The Meaning of Islam: Who will decide?

From the Holy Quran (Quran 96:1-3):

"Read! In the name of your Lord, Who has created (all that exists), has created man from a clot (a piece of thick coagulated blood)..."

Innocent Questions

I asked myself: "The Lord God created man from a clot of blood? Whose blood? Perhaps blood from the Lord God Himself?"

And here's one more question based on this from http://www.islam4all.com: "The words in the Qur'an are the exact words spoken by God to Archangel Gabriel who transmitted it to Prophet Muhammad."

Why didn’t God speak directly to Mohammed, instead of making His word known through Gabriel? To my mind, the direct approach is always more authoritative. Or maybe that's not how "it" works.

These are my innocent questions. I ask these not to offend anybody and ask forgiveness if I have done so; they simply occurred to me spontaneously. I have no grounding in Islamic theology, though perhaps if I had such, I wouldn't even consider asking such questions.

I don't know much about Islam, though I've read a few books about its import and history. Which is more than perhaps most Americans would bother doing. Most of my fellow citizens would probably be satisfied to read an article in [gag!] Time magazine or listen to someone like Ted Koppel rattle on. But I've done a bit more than that and still come up short, though I must admit that Reza Aslan's passionate book helped: No god but God.

Question: What is Islam?

Answer: Islam should be whatever Moslems deem it should be. Islam should become whatever Moslems deem it should become.

I am aware that US government agents are trying to shape Islam into a form more agreeable to US interests. The idea is, we must act to counter the influence of [as they themselves might claim], "extremists who have hijacked the Islamic faith and are infusing into it the theology of the suicide bomber." These agents would seek to become "allies" of the Silent Majority of Peaceful Muslims who would never tolerate suicide bombings, and would never block unrestricted US access to Middle East oil. [I guess that last part goes without saying.]

If I am elected as the next US president, I will order the CIA to cease its covert efforts to reshape Islam. For I am a believer in self-determination, and I respect the Islamic peoples' right to shape their own destinies - religious and political.

Suicide Bombings

As a Buddhist, I reflect on this fact-of-life: suicide bombings in the Middle East. Let's consider only the fact that innocent people are killed, setting aside (at least for today) that suicide is also involved. The strict law of karma holds that there is no such thing as an "innocent victim" - that even a baby who is murdered suffers that fate as karmic retribution for evil it had committed in a past lifetime. This would argue that anyone killed by a suicide bomber (in effect) "had it coming."

And if they didn't have it coming, then they would have been spared by (perhaps) the bomb not going off. As a matter of fact, that has happened! And there are would-be bombers sitting in Israeli prisons whose bombs didn’t detonate. Or they were caught before they had a chance to do their deeds.

Even so, suicide bombing is not something I could ever do. Though I wonder how I would feel if I had lived my entire life in squalor in a Palestinian refugee camp. I guess I'd have to conclude that it wouldn't be easy to be a Buddhist in the Middle East, trying to keep the precepts to honor all life, to combat suffering, and to maintain my calmness of mind.

Thinking of how my brothers suffer, I spur myself to pray and think of how to spare them from the desperation which leads to the taking of life. Our ability to take action, here in the US which is so safe from such turmoil, becomes a great responsibility. It is not enough that we should cluck our tongues and exclaim from afar: "Suicide bombing is immoral and indefensible." We can act and we must act to insure peace in the Middle East. And I'm not talking about a peace which is convenient to American economic interests. I mean a real peace, which respects the right of Islamic self-determination and does not bend over backwards to appease the Israeli right wing.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Not to be overlooked in any discussion of the morality of killing civilians: The United States was the first nuclear terrorist.

To repeat for the sake of emphasis:

The United States was the first nuclear terrorist.

The United States was the first nuclear terrorist.

The United States was the first nuclear terrorist.

There's no way to sugarcoat that, though I'm sure red-blooded "patriots" are right now foaming at the mouth to denounce my words. Tough - it is what it is.

There are apologists who claim that we shortened the war with these droppings. They even claim that our killing of a relatively small number of civilians was justified because it caused Japan to cease its killing (on a daily basis) of even larger numbers of civilians. I seek their real motives by asking:

Why was it necessary to drop that second atomic bomb so soon after the first was dropped - a scant three days later? Surely the dropping of that first bomb conveyed our message, though it takes time (I dare say more than three days) for a war machine to decide it's had enough. Also, I join with others in asking: "Couldn't that same message have been conveyed by not dropping on civilian population centers but instead off shore in Tokyo harbor or Mt. Fuji?"

Only upon honest reflection do our excuses fail, to be replaced with the truth: We were really trying to terrorize the Soviet Union, which was the real target of those bombings.

Conclusion

I know that passions were high during WWII and that fear of Soviet expansion was also in the air. So that's enough, for some, to justify our "excesses" at that time. It would be too easy for me to say, "High passions and fear might justify, in the heart of the martyr, his strapping on a belt of explosives." But I won't say that; saying this instead:

We will not be able to buy peace in the Middle East nor create it according to our criteria. It will only come about when we start respecting the man in the street - here, there, and everywhere.

Steven Searle for U.S. President in 2012

Founder of The Independent Contractors’ Party

“Join the New American Revolution: Declare your independence by voting for independents.”

Contact me at: bpa_cinc@yahoo.com