Speculation about racism, bigotry and trolling belongs in the Pit, not Great Debates. Given the way this thread has gone so far, I will close the discussion if there is any more of this behavior.
As noted, without ever actually making the case for your position, you are now using the No True Scotsman defense to avoid having to support your earlier claims.
I think you have sufficiently destroyed your own case, here.
Agreed.
To add to what you’re saying, he’s wrong about why the Salafists don’t view the Shia as true Muslims. It’s not because of disagreements over which hadiths are authentic.
The Salafists are also a fairly modern creation.
His knowledge and understanding if Islam seems rather limited.
The problem though is that you are being entirely inconsistent. Yes, some of us in the West tear down our cultural and religious heroes. Some of us in the West worship cultural and religious heroes and are blind to their faults. This is true of all cultures including Islamic cultures. Do you think all 1/2 billion of them actually think that Muhammad was perfect? Of course they don’t. Do I think some of them would tie themselves in semantic and evidential knots trying desperately to find a way to overlook and discount the evidence that Muhammad had sex with a kid? Hell yes.
It is a common - but major - intellectual failing to consider that groups of people who are culturally “other” to you all have a notorious fault or deficiency, based on stereotypes. This is never a mistake we would make about people we are familiar with, but only about “others”.
I’m sure I could find plenty of people outside Christian culture who could (and would like you do in your OP) point to some dumbass thing in the Bible and express deep concern about how sad it must be to be a Christian and have to believe in or worship such dumbassery.
The No True Scotsman defense does not apply. Despite what you have said, I am not making a universal claim. I am claiming that according to traditional and mainstream Islamic sources, Muhammad had sex with a nine year old child when he was fifty four. This has been proven. The cites on the Wikipedia page linked in the OP prove it. The only opposing evidence that has been presented is modern ad-hoc revisionism, which has been discredited in the Muslim world.
I said between one half and one billion because there are 1.5 billion Muslims, and my guess is that 1/3-2/3 of them are disbelievers or doubters, or at least would be if given even the slightest bit of intellectual freedom.
Some of them do, but what I have found is that these revisionist attempts get passed up the ladder of authority and rejected, and what has emerged instead is apologetic arguments for why it was acceptable: the same reasons a sexual predator might give today: she was exceptionally mature, he waited until she was ready, she wanted it, it was a special beautiful relationship, he treated her so well, ect.
I never claimed anything of the sort. I know for a fact that many culturally Muslim people don’t actually hold Muhammad, as he is recorded to have been, to be an ideal man. But many do, and that IS a fault, because he is recorded to have been a murderous warlord who molested children and murdered people for poetry.
Modern day Islam is more comparable to Christianity before and during the Reformation than modern day Christianity. Among the tools we have used to unshackle ourselves from religious domination are free speech and ridicule.
Bullshit. Here’s what you said in your OP:
You made a universal claim which is clearly wrong. Yes it may well be that according to certain traditional and mainstream Islamic sources Muhammad had sex with a nine year old child when he was fifty four. I don’t know. But even if that is correct it does not follow, as your OP asserts, that a person born a Muslim has the choice of becoming an apostate or accepting or apologising for pedophilia.
They have the option of ignoring the relevant sources, discounting them, discrediting them (validly or not), incorporating the tale into their religion or not. Religion is a made up thing, which is what the people who follow that religion say it is. Whether one is or is not an apostate from that religion for believing or not believing a certain thing is dependent upon what the people of that religion decide about their religion.
If a substantial body of Muslims don’t believe the guy they worship was a pedophile, then they will not have to accept that he was, or apologise for him being so. Nor will they be apostates if they reject the tales which would paint Muhammad as a pedophile, if everyone around them rejects the same tales.
The points I intended for the debate were the numbered points, what you quoted was an obvious editorial addition.
I guess they could also become an Ismaili. The taboo against leaving Islam is real, even among Muslims in the West. This is not some spin I am making up, it is real. For many people around the world raised as Muslims, to speak out against their inherited religion is to risk their life.
