A few hours with the Koranists

Nadia Choudhury, Jacqueline DeVeaux, Yasin Ali Bhatti, Farouk Peru

http://www.quranists.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Invitation2011withbannerfinal2.doc.pdf

https://www.facebook.com/events/223451914389560/

I thought it was going to be quite dull.  I was one of the people supposed to be speaking but was pulled because there was not enough time.

My speech would have been along these lines.

HOW TO ESTABLISH A BRITISH CALIPHATE IN ONE EASY STEP, WITHOUT CONVERTING A SINGLE SOUL

What is this first step?

The Koran is generally acknowledged to be a great work of literature, even by non-Muslims.

It is also said to be the direct word of God.

If that is so, it should be regarded as a contract between God and Man.

It promises to be a warning and a guide for mankind and warrants that its guidance will keep man peaceful and at peace with himself, but only if its directions are followed.

While it is said to be a religion of peace, it is also a religion of war – a war against evil and oppression, idolatry and irrationality, intoxication and sexual licence.  

This being so, it would benefit law students to study such a divine contract, whether or not they are Muslim as it would usefully add to their legal knowledge and drafting skills.

Even if Koranic knowledge were acquired reluctantly, just for the utilitarian purpose of passing a law exam and getting a law degree, it is very likely that the law student who goes on to becomes a legal practitioner will apply Koranic principles either consciously or unconsciously when interpreting and applying the law.

An example of this is seen in the case of Donoghue v Stevenson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donoghue_v_Stevenson which promoted the Christian principle of love thy neighbour.  The Koran has a similar principle too.

004.036
YUSUFALI: Serve Allah, and join not any partners with Him; and do good- to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, those in need, neighbours who are near, neighbours who are strangers, the companion by your side, the wayfarer (ye meet), and what your right hands possess: For Allah loveth not the arrogant, the vainglorious;-
PICKTHAL: And serve Allah. Ascribe no thing as partner unto Him. (Show) kindness unto parents, and unto near kindred, and orphans, and the needy, and unto the neighbour who is of kin (unto you) and the neighbour who is not of kin, and the fellow-traveller and the wayfarer and (the slaves) whom your right hands possess. Lo! Allah loveth not such as are proud and boastful,
SHAKIR: And serve Allah and do not associate any thing with Him and be good to the parents and to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the neighbor of (your) kin and the alien neighbor, and the companion in a journey and the wayfarer and those whom your right hands possess; surely Allah does not love him who is proud, boastful;

There will doubtless be skeptics and Islamophobes who will have to be persuaded of the wisdom of adopting such a course, which they will find objectionable and controversial.

To counter them, simply form a Koran Book Club and offer generous prizes to non-Muslims only, preferably intellectuals who are known Islamohobes eg Douglas Murray, to write essays that confirm what has been said above.

The Caliphate should be fully mature in about two decades, I predict.    

Koranism is basically rejecting any Hadith that contradicts the Koran.  The problem for Muslims that they have over the centuries preferred the corrupt practice of asking scholars what they think the Koran says because they have been told that the Koran is too difficult for them to understand and interpret or are too lazy or illiterate to read it.   The scholars assume the role of experts who cannot be questioned or contradicted.

An example would be how the penalty for apostasy.  The Koran quite clearly says that it is something for God to deal with, while the Hadiths says the penalty is death.   

The Koran does not mention any punishment that involves stoning adulterers to death, but the Hadith prefers the harsher Old Testament ways of doing things.   

Of course, when you question these Muslims, they will say such practices have been sanctified by tradition and who is anyone to question their traditions, which would be heresy!

The trouble is that much of what non-Muslims find objectionable about Islam do not come from the Koran at all, but the Hadith.   The Koran is of course the primary source of the Word of God, while the Hadith is just stories (of varying reliability) of what the prophet said and did.   The Koran does not tell us to hero-worship Muhammad, but commends itself as a warning and guide to man.  

But it is easier to hero-worship someone than to practice his teachings.  The Buddha himself had the same problem.

Koranism, for me, is back to basics.   Indeed, I would prefer such a practice to be called Islamic fundamentalism rather than the beard and burqa stoning to death kind of fundamentalism.  As far as I am   concerned, the Koran is tightly-drafted enough to be interpreted literally without doing injustice to humanity and reason.   

I was therefore a little taken aback to be told that homosexuality is not a sin by Farouk Peru, and someone else who took exception to my insistence that no other interpretation could be made of those verses other than that the Koran disapproved of homosexuality and calls for its punishment.  (I say this as someone who is atheist, has no desire to punish homosexuals if they are not exhibitionist and recruiting, but who cannot escape the plain ordinary meaning of the words of those verses.  If Farouk and the others wish to put their case that claims homosexuality is not considered a sin, then they should make it clearly and coherently.)

What I regard as the intellectual dishonesty of those trying to claim the opposite (either because they are homosexual themselves, or because they want to sell Islam to the current liberal political establishment in a cultural environment that worships sexual licence with indecent fanaticism) did not fill me with confidence for the Koranist movement, and I fear it will fall into the liberal practice of fudging and mudging issues, in rather the same way that the Orthodox Jews have been n interpreting the harsher Old Testament verses right of existence.

