By: Kerrie Armstrong
Source: SBS
Anti-Muslim activists often cite violent passages from the Qur’an and other sacred Islamic texts to prove Islam is a violent religion. But how do these claims stack up in the context of history and other religions, including Christianity?
Violent passages from the Islamic sacred text the Qur’an are often quoted to demonstrate that Islam is not a religion of peace, but of violence and hatred.
But religious scholars say the historical and political context, both past and present, of these texts is as important as the words they contain.
Monash University Islamic and interreligious studies lecturer, Dr Aydogan Kars, told SBS News that the interpretation of a text was more informative than the number of violent passages in the text.
“To me it is not so important whether the scripture contains violence or not, it is much more important and significant for us today to realise how people are reading that scripture,” he said.
“Even if there’s no apartheid in the Bible, a contemporary reader can read into it their own political agendas and might claim that there’s justification for apartheid in the Bible, and at the same time a contemporary extremist reader of the Qur’an might claim there is justification for killing everybody whom I don’t know.
“Instead of looking at the scripture, it’s more important to understand how the interpretive communities, the believers themselves, have been reading, and that should be the object of critique instead of the scriptures themselves, because these are ancient texts, they don’t speak for themselves, we the interpreters make them speak.”
Dr Kars said religious scholars would traditionally read the Qur’an in the context of asbab al nasur, or the occasions of revelation, in order to grasp the historical and situational context of a verse, which could determine its value to Islam.
“Historically the Qur’an has around 6600 verses and only around 300 of them have what we might see as verses that have legal consequences from a historical perspective,” he said.
“The Qur’an is a bit different in the sense that the verses are not revealed in the order that we see in the Qur’an, that is to say it’s not chronologic, and for that reason for each verse, even verses that follow each other, there are different contexts.
“That is generally omitted by somebody who is not familiar with what actually to expect from the Qur’an.”
‘Texts cannot be taken at face value’
University of Newcastle Emeritus Professor Terry Lovat told SBS News the Qur’an, like all ancient religious texts, should not be taken at face value, particularly when passages were taken out of context.
“The artisans of so-called Islamic State or Islamist radicals will take a little passage out of the Qur’an or something Muhammad has supposed to have said in the Sunnah, and conveniently leave out, for instance, Surah, or chapter 21 of the Qur’an: ‘We’ve not sent you except to be a provider of mercy and peace to all human kind’, or Surah 17 – and this is Allah, God himself, speaking: ‘And tell my servants that they should speak in a most kindly manner, even unto those who do not share their beliefs, we have not sent you with power to determine the faith of others’,” Professor Lovat said.
He also quoted, “Surah 53, ‘To you be your religion and to me be mine’, and in the Sunnah, Abu Dawud’s collection of Hadith, the Prophet himself, Muhammad himself, is quoted as saying: ‘Beware whoever is cruel and hard on a non-Muslim minority, or curtails their rights, or burdens them with more than they can bare, or takes anything from them against their free will I, the Prophet, will complain against that person on the day of judgment’.”
Professor Lovat said Christians had also been guilty of cherry picking Biblical phrases to justify their actions in the same way IS had done in the Middle East.
“A conservative Christian view will often be that the Old Testament’s full of violence, that the New Testament is all very peaceful,” he said.
“Well, no, not if you read passages like Matthew 10: ‘Do not think I’ve come to bring peace to the world; I’ve not come to bring peace but the sword’.
“That is a passage taken out of context that has been utilised by every lunatic, if I can put it that way, every radical Christian for at least 1000 years, back to the Christian crusaders; popes quoting that to justify going down into the so-called Holy Land and slaughtering as many Muslims as they could.
“Used by the Nazis to justify the beginnings of the Holocaust, used by the Ku Klux Klan to justify their wars on the blacks, used by the Dutch Reform Church in the times of Apartheid in South Africa.”
Professor Lovat agreed the historical contest of all religious texts must be taken into account when applying them to modern times.
“Those many different groups, individuals [who put together the texts], they had their own contexts, they were fighting wars, they were often up against some pretty vicious stuff that was being hurled at them, and they needed a strong discourse to convince the people that the God they were trying to promote was on their side not against them,” he said.
“The whole accumulation and final decision on what went into, or didn’t get into, any of the sacred cannons of any of the religions was a hugely political exercise apart from anything else.
“The last thing that we should do with the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qur’an or any sacred text is use them as some kind of a manual where you can just open a page, see a verse and pull it out and go and do whatever it’s telling you to do.
“They’re simply not constructed for that purpose.”
‘Mercy, tolerance and forgiveness’
In comparing violence, specifically in the Bible and the Qur’an, many commentators said the Bible’s violent passages related to specific stories while the Qur’an’s calls to violence were more general and open ended.
Professor Lovat rejected this argument, saying the Qur’an, like other religious texts, had violent passages in what was otherwise a largely pacifistic text.
“There’s actually stronger mercy, tolerance, forgiveness rhetoric in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, I would argue, than you would find in any one place in either the Old or New Testament,” he said.
“The Nazis, the apartheid mob, they made beautiful use of both the Old and the New Testaments and obviously the Islamists can do the same with the Qur’an, but not because there’s anything essentially different about the Qur’an from any other assembled, very political kind of sacred text.”
Professor Lovat said more religious education was needed at both school and university level to ensure the wider community had a greater understanding and appreciation of the context of religious texts.
He said better education was also needed to religious leaders to ensure they were leading their congregations in the best way possible.
Dr Kars said traditional Islam, informed by historical and political contexts, was at risk from the rise of more extreme and fundamental readings and the old educational structures were no longer there to guide Muslims.
“If Muslims had knowledge of their tradition, its transformation, its flexibility, I think that would be a very good way of showing them that the Qur’an is actually quite flexible and it can be read in many different ways throughout history,” he said.
“But what we see in this kind of absence of traditional ways of studying Islam we see the rise of neo-radicalised versions within that vacuum of authority and they claim that they are giving us back the original interpretation of their religion which is going back to the seventh century, which actually shows us how that entire heritage is actually disappearing within that interpretation.”
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of MuslimVillage.com.
