was tamerlan tsarnaev a “devout” muslim?

Religion Dispatches: Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev a “Devout” Muslim? by Sarah Posner

juan cole: terrorism and the other religions

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.

I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame.

Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)

Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo and is estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least.

Or, between 1916-1917 Tsarist Russian forces — facing the Basmachi revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian, European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and looted of much of their wealth. Russia at the time was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).

Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time when the population was only 11 million!

I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.

Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people killed by people of European Christian heritage in the twentieth century is an underestimate.

As for religious terrorism, that too is universal. Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a tactic more at some times than others. Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups. (Members at one point plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA) because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way, terrorism has declined among them. But it would likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way. In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have usurped is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered). 

Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were disturbed when a second bomb they had set did not go off, so that they did not wreak as much havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate Muslims.

Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.

 As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?

Despite the very large number of European Muslims, in 2007-2009 less than 1 percent of terrorist acts in that continent were committed by people from that community.

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.

Source

wise words in the wake of the boston bombing

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of pantheon of white people who engage in (or have plotted) politically motivated violence meant to terrorize — and specifically to kill — but whose actions result in the assumption of absolutely nothing about white people generally, or white Christians in particular.

Among these: Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and Joe Stack and George Metesky and Byron De La Beckwith and Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton and Herman Frank Cash and Robert Chambliss and James von Brunn and Lawrence Michael Lombardi and Robert Mathews and David Lane and Chevie Kehoe and Michael F. Griffin and Paul Hill and John Salvi and Justin Carl Moose and Bruce and Joshua Turnidge and James Kopp and Luke Helder and James David Adkisson and Scott Roeder and Shelley Shannon and Dennis Mahon and Wade Michael Page and Jeffery Harbin and Byron Williams and Charles Ray Polk and Willie Ray Lampley and Cecilia Lampley and John Dare Baird and Joseph Martin Bailie and Ray Hamblin and Robert Edward Starr III and William James McCranie Jr. and John Pitner and Charles Barbee and Robert Berry and Jay Merrell and Brendon Blasz and Carl Jay Waskom Jr. and Shawn and Catherine Adams and Edward Taylor Jr. and Todd Vanbiber and William Robert Goehler and James Cleaver and Jack Dowell and Bradley Playford Glover and Ken Carter and Randy Graham and Bradford Metcalf and Chris Scott Gilliam and Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder and Buford Furrow and Benjamin Smith and Donald Rudolph and Kevin Ray Patterson and Charles Dennis Kiles and Donald Beauregard and Troy Diver and Mark Wayne McCool and Leo Felton and Erica Chase and Clayton Lee Wagner and Michael Edward Smith and David Burgert and Robert Barefoot Jr. and Sean Gillespie and Ivan Duane Braden and Kevin Harpham and William Krar and Judith Bruey and Edward Feltus and Raymond Kirk Dillard and Adam Lynn Cunningham and Bonnell Hughes and Randall Garrett Cole and James Ray McElroy and Michael Gorbey and Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman and Frederick Thomas and Paul Ross Evans and Matt Goldsby and Jimmy Simmons and Kathy Simmons and Kaye Wiggins and Patricia Hughes and Jeremy Dunahoe and David McMenemy and Bobby Joe Rogers and Francis Grady and Cody Seth Crawford and Ralph Lang and Demetrius Van Crocker and Floyd Raymond Looker and Derek Mathew Shrout and Randolph Linn.

Ya know, just to name a few.
- Tim Wise

See also:

 Christian Terrorism

Anti-Abortion Violence

Domestic Terrorism in the United States

AlterNet: The Terrorists who Aren't in the News

'A Short List of Terror Plots Disrupted by Muslim Community Assistance

top ten ways islamic law forbids terrorism

Juan Cole: Top Ten Ways Islamic Law forbids Terrorism

juan cole and the concept of "enemy combatant"

Juan Cole: Is LindJohn's (Lindsay Graham and John McCain) notion of an Enemy Combatant Racist? points out the irony in how members of hate groups can commit acts of violence and Paul Curtis can even attempt to kill the President of the United States without anybody calling for them to be considered an enemy combatant.

peter king calls on fbi to put him under close surveillance and profile redheads

Juan Cole: Rep. Peter King Calls on FBI to put him under Close Surveillance and Profile Redheads is meant as satire but has more truth in it than King would like.

say no to shakira law

Pocho.com: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX): Beware of the Mexi-Muslim threat

that train is never late...

Huffington Post: Abdullah Faruque Says He Was Attacked, Called 'F**kin' Arab' In Bronx After Boston Bombing

"take five" pakistani style

game of thrones vs. brave new world

Here's where I'm "at" as a Muslim in regard to homosexuality: I accept the orthodox ruling that homosexual acts are forbidden. (Being straight, this isn't really any sort of special challenge) The Quran and hadith are abundantly clear on this point, more clear than the Bible in fact. For example, Bible-believers who want to argue that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is not really about homosexuality actually have some ammunition in passages such as:

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them, when I saw it [Ezekiel 16:49-50]

while in the Quran the men of Sodom are addressed differently saying: "Most surely you come to males in lust besides females; nay you are an extravagant people." [7.81] or again "What! do you indeed approach men lustfully rather than women? Nay, you are a people who act ignorantly." [27.55] 

At the same time, I also don't really have much of a visceral reaction ("ick response") to homosexuality either. And much of the time I find "natural law" type arguments unconvincing.

That said, the following thoughts recently occurred to me as a way of framing some of these issues: Suppose you are in a society where blood is thicker than water and people locate a great part of their identity in their biological families; e.g. Lannister, Stark, Capulet, Montague, Hattfield, McCoy (And many "traditional" stances assume this as an axiom). Then marriages don't just involve the couple getting married but they have political implications for both families (and so "arranged" marriages make a certain amount of sense). Furthermore, one of the important functions of marriage in such an environment is to create concrete natural connections between families through children (a new grandchild, cousin, etc. common to both sides).

But, in a really fundamental way, gay marriage can't play that role. Even when the gay couple "has" children, at least one family, possibly both, aren't getting a new blood relative. (and the child is possibly disconnected from some of its biological relatives). So from a traditional perspective, gay marriage is ultimately incomplete. Instead of being about families being joined, gay marriage is more fundamentally about the sex lives of the individual couple.

To be fair, people's feelings about marriage and family have been changing for a while now in various ways (e.g. towards greater individualism, increasing divorce rates, changing attitudes about adoption, limits on parental rights etc.) which probably has softened the ground for gay marriage. New reproductive technologies have allowed for surrogate mothers, sperm donors, egg donors to all be distinct from "mom" and "dad". Gay marriage is just one more thing bringing us one step closer towards Huxley's Brave New World where biological lineage and reproduction are separated from family and emotional relationships.

a muslim meditation on easter

RNS: Between Good Friday and Easter: A Muslim Meditation on Christ and Resurrection by Omid Safi is an interesting reflection on the Easter holiday. Safi's take on the subject strikes me as surprisingly "Christian". Over the years I've had my own thoughts on the subject, but have tended to put my energies into trying to make sense of the docetism of "they neither killed him, nor crucified him".
see also: good friday
the cross and the lynching tree
muslim easter hymn
day after day after day
easter memories