Spontaneous Jihad Syndrome

[Tukhachevskii]

That Christianity and right-wing politics was part of that of someone like Tim McVeigh, OTOH, is also undoubted. male who holds right wing views won't do the same? Or any alienated white suburban youth, etc. etc.


Have you ever been to a Christian church in your life? Are you at all familiar with the history of Christian European expansion in North and South America, Africa, or Asia?


There are also several different legal schools of sharia, and a quite significant population of Muslims do not accept the hadith at all. To say that there is debate over the validity of certain hadith and the varied interpretations of such within mainstream Sunni theology is quite an underestimation.

Are you aware how many scholars work at al-Azhar, and how many fatwas are issued every day? Fatwas being legal opinions, of course. As for the breast-feeding fatwa, this was mocked throughout the region, condemned in Egypt, and quickly retracted by the scholar in question.

A Saudi imam recently issued a fatwa banning cell phones. I'm sure thousands of fatwas have been issued in favor of cell phones. If you've ever been to the Middle East, which fatwa do you think will actually be obeyed?

Sir, I have obviously deeply offended you in posting what was, after all, my opinionrather than gospel.

1. I agree with you. There are many causal factors involved in the "triggering" of nutcases (to use Omarali50's felicitous formulation). However, I think we can agree that Christianity by itself does not glofiy warfare or killing in the same way that Islam does. My specific post was with regards to Islamic violence not all violence.

2. I was schooled at a Baptist school so I have some inkling of what Christianity in one of its more novel forms looks like (and lets not forget the Munster Anabaptists). As for European imperial expansion lets not conflate the terms of discourse. The Europeans were Christians but they were not by and large agents of the Pope or the Catholic(or later Protestant) church. The Churches often aided and abetted but they also obstructed imperial expansion and in some cases even humanised it. Christian law could often be deployed to defend the natives as much as it could be used to justify the usurper.

With regards to the Shari'a no Madhab has ever, to my knowledge, disputed the validity or truth of the Sahri'a, Hadeeth or the Quran. They may interpret (which is a different matter) the conditions necessary for a law to become operative but they would never dispute the truth. They all agree on Jihad as a religious duty; they all disagree on when it should occur (this doe not, however, ignore the fact that it remains a duty in constant potentiality if not actuality). As to validity of the Hadeeth I was refering, and admit that I should have made this explicit, to the Hadeeth universaally considered saheeh /correct by all Sunni and a majority of Shi'a Madhabs. Twelver Shi'a do not dispute the saheeh hadeeth in their entiret but only to those refering to Ali, Fatima and Alia.