Is there a reasonable basis for a Christian, or Jew, to have a justified fearful apprehension of the practice of Islamic theology, and of the aggressive Muslim agenda taught and represented by the Prophet Mohammed in the Koran? Does the Koran teach that Muslims should be honest, peaceful, and tolerant human beings in their associations with people Mohammed called infidels, or is it quite the opposite? These questions are answered quite differently around the world by Shiite and Sunni cross-sections of over-a-billion-strong world Muslim population. The majority of these devout practicing Muslims are the religion's fundamentalists who are citizens of the Middle-Eastern countries that were parts of the original Mohammedan Empire, which occupied and controlled most of the Holy Land, and a good deal of Europe, between 700-1100 A.D.
As is currently the case, the reading and interpreting of the Koran by a Muslim cleric in Islamabad, Pakistan and Kabul, Afghanistan, is considerably different than that done in a mosque in San Francisco, California. The fundamental commandments of love and peace given by Mohammed in the Koran, the ones he gave while he was, supposedly, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, are quite different, and quite opposed, to the ones he later gave to his disciples in Medina, which he said basically abrogated, or changed, his former commandments. These new commandments of abrogation mandated all faithful Muslims to seek out and, either, convert, capture, or kill infidels in accordance with, and fulfillment of, the sixth pillar of Islam, jihad or warring conflict. These infidels, according to Mohammed, comprised all Jews and practicing Christians, or those who worshipped the Christian trinity or Godhead. Furthermore, Mohammed encouraged faithful Muslims to lie and deceive the infidels into postures of submission to the Islamic Supreme Being, Allah. Over 350 verses in the Koran teach nothing but hate for the infidel. In one of them, (Muslim C9B1N31), Mohammed said "I have been commanded to fight against people until they testify to the fact that there is no god but Allah, and believe in me (that) I am the messenger and in all that I have brought." Hence, the meaning of the word Islam is rendered to mean submission to the will of Allah. Classical Islamic scholars have argued that anyone who has studied the Koran or Qur'an, without having mastered the doctrine of abrogation is basically deficient. Those faithful Muslims who do not accept abrogation actually fall outside the Islamic mainstream and, perhaps, even the religion itself. Yet, the Ahmadiyah Islamic sect, today concentrated in Pakistan, consistently rejects abrogation only because it makes it seem that the Koran is not free from errors.
Compared to the commandments of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament of the Holy Bible, which admonish all human beings to love and treat their neighbors as themselves, the commandments of Mohammed, in the Koran, are basically one-sided in terms of theological purpose, for they are written to only apply to how Muslims are to love and respect other Muslims, not how Muslims are to respect "all" of God's children. The austerity and strictness of fundamentalist Islamic theology, as taught and applied in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, do not derive from any other source than the Koran, as read and interpreted by classic Islamic clerics. This is why Sharia Law (or traditional Islamic law) has been advocated by Islamic leaders of burgeoning Muslim populations in Western nations, such as the United Kingdom, as the law that should be allowed to govern all Muslims. There are, for instance, so many fundamentalist Muslims in London that the British have allowed them to practice their own laws and traditions in place of British law. Among other Islamic traditions, Sharia Law permits, and enforces polygamy and, even, honor killings, wherein daughters and sons of fundamentalist Muslim families, who choose infidel mates over faithful practicing Muslims, are murdered for the honor of the families. And this type of law is, apparently, what Barack H. Obama has been quietly advocating over the years, first as a U.S. senator from Illinois and now as U.S. President, for practicing Muslims in the United States, which has clearly demonstrated his apparent higher regard for Islamic tradition and theology over what he claims are his Christian faith and values. This might explain why an 18 percent-and-growing segment of the American electorate believe that Obama is not really a Christian in basic belief.
The stark aforementioned dichotomy between the pure Christian love that was taught by Jesus, and recorded in the Bible, and the hatred and unabashed human conflict that was taught and emphasized by Mohammed, and recorded in the Koran, is the essence of this essay. This obvious dichotomy is a blatant fact, and one that makes reason stare when Muslim Taliban clerics, in Kabul, Afghanistan, can read and interpret the Islamic commandments of Mohammed and derive a totally different meaning from them than, say, westernized Muslim clerics in Washington, D.C. Of course, most argumentative Islamic clerics will endeavor to show equally rabid interpretations of Jesus' words in the Holy Bible, and the New Testament, by introducing such evidence as the bloody Crusades, which were sponsored by the Jolly Popes of the Roman Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land, supposedly, in the name of Christ. This tragic juncture in the history of Western Civilization is hardly evidence of the interpretation of Jesus' words in his "Sermon on the Mount" and throughout the course of his personal ministry and the later ministries of his apostles. For the Popes who ordered the Crusades did so not as representatives of Jesus, but as military emperors who issued their papal bulls in the name of vengeance for Western European interests. No sane and reasonable person can possibly read the words of Jesus, in Matt. 22:21, and infer from his rhetoric anything other than a clear separation of church and state, wherein his statement to the Jews, "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's" was a succinct declaration of this separateness. Jesus also declared before Pontius Pilot, in John 18:36, that, "My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world." Today, Christian ministers in Ankara, Turkey can read Jesus' "Sermon on the Mount" and derive the same basic meaning from it that Christian ministers in London or Moscow derive. Not so with Muslim clerics, in different parts of the world, who read the words of Mohammed, in the Koran, quite differently.
