On 10/27/05, Monder M Zbaeda <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Dear Gilberto,
> Salaamun 'Alaikum...
> I was reading the Qur'an today and I came across the story of Khidr and
> Musa(as) in Suratul Kahf. How would you explain the slaying of the young
> child? I would love to hear your thoughts.
> Monder
I would look to the Quran's answer. What did Khidr tell Musa when *he*
asked the question? Basically Khidr had special knowledge of the
situation and knew the specific consequences of his actions. But the
actions (in fact, all of those "questionable" actions of Khidr in that
surah) are still evaluated by the same basic values.
It's like the old riddle.. what if you could go back in time and had a
chance to kill a child who you *knew* was going to grow up to murder
large numbers of people. Would you do it? If that was the only way to
save those lives, such an action would probably be justified. But
humans have that kind of knowledge with the appropriate degree of
certainly only in *rare* situations if ever.
But I would NOT say that the rules changed for different periods of
time. What happened is that the same basic values (in this case,
sanctity of life) can lead to different actions in different
situations.
Peace
Gilberto
> Gilberto Simpson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 10/27/05, Susan Maneck wrote:
>
> > "They agreed on their own judge (who was not the
> > prophet) and the judge declared that the men should be killed. The
> > women and children were spared. It was certainly harsh. But it wasn't
> > genocide."
>
> > Dear Gilberto,
> > By 'spared' you mean the women and children were sold into slavery. In
> > Bosnia it was mostly the men who were killed as well while they women were
> > raped (which is the fate of most female slaves.) And what happened in
> Bosnia
> > is considered genocide. So by modern definitions, what would be the
> > difference? Or is it perhaps the case that we can't always judge past
> events
> > by modern standards?
>
> In this particular context, the way you are trying to redefine things
> is inappropriate to the larger issue. The issue of genocid! e came up in
> the contex of talking about how moral decisions can be made based on
> constant ethical values and principles. And in that context, I said
> that the Biblical genocides were clearly wrong. The Israelites
> believed they had a divine commandment, a God-given policy, to kill
> entire populations without sparing women and children, without sparing
> the old or the clergy, without even giving them an opportunity to
> surrender peacfully, or even convert. That's the behavior I'm talking
> about, and that's what I mean by "genocide" in this discussion.
>
> If you come along later with a weaker more inclusive "modern"
> definition of "genocide" in order to try to argue that sometimes
> genocide is okay, that would be a distortion. And comparison with the
> Bosnian genocide is really inappropriate.
>
> Here is a description from Karen Armstrong of some of the issues
> involving Banu Qurayzah:
>
>
> On Muhammad's treatment
> of Banu Qurayzah, a Jewish tribe
>
> Karen Armstrong
>
>
> There then ensued desperate days for the ummah. Muhammad had to
> contend with the hostility of some of the pagans in Medina, who
> resented the power of the Muslim newcomers and were determined to
> expel them from the settlement. He also had to deal with Mecca, where
> Abu Sufyan now directed the campaign against him, and had launched two
> major offensives against the Muslims in Medina. His object was not
> simply to defeat the ummah in battle, but to annihilate all the
> Muslims. The harsh ethic of the desert meant that there were no
> half-measures in warfare: if possible, a victorious chief was expected
> to exterminate the enemy, so the ummah faced the threat of total
> extinction. In 625 Mecca inflicted a severe defeat on the ummah at the
> Battle of Uhud, but two years later the Muslims trounced the Meccans
> at the Battle of the Trench, so called because Muhammad protected the
> settlement by digging a ditch aro! und Medina, which threw the Quraysh,
> who still regarded war rather as a chivalric game and had never heard
> of such an unsporting trick, into confusion, and rendered their
> cavalry useless. Muhammad's second victory over the numerically
> superior Quraysh (there had been ten thousand Meccans to three
> thousand Muslims) was a turning point. It convinced the nomadic tribes
> that Muhammad was the coming man, and made the Quraysh look decidedly
> passe. The gods in whose name they fought were clearly not working on
> their behalf. Many of the tribes wanted to become the allies of the
> ummah, and Muhammad began to build a powerful tribal confederacy,
> whose members swore not to attack one another and to fight each
> other's enemies. Some of the Meccans also began to defect and made the
> hijrah to Medina; at last, after five years of deadly peril, Muhammad
> could be confident that the ummah would survive.
>
> In Medina, the chief casualties of this Muslim su! ccess were the three
> Jewish tribes of Qaynuqah, Nadir and Qurayzah, who were determined to
> destroy Muhammad and who all independently formed alliances with
> Mecca. They had powerful armies, and obviously posed a threat to the
> Muslims, since their territory was so situated that they could easily
> join a besieging Meccan army or attack the ummah from the rear. When
> the Qaynuqah staged an unsuccessful rebellion against Muhammad in 625,
> they were expelled from Medina, in accordance with Arab custom.
