Word: koranic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zarqawi, the killers have often claimed religious sanction. As reported in the New York Times, a videotape of the execution in Fallujah last month of Muhammad Fawazi, an Egyptian believed by his killers to have been aiding the Americans, shows an insurgent standing over Fawazi, quoting verses from the Koran. "He who will abide by the Koran will prosper, he who offends against it will get the sword," the man says, just before two others force Fawazi to the ground and sever his head...
...Qaeda fled from Afghanistan. The U.S. and other international donors have pumped millions of dollars into the Pakistani education system in an effort to draw students away from Saudi-funded fundamentalist madrasahs, or religious schools, where 1.5 million Pakistani children spend nearly all their time memorizing the Koran in Arabic, even though few Pakistanis speak the language. Pakistanis say that so far the government has failed to build new secular schools that would provide an alternative to the madrasahs. Religious conservatives are trying to expand their reach: a Pakistani cleric and Member of Parliament has launched a campaign to shut...
...does Islam also excuse al-Zarqawi-style atrocity? Well, one verse in the Koran condones beheading, but in the heat of battle. Some accounts of the Prophet Muhammad's life, called hadiths, record the execution--by what method is debated--of a tribe that had lived among Muslims and then betrayed them. Al-Zarqawi's specific bid to sacralize Berg's slaughter rests on an allusion to Muhammad's great victory on the battlefield of Badr. According to some hadiths, Muhammad was left wondering what to do with the resulting prisoners. This, the texts claimed, was the context...
...extent to which these people enter into questions of Islamic principles is questionable." Since religious study was discouraged for decades under Saddam Hussein, many of the younger insurgents are educating themselves as they go along. If they accept as teachers theorists of terrorism like al-Zarqawi, the Koran may continue to be used to sanction atrocities no one could ever have imagined...
Those of us pushing for reforms are not seeking to change Islam. We are questioning defective doctrine from an intellectual and theological position, using the Koran, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad and ijtihad, or critical reasoning, as ideological weapons in the war over how Muslim communities define themselves. Islamic scholar Amina Wadud notes that we are emboldened to take public action to reject the way extremists have defined Islam since 9/11. We are in the midst of jihad li tajdid al-ruh al-Islami, a struggle for the soul of Islam...