I find I am now in the position of being denounced by two Orthodox Jews for my criticism of SSMs http://thebattlefieldoflove.blogspot.com/2009/11/3-degrees-of-culpability-in-single.html, when I am sure in a different age they would have approved of my stance, so corrupted are they too by the unquestioning practice of sexual liberation in the West.  Nowadays, you even have Orthodox Jewish rabbis marrying same sex couples.

http://972mag.com/orthodox-rabbi-marries-gay-couple-in-washington-dc/27424/

"O tempora!  O mores!",  as they used to say in Ancient Rome.

Not that the Chinese are not also now on their way to racial degeneracy with their one-child policy and their demographic time bomb ticking away.   "Those two are comrades" would be how the modern Chinese now refer to same-sex couples.

Below are the relevant verses commonly supposed to concern the punishment for homosexual acts. 

004.015 
YUSUFALI: If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, Take the evidence of four (Reliable) witnesses from amongst you against them; and if they testify, confine them to houses until death do claim them, or Allah ordain for them some (other) way. 
PICKTHAL: As for those of your women who are guilty of lewdness, call to witness four of you against them. And if they testify (to the truth of the allegation) then confine them to the houses until death take them or (until) Allah appoint for them a way (through new legislation). 
SHAKIR: And as for those who are guilty of an indecency from among your women, call to witnesses against them four (witnesses) from among you; then if they bear witness confine them to the houses until death takes them away or Allah opens some way for them.


004.016 
YUSUFALI: If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and amend, Leave them alone; for Allah is Oft-returning, Most Merciful. 
PICKTHAL: And as for the two of you who are guilty thereof, punish them both. And if they repent and improve, then let them be. Lo! Allah is ever relenting, Merciful. 
SHAKIR: And as for the two who are guilty of indecency from among you, give them both a punishment; then if they repent and amend, turn aside from them; surely Allah is Oft-returning (to mercy), the Merciful.  


007.081 
YUSUFALI: "For ye practise your lusts on men in preference to women : ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds." 
PICKTHAL: Lo! ye come with lust unto men instead of women. Nay, but ye are wanton folk. SHAKIR: Most surely you come to males in lust besides females; nay you are an extravagant people. 

I thought this an excellent way of disapproving of homosexuality without punishing them too harshly and sometimes not at all.   Farouk however insisted that he did not think these verses signified that homosexuality is a sin.

I then asked what did these verses mean then if they did not mean what most people think it means?

There was a murmur of agreement from the men's side of the room, for we had all subconsciously segregated ourselves as we took our seats.

I am afraid I did not understand his response at all and cannot even begin to report what I thought he said.

There was some discussion about the wife-beating verse, which I feel I have already dealt with at http://thebattlefieldoflove.blogspot.com/2010/06/my-interpretation-of-that-wife-beating.html

We were then told that we would have to agree to disagree and it doesn't matter too much what we think because we can't do anything about it anyway as individuals.

But don't they want a Caliphate?  What they said sounded frankly rather feeble and unfocused, to just read  it and discuss it and then "agree to disagree"!  Muslims are surely more than members of a book club?

It all seemed terribly wishy-washy to me.

I really would not have a problem about a Caliphate, provided the Koran was interpreted in a libertarian civic national socialist way that I would approve of, though of course I know there is no guarantee of that.

After the talk a man also ventured to put it to me that homosexuality was not a sin, according to his interpretation.  I have absolutely no desire to seek out gay people to punish them in any way, but was merely pointing out that the Koran seems to be saying quite clearly that homosexuality is a sin simply because it has prescribed punishments for it.   The burden of proof is quite high (lesbians to be convicted had to have four witnesses witnessing their lewd act with each other) and Muslims are forbidden to spy on each other so any evidence adduced through spying, phone hacking etc would be deemed inadmissible.  The idea is therefore that of tolerance, but never equality, which seems fair enough to me.   Therefore a Muslim would repeal the Civil Partnership Act without hesitation and there can be no question of allowing civil partnership ceremonies to take place in a church or a mosque under a nation guided by Koranic principles.   They could however cohabit with each other and be left in peace if they are discreet and don't frighten the horses.

If homosexuality is tolerated it will be flaunted.  When homosexuality is tolerated, so will widespread female promiscuity until, like in Britain, more than half the babies born now are the bastards of sluts who will be mostly bad mothers, whereupon the savagery, depravity, degeneracy and illegitimacy of the people will reach critical mass, triggering the decline and fall of one's civilisation.   http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/truth-about-pommy-bastards-most-births-will-soon-be-out-of-wedlock/2006/02/21/1140284069030.html  That is probably why most cultures have always had a horror of bastardy and promiscuous women while in Britain and the West generally this instinctive fear and disgust has been virtually bred out of people, unless they have the protection of a faith they take seriously enough to obey.  When all around us is sexual licence, we are near the Sodom & Gomorrah stage of our civilisation, and will probably suffer a similar fate soon enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah

Think of homosexuality as the equivalent of a dead canary in a coal mine.  It is the barometer of our societal and civilisation health.   On purely Kantian terms of universalisability, homosexuality is wrong, because, if all us were gay, the human race would die out, which would be a Bad Thing as far as we are all concerned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universalizability

He had some odd take on it that I cannot now remember because it was so convoluted.   It may not be wrong of me to say he was probably of the gay persuasion.

I then pointed out that whoever took over, if they did take over, would interpret the Koran in just the way they would wish, because they would presumably be in a position to do so once they have taken over.

Nietzsche:

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."