Who is truly "Twisting Islam to justify cruelty"?
The following is a response to "Twisting Islam to justify cruelty" by Paul Sheehan published in The Sydney Morning Herald
Summary of Sheehan's argument
=================
Sheehan starts his article by referring to the tragic murdering of an unarmed British soldier by what he described as ‘a pair of psychopaths invoking the name of Islam.’ Sheehan then quickly makes it clear that his piece is not about this incident or even other incidents committed by likewise psychopaths. Sheehan’s words and their tone show that his focus lies elsewhere. He is worried about a more pervasive problem amongst Muslims, precisely the teachings of their faith. Islam, especially its sacred text, according to Sheehan, exhorts Muslims to engage in violence. Sheehan is keen on showing that this call is both real (he makes six partial quotations from the text) and not falling on deaf ears: “So many Muslims have been encouraged to murder civilians by such exhortations that the rate of violent incidents perpetrated in the name of Islam is staggering, a toll that shows no sign of subsiding.”
To further illustrate this point Sheehan cites a comment made by a Muslim radical cleric by the name of Bakri, extolling the murder of the British soldier and calling its perpetrator ‘a hero.’ Rather than acknowledging that this is a statement by a radical who is under a house arrest precisely because his views seem so radical to his co-religionists and compatriots, Sheehan pushes his analysis, very fast I must say, to an early dramatic conclusion. He deliberately leads his reader to think that Muslims or some percentage of them (it is hard to tell how many exactly because Sheehan’s text makes some contradictory references as well shall see) share this radical cleric’s views. Muslims, Sheehan wants us to think, believe that these acts are heroic. Even worse, these Muslims long for the recognition, which they associate with these acts, and they of course never hesitate to justify them. In other words, they believe in these radical thoughts, are willing to engage in them, and readily endorse them: “There is no shortage of such heroes in the Muslim world, nor shortage of rationalizations of violence.”
To reiterate the view, which he will only slightly veers away from in other parts of his piece, Sheehan indicates, lest his readers misunderstand him, that this is not just a matter of a few radicals here and there. He speaks of thousands’ of Muslims who refer to their sacred text to support ‘murder.’ Of course, this presents a good opportunity for Sheehan to show us how violent Qur’an is. But instead of treating us to some in-depth insights from the text, he chose to give us incomplete quotes (six total out of 100 verses he claims justify violence against the unbelievers). That this is very dubious shall become clear as we further discuss this, but it certainly shows that Sheehan is not talking about a cult amongst Muslims that misuses the Qur’an to justify its despicable actions which his title might mislead someone to think. To the contrary, what Sheehan’s short piece aims to do is to paint a picture in which Muslims look violent, very much so (and if Muslims are not such, it is certainly because they have failed to follow the text they hold so dear).
Language
======
The language that Sheehan uses is carefully selected to produce that effect, while at the same time trying to cleverly showcase a sense of impartiality by throwing in a few words here and there to camouflage his bias, evident hatred of Muslims, or worse his appalling ignorance. In this short piece, Sheehan uses the word ‘murder’ instead of other possible synonyms (for example killing) to precisely appeal to the illegality and premeditation implied in that word. He also uses the word ‘civilian,’ in conjunction to insinuate that what the Qur’an preaches, and what Muslims or some unknown number of them yearn to do, is to take the lives of ordinary people. In other words, Muslims’ appetite for killing is driven by no other factor than the exhortations in their sacred text to the same effect. Their targets are everyday individuals like you and me (maybe I am not a target because I am a Muslim, but certainly you are dear reader if you happen to belong to a different faith). There is no sense of a context whatsoever to any of the purported violence that Muslims engage in. They simply murder innocent civilians because their holy text urges them to do so.
