This is very, very pretty. Last March, Juan Cole posted a smug collection of talking points about “Peace and Love in the Quran” (the better for DKos denizens to smugly quote). The first link is to a pedantic discussion of Koran 25:63:
The Criterion lays out toward the end of its 77 verses a vision of the pious believer. That has to do first of all with wishing others peace.
25:63: “The worshippers of the All-Merciful are they who tread gently upon the earth, and when the ignorant address them, they reply, ‘Peace!’”
These verses from The Criterion define the Muslim community as peaceful, as wishing even enemies peace, and as forbidding bloodshed except in self-defense.
Somebody needs to tell that to the publishers of Saudi Arabian textbooks, because they’re teaching millions of kids the total and exact and precise opposite:
ELEVENTH GRADE
“The greeting ‘Peace be upon you’ is specifically for believers. It cannot be said to others.”
“If one comes to a place where there is a mixture of Muslims and infidels, one should offer a greeting intended for the Muslims.”
“Do not yield to them [Christians and Jews] on a narrow road out of honor and respect.”
All standard disclaimers about our ignorance of Muslim theology apply, but we very strongly suspect that what’s going on is that Cole is as usual quoting a passage from early Islam that is abbrogated by later passages. The exact same thing happened with the “no compulsion in religion” slieght-of-hand that Cole (and Hitch) tried to pull against the Pope. The “no compulsion” passage comes from a period where Mohammed had to say that because he was too weak to militarily conquer his enemies. The passage that Cole is citing to prove the Koran’s inherent message of peace and love is from a period even earlier than that. We’re beginning to suspect that maybe the problem is that Juan Cole just never finished the Koran – he got to somewhere in the middle and concluded, just like with everything else in his life, that he already had it figured out.
The people who write Saudi Arabia’s textbooks seem to have read all the way to the end. Which makes this extra comforting:
The Saudi public school system totals 25,000 schools, educating about 5 million students. In addition, Saudi Arabia runs academies in 19 world capitals, including one outside Washington in Fairfax County, that use some of these same religious texts. Saudi Arabia also distributes its religion texts worldwide to numerous Islamic schools and madrassas that it does not directly operate… Education is at the core of the debate over freedom in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden understands this well; in a recent audiotape he railed against those who would ‘interfere with school curricula.’”
Someone should tell all these Muslim scholars how it’s racist to imply that Islam isn’t egalitarian.
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