Gamle bøger og moderne dilemmaer

Fra American Enterprise Institute:

… After the 9/11 terror attacks, Americans understandably felt a new surge of curiosity about Islam. In response, scholars and writers have offered two broad types of answer.

The first answer is defensive and apologetic. As typified, for example, in the work of the scholar John Esposito and the popularizer Karen Armstrong, this school denies any special connection at all between Islam and violence. To the extent that it acknowledges Islamic violence at all, it condones it as response to the aggressions of others. The logical implication of this work: If we want terrorism to stop, we must change our own behavior to stop provoking it.

The opposing answer is accusatory. As typified by the work of the scholar Bat Ye’or and the popularizer Robert Spencer, it locates the sources of Islamic violence in the Koran itself, in the person of Muhammad, and in the core teachings of the Muslim faith. The logical implication of this work: Islamic violence will continue so long as Islam itself plagues the earth.

…
If one goes back into Islamic history, one encounters many devout Muslims who read their religion in ways that seem impressively modern. They recognized that the Koran was a work of human origin, a product of its times. They applied the techniques of skeptical historiography to the legends of the life of Muhammad, the hadiths, eliminating thousands of them as spurious. Muslims called this approach “ijtihad,” the application of human reason to religious revelation.Catastrophic events in Islamic history–and perhaps also a gathering awareness that the skeptical method might cut much deeply than even its first practitioners anticipated–led to the famous “closing of the gates of ijtihad” almost one thousand years ago. But now the pressure of modernity is forcing those gates open again. Many Muslims experience this opening as deeply threatening. Reactionary Islam promises to relieve those feelings by slamming the gates shut forever, with all the force derivable from hundreds of billions of dollars of oil wealth.