Question of numbers
=============
As to how many Muslims are indeed plagued by this bloodlust, Sheehan makes some interesting contradictions, but his overall piece gives the impression that this disease is pervasive. He uses the phrase ‘no shortage’ at least twice and the phrase ‘so many Muslims’ as well. The numerical references he uses also suggest plentitude. He mentions ‘thousands’ of Muslims who are willing to engage in terrorist acts and justify them, referring to an ‘increasing rates’ and lamenting a parallel tendency to ‘understate’ the incidents of violence by murderous Muslims in the public records. It is helpful to note that when Sheehan speaks of ‘thousands’ he does not speak of a few thousands, or even several thousands. He leaves it unqualified to suggest multitude.
To be fair, Sheehan mentioned in passing that ‘most Muslims are peaceful, like most non-Muslims,’ but was too hasty to discuss the implication of that fact, which clearly undermines his argument. He was very much in a hurry to mention the Qur’anic ‘exhortations to merciless war,’ which leads ‘tens of thousands’ of Muslim to invoke them as they engage in violence. It is important to note here that Sheehan wants us to understand that the unknown figures (previously referred to as ‘so many’ and ‘no shortage’) of murderous Muslims is not just multiple of ‘thousands,’ but rather of ‘tens of thousands.’
Indeed, Shaheen, who builds his argument about the violent Qur’an and the ‘tens of thousands’ of murderous Muslims inspired by it around a few selective quotes, does make a scant reference to ‘entreaties to kindness’ that the same violent text has. But Sheehan neither gives a sense of how many of these ‘entreaties’ are there, nor does he cite one. This seems neither fair (given that he gave us both a figure (100) of the violent exhortations in the Qur’an and cited six of these) nor innocent.
It is true that Sheehan uses other figures where he documents the number of terrorist acts (an astounding 20,939) committed in the name of Islam since 2001. He attributes the figure to a website (Religionofpeace.com). This website is not an impartial institution, which generates statistics about terrorist incidents. As the name clearly suggests, this is a partisan website that was founded with the singular goal of proving that Islam is not a religion of peace. How do they collect their data, how they define terrorism is something Sheehan doesn’t bother to go into. Yet, he is ready to dismiss the criticism levied against the website as being ‘nonsense,’ an adjective that most third graders know how to say and use.
Of course, these statistics don’t reference the enormous human loss, suffering, mayhem and destruction that two violent wars caused during the same period, which no recent figures of killing or carnage can outdo. These two wars are the Afghanistan war and the deadlier and unprovoked invasion of Iraq. The Americans and their European allies were certainly not driven by Qur’anic exhortations to murder civilians, although many of those who were ‘murdered’ by these invading armies were civilians. Indeed, Qur’an was not what motivated the Americans or the British to torture Iraqis in the manner that the few images that were leaked from Abu Ghrib and other prisons across Iraq clearly show. Although some of the soldiers who participated in these wars, and some of the individuals who were key to taking the decisions to go to wars, were motivated by some Christianity views, and although the decisions to go to these wars were taken by elected officials, whom no one can readily dismiss as psychopaths, and although the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands (leaving aside those who were disabled, displaced, impoverished, imprisoned or otherwise psychologically scarred), I am confident that Sheehan doesn’t see that as evidence of something fundamentally wrong with the Christian Scripture or Western way of life. If he does, that seems to me, given the scale of destruction and the official capacity in which it is taken, to be more alarming and more worthy of denunciation.
Sheehan’s Quotes from he Holy Qur’an
=========================
The idea that the Qur’an is a violent text and that it urges its readers to murder innocent civilians is problematic in at least two ways. First, it doesn’t stand the test of textual examination. As we shall illustrate now, the quotes that Sheehan presents are neither complete, nor support his claim of indiscriminate call to murder civilians. But before examining the verses themselves, let’s briefly point out the context in which they were revealed. When Prophet Muhammad received the Qur’an, there were no treaties that governed the relationship between political entities or communities, such as the ones that regulate relationships between various nations and states today,which prominent members of the ‘civilized world’ violate at will whenever it suits them. Someone’s boundaries were drawn where his soldiers couldn’t go further. It would be wrong to suggest that there were no truces or occasional agreements, or even moral values that decry violence and aggression. But it is true that the default was that there were no definite boundaries, which a given polity had an unrivaled sovereignty within. Moreover, there were for the most part no standing armies—some empires such as the Byzantine and the Sassanid had professional soldiers. In general, every male who was not too young or too old was seen and treated as a soldier. It was in this context that Qur’an was revealed.
