It would be bad manners to question the foundations of a fellow religion, but ...

A Critical Look at the Koran

BY WILLIAM KILPATRICK

If the Koran remains unchallenged, the jihad will continue to spread, 

and there will come a day when we will wish we had contested 

the Koran while we still had the freedom to do so.

“May Allah accept this from me.”

“I’m doing it in the name of Allah.”

“To establish Islamic law—Allah’s law on earth.”

The above are statements made by would-be and successful jihadists to explain their motivations for planning or executing acts of terror in America. Jihadists in other parts of the world say much the same thing. Where, then, do they get the idea that this is what Allah wants them to do?

Jihadists usually cite the Koran as the source of their motivation. For example, Terry Lee Loewen explained his planned jihad attack on Wichita’s Mid-Continent Airport last December as follows:

I don’t understand how you can read the Qur’an and the sunnah of the Prophet and not understand that jihad and the implementation of Sharia is absolutely demanded of all the Muslim Ummah.

So how can we disabuse terrorists and potential terrorists of the notion that Allah wants them to kill infidels? The obvious place to start is with the Koran. We can’t say, however, that there is absolutely no warrant in the Koran for killing unbelievers, because there patently is. “When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them” (9:5) is typical of many similar verses. According to a content analysis conducted by the Center for the Study of Political Islam, 24 percent of the Medinan verses of the Koran are devoted to jihad. Or, as Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud once declared, “Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad.”

The you-should-read-the-Koran tactic won’t work with those who actually have read the Koran. What else might work? Another tactic is to try and convince would-be jihadists that they are misinterpreting the Koran—that it should be interpreted in a more spiritual and peaceful way. But here again we run into a problem. Since the eleventh century, a consensus has existed among Islamic scholars that the “Gates ofIjtihad” (or interpretation) are closed. Calling for new interpretations is tantamount to rejecting centuries of Islamic tradition.

....................

Read more: www.crisismagazine.com