Cherry-picking vs reality

Juan Cole has produced a series of excellent posts on the views of Islam as explicated in the Quran (or Koran), and he makes an excellent point about the right-winger tactic of bashing Islam with quotes from the Quran:

Readers asked me about the long list of militant verses collected by polemicists against Islam. The answer is that those verses refer to the Meccan power elite in the 620s AD, who were waging a determined military, political and economic war to defeat the Muslims holed up in nearby Medina, and wipe them and the new religion out. It is frankly dishonest to take a verse about, say, the battle of Badr against the militant Meccan pagans (“unbelievers”) and imply that it refers to contemporary American Christians or American atheists for that matter. What was objectionable to the Quran in practical terms about the Meccan unbelievers was their murderousness toward Muslims, not their attachment to their star goddesses. Muslims are instructed to be nice to unbelievers who don’t share that murderousness.

I’ve discussed occurrences of anti-Muslim bigotry in the blogosphere before, though certainly not with the erudition of Dr. Cole. The use of carefully selected quotes from the Quran to “prove” that Islam exhorts its followers to evil acts is certainly not a new tactic. Anti-semites have practiced this tactic for centuries, taking sentences from the Talmud out of context (or flatly lying about what it says), and claiming that they have thus “proven” that Jews are instructed by their religious texts to lie to Gentiles, or drink the blood of Christian babies, or whatever heinous crimes the writer can imagine.

In another post, Dr. Cole points out that the Quran in fact teaches that pious Christians and Jews are in no danger of eternal damnation:

Dangerous falsehoods are being promulgated to the American public. The Quran does not preach violence against Christians.

Quran 5:69 says (Arberry): “Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabeaans, whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works righteousness — their wage waits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.”

In other words, the Quran promises Christians and Jews along with Muslims that if they have faith and works, they need have no fear in the afterlife. It is not saying that non-Muslims go to hell—quite the opposite.