Yet, despite this state of affairs, Qur’an brought some remarkable rules that look revolutionary in their context—rules that go against the insinuation of unqualified ‘exhortations’ to violence and murder of civilians that Sheehan makes. The following order by the first Muslim caliph Abu Bakr (d.13/634) to one of his officers reiterates this rules: “adhere to these commandments: do not kill a woman, or a child, or an elderly person; don’t cut a fruit-bearing tree; don’t destroy an existing infrastructure; don’t kill a sheep or a camel except for food; don’t burn balm trees; don’t embezzle; don’t give into cowardice.” This text, which is available in most Muslim early collection of tradition (one can find it for example in the highly esteemed Muwatta’ of Malik d. 179/795), establishes extremely unique rules of engagement that were by all account far more progressive than their time. They certainly go against the truly ‘nonsensical’ argument that Sheehan makes here.
Shaheen’s quotes from Qur’an seem to fall in two unrelated categories, which he lumped together. The first category is the statements where God appears to command the believers to take actions against the disbelievers. The second category is of those where God warns the believers from the chastisement that shall befall those who veer away from the path He sets forth. This category (examples 1 and 3) doesn’t seem be exhortations to commit violence. That God will cast fear or terror (whatever word one chooses to translate the Arabic word al-khawf ) in the hearts of the disbelievers or that He will punish those who don’t follow His path is not the same as a command to the believers to murder. Whatever pain God chooses to inflict on the disbelievers is something the believers (being mortals) can neither assuage, nor be held liable for.
In fact the first quotation, which is Quran 8:12 starts like this “Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): "I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers.” Contrary to what Sheehan wants his readers to understand, the addressees here are the angels, not the believers. Needless to say that most Muslim Qur’anic exegetes have agreed that this verse speaks of a particular incident in a particular battle (the Battle of Badr, the first major battle between the Muslims and the polytheist of Mecca). This is not a global call to aggression. Sheehan’s ignorance of Quran is indeed astounding. Of the hundred verses he spoke of, two of the six he quotes are completely irrelevant, as we have just seen, to the case he is trying to make.
The second verse that Sheehan cites about Muslims’ violence is violently taken out of its context; this is true of all his quotes. It is a part of three consecutive verses in the second chapter of the Quran. These are Q: 190, 191, and 192. They read thus:
"Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors. And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al- Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers. And if they cease, then indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful."
When read together, the verses illustrate two important facts which Sheehan’s fragmentary quote and ellipses are meant to clearly hide from the reader. They point out the context and explain what the word ‘disbelievers’ here refers to. Again, this is not a global call to murder civilians, as Sheehan would like us to think. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Quran first puts forth a general rule. “Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress.” Then Qur’an stresses something important for those who look for God’s favor: “Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors!” That beautiful verdict is something all Muslims who have been introduced to the Qur’an have read or heard— whether they heed it or not that is an entirely different matter. Qur’an also speaks of those who ‘expelled you’ in the past tense, which links the act with a previous act. In other word, Qur’an is not saying just murder them because they deserve it, or because that is the right thing to do. It rather says, fight them because they fought you first and expelled you from your home, a clear reference to a specific context when Muhammad and his companions were driven out of their homes by the Meccan polytheists. This is not a global call to indiscriminate murdering of civilians.
