Comment is free: Supporting Islam's apostates
Interesting article. I note with particular interest the quote from the Koran which is a good example of the, ahem, problematic nature of that document.
(Go on, Geoff, hit me with some Armstrong niceness about how unfair I am being.)
I'm sure the Koran is a problematic document. Rachel Kohn had some expert on "The Ark" recently who noted that the Koran is essentially oral and for recitation, so any written version is by its nature problematic.
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting article. He seems to be saying that past eras of Islamic thought were able to live with those verses and still argue against killing apostates. The idea to argue on islamic terms against this crime seems hopeless in the short term though, sadly.
Do you think that the problem is a premodern religion becoming infected with modern need for certainty. That seems to be the problem with Christian fundamentalism. I really think people thought differently in pre-enlightenment, pre-critical eras and seemed to think metaphorically about things we think practically. I've probably blathered about it before but Elliot's dissociation of sensibility applies to religious thought as much as poetic. Current Islamic thought is a modernist version that believes in facts in a jounalistic way when its oral creation was living in a totally different thought world. Christianity was just as toxic in its triumphalist colonial phase.
Since you don't want your Christianity postmodern, what do you do to Islam?
Geoff