Blog Post #5

Posted by: rooster30 on: February 21, 2012

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Last class we continued with the biography of Muhammad. Mostly this entailed the various wars and conflicts with the Quraysh. From there we continued with debates regarding “what is your price” and “would you resist?” In general, my answer to both of those questions is “it depends.” That might be do to my nature of not being an ideologue about pretty much everything and instead taking a rational case by case approach.

The introduction of the Vision of Islam discusses many things about the the Quran. One thing of note is the importance of Arabic and how the translation of the Quran in other languages is viewed as an interpretation. The introduction also points out that there are a diversity of opinions about Islam, however in general the diversity is less than other religions like Christianity.

Like many of my fellow classmates, I have read about the burning of the Qurans in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It was obviously an incredibly stupid thing to do. That being said, the article I read in the NY Times stated that the personnel disposing of the material had no idea what they were doing – it would be much worse if they were purposefully trying to be offensive. Intentions are important. Based on the information I have seen, the disposal of the Qurans was obviously stupid, but I don’t understand why it would spark such violent protests since there wasn’t the intention to offend.

In response to lollipopsgumdropsandsunshine: I am guessing that some of your post was given in tongue-in-cheek (e.g. Galileo was a secret Muslim), but the facts about the moon were obtained from scientific discovery not theology. Knowledge about the moon (and other scientific discoveries) were already known for quite some time before the Qu’ran from the Babylonians, Ancient Greeks, and others. Islam did have a role in helping these ideas spread/return to Europe and may have been some of the spark that initiated the Age of Enlightenment. No religion has made scientific discoveries about the physical/natural laws of the Universe/Earth – scientific thought and discoveries have done that.