Unlike quotes 1, 3 (which are irrelevant) and 2 (which as we demonstrated was taken out of its context), the fourth quotation from the Qur’an is of a different genre. Indeed, most Muslims if not all of them would find it to be useful and relevant to their day-to-day life. Yes, Muslims do believe that fighting in the way of Allah is a highly meritorious matter. But what is ‘the way of Allah’? That Sheehan doesn’t talk about, perhaps we are lucky he did not, given the decrepitude of his overall analysis. One of the matters that Muslim scholars have agreed on is that defending one’s self, family, property or those of other Muslims who are wronged is ‘fighting in the way of Allah.’
What is true of these four verses is true of the remaining two quotations. Faithful to his approach of not giving proper references, Sheeehan gives no hint on how to track his quotations from the Muslim ‘body of jurisprudence’ and Hadith he alludes to. As a result, we cannot examine them, even if we truly believed that these quotes do exist in the massive corpus of Muslim literature. The statement about killing ‘any Jew who falls under your power’ seems extremely suspicious, and is certainly not something that I (a student of Islamic law) have come across.
Now that we have examined Sheehan’s quotes, it only seems fair that we cite at least the same number of the ‘entreaties to kindness’ that he spoke about but failed or deliberately chose not to cite.
What Sheehan doesn’t quote
==================
1
Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes - from being righteous toward them and acting justly toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly. Q 60:8
2
Allah only forbids you from those who fight you because of religion and expel you from your homes and aid in your expulsion - [forbids] that you make allies of them. And whoever makes allies of them, then it is those who are the wrongdoers. Q 60:9
3
Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors. Q 2:190
4
And if they incline to peace, then incline to it [also] and rely upon Allah. Indeed, it is He who is the Hearing, the Knowing. Q 8:61
5
And do good [to others] as Allah has done good to you Q 28:77
And when you judge between people judge with justice. Excellent is that which Allah instructs you. Indeed, Allah is ever Hearing and Seeing. Q 4:58
6
And do not let the hatred of a people for having obstructed you from al-Masjid al-Haram lead you to transgress. Q 5:2
7
O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm for Allah, witnesses in justice, and do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness. And fear Allah; indeed, Allah is Acquainted with what you do. Q 5:8
Logic
====
It is helpful before discussing the significance of the quotes above and responding to any possible critique of them to show two central flaws in the logic of the argument that Sheehan makes. Sheehan holds, on one the hand, that the majority of Muslims are peaceful, but at the same time attributes the violence that a minority commits to the fundamentals of the religion. His argument is that since they invoke Islam as a justification for these violent acts, then that must indeed be what motivate them. Here arise the two problems. If Islam indeed preaches violence and murder of innocent civilians, why did it fail to influence the majority of Muslims who embrace and practice it? That seems rather absurd. Finally, Sheehan has to explain why the invocation of Islam by violent murderers as what motivate them is credible enough evidence that Islam is violent, whereas the invocation by the majority of Muslims of it as their source of guidance to a peaceable and peaceful life is not.
A final note
==============
Sheehan can always dismiss these verses as simply evidence of the contradiction he sees in the Quran. It is therefore useful to highlight how Muslims have historically understood what Qur’an commands them to do. Instead of making more citations from either the Sacred text or other Muslim texts, it suffices to look for the sake of brevity at how Muslim practically understood what Qur’an truly preaches. Sheehan probably knows that Muslim did not force others to convert and to trump the rhetoric to the contrary, let’s remember the incontrovertible fact that in the lands in which Muslims historically dominated, politically, military and otherwise, non-Muslim historical communities have lived (not to say thrived) in their midst and they still do today. Muslims did so despite the fact that their geographical and intellectual neighbors, the Christians, did not practice the same set of ethics. Muslims who lived in Europe in the past had in the best of circumstances three choices to pick from (deportation, conversion, or death). This applied to non-Muslims as well. This is well documented and historically evident as to need attestations. The question then becomes why did Muslims fail to carry out the mass murder of civilians that Qur’an urges them to do at a time when they had both the numbers and the wherewithal? Did they just not understand these commands until we were finally blessed with such super Qur’anic scholars such as Bakri and Paul Sheehan?
