Islam-related controversies

113 quotes found

"I have a panic room in my house, where I am supposed to take refuge if one of the adherents of the "religion of peace" makes it past my permanent security detail and into my home. In fact, it's not really my home at all—I live in a government safe house, heavily protected and bulletproof. Since November 2004, when a Muslim murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for the crime of offending Islam, I have been surrounded by police guards and stripped of nearly all personal privacy. I am driven every day from the safe house to my office in the Dutch Parliament building in armored police cars with sirens and flashing blue lights. I wear a bulletproof jacket when I speak in public. Always surrounded by plainclothes police officers, I have not walked the streets on my own in more than seven years... Why do I need this protection? I am not a president or a king; I am a mere member of the Dutch Parliament, one of 150 elected parliamentarians in the Tweede Kamer, the House of Representatives of the Netherlands, a small country of 16.5 million in Western Europe. However, I have joined Westergaard in a rapidly growing group of individuals throughout the world who have been marked for death for criticizing Islam. For asserting our rights to say what we really think about this political ideology that disguises itself as a religion, we have been hounded by Muslims seeking to make an example of us. Offend us, they are saying to the world, and you will end up in hiding like Wilders, attacked like Westergaard, or dead like van Gogh."

- Eurabia

0 likesCriticism of IslamEuropeIslam-related controversies
"So what was abolitionism in such contexts? Can we at all use here this loaded, essentially foreign, term in a meaningful, historical sense ? Should we bother to ? True, some historians might find it worthwhile to study lone abolitionist voices in an otherwise solid anti-abolition discourse. But then, some historians would always insist that the unrepresentative is important in and of itself, regardless of its social and political significance. Even if we examine with good intentions the scant evidence that Clarence-Smith himself provides in his book, we cannot but conclude how very few and very far between such voices indeed were. Considered within the huge dimensions of the Islamic World and the extended period of time allowed by the author for these voices to have emerged, the phenomenon appears so marginal and ephemeral that it cannot possibly deserve to be called a "sentiment", let alone constitute a Subversive current' or be described as a Movement'. Why, then, we may ask, does Clarence-Smith insist on this unpromising line of investigation and rather forced research agenda.... Also, if scholars were to undertake, in earnest and honesty, extensive studies of anti-enslavement manifestations in Islamic societies, their work would most probably reinforce the kind of negative view of ' Islam' that Clarence-Smith is so eager to revise and reconstruct."

- History of slavery in the Muslim world

0 likesIslam-related controversiesHistory of IslamIslam and slavery
"It was these hardened polytheists in Arabia, who would accept nothing other than the expulsion of the Muslims or their reversion to paganism, and who repeatedly broke their treaties, that the Muslims were ordered to treat in the same way – to fight them or expel them. Even with such an enemy Muslims were not simply ordered to pounce on them and reciprocate by breaking the treaty themselves; instead, an ultimatum was issued, giving the enemy notice, that after the four sacred months mentioned in 9:5 above, the Muslims would wage war on them. The main clause of the sentence ‘kill the polytheists’ is singled out by some Western scholars to represent the Islamic attitude to war; even some Muslims take this view and allege that this verse abrogated other verses on war. This is pure fantasy, isolating and decontextualizing a small part of a sentence. The full picture is given in 9:1–15, which gives many reasons for the order to fight such polytheists. They continuously broke their agreements and aided others against the Muslims, they started hostilities against the Muslims, barred others from becoming Muslims, expelled Muslims from the Holy Mosque and even from their own homes. At least eight times the passage mentions their misdeeds against the Muslims. Consistent with restrictions on war elsewhere in the Quran, the immediate context of this ‘Sword Verse’ exempts such polytheists as do not break their agreements and who keep the peace with the Muslims (9:7). It orders that those enemies seeking safe-conduct should be protected and delivered to the place of safety they seek (9:6). The whole of this context to v.5, with all its restrictions, is ignored by those who simply isolate one part of a sentence to build their theory of war in Islam on what is termed ‘The Sword Verse’ even when the word ‘sword’ does not occur anywhere in the Quran."

- Sword Verse

0 likesQuranIslam-related controversiesJihadism