‘The Qur’anic verses commanding self-defence have been cherry-picked by anti-Muslim writers and by small cells of extremists to depict the Prophet and the community as militant. This is far from accurate’. This excerpt is from what I believe is the most disgraceful video I have ever seen on Islam: Muhammad: A Prophet of War? by University of Michigan History professor Juan Cole, made for the Emir-Stein Center.
I will first respond to all of Professor Cole’s scriptural evidences supposedly showing that Islam is peaceful. Cole first asserts that in the face of persecution, the Qur’an ‘advises’ Muhammad in Surah 73:10: ‘And be patient about what they say, and emigrate from them in a beautiful emigration.’ Then he jumps suddenly to Surah 41:34; ‘Good and evil are not equal. Repel the latter with the greater good’.
Cole is trying to portray the Qur’an’s message as one of peace by invoking passages that are not relevant to the topic. The equivocation of peace and patience is baffling. The claim is so vague that it is hard to rebuke. Does having patience with someone invalidate verses for appropriate punishment when they wage war against Allah?
When words such as ‘good’, ‘righteousness’ et al are used in the Qur’an, we must remember not to apply our standards of what they mean, but rather Allah’s standard. In Islam, Allah always defines what is good. This means that any appeal to good could be a call to violence, if Allah has deemed violent action to be good. In regard to Surah 41:34, Sam Shamoun writes: ‘Muhammad couldn’t refrain himself from inflicting torture on individuals who had attacked his shepherds and took off with his herd. What makes this all the more ironic is that these men did to Muhammad the very same thing that he and his followers had already done to the caravans of others. Muhammad’s torture of the Uraynians failed to do the more righteous thing, to follow the better way, as prescribed in passages such as 41:34.’ We even read in Sahih al-Bukhari 50, Sahih al-Bukhari 111, Sunan Abu Dawud 4491 and Sunan Abu Dawud 4515 that a Muslim should not be put to death in equivalent punishment for the death of an infidel. This is a principle also held by Ibn Kathir and other commentators. This verse’s apparent sentiment does not hold up to scrutiny; these irrelevant Meccan verses do not make the case Cole claims they make.
Cole cites other, similar Meccan verses, including Surah 25:63, ‘And the servants of the merciful are those who walk on the earth gently, and, when the fool addressed them, they say, “Peace”‘. This passage does not command peace; rather, it expresses the idea that when believers encounter fools, they should address them with peace. If the fool were to espouse polytheism or unbelief, Muslims must act in accordance with Qur’an verses such as 9:29, 9:5 and 9:123. Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir comments on Surah nine and earlier verses by saying; ‘All people of the world should be called to Islam. If any one of them refuses to do so or pay the Jizyah, they should be fought till they are killed’. Surah nine was revealed a year after Muhammad had conquered Mecca, throwing Cole’s self-defence narrative out the window. It is also ironic that Cole would claim killing is permissible in defensive war, yet would stick to the idea that evil should be repelled with the greater good. Notice, however, that even when Muhammad was forced to be submissive to others, he never preached to love your enemies.
The key fact here is that all three of the verses above are Meccan verses. According to the Islamic account of Muhammad’s career, at that time he did not have the capacity to command the explicit elimination of unbelievers. After that period come teachings that war should be purely defensive, but in Islamic theology these are understood to have been abrogated, as Ibn Kathir explains.
Cole then goes on to present some Medinan verses, and the truth seeps out. In Qur’an 8:38, ‘Say to those who became infidels, if they cease, what is passed will be forgiven them’, note the qualifier of the ceasing of their rebellion against Allah. Cole’s next verse, Surah 8:61, says the following; ‘And if they lean toward peace (truce), so lean toward it’, which once again contains that interesting qualifier. We might say Cole has ‘cherry-picked’ a little himself here. The context for this verse is that it is speaking about a truce. Cole’s final verses to support his claim that Islam teaches peace were Qur’an 48:26, 48:24 and 5:16. While both the verses he cited from the chapter of the Conquest (Surah 48) were legitimately narrated, they do not show a command for peace. He concludes by claiming that Surah 5:16, one of the last passages to be revealed to Muhammad, shows peace from Allah. Surah 5:16 is as follows; ‘Allah will guide with it the one who will follow his pleasure to the ways of peace, and he will bring them out of the darkness to the light by his permission. And he will guide them to a straight way’. This verse is clearly not a command for peace; it is Allah guiding ‘one who will follow his pleasure’ to the straight way, which, if based on the Qur’an, is inherently violent.