Summary of Sheehan's argument
=================
Sheehan starts his article by referring to the tragic murdering of an unarmed British soldier by what he described as ‘a pair of psychopaths invoking the name of Islam.’ Sheehan then quickly makes it clear that his piece is not about this incident or even other incidents committed by likewise psychopaths. Sheehan’s words and their tone show that his focus lies elsewhere. He is worried about a more pervasive problem amongst Muslims, precisely the teachings of their faith. Islam, especially its sacred text, according to Sheehan, exhorts Muslims to engage in violence. Sheehan is keen on showing that this call is both real (he makes six partial quotations from the text) and not falling on deaf ears: “So many Muslims have been encouraged to murder civilians by such exhortations that the rate of violent incidents perpetrated in the name of Islam is staggering, a toll that shows no sign of subsiding.”
To further illustrate this point Sheehan cites a comment made by a Muslim radical cleric by the name of Bakri, extolling the murder of the British soldier and calling its perpetrator ‘a hero.’ Rather than acknowledging that this is a statement by a radical who is under a house arrest precisely because his views seem so radical to his co-religionists and compatriots, Sheehan pushes his analysis, very fast I must say, to an early dramatic conclusion. He deliberately leads his reader to think that Muslims or some percentage of them (it is hard to tell how many exactly because Sheehan’s text makes some contradictory references as well shall see) share this radical cleric’s views. Muslims, Sheehan wants us to think, believe that these acts are heroic. Even worse, these Muslims long for the recognition, which they associate with these acts, and they of course never hesitate to justify them. In other words, they believe in these radical thoughts, are willing to engage in them, and readily endorse them: “There is no shortage of such heroes in the Muslim world, nor shortage of rationalizations of violence.”
To reiterate the view, which he will only slightly veers away from in other parts of his piece, Sheehan indicates, lest his readers misunderstand him, that this is not just a matter of a few radicals here and there. He speaks of thousands’ of Muslims who refer to their sacred text to support ‘murder.’ Of course, this presents a good opportunity for Sheehan to show us how violent Qur’an is. But instead of treating us to some in-depth insights from the text, he chose to give us incomplete quotes (six total out of 100 verses he claims justify violence against the unbelievers). That this is very dubious shall become clear as we further discuss this, but it certainly shows that Sheehan is not talking about a cult amongst Muslims that misuses the Qur’an to justify its despicable actions which his title might mislead someone to think. To the contrary, what Sheehan’s short piece aims to do is to paint a picture in which Muslims look violent, very much so (and if Muslims are not such, it is certainly because they have failed to follow the text they hold so dear).
Language
======
The language that Sheehan uses is carefully selected to produce that effect, while at the same time trying to cleverly showcase a sense of impartiality by throwing in a few words here and there to camouflage his bias, evident hatred of Muslims, or worse his appalling ignorance. In this short piece, Sheehan uses the word ‘murder’ instead of other possible synonyms (for example killing) to precisely appeal to the illegality and premeditation implied in that word. He also uses the word ‘civilian,’ in conjunction to insinuate that what the Qur’an preaches, and what Muslims or some unknown number of them yearn to do, is to take the lives of ordinary people. In other words, Muslims’ appetite for killing is driven by no other factor than the exhortations in their sacred text to the same effect. Their targets are everyday individuals like you and me (maybe I am not a target because I am a Muslim, but certainly you are dear reader if you happen to belong to a different faith). There is no sense of a context whatsoever to any of the purported violence that Muslims engage in. They simply murder innocent civilians because their holy text urges them to do so.
Question of numbers
=============
As to how many Muslims are indeed plagued by this bloodlust, Sheehan makes some interesting contradictions, but his overall piece gives the impression that this disease is pervasive. He uses the phrase ‘no shortage’ at least twice and the phrase ‘so many Muslims’ as well. The numerical references he uses also suggest plentitude. He mentions ‘thousands’ of Muslims who are willing to engage in terrorist acts and justify them, referring to an ‘increasing rates’ and lamenting a parallel tendency to ‘understate’ the incidents of violence by murderous Muslims in the public records. It is helpful to note that when Sheehan speaks of ‘thousands’ he does not speak of a few thousands, or even several thousands. He leaves it unqualified to suggest multitude.