You and I know that they have that option but the true believers among them do not know this. What you are talking about is innovation in religion. Something I have been taught (by Muslims) that Muslims consider to be haraam, not allowed. The idea is that God/Koran/Prophet is right, even when our modern sensibilities and rationality tell us otherwise. To obey God is to Obey him all of the time, not just when you agree with him.
Exactly. There is much about Islam as practiced and understood today that provides friction against this movement, however. Instead of some gradual inching forward toward this, it looks to me like there might have to be more of a tectonic shift. Maybe a Protocols of the Elders of Zion type thing, only designed to make Muslims look good rather than to make Jews look bad. Islam is a religion of Peace, Muhammed was a perfect man, child rape, slavery, murder, ect is horrid and therefore he could not have acted that way, and the verses that say otherwise were planted by the CIAJews. IMO frank discussion and ridicule will provide the pressure under which this shift occurs.
I concede that this is a bit of an overstatement. The video is an example that Muslims are taught to be proud of the behavior of the prophet, including the child rape.
No religious justification for child marriage: Saudi cleric
Is the Sheikh Abdullah al-Manie committing libel against Islam for teaching that the fifty three year old Prophet had sex with a nine year old?
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
It was not provided for you. It was offered to other readers who had not already made up their minds from reading tripe from thereligionofperace.com
[/QUOTE]
I have spent less than one minute reading that site. We should note that you apparently get your information about Islam from the Huffington Post, and then proclaim that others need to study more about Islam so they can be informed like you.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Beyond that, I notice that you have failed to provide any evidence that the issue of “child brides” is a Muslim problem.
[/QUOTE]
It is not a uniquely Muslim problem. No one is claiming it is.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
Finding child brides among the tribes in Afghanistan or Yemen
[/QUOTE]
Or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or India or North Africa or Nigeria.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
does not make it an issue of Islam unless you find the same problem in the cities of Iran and Iraq and Egypt or in Paris, Montreal, or Dearborn, MI.
[/QUOTE]
What makes it an “issue of Islam” is that in Islam people are taught to emulate the behavior of the prophet, and he raped a nine year old when he was fifty four. This is true regardless of whether or not every individual Muslim or group of Muslims in the world emulates that particular behavior.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
And since the problem of “child brides” is also a serious one in the Hindu back country of India, it would appear to be much more of a cultural issue then a religious one. Blaming Islam for a situation that does not occur throughout Islam but does occur in other places is a pretty clear indication that one is simply looking for reasons to bash Islam and is not really interested in the problem of forcing young girls into marriage.
[/QUOTE]
All you have shown is that that are justifications given for child marriage other than Muhammad’s example. That’s it. Not event relevant.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
This is similar to the horror of Female Genital Mutilation that some people pretend is a “Muslim” problem when it is actually a practice that occurs among Muslims and Animists and Christians.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know if it is similar or not. I have never seen the supposedly Islamic justification for this practice. I don’t think it is encoded into the source texts like child rape is, but I am not sure.
[QUOTE=tomndebb]
I am guessing that you tried to link to this story:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5huC9UMsuDGHS6MPZcDO2C0Q7Oqkw
in which it is pointed out that a Saudi Muslim cleric condemned the marriage of a young girl after protests,
[/QUOTE]
You asked for an example of Muslims using the story of Aisha to justify child marriage, and I sent you here: No religious justification for child marriage: Saudi cleric, which told you:
cite?
It is so much the norm that it is newsworthy when a judge or scholar says otherwise, as you have been shown.
I am condemning the religion, yes. I am condemning the idea of holding up as the perfect example to be emulated a man who, among many other horrible things, raped a child.
Lets put this in my terms. As a nurse I know a lot more about anatomy, physiology and pathology than they did back in the days of blood letting. Today, it’s (almost) completely off the table, and any practitioner who did it, for the reasons that they used to do it, would be widely condemned, lose their license, and likely go to jail. Now, should I judge the practioners of the past this way? When they were applying the standard of care as it was widely taught? It wasn’t any more helpful or less harmful because they were earnest, and conscientious, or because everybody else thought it was right, too. But still, I don’t think I should judge them the same way I would judge my own, and I say this believing that all religions are equally about 98% bullshit.
Not that I can see. You are the one with the desperate need to believe that he is in violation of some “Islamic” idea, yet there he is in the most culturally conservative region of Muslims speaking out against the act without (apparently) being censured by any other clerics in his land.
