TURK SAYS ISLAM NO IDEOLOGY.

(In an interview to Roger Cohen, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey claimed that "Islam is a religion, not and ideology". I comment)
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Islam is just one of the heresies of Judaism, Christianism being the other one. Judeo-Christo-Islamism is an extremely violent religion when compared to Buddhism or Confucianism and other Eastern religions.

Islam, as described in the Qur'an is not just a religion, but a legal system. This is the same with Judaism or Catholicism (the initial form of state Christianism). But the difference is that the later two spread in the Roman empire, where a secular law was already fully deployed. Ultimately even the fanatical Catholic butcher-emperor, Justinian, had to admit that Christian law had to be separated from secular law formally (Justinian killed millions of non Catholic Christians, and devastated entire regions of the Roman empire). In the empire of the Franks, Catholic law was nowhere in sight.

What to do with Islam has long been a serious political problem. Around 1300 CE, interpreting the Qur'an "literally" was repressed, and its great advocate, Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah (1263 - 1328) was put in jail, deprived of ink and paper, and died there. His ideas were resurrected centuries later in Arabia, and more recently, became the official religion of Saudi Arabia, and he is now the great hero of today's Islamist fundamentalists.

It is funny that Erdogan claims that Islam is not a discourse of ideas (ideo-logy). Maybe he should read the Qur'an. Not all these ideas in the Qur'an are bad, far from it, some are even excellent, and they assuredly have some logic to them.

So maybe he wanted to imply that he would treat Islam as a religion, the way the West treats a religion, separating it from politics. So to accentuate this, he claims that Islam has neither ideas, nor logic, or maybe ideas, but not logic, or logic, but no ideas?

Interesting perspectives...

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
Readers interested by Islam may want to read: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/god-slay-because-you-believe/.