Islam is a
Religion of Peace
The Myth:
Muhammad
was a peaceful man who taught his followers to be the same. Muslims lived
peacefully for centuries, fighting only in self-defense, and only when it was necessary.
True Muslims would never act aggressively.
The Truth:
There
shouldn't be any argument over who the "true Muslim" is, because the Quran
clearly distinguishes the true Muslim from the pretender in
Sura 9 and elsewhere. This is one of the Quran's final chapters and it defines the true believer as one who "strives and fights with their wealth and
person" while the hypocrites are those who "sit at home," refusing
to join the jihad against unbelievers in foreign lands.
The reality is that Muhammad
organized 65 military campaigns in the last ten years of his life and personally
led 27 of them. The more power he attained, the smaller the excuse
needed to go to battle - until finally he was attacking tribes merely because
they were not yet part of his growing empire.
Aside from the
campaigns, Muhammad ordered the murder or execution of over 50 individuals during a ten-year span, and even the slaughter of several hundred tribesmen in one day. Some of these were elderly people, women and poets slain in their own homes. Apologists bend over backwards in an attempt to dismiss most of the killing as cases of self-defense. In the real world, that defense falls apart after the second or third serial murder, not to mention the 50th.
After
Muhammad’s death, his successor immediately went to war with former allied
tribes which wanted to go their own way. Abu Bakr called them 'apostates'
and slaughtered anyone who did not want to remain Muslim. Eventually, he
was successful in holding the empire together through blood and violence.
The prophet
of Islam's most faithful followers and even his own family
quickly turned on
each other as well. There were four caliphs (leaders) in the
first twenty-five years, each of which was a trusted companion of his. Three of these four were murdered. The third
caliph was murdered by those allied with the son of the first caliph. The fourth
caliph was
murdered in the midst of a conflict with the fifth caliph, who began a 100-year dynasty
of excess and debauchery that was truncated in a gruesome,
widespread bloodbath by descendants of Muhammad’s uncle.
Muhammad’s
own daughter, Fatima, and his son-in-law, Ali, who both survived the pagan
hardship during the Meccan years safe and sound, did not survive Islam after the
death of Muhammad. Fatima died of stress from persecution within six
months, and Ali was later assassinated by Muslim rivals. Their son (Muhammad’s grandson)
was killed in battle with the faction that became today’s Sunnis. His
people became Shias. The relatives and personal friends of Muhammad were
mixed into both warring groups, which then fractured further into hostile
sub-divisions as Islam expanded.
Muslim
apologists, who like to say that is impossible for today's terrorists to be
Muslim when they kill fellow Muslims, would have a very tough time explaining the
war between Fatima's followers and Aisha to a knowledgeable audience. Muhammad
explicitly held both his
favorite daughter and his favorite wife as model Muslim women, yet they were invoked
respectively by each side in the violent civil war that followed his death.
Which one was the "prophet of God" so horribly wrong about?
Muhammad
left his men with instructions to take the battle to Christians,
Persians, Jews and polytheists (which came to include millions of unfortunate
Hindus). For the next four centuries, Muslim armies steamrolled
unsuspecting neighbors, plundering them of loot and slaves, and forcing the
survivors to either convert or pay tribute at the point of a sword.
Some companions
of Muhammad lived to see Islam declare war on every major religion in the world
in just the first few decades following his death - pressing the Jihad against
Hindus, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists. There is no record of these Companions objecting to any of this.
By the
time of the Crusades (when the Europeans began fighting back), the "Religion of Peace" had
conquered two-thirds of the Christian world by sword, from Syria to Spain,
and across North Africa. Millions
of Christians were enslaved by Muslims, along with tens of millions of Africans. The Arab
slave-trading routes would stay open for
1300 years until pressure from Christian-based countries forced Islamic
nations to declare the practice illegal (in theory). The
Muslim world has never apologized for the victims of Jihad and slavery.
In our day, there is no other religion in the world that consistently produces terrorism
in the name of God as does Islam. The most dangerous Muslims are
nearly always those who interpret the Quran most transparently. They are
the fundamentalists or purists of the faith, and believe in Muhammad’s mandate
to spread Islamic rule by the sword, putting to death those who will not submit.
In the absence of true infidels, they will even turn on each other.
The holy
texts of Islam are saturated with verses of
violence and hatred toward
those outside the faith, as well as the aforementioned "hypocrites" (Muslims who don't act like
religious Muslims are meant to act). In sharp contrast to the Bible, which generally
moves from a depiction of violence against others to more peaceful mandates of self-improvement, the Quran
travels the opposite path (violence is first forbidden, then permitted,
then mandatory). The handful of earlier verses that speak
of tolerance are overwhelmed by an avalanche of later ones that carry a much
different message. While Old Testament verses of blood and guts are
generally bound by historical context within the text itself, Quranic
imperatives to violence usually appear open-ended and subject to personal
interpretation.
From the
history of the faith to its most sacred writings, those who want to believe in
"peaceful Islam" have a lot more to ignore than do the terrorists. By any
objective measure, the "Religion of Peace" has been the harshest, bloodiest
religion the world has ever known. In Islam there is no peace unless
Muslims have power - and even then...
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