Does Islam Promote Peace? Of Course!

INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, after September 11th, in an age when prejudice against Muslims runs rampant in America, countless people are now trying to rationalize their unwarranted hate by writing articles which misapply and/or misquote verses from the Koran in an attempt to show that it is a basic teaching of Islam that non-Muslims must be dominated and/or killed. It has become so common now that every such article is almost identical, and as such a refutation of Answering Islam’s typically deceptive attempt to debunk an unassailable religion should be a sufficient answer to them all, and an exposition of the likely dishonesty that goes into ripping these verses out of context.

And I’m not some amateur Christian inerrantist who says, “That’s out of context!” and doesn’t explain how. No, I’m going to expose some quite probably deliberate deception that is a hallmark of Answering Islam as well as a number of skeptic’s similar “Is Islam Really a Religion of Peace?” articles. I’ll also expose the out-of-context verses others quote to make Islam look militant: this “Islam promotes terrorism” s**t has gotta stop

WELL, IS ISLAM A RELIGION OF PEACE?

First, let me point these things out. Making peace between people, according to Koran 2:224, is a virtue. The Koran is meant (amongst other things) to bring inner peace, according to 20:47. MAKING PEACE WITH AN UNBELIEVER IS A MARK OF A TRUE BELIEVER ACCORDING TO 25:63. Allah is the bringer of peace according to 59:23. Even the word “Islam” is related to (derived from, some say) the Arabic word for “peace”, “salaam”. Does that not sound to you like this is a religion of peace?

But no, Answering Islam with their lying ways has to say otherwise in their lying ways at http://answering-islam.org/TWOR/ peacepromoting.html, one of their most disgusting articles ever. Their article starts on an ignorant note, when they say:

For the record, let me say that Jesus Christ taught his followers to "love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you." (Injil, Matthew 5:44 NKJV).

This is apparently meant to be contrasted with the Koran, but the Koran says the same thing:

41:34 Not equal are the good deed and the evil deed. Repel with that which is fairer and behold, he between whom and thee thereis enmity shall be as if he were a loyal friend.

They ask the question:

Now let us get on with our subject: DOES ISLAM PROMOTE PEACE? If so, what kind of peace?

Both inner and outer peace, as I have pointed out.

Then they get to the deceptive misapplying of the Koran’s verses, that same old same old misapplying that I’m getting awfully tired of. Now watch as I add context and these verses transform before your very eyes...presto!

“As for those who are slain in the cause of God, He will not allow their works to perish. ... He will admit them to the Paradise He has made known to them.”

(47:4-6)

Yes, if you are martyred, you will automatically go to Paradise. But the Koran consistently refers to the approved fighting as being against persecutors, as the original Muslims were persecuted throughout the Prophet’s (peace be on him) lifetime. This article itself points out earlier, in its introduction to its list of deceptive misapplications of verses, these verses from the Koran:

"Fight for the sake of God those that fight against you, but do not attack them first. God does not love the aggressors. Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is more grievous than bloodshed.... Fight against them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme."

2:256 which says: "Let there be no compulsion in religion.”

So what’s the matter? Why can’t they put these verses together in their heads to arrive at the following equation: do not be an aggressor + no compulsion in religion + fighting an oppressive fight to die in God’s way = not dying in God’s way? When I say “they”, I mean both the author of this article. The purpose of the article is to show that Islam is not a religion of peace, but it proves itself wrong right there! They indavertently answer their own question: “What leads young men to volunteer to die for the privilege of killing others ‘for the cause of Allah’?” By the verses they’ve cited themselves, it is not by the cause of Allah, so it is obviously unIslamic political influences. I get asked the same question myself a lot and that’s the answer. I just don’t understand why this is so hard to grasp for so many people!

THE KORANIC VERSES ANSWERING ISLAM HAS TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT

Now let’s move on to the misapplied Koranic verses:

"Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God; whether he dies or triumphs, We shall richly reward him. ... The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan ..."

(4:74,76)

As I said, all you have to do is add some context and watch it transform before your very eyes. Now they quote 4:74 and 4:76. Why did they leave out 4:75? Because it exposes their deception:

4:75 How is it with you, that you do not fight in the way of God, and for the men, women and children who, being abased, say, “Our Lord, bring us forth from this city whose people are evildoers, and appoint to us from Thee a helper’?

