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Notes -
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
I don’t know anything about Islam but a fairly similar phenomenon exists in Christianity. I don’t think progressive Christians are lying. I think it’s extremely silly to believe Jesus was a pro-LGBT feminist socialist but I think people who say that aren’t lying they’re just acting in the venerable millennia-old tradition of interpreting the Bible to justify whatever you want to do right now whether it’s legalizing gay marriage or looting Mesoamerica.
Best I can tell reading the gospels for myself, a sincere attempt to follow the teachings and examples therein would not be at all compatible with any modern political philosophies of any significance, right or left. I wonder if it’s a similar deal with the Quran.
While the Jesus of the gospels doesn’t come off as a Republican, he definitely does come off as a moralizing leader of a strict, high commitment religion holding non-negotiable commands for followers but not pushing broader social change. This codes right in this day and age.
I guess. But "not pushing broader social change" is a pretty big deal. The entire NT assumes either implicitly or explicitly Christians will always be a powerless minority in the world, so there's tons of advice on how to navigate an unbelieving world, but nothing about how to actually run or structure society at large, since none of the authors seemed to dream that Christianity would ever become a popular, let alone state-enforced, creed. Jesus and the earliest disciples seem to have operated on the assumption that they were just going to have to "ride it out" until God came down (very soon) and set things right himself, and the (in)famous teachings urging poverty and passivity are given in light of that. Maybe such an ethos is right-wing, but it's not very attractive or useful to right-wingers today, nor has it historically been very attractive to Christian potentates, which is why so much ink has been spilled then and now to justify what boil down to the same old pagan statecraft and social mores, but with a cross on top.
Strongly disagree with this. Everything from the assertion that there's no advice on how to run a large society, to the implication that the authors were incorrect to assume that Christianity would never be popular.
As far as advice on how to run a large society, there was plenty of direction regarding church organization throughout the book. Heck, Jesus seems to spend more time criticizing the existing leadership, and showing them a better path by example, than he does doing anything else.
As far as the church never being popular:
It's easy to interpret essentially all of those teachings as more metaphorical, and I think doing so is more accurate than not. "The world" can be against Christianity even if Christianity is the dominant religion, simply by virtue of the world being worldly, or most Christians not yet being truly converted.
Also very easy to (and plenty of people do) consider Catholicism a sort of co-opted Christianity, one which at some point lost its way. Hard to argue that Christianity is a popular world religion if its two largest champion institutions (Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) are not Christian.
That's very different. Most of this advice is given as just that, how to run the church as an insular community, and always defined against the larger unbelieving world. The Old Testament is full of laws, punishments, and rewards, but there's almost none of that in the NT.
This is true, but there's no indication that Jesus or anyone else thought they would ever not be in an unbelieving world, at least until the eschaton. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head I don't believe there's a single place in the NT where it's even suggested that one day Christians might be kings, or generals, or even public magistrates. That verse in Luke is, as far as I'm aware, the only spot in the whole NT that even comes close to a suggestion that Christians should ever do violence against anyone else, so it naturally comes up a lot in discussions about this. But just a few verses later when the priests and the soldiers come to arrest Jesus, and the disciples try to defend him by force, he tells them to put the swords away. Why Luke included this bit, who knows for sure, but to me it looks more like Jesus in this story wanted to make a point that swords were in fact useless because what was happening was preordained.
There are plenty of places in the NT where God does violence on behalf of Christians (the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, the earthquake that frees Peter from prison) but none where Christians are encouraged to do violence against anyone else, except for the episode at Gethsemane which is not approved of by the narrative of any of the gospels.
You make good points, mainly I disagree that things like "the world will hate you" referred to political power, and I especially disagree with the implication that this means that the later political power wielded by Christianity contradicts the Bible.
I think most of the "the world will hate you" referred to spiritual hatred etc., including the hatred each of us has towards our own higher impulses. Even in very Christian society, such as Christian Rome, there were plenty of high-level leaders who weren't sold on the religion. They were wolves in sheep's clothing, so to speak. That's not to say Christianity was not politically powerful, but spiritually it had much less power than "the world" i.e. all influences other than Christianity.
I generally read the NT as an amendment to the Old Testament. If the NT doesn't contradict the OT, then the teachings of the OT are still in force. With that in mind, I think it makes sense that the NT was more focused on the higher law--the lower law (all the laws etc.) had all been given and now Jesus was attempting to teach the next step. So yes, there was very little focus on laws etc. because that had already been covered. Kings, priests, etc. already had political power in Israel and now the next step was to take some of that away from them because they were misusing it.
I suppose I'm nitpicking, especially if that implication was unintentional. I agree with your point that Jesus taught poverty and passivity which is not very appealing in today's political climate.
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