Qur'an: Conclusion

I have finished reading the Qur'an. Achievement Unlocked!

Concluding Islam post. It was my intention that these posts presented a reasonably balanced view of Islam: I did not want to come across as either an Islamophile or Islamophobe.

I think it's fairly obvious that Muhammad was insane, but the Qur'an is nowhere near as barbaric or bigoted as I was expecting. As sacred texts go, the Qur'an is almost shockingly benign. It lacks the extreme barbarism of the Old Testament and the arrogant exclusivism of the New Testament.

The Qur'an advocates neither genocide nor genital mutilation. Violence is only to be used for defence; turning the other cheek isn't helpful when people are coming to kill your children. Muhammad does not say that Islam needs to be spread across the world (Mark 16:16, Matthew 28:19), that people of other faiths are withered branches to be gathered up and burned (John 15:6), or that he's been sent to fuck shit up (Matthew 10:34-36).

The Qur'an is, however, really boring. As a collection of speeches, there's very little development. The tone gets darker in his later speeches, as Muhammad went from street preacher to statesman to warlord, but overall it is tedious drivel. It is arguably the most moral and progressive of the 'Holy Trilogy' (Hebrew Bible; New Testament; Qur'an), but it is the least entertaining or inspiring. If we imagine God as the author of all three, I can't help but think that he'd ran out of ideas and only did the Qur'an to complete his book contract. I'm sure the Arabic poetry is lovely.

Like the Western world, the Muslim world is not monolithic: there are myriad sects and interpretations of Islam. It is unhelpful to think of our current situation as a war between Islam and the West. It is a civil war within Islam, between different extremist groups (Sunni vs Shia, Wahhabist vs everyone, Jihadist vs everyone), that now affects all of civilisation. This is not a clash of civilisations, but a clash for civilisation itself. We cannot afford to group all Muslims with the fundamentalists or the extremists; those of us who share common goals - peace, equality, justice, etc - must work together against the toxic branches of Islam that threaten us all.

It is often said that Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, has not had a reformation. Modernity has been thrust on Islam; the Islamic reformation is happening right now. Reformations always involve violence: certain groups will cling to the present or retreat to an idealised past rather than look to the future. During the Jewish reformation, Jerusalem was levelled and thousands of Jews were killed. The Christian reformation culminated in the Thirty Years War, one of the darkest periods in human history. We need to be on the side of reform, on the side of civilisation, in the struggle to come. Reform is a step towards secularism.

I conclude with the words of one of my personal heroes, Olaf Stapledon, writing in the 1930s, having survived the First World War and soon to see its sequel:

'The whole planet, the whole rock-grain, with its busy swarms, I now saw as an arena where two cosmical antagonists, two spirits, were already preparing for a critical struggle, already assuming terrestrial and local guise, and coming to grips in our half-awakened minds.
One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more sinister? Was it the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive, passion of the tribe.'