You need for him to be censured by “Islam” and you provide no evidence that he is being censured.
Your whole case is that this story about Aisha–a story contradicted by other stories from the same author–is some grand exemplar to which all Muslims must aspire. Yet, the best that you can come up with is that a conservative cleric doesn’t bother pointing out the facts that would demonstrate that the story is in error even while condemning the act that you claim is being encouraged.
So, you provide a story and then admit that you have not bothered to study it. You then reject the words of an Islamic scholar simply because he posted his text on Huffington.
Your malice is pretty clear in this situation and your lack of scholarship is demonstrated every time you ignore information that contradicts the tale that you have constructed. You keep talking about how you know what “Muslims” believe because you have talked to them. There are Muslims who post on this board and I have never seen any of them hold the position to which you have assigned them. None of the Muslims with whom I have worked have ever expressed similar beliefs. IF you actually have talked to real Muslims, I would guess that you have simply stumbled into a cluster of people who are to Islam what Bill Donohue, Ian Paisley, or Pat Robertson are to Christianity. You have provided no reason for anyone to accept that you have, somehow, discovered the beliefs of “real” Muslims when anyone who has known any Muslims in real life recognize that your claims do not apply to the people they have met. You already demonstrated the paucity of your logic when you played No True Scotsman with the entire Shia sect.
I doubt that he raped a nine-year-old girl and nothing you have posted has given me any reason to believe he had. One paragraph in one Hadith, written 150+ years after the death of Mohammed by an author who also wrote statements that contradict that same paragraph is not “proof” of anything and it does not make your belief “true.” Beyond that, I don’t know anyone who lives outside one specific region of the world (aside from a few foaming-at-the-mouth Islam-hating Christians) who believe it, either. And your claim that they are taught to emulate that behavior is contradicted by the clear fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslim nations have laws that prohibit such acts. Certainly, there are places where such behavior continues–much as one may find clusters of break-away Mormons practicing polygyny in defiance of the laws of Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Your claim is that Islam spurs this belief–at least when you are not back-pedaling and saying that it is true even if it does not matter if many (read most) Muslims reject it. You have failed to support your claim.
(BTW, Making one’s font larger in boldface is not an exercise in logic.)
I have repeatedly explained to you that the consensus is that Mo had sex with a nine year old, according to traditional and mainstream sources. This has been proven.
That attempt at revisionism unfortunately failed, as was shown in post 71.
You are confused. The Sheik is not claiming that Mo didn’t have sex with Aisha at age 9, he is merely taking the minority position that it should not be used to justify child marriage today. The fact that it is a minority opinion and newsworthy shows beyond a shadow of a doubt the widespread use of Mo’s rape of Aisha as justification for modern day child rape.
What do you mean that I “claim” it is being encouraged? Don’t you see that this Sheik is combating the widespread problem of real rape of real children, which is justified by the story of Aisha?
No, I posted the refutation to his revisionism and pointed out the irony of your maligning my sources while citing Huffpo, as if Muslims the world over rush home after Friday prayers and refresh Huff onto their browsers for guidance, instead of visiting their own sources. These particular revisionist claims have been passed up the ladder of authority and rejected. They are considered about as credible as intelligent design arguments are in biology.
MY lack of scholarship? You don’t understand what you are talking about in the slightest, you just took the first search result on Google that agreed with your position and passed it on, without realizing that these claims have already been refuted by very influential people. Again, this has been proven in the thread.
Have you asked them? Some might be understandable ashamed to admit it. It is not one of the selling points of Islam in the West, that is for sure.
What was that about Scotsmen?
Yes I have. I have proven, repeatedly, that in the widely accepted bio of Mohammed he had sex with a nine year old when he was fifty four. This is a mainstream view, regardless of how hard that is for you to accept.
The way in which you interpret Hadith is not important. You have no influence over Muslims. And there is much more evidence than one paragraph. The Hadith in the Bukhari collection in which Aisha says she was nine are as authentic as anything in the collection, they are “mass transmitted”, mutawatir.
Again, what or who you know is irrelevant.
