@J.J Philips
Qur'an 5:33. "The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter."[/b]
My Answer
Hey listen to me the verse you quote is true If some will did war against Islam or say something about Muhammad (SAW) then he/she will be killed by muslims and he will no more in this world..
Let me ask one thing ? Suppose if someone did war against the one whom you believe ? What you can do ??
I suspect you use the word "war" very differently than I do. There's a huge difference between someone killing a Muslim and someone mocking Muhammed.
I defend the right of people to say things I disagree with. I get the impression this is difficult for Muslims to understand. Of course, obviously, I might argue with people I disagree with, but I wouldn't kill them.
I don't mind if murderers get killed. You could say that the Muslims who murdered the Charlie Hebdo artists committed an "act of war" against something I believe in (freedom of expression). And I'm glad they were eventually killed. I watched the video of French police repeatedly shooting Amedy Coulibaly and enjoyed it. I wish all Nazi murderers like him were violently killed on camera. In a variety of ways, of course. Otherwise it would get boring.
Freedom of thought and freedom of expression are ideas that became very important in the West during the past centuries. If you'd like a good summation for how and why they are important, I recommend reading Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty. He even discusses the specific example of allowing people to speak out against religious doctrines. There are a lot of interesting passages. Here's one:
But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not suppressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions: the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dolcino was put down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was successful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and, most likely, would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died. Persecution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too strong a party to be effectually persecuted. No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire. It spread, and became predominant, because the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm not aware of any time or place in the history of Islam in which there was even
the idea that people should be free to express unpopular ideas (e.g., atheism). I suspect the idea still sounds so foreign to Muslims that they simply can't understand it. They can't get past the idea that
of course people who insult Muhammed should be put to death. Anything else sounds crazy.
Not that the West is perfect. I think the West is going through a scary period in which expressing certain "politically incorrect" ideas can get people punished by law. I'm thinking specifically of people who vocally oppose gay marriage. I don't care about gay marriage, but I care about people's right to freely express their ideas. (The term "gaystapo" used to sound funny to me; now it sounds accurate.) The rush to blame the youtube video "The Innocence of Muslims" after Benghazi in 2012 also makes it clear that people are not legally free in the West to speak out against Islam. In some parts of the West mentioning bad things about Muhammed is considered Islamophobia and is actually
illegal.
This thread has largely been about denying that Jihadis committed the September 11 attacks. It's obvious to me (and many others) that Jihadis committed the September 11 attacks. But I don't think people who think differently should be silenced. They should be argued with. People should present evidence and other people should poke holes in their evidence. That's one way knowledge is obtained, precisely through this kind of debate.
To be honest, though, I think Muslims should fear freedom of expression. Most of their beliefs are ridiculous, and that becomes clear when people are free to talk openly about those beliefs. If there weren't this politically correct taboo against criticizing Islam, Islam would probably be seen as like Scientology. Except where Scientology was created by a science fiction writer, Islam was created by a 7th century illiterate.