Understanding Islam

[novon]

Listen

Off Minnesota Public Radio

 

[ToBeMe]

Yeah......isn't it to bad Usama and the Taleban are not "normal" Islamic people.............They are extremeists and twist the Koran to their beliefs much as some "TV Evangelists" do in the US and other parts of the world...............

 

[yllus]

I haven't listened to that RA link yet, but I thought I'd chime in with another excerpt from Haroon Siddiqui's columns.

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Muhammad, the only prophet to form a state, abolished female infanticide, conferred rights on women and established rules of conduct between citizens. The Muslim empire that stretched from Spain to India succeeded primarily because it let prevailing cultures and religions be. Not all Muslim rulers were saints. Some inflicted untold atrocities on minorities. But the most successful were those with non-Muslim majorities, applying the Qur'anic rule that people should be free to practise their own faith: "Let there be no compulsion in religion."

A greater legacy of Islam was intellectual: four sophisticated schools of jurisprudence; a democratic discourse, based on shura (consultation), then ijma (consensus), and, finally, ijtihad (innovation, by scholars, to fit religious practices to changing times); and academic excellence in a range of fields, from astronomy to philosophy to natural sciences.

 

[novon]

Yeah, they talk about the Taliban's twisted version, they also talk about Rumi, man that guy was enlightened.



<< We are the flute, our music is all Thine;
We are the mountains echoing only Thee;
And movest to defeat or victory;
Lions emblazoned high on flags unfurled-
They wind invisible sweeps us through the world. >>