The fact that Islam does not completely dominate every aspect of the political lives of every Muslim in every Muslim majority country does not change the fact the a core aspect of Islam is the idea that Mo was the ideal man.
No, not much as. I have shown you that in Saudi Arabia, a nation of 30 million people, that justifying child marriage is the norm, so much so that when someone with authority claims that the story of Aisha’s rape does not justify these practices it is newsworthy.
I have shown that it is the traditional mainstream understanding.
It might help someone who is having trouble reading though.
You have repeatedly made this claim, but you have not demonstrated that it is actually the consensus. That you can find some who believe that makes no more of a point than pointing to Biblical Literalists and claiming that it is the “consensus” that the Genesis Creation stories are literally true.
You waving the word “revisionist” around fails to “prove” anything and quoting a single traditionalist argument, while it supports the idea that some people feel that way, also fails to “prove” your point.
Mischaracterizing my statement does not make me the one who is confused. I made no claim that the cleric denied the story. As a member of the Saudi culture, I would not be surprised that he did believe it. However, you continue to insist that Muslims are compelled to look on your alleged “rape” as a model of behavior while he is clearly not making that claim.
He is addressing an issue that appears to be specific to the culture of his region. You continue to insist that it is a matter that applies to all Muslims in the world, (when you are not trying to exclude Muslims who clearly do not share that belief).
Your repeatd references to Huffington are a red herring. The author of the Huffington article is a Muslim scholar. You may find it distressing to find a Muslim scholar who does not actually embrace the story that you want to hold up as “true,” but continuing to pretend that the essay is “Western” or “revisionist” simply because it appears on the Huffington site is just silly. Your claim that I have “maligned” your sources is also not born out in any of my posts. I do not deny that some number of Muslims in he MENA region hold those beliefs; I do deny that you have demonstrated any “core” belief that permeates all of Islam.
Interesting analogy, given that you are trying to pretend that those who would promote the “Creationist” viewpoint are the ones to whom we should listen.
Again with the false assumptions about what i have studied or read. This is not the first time that some Muslim basher has posted the same arguments on this message board or similar message boards. I am familiar with the arguments on both sides and have been for years.
Your position is that only Muslim Fundamentalists, those who hold positions analogous to the views of Christian literalists and Creationists, can be examined. That is rather like insisting that the only true spokespersons for Christianity are the staff at the Moody Bible Institute and that every other biblical scholar in the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, or other traditions are not “really” representing Christian belief.
It does not work that way.
No. You have demonstrated that you can marshall statements from a number of traditionalist Muslim scholars to support a belief that is widely held in a limited region of the world. It is not the same thing.
(You are also not presenting the story accurately, here.) The Hadith in which Aisha is purportedly quoted is not a biography of Mohammed. No similar claim is made in the actual biography of Mohammed.)
A statement, I note, that bears directly on your persistent claims of personal knowledge of the beliefs of some unidentified group of Muslims.
It does, however, demonstrate that your belief that old men marrying young girls has carried over to all the Islamic world as a “core” belief is in error, given that it is not encouraged outside the MENA region and is even proscribed by law. In fact, it is a violation of the various forms of Sharia to engage in sex with a young woman who has not experienced menarche. Do you have an actual statement from a Muslim scholar defending Mohammed for violating that stricture?* Or is it more likely that the majority of Muslims ignore the age discrepancies in the multiple texts and simply assume that Aisha was post-pubescent?
- (Actually, to support your tirade, you would need to provide a citation to rather more than a single scholar defending that proposition; you should be able to demonstrate that there was widespread recognition of and excuses for his violation of God’s Law.)
While this is true there are lifestyle differences between Mohammad, Jesus, Buddha and other religious figures. It’s easy to overlook parts of various religions as we move forward in time and religion is reworked to fit with the times. But it gets problematic when the more fervent of believers refer back to the progenitor of the religion and ask themselves what the prophet would do.
The editors of wikipedia figured this out. They have provided you with citations, as have I.
Revisionist perfectly describes this scholarship. The particular arguments have been addressed and dismissed by people far more influential than him, like Shaykh Gibril Haddad
As a member of the Saudi culture?
