no evidence about the attitudes or behaviours of actual Christians.

In , researchers tackled that question by asking whether there was a relationship between a country's main religion and the number of important biodiversity areas it contained. They found that Christian countries, particularly Catholic ones, tended to have more areas set aside for nature than other countries. However, this does not mean White was completely wrong. Other studies suggest that conservative Christians really are less environmentally friendly than other denominations. In a study published in , priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley looked at how much Americans were willing to spend on conserving the environment.

He found that Christian fundamentalists were less willing, and Catholics more willing, to financially support the environment. This suggests that it is not whether a person is Christian, but rather what type of Christian they are, that influences their behaviour towards nature. It also seems that people's attitudes towards the environment can be affected by the way Christianity interacts with other religions. View image of In Kenya, Christian converts regarded forests as evil Credit: These are places of biological and spiritual significance, created and maintained by communities who adhered to a traditional faith.

Shepheard-Walwyn found that "some of the Christian people interviewed felt the forests should be destroyed as they are associated with the traditional faith, which they believe to be evil. One Christian interviewed said that "tradition is now witchcraft". Others described the sacred sites as places associated with demons and superstition. This suggests that conflicts between opposing faiths could influence how people feel about protected areas. In particular, a shift away from more traditional faiths could be bad for nature.

View image of People's attitudes to lions are changeable Credit: In a study published in , Leela Hazzah of Lion Guardians showed that Maasai who had converted from a traditional faith to become evangelical Christians had a higher intent to kill lions than those that kept their traditional faith. Because the Maasai are not exposed to much television or other media, they look to their pastors for information about the world. If a pastor does not include positive stories about nature in their sermons, the churchgoers would not get any guidance on how to be environmentally friendly.