So as you can see, if your people are being abased and stuck in a city of evildoers (in this case, Arabs and Jews who were persecuting the early Muslims), then fight in the way of God. The same applies to the next quote, which is just a few verses later:

“The believers who stay at home––apart from those that suffer a grave impediment––are not the equals of those who fight for the cause of God with their goods and their persons. God has given those that fight with their goods and their persons a higher rank than those who stay at home ...”

(4:95,96)

Next we get a very popular misapplied verse. This is one of the most commonly seen ones.

“Slay the idolaters wherever you find them. ... lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way ...”

(9:5)

Now here are the conveniently left out verses following:

9:6 And if any of the idolaters seeks of thee protection, grant him protection till he hears the words of God; then do thou convey him to his place of security--that, because they are a people who do not know.

9:7 How should the idolaters have a covenant with God and His Messenger--excepting those with whom you made covenant at the Holy Mosque; so long as they go straight with you, do you go straight with them; surely God loves the godfearing.

9:8 How? If they get the better of you, they will not observe towards you any bond or treaty, giving you satisfaction with their mouthts but in their hearts refusing; and the most of them are ungodly.

9:9 They have sold the signs of God for a small price, and have barred from His way; truly evil is that they have been doing,

9:10 Observing neither bond nor treaty towards a believer; they are the transgressors.

9:11 Yet if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then they are your brothers in religion; and We distinguish the signs for a people who know.

9:12 Will you not fight a people who broke their oaths and purposed to expel the Messenger, beginning the first time against you? Are you afraid of them? You would do better to be afraid of God, if you are believers.

This also applies to a verse from the same context they quote later:

"Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given ... and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued."

(9:29)

The next verse is not misapplied but simply assumed to be more brutal than American methods of punishment:

“Those that make war against God and His apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land. They shall be held up to shame in this world and sternly punished in the hereafter: except those that repent before you reduce them ...”

(5:34,35)

Yes, those are the punishments, in varying degrees of extremities, and they are opposed to what? Sending people to a prison where they will quite possibly be mutilated, beaten, raped repeatedly, tortured or murdered, and depriving their family of them, even if the culprit is the provider of the family, for years, punishing all the loved ones who did nothing. American punishment is more brutal than most Americans know. In any case these punishments were for the persecutors of the early Muslims, as the verse states, and as far as I know the death penalty is the only punishment which remains in every Islamic country.

The next verse they quote is suspiciously poorly translated, judging by the comparison of it to all the most respected translations of the Koran by Muslims and non-Muslims alike (remember that the translation I always use, Arberry’s, is a non-Muslim’s one):

“Make war on them until idolatry shall cease and God’s religion shall reign supreme”

(8:39)

Here is the correct version of the verse:

8:39 Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is God’s entirely; then if they give over, surely God sees the things they do.

The next verse they quote is about the same war (against the oppressors at Madinah)...

“Prophet, rouse the faithful to arms. If there are twenty steadfast men among you, they shall vanquish two hundred; and if there are a hundred, they shall rout a thousand unbelievers, for they are devoid of understanding.”

(8:65)

...and this very important verse is between the two verses they quoted:

8:56 Those of them with whom thou hast made compact then they break their compact every time, not being godfearing.

OTHER COMMONLY MISAPPLIED VERSES

Let me get this out of the way here, expose some other out of context verses that other people are always using for these ends but which were not mentioned in this article. First, there’s 66:9, which is always quoted in part: “Struggle with the unbelievers and hypocrites, and be thou harsh with them; their refuge shall be Gehenna--an evil homecoming!” The verse actually begins with, “O Prophet”, so that it was a command to Muhammad (peace be on him) and not to us. Another verse quoted in part is 47:4, which is always quoted as, “When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds.” The part these anti-Islamic folk conveniently leave out follows: “Then set them free, either by grace or ransom, till the war lays down its loads.” Till the war lays down its loads. In other words, until the other people stop! This was from a surah revealed during the flight of the early Muslims from their Meccan persecutors.

