
I’m always hearing people talk about how Islam is a more inherently violent or oppressive religion than Christianity or really any other major religion. I can think of many reasons to dispute that myself but I’m not a member of any religion so I’m curious what you could/would say to those people 🙏
Tbh I don’t think either Islam or Christianity are necessarily violent or oppressive so much as powers that be who are in fact violent and oppressive may use them for their own ends. Ie if you are a violent oppressive person you will be that way regardless of ideological label. But if you mean what does Islam actually promote, well then I’d say look to the prophet pbuh’s life. He was persecuted for a over a decade and didn’t fight back, only when they started murdering people for being Muslim
And driving them out of their homes was he allowed by God to fight back militarily in self defense. Over the course 23 years on both sides 1k people died, which compared to the empires of the time and today is nothing. When he took control of Mecca he granted amnesty to the people who literally killed his family and desecrated their corpses since the war was over, didn’t force anyone to convert. As Muslims we follow the prophetic model, so there is room for self defense, but you don’t trespass
Limits. There are well defined rules of violence/war where you cannot be initiating violence on people and if you have to fight then if they surrender you have to accept that, that you can’t even harm the trees of an area where you’re at war, etc. When Muslims after the prophet pbuh’s died ended up taking over Persian and Roman territory the people were not harmed, and were allowed to keep their religions. This is why to this day indigenous and prior religions to Islam still exist in Islamic
Areas whereas if you look to European Christiandom non Christian’s were for the most part genocided and forced to convert. The whole colonization effort had massive religious support that justified its violence. Again I would say that’s a corrupted form of Christianity manipulated power hungry people to serve their interests same as any other ideology, but the historical record gives you an idea of which results in more violence. Out of the largest most bloody wars in the last thousand years,
None of them have been from Muslims (outside of Tamerlane who wasn’t really Muslim, more Turkic mongol than anything and killed mainly fellow Muslims himself). No Muslim country is going around mass killing civilians under the name and backing of Islamic orthodoxy, most of our extremist groups are literally funded by the cia and Israel and kill mainly Muslims. Compare that to Christian countries mass killing ppl rn, self professed Christians war mongering constantly, and you get the idea
Well he was def a terrorist. He literally went outside of Islam to justify his actions against innocent civilians, which is clearly haram. He tried holding random people to account for the massacres carried out by western powers against Muslims abroad and said as much that Islam didn’t support it but that he was being politically realist or whatever nonsense. The IRA also never mass targeted thousands of innocent civilians 9/11 style afaik