Yvonne:) debate is like a game of chess. Sometimes we put our pawns out in what appears to be a 'suicidal' move :) but aaaah.. then biff, clobber, bang.. we take the other's bishop with our knight lurking off to the side.

My unequivocal statement about 'correct' interpretation fulfilled its goal, of bringing out some very good discussion. And all I had to do was apparently claim I knew the 'only/correct' interepretation :)

Let me now restate more along Goodthiefs lines.

There is a Correct, and Incorrect and many shades in between.
2+2 can be decribed in many ways. But the most 'correct' meaning of '2+2' is that it equals 4. rather than 5.

"You shall have no other gods before me" is pretty clear.
"You shall not covet your neighbours stuff" is pretty clear.
Ali G is quite wrong when he claims that one should not commit adultery "unless she is fit" (Da gospel according to Ali G)

Topic. Will an Islamic renaissance involve the repudiation of specific verses of the Quran?

9:30 is the most important one, it is the 'Mein Kampf' of Islam.

FH claims the context was a battle. Syed Maududi explains.

"The second event that contributed towards making Islam a formidable power was the Campaign of Tabuk which was necessitated by the provocative activities of the Christians living within or near the boundaries of the Roman Empire to the north of Arabia."

'PROVOCATIVE ACTIVIIES' of Christians ? err.. believing that Jesus is the Christ the SON OF GOD is a 'provocative activity'? requiring that they be 'destroyed'?

Is it sinking in yet? I sure hope so. Are you seeing the 'correct' :) Interpretation of this verse?

If Maududi IS correct, then the Quran would not be speaking about 'beliefs' it would be referring to 'provocotive acts' of a military nature. Right or wrong?

Thus, the deeply dark and pernicious, hateful,aggressive,violent,anti-semitic nature of "Islam" is further confirmed by this discussion, and the possibility of an Islamic Renaissance can only ever occur by Muslims completely repudiating such verses as this one.
Again..'right or wrong'?

Boaz,

Had to copy and paste since you repeat yourself on many threads.

Hitler, 12 April 1922 speech:
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
"My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.”
Note the “Their sword will become our plow" used in his speech is copied from the Bible (Micah 4:3) and the ‘tears of war’ copied from Joel 3:9-10)

Even though you are marketing your faith as loving, peaceful and tolerant, someone found justification to murder 6 million innocent jews.

A decade ago in Rwanda, 96% population murdered 800,000 non-Christian infidels! How did that happen?

My point is simple: it’s not the scripture, its how you contextualise and teach it. If you followed the same approach with the Bible you might win the world’s shortest book.

How do you explain that Christians and Jews lived amongst Muslims for the last 14 centuries, their faith, places of worship intact while the Muslims and Jews were slaughtered (and burnt alive) under tolerant Christianity? Something is not adding up Boaz.

Back on topic:
Islamic renaissance started as early as last century with scholars like Mohammed Abduh and Gamal Al Afghani. They travelled across the world and returned to innovate and modernise. I am not sure Muslim scholars have to live in the west for the renaissance to happen.

aqvarivs,
I think I understand what you mean, namely that I failed - to use the words from the Tillich quote - to convince you that the East-West polarity "makes the reality which these ideas are supposed to reflect understandable." I apologise.

Nevertheless, may I add, that your ice cream eaters differ only in their sensual perceptions, where the situation is quite easy: if we both looked at a pair of elephants, I claimed one of them was pink the other grey, whereas you saw only grey elephants, it would be easy to decide objectively (comparing the wavelengths of the lights emitted) whether you were colour blind or I had hallucinations.

When the perception goes beyond sensual, when human nature is involved, when it is concerned with explanation and assessment of possible future developments, the situation is much more complicated and harder to convey one's way of seeing things. I used to compare the filter of East-West polarities to the split image focusing system in older SLR cameras: the vertical line in the viewfinder was neither really broken (objective truth), nor was its brokenness just a fiction of the photographer's imagination (subjective fantasy) but it was part of the camera's way of helping the photographer to properly focus in.

Well I am again not sure if this helped, and, anyway, we have drifted too far away from the topic of the article.

Sorry, fixture, not fiction of imagination.

Dear F.H. what you don't realize (it appears) is that 'your' version of Islam is not that of many others. I'm sure there are those who share your moderate and matey approach, but as I've said, they are not my concern.

The vid of Indonesian Christians at the courthouse, with a raging Muslim mob outside yelling GANTUNG "Hang them" is about as real as it gets for me, because I can put names to each of those faces in the Muslim mob, as in, I know people in Malaysia who would be doing exactly the same thing, and to MY FAMILY.

You are welcome to mention Hitler, I take all that on board, and I did read quite a bit of not only that speech, but excepts from many others.
To undersand Hitlers use of religion one needs to consider the social mielliue of that time. In 1956 the largest crowd EVER to goto the MCG attended the Billy Graham crusade in Melbourne, over 150,000.

When his son came out a year or 2 back, there was a nearly full Telstra Dome,but that equates to just 35,000 people or so.
Hitler said what he needed to say, to capture the crowd.

He may have even believed some of it, even most of it, but again, I remind you, comparing his understanding with a 'correct' interpretation of the scriptures shows clearly that he had no scriptural basis for his actions.

THAT my friend, is the problem with Islam, there IS a scriptural?Quranic basis for the attacks on Jews and Christians.

The Tabuk Campaign involved murders, (brother of Prince Ukaydir of Duma) forced conversions, pillaging of property and military threats.

While wholesale slaughter of Christians was not undertaken, this had a reason behind it. They were the BUFFER between the Byzantines and Arabia.

Mohammad, by forcing the Christian Arabs into military treaties, basically signed their death warrants without firing an arrow, because they would be either killed by the Byzantines he forced them to betray, or by HIM if they betrayed him and turned back to them.

Islam is about what Muslims and Islamic countries do in practice, not what their scholars or apologists write. The evidential data is that Islam is not so much a religion but rather a political system.

It is a religion when Muslims are a minority in a country. They have many, many ‘religious’ practices (many of them are irrational e.g. dietry prohibitions, a woman can’t shake the hands of a man, can’t drink beer, etc.) which prevent them from integrating with the rest of the non-Muslim community wherever they are. Then, they think that the law of the land is not good enough for them. They give a 1001 frivolous reasons why they need to have their own laws, i.e. Sharia law.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4215182.stm

Should Muslims be in a majority Islam becomes a political system. It is not tolerant of other religions and establishes barbaric laws based on the Koran that is alien to democracies and socialist countries. Without any exception all Muslim-majority countries have laws that forbid Muslims from renouncing Islam.
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Religion&loid=8.0.408803447&par=0
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_4_18/ai_82651661

Even in so-called moderate Islamic country of Malaysia, there is no freedom of religion.
http://www.islam-watch.org/AdrianMorgan/Totalitarian-Aspects-Moderate-Muslim-Malaysia.htm

The majority of Muslims aren’t interested in Islam. Through a long process of indoctrination, brain-washing and threats of hell, the Islamic cleric and jihadist have a strangle-hold on the minds, and life-style of Muslims. Therefore, the Muslims are to be pitied rather than hated. They can be helped by abandoning their traditional mosques and madrassahs altogether. Progressive Muslims like Mohammed Arkoun, would go even further if he embraces secularism and join the ranks of Ibn Warraq, Ali Sani, etc from International Society for Islamic Secularization, or less well known Indian-Muslim Hamid Dalwai http://www.hvk.org/Publications/wit.html