To be fair, Sheehan mentioned in passing that ‘most Muslims are peaceful, like most non-Muslims,’ but was too hasty to discuss the implication of that fact, which clearly undermines his argument. He was very much in a hurry to mention the Qur’anic ‘exhortations to merciless war,’ which leads ‘tens of thousands’ of Muslim to invoke them as they engage in violence. It is important to note here that Sheehan wants us to understand that the unknown figures (previously referred to as ‘so many’ and ‘no shortage’) of murderous Muslims is not just multiple of ‘thousands,’ but rather of ‘tens of thousands.’
Indeed, Shaheen, who builds his argument about the violent Qur’an and the ‘tens of thousands’ of murderous Muslims inspired by it around a few selective quotes, does make a scant reference to ‘entreaties to kindness’ that the same violent text has. But Sheehan neither gives a sense of how many of these ‘entreaties’ are there, nor does he cite one. This seems neither fair (given that he gave us both a figure (100) of the violent exhortations in the Qur’an and cited six of these) nor innocent.
It is true that Sheehan uses other figures where he documents the number of terrorist acts (an astounding 20,939) committed in the name of Islam since 2001. He attributes the figure to a website (Religionofpeace.com). This website is not an impartial institution, which generates statistics about terrorist incidents. As the name clearly suggests, this is a partisan website that was founded with the singular goal of proving that Islam is not a religion of peace. How do they collect their data, how they define terrorism is something Sheehan doesn’t bother to go into. Yet, he is ready to dismiss the criticism levied against the website as being ‘nonsense,’ an adjective that most third graders know how to say and use.
Of course, these statistics don’t reference the enormous human loss, suffering, mayhem and destruction that two violent wars caused during the same period, which no recent figures of killing or carnage can outdo. These two wars are the Afghanistan war and the deadlier and unprovoked invasion of Iraq. The Americans and their European allies were certainly not driven by Qur’anic exhortations to murder civilians, although many of those who were ‘murdered’ by these invading armies were civilians. Indeed, Qur’an was not what motivated the Americans or the British to torture Iraqis in the manner that the few images that were leaked from Abu Ghrib and other prisons across Iraq clearly show. Although some of the soldiers who participated in these wars, and some of the individuals who were key to taking the decisions to go to wars, were motivated by some Christianity views, and although the decisions to go to these wars were taken by elected officials, whom no one can readily dismiss as psychopaths, and although the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands (leaving aside those who were disabled, displaced, impoverished, imprisoned or otherwise psychologically scarred), I am confident that Sheehan doesn’t see that as evidence of something fundamentally wrong with the Christian Scripture or Western way of life. If he does, that seems to me, given the scale of destruction and the official capacity in which it is taken, to be more alarming and more worthy of denunciation.
Sheehan’s Quotes from he Holy Qur’an
=========================
The idea that the Qur’an is a violent text and that it urges its readers to murder innocent civilians is problematic in at least two ways. First, it doesn’t stand the test of textual examination. As we shall illustrate now, the quotes that Sheehan presents are neither complete, nor support his claim of indiscriminate call to murder civilians. But before examining the verses themselves, let’s briefly point out the context in which they were revealed. When Prophet Muhammad received the Qur’an, there were no treaties that governed the relationship between political entities or communities, such as the ones that regulate relationships between various nations and states today,which prominent members of the ‘civilized world’ violate at will whenever it suits them. Someone’s boundaries were drawn where his soldiers couldn’t go further. It would be wrong to suggest that there were no truces or occasional agreements, or even moral values that decry violence and aggression. But it is true that the default was that there were no definite boundaries, which a given polity had an unrivaled sovereignty within. Moreover, there were for the most part no standing armies—some empires such as the Byzantine and the Sassanid had professional soldiers. In general, every male who was not too young or too old was seen and treated as a soldier. It was in this context that Qur’an was revealed.
