Islam; The Coming Universal Religion ?
by Edo Pivčević, The Salisbury Review:
It has become commonplace for Moslems who recoil in horror from the Isil-Daesh atrocities to insist that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’. Even a British Prime minister has described it as such in the British House of Commons. No doubt they all earnestly desire it to be so. But if ‘peace’ means being ready to allow space for beliefs contrary to one’s own to be expressed and flourish, then this is difficult to reconcile with the ferocious diatribe in the opening chapters of the Koran against the ‘unbelievers’ – meaning principally Jews and Christians – who, it is alleged, have ‘monstrously corrupted’ God’s message as revealed by their own apostles from Abraham to Moses and Jesus.
The entire Koran is conceived primarily as an indictment of what Mohammad and his followers saw as a scandalous vitiation and debasement of God’s revelations in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospel. The Jews are accused of hypocritically professing allegiance to the all-embracing Abrahamic faith while at the same time trying to make it serve their own ends and ‘debarring others from the path of God’. They ‘disclaim’ responsibility for executing Jesus while actually ‘wanting him to be killed’. In addition, they engage in ‘usury although they were forbidden it’, and ‘cheat others of their possessions’ (4:158). As far as Christians are concerned, they are guilty of sacrilegiously proclaiming Jesus to be the ‘Son of God’ and of having fabricated the absurd doctrine of the Trinity, which violates the principle of monotheistic faith.
But the main underlying charge laid against both Jews and Christians is that they have turned God’s message into something very close to a tribal ideology, designed to serve their own sectional interests. The Jews see themselves as God’s favourite nation and a cut above the rest, and the Christian world, while ostensibly preaching the message of universal love and brotherhood, has become inextricably entangled with the beliefs and traditions of Greco-Roman civilisation, and is trying in effect to foist western values on the rest of humanity.
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