Re: Those who do not obey shall be destroyed

>>>>> "bijan" == Bijan Parsia <bparsia-vEoVa6Jh+/J4piUD7e9S/[email protected]> writes:

  bijan> Of a rather strange sort, no less. It's unclear whether they
  bijan> think claims of Jewish deaths are exaggerated (i.e., that
  bijan> what happened didn't happen at all) or whether it's just that
  bijan> they think that other groups that suffered at the hands of
  bijan> the Nazi's are ignored or downplayed in standard
  bijan> accounts. Or, perhaps more likely, both.

As you said online yesterday, their anti-Semitism *so* doesn't help.

There's another (logically possible) reading, though I admit it's
strained: that the millions of people killed by Nazis specifically in
death camps were *Europeanized* Jews and so should count as European
deaths; maybe it's a implicit claim about the tie between being Jew
and being in or near the Levant?

Who knows, but none of it helps.

  bijan> """1- In the light of the recent spate of explosions in
  bijan> America, the Hamas Movement would like to affirm that it is
  bijan> against violence being committed against innocent civilians
  bijan> anywhere in the world especially that the Palestinian people
  bijan> can understand the suffering more than many nations as
  bijan> victims of constant Zionist terrorism.

The key word there is "innocent" civilians, i.e., I suspect they take
the general view that Jewish settlers are not innocent, since they are
the wedge of territorial expansion and dispossession.

I can imagine native Americans taking the same tact against White
settlers.

I tend to think of a group like Hamas not as a terrorist group per se
but as a group fighting for national liberation, which is a specially
recognized category under the UN and law generally. I'm not sure,
however, what the consensus view of the rest of the world is on this
question.

  bijan> Of course, who is an *innocent* civilian? That is surely
  bijan> something played fast and loose on all sides.

Oops, yeah, my point. Just saw you'd made it already. :>

  bijan> Are Jewish settlers still "usually unarmed"?

Perhaps on buses? I've seen lots of tape of settlers with
guns. Or, rather, I never see settlers throwing rocks.

  bijan> "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight
  bijan> the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind
  bijan> stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O
  bijan> Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only
  bijan> the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would
  bijan> not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
  bijan> (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem)."

  bijan> Not promising at all. Horrid.

This isn't from the Qur'an. But, first, what it would mean if it were?
Not much in my view. It's clearly an apocalyptic saying and, as such,
has a particular status and state within Islamic thought. It's not
uncommon for apocalyptic sayings, across all three axial Western
religions, to be genocidal or to appeal to genocidal impulses; just
check out the Christian Book of Revelation, which contains the mother
of all genocidal projections; almost *everyone* but Christians are
killed in some gruesome way. It's species-cide, actually.

(So if I had to say only two or three sentences about this text, I
would say that it's likely old -- al-Bukhari died in 873 -- and may
well have come out of a time and place when Muslims and Jews were not
at peace, as they have been in many other times and places.)

Now, what does that mean about Christianity? Not much, except to the
wingnuts who take it seriously. To other Christians it's "merely" an
artifact of a pre-scientific, mythological world, like much of
Christian scripture. (It's never of course that simple.)

Now, as to this thing Hamas is pointing out, it's a 'hadith' actually,
which is one of a collection, called ahadith (pl. hadith), an
extra-Quranic source of reports of sayings and actions by the Prophet;
i.e. a kind of source collection of "oral tradition" which often
purports to trace back to Muhammad himself. Except that "source of
oral tradition" is misleading; more on that below.

In the historical-critical sense hadith are different than the
Christian gospels, and they are a wholly different literary genre
(which is also a very interesting historical-critical question, since
the question of genre of the gospel literature is -- or: can be,
depending on who you are -- hermeneutically significant: are the
gospels sui generis? Are they like Greek legends? And on it goes).

The hypothesized source document, called Q, (for "quelle", German word
for 'source') of the Gospels, however, which is conjectured by way of
historical-critical study of the canonical and apocryphal gospels
themselves, is rather more like hadith, conceptually. But, again, this
is only a very rough similarity and only from a particular point of
view (that of source criticism).

