Dear Professor Mansur,
Your letter was very interesting and informative, except that I cannot help feeling it has been strongly influenced by Christian thought rather than the Muslim tradition. You assert there can be no belief without freedom, but in Islam there can be no free will at all given God is All Powerful and All Knowing. Modern Muslims in the West may like to deny this, but I do not know of any pre-Modern Muslim who has ever asserted otherwise.
You assert that freedom means freedom from idolatry, but that is just another way of saying that men are free if they have no right to choose. You defend a totalitarian religious ideology and assert that men are free when they obey like slaves. This is absurd. The only real freedom is to believe and worship as you, an individual, sees fit and not to allow the Imams to determine what is polytheism. When you go further and claim that the fight against tyranny is the fight against polytheism, what you are asserting is the 1984 dictum that Slavery is Freedom. The fight against tyranny is the fight against anyone who claims to hold a monopoly on the Truth and to be the sole possessor of the Keys of Heaven.
The Quran proclaims there was no compulsion in religion, but that was abrogated by Muhammed when he was powerful enough to enforce Islam. Before he took Mecca there were no Muslims in that city. After, there were no pagans.
Again to assert that there is no Faith unless it is freely chosen is to assert a Christian, not Muslim, view. In Islam orthopraxy is what counts and that can be enforced. Only Christians insist on people being “Born Again”. Forced conversion has long been a Muslim practice and one that is not yet dead.
The problem with Jihadis is that they do not have to misquote the Quran. They have support for what they do in the Quran, the aHadith and the Sira. Muhammed oppressed others, he murdered girls for singing songs about him, he stole, raped and allowed his men to. The Devil is not misusing the Quran for that purpose or at least you have failed to explain how the Jihadis have done so. It is true that the Bible says “by their fruits you shall know them.” By that measure, Islam’s fruits are illiteracy, dictatorship, oppression, terrorism and violence. The Muslim world nowhere presents a healthy, free and prosperous society without large non-Muslim minorities.
You assert that a common mistake made by non-Muslims is to draw a comparison between Jesus and Muhammad. That is true, but by denying the evidence of the Quran and aHadith, by asserting Muhammed did not sin, Muslims makes that comparison every day.
I fail to accept that being honest about Islam means any comparison with the Jihadis. We are all called to be honest about ourselves, our beliefs and the world around us. If the Jihadis understand their religion correctly, so much the worse for Muslims. If they do not, you have no provided any evidence of that fact. Either way, we have no obligation except to search out the truth because the truth will make us free. If you call that defaming your religion, so be it. It will not change the fact that the Quran contains errors and Muhammed married a six year old girl.
Yours
HeiGou
