Interfaith Dialog

I stumbled across The American Muslim website via a Negrophile twit. The linked article had an interesting quote:

The leadership has erroneously preached that after the coming of Prophet Muhammad, all other religions are null and void, and that the Quran supersedes all other religious scriptures — when the fact is: That Quran came to bring the “ignorant Arabs” on par with other revealed faiths – because the Arabs had never had an Arabian Prophet nor a revelation in Arabic, The Quran. (Ref. 5:19,26: 192 to 200, 32:3 & 41:44). This interpretation lays the groundwork for religious diversity, pluralism and tolerance.

This quote is pretty interesting. I have repeatedly written that Islam was a unifying force for Arabs and was/is a vehicle for Arab nationalism no different in my view of how Christianity became the unifying theme for Europeans. The author of the above then makes the exact argument that I have been making. I won't get into the "revealed faiths" issue but it is interesting that Arabs who apparently needed "an Arabian Prophet" would then seek to convert other people to an "outside" religion when they themselves (by word of the quoted author) did not see it as satisfactory to adhere to or follow non-Arabic revelations.

Of course it is also the case that if Islam was meant to bring Arabs "up to par" in regards to other religions, then it would undermine arguments for even converting to Islam simply because if one is already practicing a so called "revealed" religion, then Islam is merely the "johnny come lately" (to borrow the words of Dr. Clarke) and arguments such as the NOI's "Islam is the original religion of the black man" fall flat. So too does the concept of "reversion" to Islam, since by the quoted author's writing:

Prophet Muhammad preached, “To every people was sent an Apostle in their own language and in their own country ( Ref: 10:47, 14:4 & 16:36), and that more than 124,000 Prophets (infinite) have been sent by The Merciful God from the beginning of human life.”

In which case you can't revert to that which came late to the party. Of course the flip side is to reject the authors condemnation of those:

The leadership has erroneously preached that after the coming of Prophet Muhammad, all other religions are null and void, and that the Quran supersedes all other religious scriptures

Since only through the above belief can one sustain the idea of reversion and to an extent, conversion.

Overall the article is interesting in terms of it's implications. I'm not entirely convinced that the general observant Muslim population actually buys into the argument presented, but I have no way of knowing that. However; it would be interesting to see how some of the persons about whom I've written about or with would react to such statements.

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