Are you an extremist too?

Question:
You said:

“An extremist is a person who believes that only his views are correct while all others are incorrect and he is therefore not prepared to respect and listen to the other views to find out if they could be correct too.”

Are you as a true Muslim ready to accept that Islam is a false religion? If this is you basic belief that Islam is the true religion, will you consider yourself an Extremist too?

Response:
I must admit that it is a good question.

If someone tells me that my religion was false, I would consider such a person to be a bit uncultured, for there were more refined ways of saying the same thing. To begin with, therefore, I may get offended. However, if the person would give some arguments for the reason why he believed my religion was false, I would take those arguments of his claim seriously.

For some time, I have been trying to mention my understanding in my blog-articles on the website and elsewhere too that it was the claim of Islam that it is the religion of God and therefore it was the duty of those who believed in that claim that they should present justifications for their belief. I believe the Qur’an has done exactly that all along.

If a Muslim knew that somebody had raised serious objections against Islam and he condemns that person as someone who was misled without considering the merits of the arguments of those objections, then the Muslim making that claim was most certainly being an irrational person and not behaving according to Qur’anic teachings. The book of God gives the prophet to follow this advice: “Tell them (the disbelievers) that (if they think that there claim that Torah and Qur’an weren’t from God was correct) then they should bring forth a book from God which is straighter than these two books, I (the prophet) shall follow it, if you are really truthful.” (28:49)

My answer to the question therefore is that if a Muslim rejects the criticism against Islam without looking into the arguments of those criticisms, he is not following the correct Islamic approach. However, if the Muslim accuses the other person of not having reasons to hold his views without looking into the merit of those views, then he is likely to be an extremist. I do admit that all people displaying that behaviour may not be extremists. Some of them may still have moderate tendencies while dealing with others despite being irrational. However, all extremists must behave irrationally in religious debates or else they cannot be extremists.

I thank you for asking this question. I am altering my statement in the blog. The correct statement should be this: “All extremists believe that only their views are correct while the views different from theirs are incorrect and they are therefore not prepared to respect and listen to the other views to find out if they could be correct too.”

Views: 1187