Finally, there’s 25:52, which says, “Obey not the unbelievers, but struggle with them thereby mightily.” The omitted verse before it says, “If We had willed, We would have raised up in every city a warner.” What city is it referring to? Mecca again: that’s when this surah was revealed, more persecution by the Meccans.

ALL THOSE “ISLAMIC” COUNTRIES....

The next section of Answering Islam’s article can be summed up by the following quote:

There is no country in the world that exemplifies true Islam. Yet Islam claims to be a religion that has the answers for society, a religion that offers peace and wholeness.

It certainly offers a lot of peace and wholeness to me. The article said earlier:

Just as there are many who call themselves Muslims who do not live according to the teachings of Muhammad, it is safe to say that many who call themselves "Christians" do not live according to the teachings of Christ.

So what’s the problem? The article even complains about America being an amoral “Christian country”, and I can think of North Ireland as a shining example of a “Christian country” where terrorism is a way of life. Why do these connections never occur to the Christians who point out all these things? Something else I just don’t understand.

“MUHAMMAD’S EXAMPLE”

After an irrelevant anecdotes and another verse from surah 9 about the same thing the other verses were about, a hadith is quoted which indeed makes Muhammad (peace be on him) look cruel:

"A group of eight men from the tribe of 'Ukil came to the Prophet and then they found the climate of Medina unsuitable for them. So, they said, ‘O Allah's Apostle! Provide us with some milk.’ Allah's Apostle said, ‘I recommend that you should join the herd of camels.’ So they went and drank the urine and the milk of the camels (as a medicine) till they became healthy and fat. Then they killed the shepherd and drove away the camels, and they became unbelievers after they were Muslims. When the Prophet was informed by a shouter for help, he sent some men in their pursuit, and before the sun rose high, they were brought, and he had their hands and feet cut off. Then he ordered for nails which were heated and passed over their eyes, and they were left in the Harra (i.e. rocky land in Medina). They asked for water, and nobody provided them with water till they died."

(Hadith, Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 261: Narrated by Anas bin Malik.)

What kind of an example is this? A false example. Why? Because to us, any hadith which contradicts the Koran is a false one. The ahadith are not infallible, and are judged by the Koran. The Koran depicts the prophets as being pure and sinless. Sahih Bukhari is, from what I’ve learned, the least respectable source of ahadith. This hadith is not repeated, as more trustworthy ones usually are. I’d say it’s out. Not that I’m anything near an expert at assessing hadith, but this is my article, after all. As I point out in my article on the blessed Jesus in the Bible and in the Koran on this site’s “Bible and Koran” page, nasty actions were also slanderously attributed to Jesus (peace be on him).

WAS ISLAM SPREAD BY THE SWORD? AND IF IT WAS, DOES THIS COMPARE TO THE OLD TESTAMENT CONQUESTS?

I really do not care if Islam was spread by the sword, since the spreading in question happened after the blessed Prophet’s death and thus was not under his supervision. His time has occupied for most of his life simply fleeing from persecutors. The fact is, Islam was spread in part by the sword, but so was Christianity. So what of it? As Answering Islam’s article said earlier, there are people who corrupt both religions. To make a religion into an excuse for war against its wishes (and I have already proven that it is in Islam’s case against its wishes) is just in human nature for some people. It’s done with just about every religion.

Does it compare to the Old Testament conquests? All I know is that, as I have shown, the Koran tells you to make war only on your persecutors, whereas the Old Testament involves conquest in which God orders:

Now go and smite Am’alek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (1 Samuel 15:3)

Try to find a place in the Koran where God orders the killing of babies to anyone at war. I dare you.

