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:
“I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)