> Muhammad tried to reassure the Nadir, and made a special treaty with
> them, but when he discovered that they had been plotting to
> assassinate him they too were sent into exile, where they joined the
> nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar, and drummed up support for Abu
> Sufyan among the northern Arab tribes. The Nadir proved to be even
> more of a danger outside Medina, so when the Jewish tribe of Qurayzah
> sided with Mecca during the Battle of the Trench,! when for a time it
> seemed that the Muslims faced certain defeat, Muhammad showed no
> mercy. The seven hundred men of the Qurayzah were killed, and their
> women and children sold as slaves.
>
> The massacre of the Qurayzah was a horrible incident, but it would be
> a mistake to judge it by the standards of our own time. This was a
> very primitive society: the Muslims themselves had just narrowly
> escaped extermination, and had Muhammad simply exiled the Qurayzah
> they would have swelled the Jewish opposition in Khaybar and brought
> another war upon the ummah. In seventh-century Arabia an Arab chief
> was not expected to show mercy to traitors like the Qurayzah. The
> executions sent a grim message to Khaybar and helped to quell the
> pagan opposition in Medina, since the pagan leaders had been the
> allies of the rebellious Jews. This was a fight to the death, and
> everybody had always known that the stakes were high. The struggle did
> not indicate any host! ility towards Jews in general, but only towards
> the three rebel tribes. The Quran continued to revere Jewish prophets
> and to urge Muslims to respect the People of the Book. Smaller Jewish
> groups continued to live in Medina, and later Jews, like Christians,
> enjoyed full religious liberty in the Islamic empires. Anti-semitism
> is a Christian vice. Hatred of the Jews became marked in the Muslim
> world only after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the
> subsequent loss of Arab Palestine. It is significant that Muslims were
> compelled to import anti-Jewish myths from Europe, and translate into
> Arabic such virulently anti-semitic texts as the Protocols of the
> Elders of Zion, because they had no such traditions of their own.
> Because of this new hostility towards the Jewish people, some Muslims
> now quote the passages in the Quran that refer to Muhammad's struggle
> with the three rebellious Jewish tribes to justify their prejudice. By
> takin! g these verses out of context, they have distorted both the
> message of the Quran and the attitude of the Prophet, who himself felt
> no such hatred of Judaism.
>
> Muhammad's intransigence towards the Qurayzah had been designed to
> bring hostilities to an end as soon as possible. The Quran teaches
> that war is such a catastrophe that Muslims must use every method in
> their power to restore peace and normality in the shortest possible
> time.18 Arabia was a chronically violent society, and the ummah had to
> fight its way to peace. Major social change of the type that Muhammad
> was attempting in the peninsula is rarely achieved without bloodshed.
> But after the Battle of the Trench, when Muhammad had humiliated Mecca
> and quashed the opposition in Medina, he felt that it was time to
> abandon the jihad and begin a peace offensive. In March 628 he set in
> train a daring and imaginative initiative that brought the conflict to
> a close. He announced that he wa! s going to make the hajj. to Mecca,
> and asked for volunteers to accompany him. Since pilgrims were
> forbidden to carry arms, the Muslims would be walking directly into
> the lions' den and putting themselves at the mercy of the hostile and
> resentful Quraysh. Nevertheless, about a thousand Muslims agreed to
> join the Prophet and set out for Mecca, dressed in the traditional
> white robes of the hajji. If the Quraysh forbade Arabs to approach the
> Kabah or attacked bona fide pilgrims they would betray their sacred
> duty as the guardians of the shrine. The Quraysh did, however,
> dispatch troops to attack the pilgrims before they reached the area
> outside the city where violence was forbidden, but the Prophet evaded
> them and, with the help of some of his Bedouin allies, managed to
> reach the edge of the sanctuary, camped at Hudaybiyyah and awaited
> developments. Eventually the Quraysh were pressured by this peaceful
> demonstration to sign a treaty with the ! ummah. It was an unpopular
> move on both sides. Many of the Muslims were eager for action, and
> felt that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammad was determined to
> achieve victory by peaceful means.
>
> Hudaybiyyah was another turning point. It impressed still more of the
> Bedouin, and conversion to Islam became even more of an irreversible
> trend. Eventually in 630, when the Quraysh violated the treaty by
> attacking one of the Prophet's tribal allies, Muhammad marched upon
> Mecca with an army of ten thousand men. Faced with this overwhelming
> force and, as pragmatists, realizing what it signified, the Quraysh
> conceded defeat, opened the city gates, and Muhammad took Mecca
> without shedding a drop of blood. He destroyed the idols around the
> Kabah, rededicated it to Allah, the one God, and gave the old pagan
> rites of the hajj, an Islamic significance by linking them to the
> story of Abraham, Hagar and Ismail. None of the Quraysh was forced to
> become M! uslim, but Muhammad's victory convinced some of his most
> principled opponents, such as Abu Sufyan, that the old religion had
> failed. When Muhammad died in 632, in the arms of his beloved wife
> Aisha, almost all the tribes of Arabia had joined the ummah as
> Confederates or as converted Muslims. Since members of the ummah could
> not, of course, attack one another, the ghastly cycle of tribal
> warfare, of vendetta and counter-vendetta, had ended. Single-handedly,
> Muhammad had brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
>
> [end quote]
>
>
>
>
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