Yet, despite this state of affairs, Qur’an brought some remarkable rules that look revolutionary in their context—rules that go against the insinuation of unqualified ‘exhortations’ to violence and murder of civilians that Sheehan makes. The following order by the first Muslim caliph Abu Bakr (d.13/634) to one of his officers reiterates this rules: “adhere to these commandments: do not kill a woman, or a child, or an elderly person; don’t cut a fruit-bearing tree; don’t destroy an existing infrastructure; don’t kill a sheep or a camel except for food; don’t burn balm trees; don’t embezzle; don’t give into cowardice.” This text, which is available in most Muslim early collection of tradition (one can find it for example in the highly esteemed Muwatta’ of Malik d. 179/795), establishes extremely unique rules of engagement that were by all account far more progressive than their time. They certainly go against the truly ‘nonsensical’ argument that Sheehan makes here.
Shaheen’s quotes from Qur’an seem to fall in two unrelated categories, which he lumped together. The first category is the statements where God appears to command the believers to take actions against the disbelievers. The second category is of those where God warns the believers from the chastisement that shall befall those who veer away from the path He sets forth. This category (examples 1 and 3) doesn’t seem be exhortations to commit violence. That God will cast fear or terror (whatever word one chooses to translate the Arabic word al-khawf ) in the hearts of the disbelievers or that He will punish those who don’t follow His path is not the same as a command to the believers to murder. Whatever pain God chooses to inflict on the disbelievers is something the believers (being mortals) can neither assuage, nor be held liable for.
In fact the first quotation, which is Quran 8:12 starts like this “Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): "I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers.” Contrary to what Sheehan wants his readers to understand, the addressees here are the angels, not the believers. Needless to say that most Muslim Qur’anic exegetes have agreed that this verse speaks of a particular incident in a particular battle (the Battle of Badr, the first major battle between the Muslims and the polytheist of Mecca). This is not a global call to aggression. Sheehan’s ignorance of Quran is indeed astounding. Of the hundred verses he spoke of, two of the six he quotes are completely irrelevant, as we have just seen, to the case he is trying to make.
The second verse that Sheehan cites about Muslims’ violence is violently taken out of its context; this is true of all his quotes. It is a part of three consecutive verses in the second chapter of the Quran. These are Q: 190, 191, and 192. They read thus:
"Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors. And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you, and fitnah is worse than killing. And do not fight them at al-Masjid al- Haram until they fight you there. But if they fight you, then kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers. And if they cease, then indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful."
When read together, the verses illustrate two important facts which Sheehan’s fragmentary quote and ellipses are meant to clearly hide from the reader. They point out the context and explain what the word ‘disbelievers’ here refers to. Again, this is not a global call to murder civilians, as Sheehan would like us to think. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Quran first puts forth a general rule. “Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress.” Then Qur’an stresses something important for those who look for God’s favor: “Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors!” That beautiful verdict is something all Muslims who have been introduced to the Qur’an have read or heard— whether they heed it or not that is an entirely different matter. Qur’an also speaks of those who ‘expelled you’ in the past tense, which links the act with a previous act. In other word, Qur’an is not saying just murder them because they deserve it, or because that is the right thing to do. It rather says, fight them because they fought you first and expelled you from your home, a clear reference to a specific context when Muhammad and his companions were driven out of their homes by the Meccan polytheists. This is not a global call to indiscriminate murdering of civilians.
