[TheMuslimAgorist]

"9:5 Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)."



Sounds scary right? It's known as "The Verse of the Sword", and admittedly many Muslims have used this verse to justify their corrupt intentions. However, it does not establish a doctrine of perpetual violent jihad against all non-Muslims for all time, as the Anti-Muslim Brain Trust would have you believe. I will show this, and then we'll discuss some principles which I believe can be derived from this verse and it's context.



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[snoopy]

Unfortunately you find that Muslims get confused about the meaning because they lack of the necessary, understandable exegesis - which luckily I have 'The Message of the Qur'an' by Muhammad Asad goes into great detail about these versus. Now he does highly contextualise it by relegating such events as being a historical event with direct commands only to Muhammad rather than generalised declarations that Muslims today take upon themselves to act out - hence the accusations of him being a Mutazillite comes from. I have to admit if I was a Muslim I'd probably take the highly contextualised religious evolutionary stance that a Mutazillite versus how mainstream Muslims would understand it. Viewing it as a historical book rather than an 'all times and all places' set of instructions.

[TheMuslimAgorist]

Someone once called me a Mutazillite Apostate. I thought that was pretty clever. The Mutazillites are called the Islamic Rationalists. If we reject them we either have to concede that mainstream Islam is irrational, or we have to critique some part of the Mutazillite methodology as irrational and continue forward as the true Islamic Rationalists.

I personally don't find these distinctions useful. "Muslim" works fine for me. I'll say and behave according to what I believe as true, and I'll change my position when superior evidence reaches me. When people try to brow beat me with their "accepted" beliefs, but lack the evidence to prove it to me, I consider that their problem, not my problem.

[snoopy]

Someone once called me a Mutazillite Apostate. I thought that was pretty clever. The Mutazillites are called the Islamic Rationalists. If we reject them we either have to concede that mainstream Islam is irrational, or we have to critique some part of the Mutazillite methodology as irrational and continue forward as the true Islamic Rationalists.

I personally don't find these distinctions useful. "Muslim" works fine for me. I'll say and behave according to what I believe as true, and I'll change my position when superior evidence reaches me. When people try to brow beat me with their "accepted" beliefs, but lack the evidence to prove it to me, I consider that their problem, not my problem.

I'm working through the discourse between Al-Ghazali (Incoherence of the philosophers) and Ibn-Rushd (Incoherence of the incoherence) and to be quite frank Al-Ghazali comes across like a undisciplined child where Ibn-Rushd command of the subject is beautiful and articulate. Maybe it is my western background and immersing into Greek-Roman philosophy but Ibn-Rushd provides a coherent argument where Al-Ghazali sounds like a politically motivated rant off the back of expunging 'foreign elements' out of Islam. Funny enough he decries Greek-Roman philosophy and yet he embraces the very tools from those whom he denounces. Very much in the same way that Michel Foucault decrying the enlightenment and yet using the very tools provided by it in the critique of it.

When I read many of the writings form the heavy weights of Mutazillite thought and I hear criticism directed at them, I can't help but come to the conclusion that those who criticise Mutazillite fail to understand the basic axioms on which their movement is based upon. One example is the accusation that they deny the attributes of God because they don't take the attributes as mentioned in the Qur'an literally. The hand of God is a metaphor for divine will - for example. Then there is the issue of intervention and freewill - the accusation against Mutazillite is that they deny God intervening (predestination, divine will etc) from the position of 'capability' when Mutazillite will argue that God has the capacity to do something but chooses not to. A divine being can not contradict itself or otherwise it isn't a divine being.

As for my position, as I've said in the past, if I were ever to become a Muslim I'd probably be a Mutazillite - and irritate a lot of the orthodox Muslims in the process.

This post has been edited by snoopy: 18 May 2010 - 09:40 PM

[AbdMahdi12]

Someone once called me a Mutazillite Apostate. I thought that was pretty clever. The Mutazillites are called the Islamic Rationalists. If we reject them we either have to concede that mainstream Islam is irrational, or we have to critique some part of the Mutazillite methodology as irrational and continue forward as the true Islamic Rationalists.

I personally don't find these distinctions useful. "Muslim" works fine for me. I'll say and behave according to what I believe as true, and I'll change my position when superior evidence reaches me. When people try to brow beat me with their "accepted" beliefs, but lack the evidence to prove it to me, I consider that their problem, not my problem.

Asalaam Alaykom brother,

are you not the one whom gave yourself the label and not others?



Allah bless you always