Islam and the Challenge of Civilization

Prologue: Religion and Violence

Islam is not the only faith to have committed acts of violence in the name of religion. Christians have also waged holy wars against the infidel. Nor is such violence the sole province of monotheisms. Such violence often stems from too literal an interpretation of foundational scriptures, and a failure to properly contextualize and historicize the production of those scriptures. Among the three major world monotheisms, Islam, unlike Judaism and Christianity, has yet to seriously reform this literalist, ahistorical approach to its own texts, and to place secular citizenship before religious identity. Muslims in Europe are poised to achieve this goal. This book proposes a new hermeneutics of the foundational texts of Islam that could achieve this.