Note that it's not particularly interesting to do this comparitive
thing; that is, I'm not suggesting that Islam needs to be understood
in terms of Christianity. I'm only saying it here because I suspect
most people on this list are more familiar with Xnty than Islam, and
the very rough comparisons may help get some initial perspective on
what we're talking about.

Hadith, which I think should be left untranslated, was often taken by
the earliest Western Islamicists -- almost all of whom were Christians
-- to be merely "tradition" and translated and interpreted as
such. But that's misleading. Unlike the connotations of 'tradition' in
the Latin West, hadith are very precise written texts, written down
rather early in the formative period of Islam, often contrary to
custom, and they always name both their transmitters and their
original source.

The men who helped form the hadith were often innovative, often
explicitly opposing customary Muslim ideas and practices. I don't
particularly see the marks of that in this hadith (though it may well
be true), but it's true of them as a collection of texts.

There are parts of Islam as a religious tradition that were
particularly, we might say, devoted, to the hadith. Scholars translate
these strands as "hadith-folk" (Ahl al-Hadith), we might say 'people
of the hadith' or somesuch. They were Muslims who concentrated on
hadith reports as the "chief form of learning and source of
authority"; among the Jama i-Sunnis there is a tradition of piety
associated with hadith.

There is a corpus of hadith; that is, a collection of the collection
of sayings and reports. And the hadith corpus is itself ranked; that
is, some are seen as more trustworthy, more authoritative, more
canonical than others. In general, the earlier the hadith, the more
trustworthy it was taken to be. Among the Jama i-Sunnis eventually six
collections of hadith were accepted as canonical (in the sense of
legality).

Of these six, the hadith of Bukhari and of Muslim are especially
revered as holy because their contents were taken to have been most
carefully sifted for genuineness; it's the "good stuff".

This is significant since the Hamas hadith attributes itself to both
Bukhari and "Moslem" (no, that's not a misprint; there was a person
who collected hadith whose name is transliterated variously as
"Moslem" and "Muslim"), which may mean that it is in fact part of the
trusted core of hadith; it may also mean that Hamas is attributing it
to Bukhari and Moslem in order to make it seem like it's part of the
trusted core. We can't tell which is which w/out more detail about
this particular hadith.

So hadith were not only a source of Muslim piety and spirituality, but
also a source of Muslim law, which is called Shari'ah. The structure
of Muslim law, shariah, was worked out though a form and tradition of
legal reasoning called fiqh. It had some customary sources, that is,
sources of legal reasoning and legal content, which are called usul
al-fiqh, the "basic sources of legal authorities"; for Sunni Muslims,
the usul al-fiqh were the Qur'an, hadith, ijma (or legal consensus),
and qiyas. Qiyas is a mode of analogical reasoning from some decision
in the Qur'an or a hadith to a new legal decision. Among Shi'a
Muslims, aql takes the place of qiyas; aql is logical reasoning in
general, not just that based on analogizing from Qur'an or
hadith. Also Shi'a Muslims often take ijma, or consensus, to be the
ijma of imams or religious leaders. Among Sunnis ijma meant the
general consensus of the Muslim community, not just of the clerics
(and of course there were debates about what constituted community).

I go into all this detail because it's probably very likely -- and
I've been meaning to see if there's anything on the Web to confirm
this -- that the Taliban's Council of Elders is a kind of fiqh
deliberative body which intends to make a ruling about the disposition
of bin Laden. From a purely religious studies point of view, that's
fascinating stuff.

That's the historical-critical part of it. The theological questions,
which we can reduce to the questions of what authority hadith have
generally and what meaning or significance are attributed to them by
various strands of Islamic thought, is a bit complicated. Suffice it
to say that hadith are an independent source not only of law but of
doctrine and piety, often contradicting points of Shari'ah.

Finally, let me say a word about my sources. There's a lot of bad
popular stuff about Islam floating around in the West, avoid it if you
can. Almost all of the pre-20th century Western scholarship about
Islam is untrustworthy to some degree. Hadith in particular are often
wildly misinterpreted as being, simply, a kind of traditionalist (what
we would call *conservative* in the original sense) element, which is
at best misleading.

Most of what I know about Islam comes either from reading Marshall
Hodgson's magisterial two-volume, The Venture of Islam, and studying
primary sources.

Kendall Clark