Islam Is Not A Peaceful Religion: Daniel Johnson in an Oxford Union Debate following the murder of a British Soldier by an Islamist fanatic in Woolwich

Islam has the potential to be a religion of peace, but it will need to evolve a great deal if it is actually to become a religion of peace. Islam cannot involve unless Muslim authorities both religious and secular allow the freedoms we in the west take for granted, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, of course these freedoms go together with other basic principles which are absent in those countries. Equality before the law, civil and political rights, constitutional democracy, economic liberty, the separation of church or mosque and state.  All these and ideas emerged in the west because the Judeo-Christian tradition has always evolved in classical and medieval renaissance and enlightenment periods Andy is still evolving today.

As a catholic I must acknowledge but it is only in my lifetime that the church adapted it's teaching on the Jews from enemies to brothers and in order to ensure that the one point two billion Catholics could see but the church banished anti Semitism its practice as well as it's preaching, successive popes have gone out-of-the-way to reach out to Jewish people. How very different is the situation in Islam where Jews and Christians have allowed the reinterpretation of the Bible, Muslim scholars of insisted that the Quran as the unmediated word of Allah cannot be reinterpreted despite this rigidity Islam did evolve in its early centuries but since the medieval period it is undergone successive waves of fundamentalism intended to restore the faith to its original purity and to impose it, if necessary by force on the rest of the world.

We are living through such a wave of today which includes the Wahhabi and Salafi branches of Sunni and the Iranian inspired Shia Islam. The overall name we give to these movements is Islamism or radical Islam rather than emphasize the earlier more pacific elements in the Mohammad’s teachings such as his constitution of Medina which granted equal rights to Jews Christians and pagans. Islamists emphasize later doctrines such as the division of the world into the Darul Islam and the Darul Harab, the house of Islam and the house of war. We are living apparently in the house of war or the draconian enforcement of Sharia law.

URL: https://newageislam.com/multimedia/islam-peaceful-religion-daniel-johnson/d/12574