For 1,300 years, the Muslims have ruled this part of Iraq where Mosul lies. Nevertheless, Mosul has contained a very large Christian population all of this time. Whether there were persecutions of them or not at various times, I am not certain. I believe there was a mass persecution of Assyrian Christians in Iraq in the 1930’s. At any rate, the Muslims have always allowed the Christians to have a large community in Iraq and especially in Mosul. Until ISIS came along that is.
People say that ISIS is nothing more than Islam. That does not seem to be true as all of the previous Muslim rulers of this part of Iraq have always allowed large numbers of Assyrian Christians to retain a presence in the city. There are churches in that city that are 1,800 years. That means over all of those years of Muslim rule, that church was never torn down. There were many old churches in Mosul. The fact that many old churches existed in Mosul to this day means that the Muslims never destroyed them – they always allowed the churches to exist.
The lesson here is clear. ISIS is by far the most extreme and radical band of Muslims to have ever set foot in the region. Even all of the various Caliphates were much kinder and more tolerant to the Mosul Christians than these ISIS people are.
The conclusion is that ISIS is out of step with the norm of Islamic rule in Iraq for the last 1,300 years. Instead of perpetrating proper Islamic teachings, ISIS appears to be deviationist, Kharajite, Wahhabi. What are proper Islamic teachings in terms of Muslim Iraq. Proper Iraqi Islamic practice is what was practiced over the past 1,300 years in which large Assyrian Christian populations were retained in Mosul along with many ancient churches which were allowed to exist and never torn down.
All statements that ISIS represents the “real Islam” whether from Islamophobes or from takfiri Kharajite Wahhabi deviationists, would seem to be incorrect.
Wahhabism is not proper interpretation of Islam. It is deviationist theology derived from backwards Arabian nomads in the 1800’s. Kharajite practice has been condemned as deviationist by all four major schools of Islam and by Al-Azhar University in Egypt, the seat of Islamic learning today.
Takfirism is modern deviationism, as Islam never stated that a Muslim is an apostate on account of not being a good Muslim. One could be a good Muslim or a bad Muslim, but one was always a Muslim nevertheless unless and until one explicitly left the faith, at which point one became an apostate.
Takfirism is Qutbism, a deviationist theology coined by radical Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood ultra-radical, in various texts printed around 1950. He was quite properly executed in the mid-1950’s by Gammal Nassser, a true Muslim and one of the finest statesmen of the 20th Century, the father of modern Egypt.
