Disbelievers Quotes

This sura is used by fundamentalist Islamic regimes to justify religious persecution and prohibit any public worship other than Islam. Jews and Christians went through this stage and there are still a few fundamentalist extremists who would deny freedom of religion if they could. While the percentage is small, those in Islamic nations are a much larger proportion of the whole.

Although this verse illustrates the particular enmity that some orthodox Muslims have for Christians and Jews, philosophically the hostility it not unlike that some orthodox Christians had (and still have) for Jews. The theory was that among the more primitive people a certain “ignorance” was tolerable, but “People of the Book” were not ignorant but actually rejected the word of Muhammed or in the case of the Jews vis a vis the Christians, they rejected the word of Christ. The hate message is preached within some Christian circles about Jews and Muslims today, but the overt, visible, statement in the midst of the holiest of Scripture makes the Koranic version even more socially and ethically difficult in a pluralistic society.

While moderate Muslims interpret this sura as meaning that theologically, a belief in the divinity of Christ is inconsistent to Islam, extreme fundamentalists take this to indicate that Christians are heretics and should be executed in accordance with Sharia – Islamic Law.

This sura is interpreted in two ways. For many modern Muslims it means that in discussions and debates on religion with non-Muslims, do not back off, and if you do it is a religious transgression. Defend the faith. For the fundamentalists and extremists, they interpret the same sura in physical warlike terms. So if there is a fight or battle with disbelievers, retreating from the battlefield is not only cowardice and perhaps a crime under military regulations as it is in the West, but it is in Christian terms a mortal sin for which there one will go to hell. So the most religious of Muslims will fight to the death using this sura as their guidance. On the other hand, Muhammad himself as the military and civil leader of Islam made strategic retreats. In the history of almost all warfare between the West and Muslims—especially the Arabs—courage on the battlefield has been lacking and the Israelis, British, French, Americans, and Hindus of India all observe this military weakness and accounting for this is built into their military doctrine.

These suras are ones that for some fundamentalist extremists justified the killing of Iraqis Muslims who worked with the British, Americans or other Coalition forces in the Iraq war or even politicians who cooperated with the coalition.

Essentially such a rigid conviction of unbelievers was common with both Protestants and Catholics in the middle of the second millennium, but Christian theology evolved and forgiveness and repentance became major factors. Islam did not so modernize so even in the 21st century a disbeliever deserved nothing from Muslims because Allah would never forgive them and they would be consigned to hell. So this Sura and {584363} made fundamentalist Muslim terrorists particularly willing to kill non-believers.

See {586039} for a quotation that goes further and seeks to punish and humiliate the non believers. This sura is often used by those wishing to illustrate the intolerance of Islam—especially of other religions. They fail to put this into the context of the Old Testament which proscribed death for heretics or the history of Christianity regarding the murder of nonbelievers. The difference is however, that a very small proportion of Jews or Christians today believe in following Biblical instructions in this respect while the proportion of Muslims who believe in the literal interpretation of scripture on these points is much larger. However there are Islamic modernists and moderates throughout the world who reject this notion of warring on all other religions and there is a struggle going on within Islam itself.

This sura poses a particularly distressing problem to many Islamic theologians and leaders. Since the closing of Islam in the Middle Ages, the Muslim world has not been as successful as has that of those that they would call disbelievers. But disbelievers were not to be successful. To rationalize this with the reality of history they speculated: What the West has achieved is not success. Evil corrupt rulers of Islamic nations have been holding the Islamic countries back. Islamic nations are punished by Allah because they have not spread Islam as Allah commanded. The barren traditional Islamic lands do not allow development and competition in the world. The latter a major reason there is so much enmity towards Israel and Turkey. The Turks who have become secular and the Israelis who were Jews both developed modern industrial countries without oil. The disbelievers had been extremely successful and this was not only a humiliation but threatened the understood integrity of Islam.