Here’s a twist: I’ve been reported as spam

Last updated on: January 11, 2015 at 7:53 pm by Jane the Actuary

Here’s a twist: I’ve been reported as spam 2015-01-11T19:53:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Idiots.

So I’ve written a couple posts on “moderate Islam” over the last couple days, and, as I tend to do, when an article on the topic appeared at the National Review’s Corner, I commented with a summary of my views and a link to the most recent post. Some idiot — actually multiple idiots — accused me of spam because I had linked to my post, and, in fact, reported my comment as spam.

So far as I can tell, only this particular comment has been deleted; I don’t know if this “marks” me in some way as far as my Disqus account and ability to comment on Discus-configured comment sections.

But in reality, I think this was in response to the content of my post, which is, essentially, this:

It is foolish for us Westerners, or even Muslims themselves, to claim that fundamentalist Muslims are not “real Muslims.” The theology of these Muslims is rooted in their texts, and they can point to long-established traditions for even such extreme claims as the rightness of enslaving women in the name of Islam.

They are “real Muslims,” like it or not. It makes us stupid to assert otherwise, and our continual assertion doesn’t help in coming up with a way to solve the problem of the increasing power of extremist Islam.

So far, so good. But I think what got me “flagged was spam” was this: to assert that a “moderate Islam” is a similarly legitimate version of Islam. In their view, Islam is wholly corrupt and irredeemable.

Which is just as much a dead end as the reverse. You’re not going to convert Muslims, “moderate” or “fundamentalist,” to Christianity, or any other faith. It’s not going to happen. But maybe there is a chance that moderate Muslims could convert their extremist brethren to their faith.

And while I’ve questioned exactly what “moderate Islam” looks like, or whether it has a coherent theology or theological “governing body” in the same way as the various strands of Traditional Islam do, there is nothing to prevent it from existing.

I tried to compare this to the fact that some Christians take the Bible literally and others don’t, but this didn’t go anywhere except accusations of spam. So let’s compare this to a different religion:

Before the eighteenth century, Judaism in Europe had followed the same set of ritual laws for millennia: no work on the Sabbath, a complex set of practices around keeping Kosher, ritual purity laws, and so on. It was unchanging — laws given by God through Moses and interpreted by ancient scholars. This was what it meant to be a Jew; on this, sacred texts and scholars’ interpretations both agreed.

Then, in the early 1800s in Germany, a new kind of Judaism arose: reform Judaism. (See here for the first hit in my google search.) They abandoned these age-old practices — even going further, in these early days of reform Judaism, than is the case now, moving worship to Sundays, for example, and rejecting circumcision.

Would not a move to a “Reform Islam” — retaining only those scriptures and practices and theology which draw one closer to God and a more holy life — likewise be as genuinely Islam as Reform Judaism is Jewish?

Likewise — and here I’m really venturing into something I know nothing about — I have the impression that Hinduism has changed, too, that the multitude of Hindu gods and goddesses that were once worshipped as, in fact, a pantheon much like the Greek or Roman gods, are viewed by “modern Hindus” as all one God, about whom many stories have been told, and these different “gods” are viewed as different aspects of this one God. But I may be completely wrong here.

In any event, I was supposed to be spending my free time this weekend writing up some commentary on items I’d come across recently regarding retirement. But that’s the thing about blogging: it offers a platform for writing out your ideas — but, absent a significant uptick in readership, often leaves me frustrated that I can’t get some idea or another of mine truly “out there” into the wider world and get people to respond.

So that’s that; time to move on.

UPDATE: I am, indeed, well and truly blocked from commenting at NRO now!

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