Intolerance Within The Qu'ran and the Future of Islam
Reader comment on item: The Triumph Of the 9/11 Commission

Submitted by Tanru (United States), Jul 27, 2004 at 16:38

The article correctly states that intolerance and a totalitarian ideology is not a corruption of Islam but comes from within Islam. That is because intolerance comes from within the Qu'ran. Surah 9 and particularly Ayah (Verse) 30 where all Chistians are Jews are explicitly and without qualification wished dead.

There may be a struggle within the Islamic World for control. But there is little evidence that any force for moderation opposes the forces of radicalism on the basis of another view of the Qu'ran and Islam. Rather, the only struggle that is evident is between rather unpopular pragmatic power elites who water down Islamic zeal in the name of business and survival and the radicals who wish to unseat them and use the resources of the Middle East against the West. Clearly the radicals have the upper hand in making their religious case.

The West must support moderation, if it exists, or any other alternative to radicalism within Islam. But the West cannot be held hostage to the outcome of a fight in which it is merely a "bystander", as the article calls America. The alternative to Islamic moderation is clearly not acquiescence to a hostile, violent and unstable Muslim World, nor is it conversion to Islam. The future of Islam depends on adopting a view of the Qu'ran that essentially strips out its intolerant passages because the alternative is the annihilation of the Muslim World as a whole.

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