Sunday, July 28, 2002 |
11:12 - Well, that bloody figures.
http://muslimpundit.blogspot.com/
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MuslimPundit is idle for over three months; we all hold our breaths, hoping for Adil's glorious return, any day now-- but it looks more and more unlikely as time goes on.
And the day after I remove his link from my blogroll, he returns.
Razzam-frazzam.
Anyway, he's leading off his new stint of being-there-hood with a long essay on the nature of jihad, in which he deflates the new-age redefinition of the word from "moderate Muslims" who have been trying to tell us that the proper meaning of jihad, the one that the Koran commands all Muslims to embrace, is an internal or spiritual struggle rather than armed aggression against the infidels.
What the Qur’an does say, however, is very interesting: not only does it subscribe to a warfare-approach to “jihad”, but what comes across also as increasingly clear is the fact that by far the most instances where Muslims are prompted to carry out jihad in the Qur’an, refer to acts of aggressive instigation rather than that of defensive warfare (just examine the subject index in any good copy of the Qur’an). Not only is it permitted, but the Qur’an orders that it be waged till the cause of God prevails. This flies in the face of Armstrong’s blind belief that Muslims “…may never initiate hostilities… and aggressive warfare is always forbidden. The only permissible war, therefore, is a war of self-defense…”. Such injunctions heavily tend towards being exceptions rather than instances of a general rule. Thus, Muslims, as well as some non-Muslim “experts”, who propound this version of “self-defence-only jihad” subscribe to a notion that, with respect to the classical Islamic doctrine, is palpably false. Some modernist Muslims, like the late Fazlur Rahman of Chicago University, have rejected this view owing to its gross misuse of history. As they point out, this notion of “jihad”, as a strategy only for self-defence, is a myth.
Yeah. This is why I had that link there in the first place. Back it goes.
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