1. None but the uneducated would refer to Alexis de Tocqueville as 'some historian.'
2. Based on that evinced lacunae, I'm going to assume that you know as much about the Koran, as about Tocqueville.
So here is a lesson on same:
Americans have very little understanding about Islam. The religious and political aspects are contained in the Koran, organized into Sura, which is not organized numerically, but rather with the longest first, and the shortest toward the end. The believer is required to look at the ones written after Muhammad went to Medina, in 622 ad, for guidance.: these later sura rule over the earlier ones. This is know as the theory of abrogation. The suras that entail supremacy include:
a. "fight and slay the pagans (or infidels or unbelievers) wherever you find them?" (9:5).
b. Verse 29 of chapter 9 of the Qur’an mandates that the Muslims fight against the Jews and Christians “until they pay the jizya [poll tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
c. Qur'an (5:51) - "O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people."
These sura are the most radical and violent. Nor are they subject to interpretation:
d. The words of the Lord are perfect in truth and justice;
there is NONE who can change His words.
He both heareth and knoweth.
-- Sura 6:115 None can change the words of God;
-- Sura 6:34
e. There is no changing the words of God;
that is the mighty triumph.
-- Sura 10:64
f. And recite what has been revealed to you of the Book of your Lord,
there is none who can alter His words;
and you shall not find any refuge besides Him.
-- Sura 18:27
And the Koran explains why the later sura supersede the prior:
g. And for whatever verse we abrogate and cast into oblivion
We bring a better or the like of it;
knowest thou not that God is powerful over everything?
-- Sura 2:106
h. And when We exchange a verse in place of another verse --
and God knows very well what He is sending down --
they say, 'Thou art a mere forger!'
Nay, but the most of them have no knowledge.
-- Sura 16:101
Wherein do you see a belief in a constitutional democracy?
HillsdaleÂ’s Kirby Center sponsored a lecture by Brian Kennedy, President of Claremont Institute, and Ballistic Missile Defense Project Director. The above reference to the Koran are from that lecture.
3. "Take a look at the similaries between the two religions, explained side-by-side"
How about you take a look at this, and open your eyes:
From "The Farhud," by Edwin Black:
Jews had lived in Iraq for some 2600 years, but the origin of this mass Muslim movement was in 627. At that time, Mohammed, defending Medina, judged the Jewish tribe to be guilty of aiding the Meccan attackers, and oversaw such acts as the beheading of 900 captives of the Banu Qurayzah tribe, he watched the bodies thrown into a pit.
(Â… in his 1895 biography of Muhammad ("Mahomet and Islam", London, 1895, p. 151), which relied entirely on the original Muslim sources, the scholar Sir William Muir observed:
"The massacre of the Banu Coreiza was a barbarous deed which cannot be justified by any reason of political necessity the indiscriminate slaughter of the whole tribe cannot be recognized otherwise than as an act of monstrous cruelty?")
The Legacy of Jihad [Andrew G. Bostom] - Muhammad, the Qurayza Massacre, and PBS
The point to be gleaned from the above two notes? The extermination of the Jews of Medina represents the
iconic moment in Islam, just as the Sermon on the Mount is the iconic moment of Christianity, or the parting of the Red Sea is for the Jews.
How's that for the "similaries between the two religions, explained side-by-side."