You like to make up claims. What I claim is that a core principle in Islam is to follow the Sunna, based on the teaching and practices of Muhammad. This is basic stuff, for you to argue otherwise is to make a fool of yourself.
You continue to make up claims (because the claims in the OP have been proven).
I didn’t claim it was Western and revisionist because it was in the Huffpo. It is Western since it written by a Westerner, and it is revisionist because it revises the traditionally held view.
The editors of Wikipedia demonstrated it, for one thing. I have shown you influential Muslims who state that it is the traditionally held view.
What?
This is an unjustified insult.
No, you are not. You are not the slightest bit familiar with them. You rage into this thread on your crusade all ready to save the poor brown Muslims from the evil bigotry. Only you don’t realize that the form you present is one fit for Monty Python, a blind knight charging into battle sitting backwards on his horse.
No, that is some more shit you made up.
No it isn’t like that at all. It is more like the other way around.
Read the wiki cites dude.
It is not the same thing.
I don’t know what particular bio you are talking about, but all of them contain info from Hadiths.
More made up stuff.
Yeah, it is “limited” to two immense geographical regions of the world with hundreds of millions of people. Oh and you left out South Asia. Now we are talking about being limited to areas where a quarter to half of the entire population of the world lives.
.
According to some interpretations. Don’t forget the Shia. Didn’t Khomeini have a ten year old bride? And the fact that some old bastard waits until a little girl has her first period before beginning to rape her is not reassuring, at least to me.
Some claim she had STARTED her period at nine years old, and thus is was ok. That is the most common response to criticism of her young age. STARTED her period. Nine year olds are far from being physically or mentally ready for sex or pregnancy, regardless.
**Hank **it isn’t obvious that you have any real understanding of religion at all.
Upthread I said:
And your response was:
…which just shows you don’t understand.
To obey one’s deity is to obey him all the time, not just when you agree with him. But there is no deity because deities are made up things, and religious groups get to decide what their deity commands. So religious groups commonly subtly change over history what it is they choose to believe their deity commands, all while paying lip service to the idea their religion is timeless and their deity’s commands unchanging.
Yesterday we were and always had been at war with Eastasia, next century we will be and always will have been at war with Eurasia.
It barely matters what some Islamic scholar told you or what you read somewhere. If you want to learn something about Islam, consider that every now and again I have a few bottles of Bintang; it’s not a bad drop. There is more real world relevance in the implications of my last sentence than in your whole OP and every post you have made in this thread.
PS I enjoyed your “obvious editorial addition” disclaimer. Hilarious. Do you do standup?
If your statement isn’t bigoted, then you have no reason to try to convince anyone that you aren’t a bigot. People only suspect bigotry from people who say bigoted things.
Even I, who knows almost nothing about Islam, knew that most Muslims do not actually think that Mohammed had sex with a nine-year old. I was going to say something when this thread first started, but I realized the only citable sources I had were the same ones you had, and thus I KNEW I DIDN’T KNOW ENOUGH TO MAKE AN ARGUMENT.
And I’m not exactly thought of as the smartest person around here, either.
Ignoring the religious documentation, what I’d like is a cite that marrying and having sex with a 9 year old was illegal and/or unusual in the Middle East during the 9th century AD. As every intelligent person knows, you cannot judge historical people by modern standards.
If you use the internet to try to find out what age people think Mary was when Jesus was conceived, you’ll see that a huge number of Christians think that God conceived a child with a girl who was below the age of consent in most states. (The ages people claim range from 12 to 16, on a brief and not remotely thorough search.) If we heard about someone in a position of power talking a girl of 12 into having a baby, we’d be horrified.
But if you ask Christians if they know this, some of them probably do. Some probably agree. Some probably disagree. Some are probably bothered by it. Some probably don’t care. And this is one of the major miracles in the New Testament. This is big stuff! And this is supposed to be GOD acting, not just a prophet. But people still shrug about it.
I have no idea why I’m supposed to assume Muslims are different from Christians when it comes to topics like this:
- It didn’t happen that way, or
- It happened that way but she was older, or
- It happened that way but that was how life was then, or
- It happened that way but this is God/this is a prophet so the rules are different, or
- What are you saying happened? or
- I like pizza.