After his ascension into heaven, Jesus taught through his apostle, James, that it is impossible for, both, good and evil things to proceed righteously from the same godly person. The profound biblical scripture, in Jas 3:11, explicitly illustrates this Christian principle. "Does a spring pour forth from the same opening fresh water and brackish?" In Mohammed's case it did, for he exhorted his disciples to say, and do, things that were both evil and, supposedly, beneficial for Muslim interests. This is a matter of historical record. Would a true prophet of the true God of heaven say such things? I don't think so. Now, as for the fear that true Christians in the United States should have of the spread of Islam within the republic, and the drastically increasing population of Muslim immigrants and their progeny, I sincerely believe that the international Muslim community has an agenda to subdue infidel Western countries through the strategy of becoming so populous within the various nations that, one day soon, Sharia Law will be inexorably voted into practice by an overwhelming Muslim majority. That is, if they continue to multiply at such a prolific rate and are allowed to collectively exert their political clout.
The worldwide Muslim community was a potentially ominous sleeping giant before 1950, before the United States and Britain began surreptitiously interfering with Muslim homelands in order to control their rich oil resources and its production, and especially before the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991. The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom don't relish recalling the 1954 CIA/MI6 led Iranian coup, Operation Ajax, that overthrew a democratically elected head of a Muslim state, and installed a U.S./British puppet dictator, the Shah, to head the Iranian government. This, among other things, was looked upon by fundamentalist Muslims as a continuing compelling reason for vengeance against the Western infidel. Moreover, Muslim immigration into the United States, before 1970, was at an all time low. Then, beginning with the Iranian Islamic Revolution, in 1979, and, later, when the orchestration of the 9/11 mass-murders were conveniently blamed on fundamentalist Islamic jihad and Saudi Ossama bin Laden by the Bush administration, and, especially, after Afghanistan and Iraq were ineffectually invaded to overthrow the Taliban and Saddam Hussain, the fundamentalist Shiite and Sunni factions of Islam, the world over, began to theologically coalesce and work amazingly well together to oppose the invading infidels. A rag-tag army of mostly untrained and scantily armed Islamic Afghani Taliban fighters have, since 2002, successfully kept at bay over a hundred thousand of the best trained Marine Corps, Army, and joint U.S. Special Forces troops, which have been sent to neutralize the insurgent forces throughout the mountainous country. It would have seemed that the awful lesson learned by the Soviets in their attempted subjugation of Afghanistan would have taught the arrogant imperialist U.S. politicians controlling the U.S. military a significant lesson in fighting unjust un-winnable wars. For that matter, Vietnam should have been the lesson learned for all time. Yet, since 2003, the same sad effect has been experienced in Iraq, which leads a reasonable mind to conclude that suppression, and the elimination, of bloody militant Muslim opposition to U.S. presence in Islamic nations is virtually impossible.
Since 1991, demographic facts support that immigration of Middle-Eastern Muslim men, women, and families into Western nations has increased 85 percent, and the current Muslim birthrate in the United States, and the United Kingdom, is approximately 6-to-7 children per adult Muslim woman. No wonder the Muslim population in London has increased a staggering 85 percent between 1980 and the year 2000. This is probably why the Muslim population was great enough in that British city for them to demand the practice of Sharia Law, which was officially adopted in Britain on September 14, 2008, with Sharia courts, possessing Islamic powers, set up in the capital city. A colleague of mine said something recently that was extremely provocative in terms of its probable truth regarding the spread of Islam in the United States. In gist, he proposed that, if the Koran encourages faithful Muslims to lie and deceive the infidel Christians and Jews into trusting them, in order to gain power over the infidels, how can you trust any practicing Muslim, especially the ones who arbitrarily interpret the Koran to say that Muslims are commanded to love and tolerate Christians and Jews. This not-so-unreasonable Christian and Jewish perception of a probable Islamic agenda to conquer and control what conscientious Muslims perceive to be the great Western Satan is one held currently by millions of Christians and Jews around the world. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, or, in this case, what is written in the standard handbook for the practice of Islam, the Koran. That very few of the hundreds of millions of Christians in the United States, the U.K., and Western Europe have no real knowledge of the abrogation taught by Mohammed in the Koran, and of the utter hatred expressed in its words against Christians and Jews, is a tragic reality. Most of these uninformed individuals are accepting the interpretations of Islamic doctrine from, supposedly, westernized Muslim clerics, and wrongly believing that the Muslim communities in cities such as Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and, even, Sydney, Australia truly love and tolerate Christians and Jews.
I recall the words of a venerable Jewish scholar, Helmud Weiss, who had taught German literature at the University of Berlin during the time Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were coming to power. He laughing had said to his concerned friends, when sternly advised to flee his homeland for America, that, "even if the Nazis do come to power, there will be enough men of good will in Germany to put a stop to Hitler's anti-Semitism, for the words and ideas of the man are an abomination to all that is good." Nonetheless, history sadly records that Professor Weiss was sent, in 1939, to one of the gas chambers at Auswitz. Therefore, it would probably be a very good idea for all those people, who presently trust the practicing Muslims to have love and toleration for Christians, Jews, and all other non-Muslims, to read the Koran for themselves in order to derive a true and correct understanding of the religion established by Mohammed.
Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the University of Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin has attended LaJolla, California's National University and Malibu's Pepperdine University to attain graduate credits in business management and economics. Mr. Nowlin also attained a Texas State Teaching Certification, in social studies and psychology, from the University of Texas at Tyler. A Christian, first and foremost, an educator, paralegal, published essayist, poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.