Unlike quotes 1, 3 (which are irrelevant) and 2 (which as we demonstrated was taken out of its context), the fourth quotation from the Qur’an is of a different genre. Indeed, most Muslims if not all of them would find it to be useful and relevant to their day-to-day life. Yes, Muslims do believe that fighting in the way of Allah is a highly meritorious matter. But what is ‘the way of Allah’? That Sheehan doesn’t talk about, perhaps we are lucky he did not, given the decrepitude of his overall analysis. One of the matters that Muslim scholars have agreed on is that defending one’s self, family, property or those of other Muslims who are wronged is ‘fighting in the way of Allah.’
What is true of these four verses is true of the remaining two quotations. Faithful to his approach of not giving proper references, Sheeehan gives no hint on how to track his quotations from the Muslim ‘body of jurisprudence’ and Hadith he alludes to. As a result, we cannot examine them, even if we truly believed that these quotes do exist in the massive corpus of Muslim literature. The statement about killing ‘any Jew who falls under your power’ seems extremely suspicious, and is certainly not something that I (a student of Islamic law) have come across.
Now that we have examined Sheehan’s quotes, it only seems fair that we cite at least the same number of the ‘entreaties to kindness’ that he spoke about but failed or deliberately chose not to cite.
What Sheehan doesn’t quote
==================
1
Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes - from being righteous toward them and acting justly toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly. Q 60:8
2
Allah only forbids you from those who fight you because of religion and expel you from your homes and aid in your expulsion - [forbids] that you make allies of them. And whoever makes allies of them, then it is those who are the wrongdoers. Q 60:9
3
Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors. Q 2:190
4
And if they incline to peace, then incline to it [also] and rely upon Allah. Indeed, it is He who is the Hearing, the Knowing. Q 8:61
5
And do good [to others] as Allah has done good to you Q 28:77
And when you judge between people judge with justice. Excellent is that which Allah instructs you. Indeed, Allah is ever Hearing and Seeing. Q 4:58
6
And do not let the hatred of a people for having obstructed you from al-Masjid al-Haram lead you to transgress. Q 5:2
7
O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm for Allah, witnesses in justice, and do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness. And fear Allah; indeed, Allah is Acquainted with what you do. Q 5:8
Logic
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It is helpful before discussing the significance of the quotes above and responding to any possible critique of them to show two central flaws in the logic of the argument that Sheehan makes. Sheehan holds, on one the hand, that the majority of Muslims are peaceful, but at the same time attributes the violence that a minority commits to the fundamentals of the religion. His argument is that since they invoke Islam as a justification for these violent acts, then that must indeed be what motivate them. Here arise the two problems. If Islam indeed preaches violence and murder of innocent civilians, why did it fail to influence the majority of Muslims who embrace and practice it? That seems rather absurd. Finally, Sheehan has to explain why the invocation of Islam by violent murderers as what motivate them is credible enough evidence that Islam is violent, whereas the invocation by the majority of Muslims of it as their source of guidance to a peaceable and peaceful life is not.
A final note
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Sheehan can always dismiss these verses as simply evidence of the contradiction he sees in the Quran. It is therefore useful to highlight how Muslims have historically understood what Qur’an commands them to do. Instead of making more citations from either the Sacred text or other Muslim texts, it suffices to look for the sake of brevity at how Muslim practically understood what Qur’an truly preaches. Sheehan probably knows that Muslim did not force others to convert and to trump the rhetoric to the contrary, let’s remember the incontrovertible fact that in the lands in which Muslims historically dominated, politically, military and otherwise, non-Muslim historical communities have lived (not to say thrived) in their midst and they still do today. Muslims did so despite the fact that their geographical and intellectual neighbors, the Christians, did not practice the same set of ethics. Muslims who lived in Europe in the past had in the best of circumstances three choices to pick from (deportation, conversion, or death). This applied to non-Muslims as well. This is well documented and historically evident as to need attestations. The question then becomes why did Muslims fail to carry out the mass murder of civilians that Qur’an urges them to do at a time when they had both the numbers and the wherewithal? Did they just not understand these commands until we were finally blessed with such super Qur’anic scholars such as Bakri and Paul Sheehan?
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