TREATMENT OF APOSTATES

Yes, there are ahadith telling you that apostates must be executed--but as I’ve said before, the Islamic rule is that if a hadith contradicts the Koran, it is false, and the Koran says, “No compulsion is there in religion. Rectitude has become clear from error.” (2:256)

TREATMENT OF WOMEN

If there is anything anti-Islamic people are oh so stubborn about, it is refusing to believe that the Koran is very tolerant toward women. It gives them divorce and inheritance rights that they didn’t get in America until the twentieth century. The command to beat wives is a mistranslation, as Osama Abdallah points out at answering-christianty.com. Do a word search there for “wife-beating” and find the article for the “no beating” theory and you’ll see what I think is irrefutable evidence for the mistranslation of the verse. Answering Islam’s article says:

The New Testament Scriptures teach that "husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church." (Eph 5:28,29)

Yes, St. Paul did say that, and he also said:

Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty. (1 Timothy 2:11-15)

There’s no way out of it: when it comes to women in the Bible vs. women in the Koran, women in the Koran win by a mile.

THE MUSLIM’S RELATIONSHIP TO GOD

That’s right: God is essentially unknowable yet closer to us than our jugular vein. We cannot have a personal relationship with God as we can with a human, simply because He is God and never was a human. We Muslims never have a problem with this, because we can see clearly: God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, morally perfect, beyond everything, above everything. Therefore we can have no personal, humanoid relationship with Him, although we can have a sort of subject-ruler relationship with Him, and He sometimes answers our prayers. No problem there, just common sense.

The article then says:

Muslims are quick to say, "We believe all the prophets!" and "We believe in Jesus! He was a great prophet!" In response to these statements, I ask my Muslim friends, "What does it mean to believe a prophet? Does it not mean to understand and believe their message? And where do we find the message of the prophets? Is it not in the Scriptures of the prophets?"

It’s in the Koran, which records the teachings of most of the prophets, without a single mistake. After this the article goes on with that same old “the Koran endorses the Bible, show me where it says the Bible is corrupt” thing that I’ve answered already in other articles, then goes on with nonsense I’ve also refuted elsewhere on this site that there are no major corruptions in the Bible, then with nonsense about some ill-supported “central message” of the whole Bible that Jesus (peace be on him) was to die, in which the author finally even resorts to shouting (apparently being so frustrated with his or her inability to come up with a new argument against Islam that hasn’t been thrashed into oblivioun on a thousand Islamic pages that now he or she must shout):

Dear friend, if Jesus did not die on the cross, then please tell me, WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE ANIMAL SACRIFICE? And WHY ALL THE PROPHECIES ABOUT A SUFFERING MESSIAH? And WHY DID JESUS HIMSELF KEEP TELLING HIS DISCIPLES THAT HE WOULD BE CRUCIFIED AND BE RAISED AGAIN THE THIRD DAY? I invite you to read Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 for starters—two Old Testament passages which predict with precision how the Messiah would suffer and die as a sacrificial payment for the sins of the world. God is holy and His holiness requires that sins be paid for. "The payment for sin is death!"—NOT good works—but death and eternal separation from God! Jesus died in our place. He took our hell, so that God can count us righteous and allow us to live with Him forever.

The answers are: (1) A sacrifice is a literal sacrifice, a waste of an animal you could have used in order to show your devotion to your god--that’s just common knowledge in religion outside Christianity; (2) There are zero prophecies about a “suffering Messiah”, as a new page I’m planning will show; and (3) I, like most Muslims, do not take the historicity of the Gospels in the Bible for granted, so I don’t know that he said that. If God chooses to forgive me, no one need take my hell. What kind of wretch would forgive you but then still have to punish someone? Of all the many, many Christians I’ve brought that point to, not one has ever given me a satisfactory answer, and I’d be shocked to death if one ever did. Once again, it’s just common sense, the sort of common sense which Christian doctrine lacks. Finally, the Koran repeatedly says that faith AND good works are what get you saved.

Does Islam promote peace? How can it promote true peace when it denies the very means God has provided to establish a lasting peace between God and man, and between man and man?

This is really what they have to resort to by this point, because once again I think the author probably knows deep down inside that his or her points have been brought up again and again elsewhere and answered with utmost logic and tact again and again by Muslims. What establishes a lasting peace between God and man is man’s submission to God, and what establishes a lasting peace between man and man is their willingness to work for it, which as I’ve pointed out earlier, is promoted thoroughly by the Koran. Islam is a religion of peace and there’s nothing anyone can do to change the obviousness of that fact, regardless of how much they deceive, repeat and shout.