I've long linked to this blog and sometimes I've highlighted particular posts as exemplary.
Recently I made a comment and out of the blue I was invited to join it. I don't know whether that was a mistake, because many of my own posts are highly and pungently critical of some aspects of Islam - or at least some of its supporters - but here's my first post to see if I can find out something I consider to be very important , and it's a question about what is for me the crux of the Islam/religion of peace controversy.
What allows all you pious, observant Muslims to eschew violent jihad and taqiyya against us non-believers? What makes you the peaceful people that you are and lets you stay faithful to Islam at the same time?
This question may seem to be insulting and hostile to Muslims but it isn't meant to be so and so please bear with me while I explain myself... and then tear my arguments to shreds in the comments section if need be.
I'm not asking why so many of my fellow human beings who happen to be Muslim neither try to subvert nor enslave their predominantly non-Muslim homelands; nor do they lie to their neighbours about any intention to pursue jihad at some more propitious time. It takes no explaining or justification that a majority of pretty much any group mostly wants to get on with their lives without deliberately hurting anyone else - it's a common feature of human nature after all - though sadly not a universal one.
I don't expect most of my Muslim neighbours her in north-west England to be plotting mayhem or savagery against the rest of us, or even oppression against those in their own religious communities. They get on with life running shops or teaching in schools and colleges or cooking or driving taxis or selling mobile phones or nursing in our hospitals, and it doesn't surprise me or alarm me that they do so - 'just folks,' and all that...
BUT - and this is where the politics comes in - some students of Islam whom I read and admire (such as Robert Spencer and Melanie Phillips ) say that the Koran is held to be the perfect and definitive word of God; incapable of amendment or improvement.
How does the Koran's clear and open-ended injunctions to faithful Muslims to wage war against infidels: some quotations here, and here; or which permanently demean unbelievers here (all collected from the strongly anti-Islam website The Religion Of Peace, ) square with both the faithfulness and the peacefulness of most Muslims in the West?
It is quotations like these that the head-hackers and bombers use to justify their killings, and I believe it is such writings that provide the original motivations of such crimes.
But they are the bad guys. I'm asking about the good guys here.
As I say, I'm not surprised when my Muslim countrymen leave me unharmed and in peace, but how do they and you, the believing Muslims who are Muslims Against Sharia contributors get around what Mohammed quite clearly has reported in the Koran, and what the Hadith and Sunna also report Mohammed as having said or done or enjoined on the faithful to do?
How does a decent - or how do scores of millions of decent Muslims - go to work, pray, live alongside their non-Muslim fellows in amity or peaceful competition, and ignore the supposedly unimpeachable but bloodthirsty or cruel passages of the Islamic trilogy?
What makes you as soppy as me and Episcopalians and Jews?
It's not the decency I don't understand - only how it triumphs over what seems to me and to many others to be very clear and oppressive notions?
Where's your 'Stop sign?'
Cards on the table about me here. I'm a Right-wing (by British standards) conservative and a willing follower of a formerly violent and cruel religion called heathenry, which was once suppressed and later wiped out by Christians throughout Europe, but which has now revived as a much gentler ( I'm glad to say) and tolerant minority cult of tree-huggers in parts of Europe and North America.
This is where I'm coming from, just so you know.