Mas Arifiq - So if

Mas Arifiq - So if I have a prejudice, it's that I tend to be more trusting - tend, mind you, not some absolute knee-jerk reaction, just a tendency - toward people of faith. Christians and Jews, obviously, but also Moslems, Hindus, and to some degree Buddhists.

I've had reason to stir that belief up a bit in the past ten months, of course. The Islam we see in the US, certainly, is a combination of the flaming-eyed zealots on the evening news, congratulating their children for blowing themselves up and demanding pyramids of Jewish skulls on the one hand, and the great tradition and, in many ways, beliefs similar to Christianity. Islam has been a great civilizing faith. It's also half Christianity's age - and remember what we were like a thousand years ago...

The temptation is there to try to read the Koran, to get the story direct from the horse's mouth, as it were.

Er, yeah. I'll get back to you on that. I'm as likely to do that as I am to memorize the Old Testament.

There are those better placed to analyze this - and John Derbyshire is one of them. This article is an excellent look at the subject. My favorite part:

A coherent and well-established religion like Islam is an asset to the human race, with the potential to soften the hearts and enlighten the minds of believers. It might be the instrument for lifting those believers out of the pit of lies, cruelty, intolerance and stagnation into which their tribal cultures seem have dragged them. If today Islam is showing an ugly face to the world, that is not a reason to give up on Islam. Christianity showed a pretty ugly face during the Thirty Years War (not to mention the Crusades). A few generations later it was ending the slave trade, providing spiritual fuel for a mighty commercial civilization, and bringing education and medicine to places that never had either.

Instead of mocking or dismissing Islam, we should appeal to believers to look to the nobler and more generous texts in their scriptures, the texts that emphasize a common humanity. We have nothing to gain from alienating honest Muslims, any more than they have anything to gain by being enemies of the West. If we can remember the first, and persuade them of the second, there might be some prospect of cutting off significant support to the legions of glittering-eyed Koran-waving murderers the world is currently infested with, and of averting the destructive clash that we are all, slowly but surely, coming to believe inevitable.

OK, I think the thought is right. OK, my only question: Precisely which Moslems who might be susceptible via Islam's "nobler and more generous texts" aren't already more or less on our side?

This debate'll go on a while, so I won't look for an answer just yet...

Posted by Mitch at July 12, 2002 07:32 AM