Islam Is Not a Civilization

[Sanguine]

September 4, 2016
By Paul Eidelberg

We need a politically incorrect and radically new multi-disciplinary and multinational understanding of Islam.

To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three Abrahamic faiths” or as the “three religions of the Book,” or, more significantly, as the “three monotheisms,” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, says theologian George Weigel, ought to be retired.

The eminent French scholar Alain Besançon agrees. He writes, “The Abraham of Genesis is not the Ibrahim of the Qur’an; Moses is not Moussa. As for Jesus, he appears, as Issa, out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel. His mother, Mary, or Mariam, identified as the sister of Aaron, gives birth to him under a palm tree. Then Issa performs several miracles, which seem to have been drawn from the apocryphal gospels, and announces the future coming of Muhammad.

Alain Besançon takes us deeper into the heart of the matter. He draws this theological distinction between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and Islam, on the other:

Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian concept of God, is “Father” — i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relationship with men. The one God of the Qur’an, the God who demands submission, is a distant God; to call him “Father” would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege. The Muslim God is utterly impassive; to ascribe loving feeling to Him would be suspect.  If God is not “Father,” then it is difficult to imagine the human person as having been made “in the image of God.”...

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/09/islam_is_not_a_civilization.html

There's some good information and links in this article.

[TomSea]

Clicking on the links, brings one to this: http://www.israpundit.org/archives/63617064

And that is fine. I'm still not convinced that Iran is a great evil; a lot of the experts are. I'd like to hear them discuss this more.

Obviously, Iran is a repressive regime but clearly, there's a lot of Sunnis who'd do them in.