Where are the Moderate Muslims? A Response to Hussein Aboubakr

By
Dr. John Andrew Morrow
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1825

After every new terrorist attack in the West, falsely committed in the name of Islam by heretics or mercenaries, some politician tries to profit from the tragedy by scapegoating all Muslims and demonizing an entire world religion. Dr. John Andrew Morrow presents the full facts on Islam and Muslims.

Script Highlights:

According to the Pew Research Center, 93% of the Islamic World is made up of Sunnis, Shiites, and Sufis. They are orthodox Muslims. 7% of the Islamic World is made up of Salafis, Wahhabis, and Takfiris. They are not orthodox Muslims. They are heretics. They are the people referred to in the West as Islamists, Jihadists, and Islamo-Fascists. Statistically speaking, there is absolutely no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are as law-abiding as the members of any other monotheistic faith. Anyone who argues otherwise is dishonest, duplicitous, and deceptive…

Hussein Aboubakr focuses on the fact that many Muslims from the Middle-East and South Asia support the death penalty for apostasy. However, he conveniently ignores the broader picture. 71% of Tunisian Muslims, 73% of Thai Muslims, 78% Tajik Muslims, 83% of Turkish Muslims, 82% of Indonesian Muslims, 85% of Bosnian and Russian Muslims, 89% of Kosovo Muslims, 92% of Albanian Muslims, and 96% of Kazakh Muslims oppose the death penalty for people who leave Islam…

Over 60% of Muslims support democracy. If this seems low to some, it is because Muslims have been victims of fake democracy since the end of colonial times. If 40% oppose democracy, it is the “democracy” of military dictators and monarchs that they oppose as well as the “democracy” of Western invasion and occupation. When asked about religious freedom, 92.6% of Muslims asserted that it was a good thing. Anyone who claims that “most of the world’s Muslims believe that any acts of violence against Israel, including suicide bombers in buses and restaurants, are justified” is a liar. As the Pew Research Center confirms, the majority of Muslims oppose extremism, terrorism, and suicide bombing…

Calling out Radical Islamists and Jihadists does not make one an Islamophobe. I do it all the time and I am a committed Muslim. Putting all Muslims in the same boat, painting them with the brush, falsifying facts, and trying to convince people that even educated, unveiled, and accent-free Muslim women were extremists is the very epitome of Islamophobia. It is equally Islamophobic to claim that Muslims do not rise up to denounce Islamicist terror because they are secretly in sympathy with the terrorists. Wrong! They denounce it all the time, by the millions. Muslim voices, however, are routinely censored by the mainstream media.

It is critical to distinguish between the masses of Muslim human beings from the tiny minority of sub-human terrorists. The traditional values of Islam are perfectly compatible with the traditional values of the Western world; Judeo-Christian values and Humanitarian values. The Prophet Muhammad produced the first constitution in the political history of humanity. The Covenants of the Prophet were the first to enshrine modern notions of civic and human rights. The principles of the Prophet influenced the European Renaissance, the Napoleonic Code, the American Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Orthodox, traditional, mainstream, civilizational, and classical Islam does not need to be reformed. It needs to be healed of a disease, a poisonous innovation, called Takfiri Salafism—a cancerous tumor attached to the body of Islam. It does not belong to the body. It will debilitate, destroy, and kill the body. It must be amputated. The sooner that the cancerous tumor is surgically removed, the better it will be for both Muslims and non-Muslims.

I am Dr. John Andrew Morrow, unapologetically Muslim, for the Covenants Initiative.

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Dr. John Andrew Morrow
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The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World by Dr. John Andrew Morrow is constructed around covenants that the Prophet concluded with various Christian communities of his time, which Prof. Morrow has discovered in obscure monasteries, collections, and book out of print for centuries, in some cases newly translating them into English, as well as providing cogent arguments for their validity. They uniformly state that Muslims are not to attack peaceful Christian communities, rob them, stop churches from being repaired, tear down churches to build mosques, prevent their Christian wives from going to church and taking spiritual direction from Christian priests and elders, etc. On the contrary, the Prophet commands Muslims to actively protect these communities “until the End of the World”.

With the publication of The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World we may in fact be witnessing—unexpectedly, miraculously, at this extremely late date—the emergence of a third foundational source for Islam in addition to Qur’an and hadith: the application of western methods of textual and historical research to the documents composed by the Prophet himself during his lifetime. These documents—letters, covenants, treaties etc.—though known to a few scholars for many centuries, have been largely neglected by both traditional Muslim and modern western scholarship, and are virtually unknown to the mass of believers.

One of the most valuable contributions of this work is that it represents a comprehensive treasury of rare, ancient, Islamic sources, many of which have been quite difficult to obtain. Rather than spend their time scouring European and Middle Eastern archives, scholars will now have all the sources they need to conduct further studies on the Covenants and advance our knowledge in this fascinating field. Not only has Dr. Morrow included the original primary sources in Arabic and Persian, he has provided corrected versions of most of these in modern Arabic typescript, along with a wide variety of translations for the purpose of comparative analysis.

Consequently, the Covenant of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World represents a necessary and foundational resource and source of reference for all subsequent studies. And now that we are witness to widespread Islamicist violence against Christians in places like Syria and Egypt—often perpetrated by groups fighting as proxies for the United States and Israel—It is nothing short of providential that The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World should see the light of day at this precise historical moment.

John Andrew Morrow was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1971. He received his doctorate from the University of Toronto where he acquired expertise in Hispanic, Native, and Islamic Studies. He has served as a faculty member and administrator at numerous colleges and universities, the most notable of which was the University of Virginia’s Semester at Sea program for which he taught Spanish, English, and Religious Studies while circumnavigating the globe.

Dr. Morrow had authored and edited a wide body of books in various fields. In the area of Islamic Studies, his works include: Arabic, Islam, and the Allah Lexicon: How Language Shapes our Conception of God (Edwin Mellen, 2006), the Encyclopedia of Islamic Herbal Medicine (McFarland, 2011), Religion and Revolution: Spiritual and Political Islam in Ernesto Cardenal (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), Islamic Insights: Writings and Reviews (Ansariyan, 2012) and Islamic Images and Ideas: Essays on Sacred Symbolism (McFarland, 2013), among many others.

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