The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other perceived supporters of the Nigerian government.
Now it has an ominous new front: a war against schools.
Public and private schools here have been doused with gasoline at night and set on fire. Crude homemade bombs ”” soda bottles filled with gasoline ”” have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children.
This is not a clash between civilizations. It is a fight between civilization and utter barbarism. ISLAM — fighting for the right to mutilate and kill our daughters and anybody else we don’t like … since 622.
Anyone who says that Islam is a legitimate religion is a fool.
I guess I’m something of a fool then. The core of Islam strikes me as okay: declaring that God is GOD, charity (zakat), daily prayers, fasting (Ramadan was modelled on early Lent), and pilgrimage aren’t the problem. Is there anything there you as a Christian would reject?
The problem is that a decent basic faith was subsumed into what even in the 7th century was a desperately backwards nomadic desert culture, and that those backwards aspects were subsequently made more or less normative. The hyper-militancy became mandatory (and problematic) beginning in the 14th Century, BTW, not the 7th.