A recent tweet caught my eye, where Qasim Rashid asks Sam Harris to debate Ahmadi Muslims, who are indeed, a completely peaceful sect of Islam.
Must take a lot of faith for @SamHarrisOrg to avoid the world’s single largest Islamic sect under a Khalifa, who demonstrate 100% peace.
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@MuslimIQ)
In fact, I’ve seen Sam Harris refer to Ahmadi Muslims favorably on his blog before, talking about the plight of minorities in Muslim countries, such as Pakistan.
As an ex-Ahmadi Muslim myself, I can tell you the reason that Ahmadi Muslims are indeed peaceful. I respectfully submit that it is not what Qasim Rashid suggests. I don’t doubt that he sincerely believes it. I just disagree.
I believe Ahmadi Muslims are peaceful because their founder and the movement that he started chose to ascribe an exegesis to the Qur’an that fit the peaceful narrative that he desired. I applaud the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community for wanting to change the predominant narrative of the Islam of his time.
With a Khilafat (spiritual leadership) that is considered divine by the Community’s membership, what the Khalifa says, goes. What the officially sanctioned books of the Community say about how to interpret troubling passages of the Qur’an, goes.
It’s not a mystery. It’s about deciding on a peaceful outcome as your goal, and then working backwards to ascribe meanings to verses that suit the narrative you want.
Add in the strong control you get with a Khalifa that the Community is constantly reminded was chosen by God, and you have a recipe for creating a peaceful belief system.
That doesn’t actually say anything about the Qur’an.
Let’s look at the translation and commentary of the Qur’an, published by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, verse 4:4 (using the Ahmadi Muslim numbering):
http://www.alislam.org/quran/tafseer/?page=182®ion=EN
Just read the reams of apologetic commentary trying to wriggle out of the clause “right hands possess”. The Ahmadi commentary is trying to suggest that a Muslim man cannot have sexual relations with a female slave; that the Muslim man must marry her first.
Such an important concept that is not “clear” until you layer on reams of interpretive gymnastics.
Further, most Ahmadi Muslims speak Urdu, not Arabic. So a tiny fraction are reading the Qur’an in Arabic and actually understanding its meaning. The vast majority read a translation that has been carefully worded by the Ahmadi Muslim Community (which has overseen translations into numerous languages).
Ahmadi Muslims consider the Qur’an too holy, too dense in meaning to read the words simply. And so they defer to commentary and other such books that the Community publishes, purporting to explain the “real” or “deeper” meaning.
You could create a religion out of just Deuteronomy and Leviticus, layer in reams of similar interpretive gymnastics, and then top it all off with the strong control you get from a very organized religious hierarchy. The result? You’d have a peace-loving community mistakenly attributing their good nature to the thousand-plus year-old scriptures.
If you perform double, triple and quadruple flips in your exegesis to work around problematic verses, anything is possible.
That doesn’t exonerate the Qur’an.
It’s a testament to your ability to have people downplay the literal words that they read and take your explanations instead, for what those words mean.
Oh, and if you ever do get that dialog going with Sam Harris, be sure to include an ex-Ahmadi Muslim into the mix.