Reply to Muslim death threat!

I got a lot of comments yesterday about my article telling the story of the Muslim guy who converted to Christianity and recieved death threats because of it!

What made it so scary was that this guy didn't live in the Middle East or even Europe, he lived right here North America in good of "white bread" Oklahoma!

Most of the comments were naturally from Muslims who claimed that Islam is the literal word of God and ALSO that Islam NOT a religion of violence etc. etc!

Rather than go into a long dissertation about their objections on a point by point bases, I am going to give your a quote from my book "The Plain Truth About God" which should sum it up fairly well!

Where we run into a problem is that, as in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, there is no actual copy of the Koran that can be said to have come directly from the hands of Mohammed.

The earliest written record of the Koran (and the 45 scribes who supposedly documented it) was written in the biography of Mohammed by a certain Ibn Ishaq who wrote Sirat Rasul Allah, (The life of the Prophet of God) about 100 years after the death of the prophet Mohammed!

From this point on, it gets even hazier since there is no actual record of this document as well, but rather, it is extensively quoted in an even later work by al-Tabari who lived close to 200 years after the death of Ibn Ishaq.

Suddenly we have a space of 350 years (close to 1000 C.E.) that cannot be properly documented.

With this in mind we can look back to about 620 C.E. when Mohammed, (or someone like him,) started on a campaign of dominance.

Here in less than 100 years, Arab tribesmen, riding on horseback, emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain.

Now the great question we have to ask here is whether the Arab armies were fuelled during their expansion by religious fever; or was the religion “spiced up” during the 350 years where it was not documented properly.

In other words, was this re-vamping of Islam the manipulations of a politically dominant group whose aim was to establish a religious justification for Arab imperialism?

Or was it based on a religion that advocated the expansion of its ideals by force?

Don’t forget, during the first 200 years of this great expansion Arab conquerors were a minority against a non-Moslem majority.

Then, once the Arabs had acquired a sizable empire—a coherent religion was necessary in order to hold that empire together.

(Note: in the long run, over the centuries, the main purpose of any religion, once it had gone beyond the “sect” stage, was to perpetuate itself and also act as a glue to hold the empire together. See the chapter on "Memes!")

So once again, was the religion in place and acting as the fuel for Arab hegemony, or was it the glue that was manufactured “after the fact” to hold the whole empire together.

This is a question that will never be properly answered - as it is now lost in the mists of time.

However, we can draw certain inferences from it.

One of the facts that we have to consider is that while Christianity was founded on the premise of “love” for others, the main driving force behind Islam is that it was bound up in war and aggression from its very inception.

As a result, no matter how close or far from the intended message of the Koran it was, portions of it were always used to justify an Arab extremist and expansionist view.

History has now given us an almost unbroken string of militant Islamic movements from the “Assassins” of the 11th-12th century to the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

(Even if he is technically a Persian and not Arab.)

The crusades were the first catalyst that got Islam to “rally round the flag” in Middle East terms and the second was the Mongol invasion shortly after.

Arab society became full of hatred to both Eastern and Western invaders. Many lives were lost and cultures destroyed before the infidels were defeated by the religiously mobilized Islamic armies.

So there ya have it kids, do with it what you will!

Allan W Janssen is the author of the book The Plain Truth About God (What the mainstream religions don't want you to know......!) and is available as an E-Book H E R E! and H E R E! And as a paperback H E R E ! and H E R E !