Broken_Shoelace said:
Muslims don't currently have the equivalent of the Pope if that's what you're asking. For that to happen, you need a Caliphate established, with a Caliph to rule over the Muslim world. I speak on the behalf of both of us when I say thank god this doesn't exist. However, most Muslim authorities condemn these attacks.
Broken, this is meaningless. I don't care if a couple sheikhs with a broad public standing make some vague statement condemning violence after al-Qaeda or Boko Haram or ISIS pull off their latest attack, because there are other sheikhs and imams who will justify it by turning to the Qu'ran, the Hadiths, the schools of jurisprudence, and the biography of Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq.
So which side is right? Well, that is an academic discussion, but ultimately you need a final powerful authority who just says "This is the law, this is the true Islam, and those who don't follow these rules are false Muslims". That's what the Catholic Church has in place with the practice of excommunication, and the Church used to actually enforce it, which it should on John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and other public Catholics who are a disgrace.
What you have failed to do is prove to me why - in a definitive, absolute sense - the likes of Choudary, Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc. are bad Muslims or people who are not true Muslims. Calling them extremists doesn't cut it. Saying that someone is extreme in a devotion does not nullify the devotion. If I was to say that someone was an "extreme Nazi", would you then have justification in saying they are not really a Nazi? If I was to say that someone was an "extreme Communist", would you have justification in saying that they are not really a Communist? That makes no sense whatsoever.
For all the leftist handwringing over Islamophobia and the repeating of the same hollow cliches about how the terrorists are a non-Islamic extremist minority twisting the real meaning of the religion, absolutely no one has definitively proven why ISIS and the other extremist groups are not Islamic. No one has done this, and no one will do it because no one can do it.
Broken_Shoelace said:
What do you mean "no one has proven"? You don't need an authority to explain how the killing of innocents is wrong.
Seriously Broken? Come on, you can't be actually making this argument.
You know full well that the Islamist militant groups do not claim to be killing innocents just to kill innocents and be sadistic. They justify their actions by saying that their victims are blasphemers of the prophet, or apostates (i.e. Shiites), or that they have victimized Muslims (i.e. the U.S. or India or Russia, as three examples). When it comes to these gray areas, Muslim authorities absolutely do need to speak with one voice in explaining the theoretical errors of the extremist Muslims if there is to be any meaningful opposition to them in the Islamic world.
Broken_Shoelace said:
don't know where you get the impression that Bin Laden was highly revered in the Muslim world. You have to keep in mind that if Al Qaeda or ISIS are as accepted as you think they are, they would have taken over the Muslim world by now. As it stands, they don't even occupy a quarter of it.
They don't occupy even a quarter of it because the United States has propped up favorable pro-Western tyrannies since the Cold War, and that is part of the reason why al-Qaeda directed its war against the U.S. in the first place.
Also, I would note these three realities: 1) Islamist groups have done very well in numerous elections across the Middle East, 2) Bin Laden was banned from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the House of Saud because they saw him as a serious threat to their power, due to his popularity in the kingdom, and 3) even if most Arabs and Muslims don't have a zeal for fundamentalist Shariah the way Bin Laden did, they still do share many of his sentiments about U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, and in that sense he was quite popular in the Arab world, was he not?
^
