Correcting Myths About The Koran
Hamid corrects misinformation about the Koran. He corrects three commonly misunderstood topics including the following:
- Does the Koran instruct Muslims to kill non-Muslim?
Hamid explains why not. All interpretations of the Koran which concludes otherwise, he explains, ignore the article "the", or its Arabic equivalent "al-". For example, Koran uses the term "al-Kafereen" ("the infidels") to refer to those who initiated hostilities during early phase of Islam, not any "infidel" in perpetuity.
He quotes verse 2:190, which reminds good Muslims not to initiate violence under any circumstance against anyone and to restrain themselves in the event the enemy initiates hostilities.
- Does the Quran support anti-Semitism?
He shows examples of the Jews being praised and that "pigs" and "monkeys" are not to be taken literally.
- Are we allowed to judge others or condemn them as "Infidels"?
He says that only God knows everything and so humans should not judge others on necessarily incomplete information.
Read more about this topic: Tawfik Hamid
Famous quotes containing the words correcting and/or myths:
“One must first correct oneself before correcting others.”
—Chinese proverb.
Confucian Analects.
“... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)