Cole’s straw man at the beginning, namely that observations that Islam teaches warfare are ‘anti-Muslim’, is in full flight by the time he cites Surah 2:190: And engage in war for the sake of Allah against those who engage in war against you. God does not love aggressors’. Professor Cole’s best example of Allah commanding peace is ‘cherry picked’ from a set of verses explicitly commanding war when disbelievers make war against them.
But how exactly can a disbeliever make war against Muslims? One example is explained in Surah 5:33; ‘Surely the reward of those who war against Allah and his messenger and go about to vandalize on the earth is only that they will be killed or crucified or have their hands and legs cut off on opposite sides or they will be banished from the earth’. We see another specific punishment given in Surah 8:12-13: ‘When your lord revealed to the angels: “I am with you, so make firm those who believed. I will cast a terror into the hearts of those who became infidels. So strike above their necks, and strike off every finger from them.” This is because they have opposed Allah and his messenger, and whoever opposes Allah and his messenger, so surely Allah is severe in the punishment’. It is very clear that Allah sees opposition to him as a severely punishable action. The Qur’an commands killing in over 70 verses,; all for specific reasons and usually with specific punishments.
Some more verses in the Qur’an commanding Muslims to kill include Surah 2:193, 2:216 and 9:73. In Surah 2:193, just a few verses after one of Cole’s examples of the Qur’an teaching peace, comes the following; ‘And engage in war with them until there be no sedition and the religion be to Allah. So if they desist, so there will be no transgression except on the unjust.’ The only time the slaughter of those unbelievers in such a war is to stop is when they surrender, the very meaning of ‘Islam’. In his notes on his translation of the Qur’an (The Generous Qur’an, which is the only correct title translation), Usama Dakdok writes before these verses that they teach the following; ‘Never stop waging war until all men worship Allah. Revenge is lawful’. Dakdok then compares it to the Christian covenant: ‘This contradicts Matthew 5:38-39, 44; Romans 12:19-21; and I Peter 2:21-23.’
In Surah 2:216, further harming the self-defence narrative, Allah explains that ‘War is decreed to you, and it is hated by you. And perhaps you may hate something, and it is good for you; and perhaps you love something, and it is evil for you. And Allah knows, and you do not know’. As we see, war is decreed by Allah himself. Clearly sometimes Muhammad’s men were hesitant or cautious, but fighting for the sake of Allah is paramount. We read in Surah 9:73: ‘O you prophet, perform jihad against the infidels and the hypocrites, and be harsh with them. And their abode will be hell, and evil is the final place.’ Once again, the self-defence narrative is eliminated as jihad against the infidels and hypocrites is mandated for the perfect man, Muhammad. As we know, jihad in Islamic theology is warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers under the hegemony of Islamic law. In the reliable Islamic sources, there is only one application, and of course in this scenario, performing against the infidels and hypocrites, it is crystal clear.
My challenge to Professor Juan Cole, on his premise that Islam is peaceful, is for him to cite a single verse in the Qur’an (the direct, perfect, unchangeable, eternal, perfectly preserved word of Allah) that preaches love for an unbeliever. Knowing that all the verses he previously presented fall flat in the light of clear, contextual commands to kill in many varying scenarios, how truly can he claim that the sentiments of Islam are peaceful and that Muhammad was a Prophet of Peace?
As Coptic Orthodox priest Zakaria Botros, called by some ‘Islam’s public enemy number one’, with a $60 million Al Qaeda bounty on his head, says of the importance of speaking the truth about Islam: ‘We should not flatter people at the expense of truth’.