[QUOTE=The Muslim 500]
Dr Al Arifi is a well-known scholar and lecturer from Saudia Arabia. He is a founding and honorary member of various Da’wah organisations, as well as being a member of their advisory committees. He is also a professor in King Saud University of Riyadh. He takes a special interest in Hadith literature and has received licenses for the chains of transmission for various Hadith texts from a number of scholars.
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That does not mean that there is no commonly accepted interpretation. She says, “I was nine” in many hadith that have long ago been judged as authentic, so when the inconsistencies that you refer to are reflected upon, the hadith in conflict with Aisha’s positive claims are the ones called into question.
The Koran with it’s many interpretations and tafsirs and the hadiths are all available online now, you know. Islam is one of many areas of interest that a person can become informed about much more quickly than in the past, now that the source material is accessible in our homes. To paraphrase a favorite author, your experience has been rendered obsolete by deflationary time.
None of those people have declared the hadiths which say that Aisha was born prior to Muhammad hearing the call or that she was ten years younger than her sister Asma.
Now, if what you’re saying is true it should be very easy to prove.
Quote them saying that and provide a provide a proper link.
Of course you can’t and you won’t.
Huh?
I merely ridiculed you for pulling some no name off youtube and claiming he was the most well-regarded critic you could find.
I merely asked if you’d never heard of Reza Aslan.
You have since demonstrated that you so embarrassingly ignorant and your research was so absurdly shoddy that you weren’t.
This is truly one of the stupidest comments I’ve actually read on this site and that is saying quite a lot.
Aside from the fact that while he doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve, he’s a believing Christian, he’s actually criticized Muhammad.
Moreover, if he was actually a devout Muslim as you are insinuating he would have been adding a rather specific phrase after every mention of Muhammad(for any non-Muslims who find that affection annoying, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Lots of less than devout Muslims hate it too).
Finally, if you want to insinuate he’s a Muslim there’s a slightly different question to ask him.
Hint, Muslims accept Jesus(Issa) as a prophet also.
I see no evidence whatsoever that tomndebb is arguing in favor of Islam. What he is doing is arguing against the incredibly mistaken comments from a particular poster about Islam.
They don’t have to, the multiple positive claims of her age narrated in her own voice trump these little revisionist quibbles
I said he was the most well-regarded critic I could find who claimed the particular hadiths where Aisha narrates her age in her own voice* were fabricated.* So far he is the only one referenced in this thread who has made that claim.
The bulk of Muslims the world over don’t get their religious direction from books they bought at Barnes and Noble after reading about on the NYT, or hearing about on NPR.
Ibn Warraq - I was just curious about tomndebb. I had no dog in this fight. Your posts, however, are extremely intense to the point of being rude and quite myopic. You post as if all the followers of Islam are absolutely innocent of any offence ever. No religion has ever had 100% adherence to the best of its beliefs. NO RELIGION.
I roll my eyes at any claim you make to objectivity. There is good in Islam and there is evil in Islam. Your posts don’t express that you know the difference. Do you care to share what you feel the negative aspects of Islam are?
This discussion is very strange, I am always very astonished that the persons who have hatred against Muslims use this subject.
But I think I can add a useful real point of data for what in a Muslim country where the real majority feelings are. It is the case of the Morocco where a few years ago an Imam on his own issues a fatwa to legitimate religiously the marriage of girls from 6 to 9 years of age. In the French and the Arabic you can find much more information, but there is no doubt that the great popular reaction of all segments of the society was very negative to this Imam with popular protests against him as being deviant, and the government of Morocco at the request of many segments including the local Ikhouan, took legal action against him.
It is easier to see if you can read the arabic articles, but here in English you can see there was strong revulsion against such views.
The council of the Ulemas is the body of the trained islamic scholars.
So to refute the claims of the OP, it is in fact evidenced in this that it is not the ordinary view of even a conservative traditional body of Islamic scholars that the interpretation of 6 or 9 years old is actually Sahih. It is true this is an interpretation very much promoted by the Wahhabite vision that comes out of the Arabia Saudite, but their vision is a perverted one that is not acceptable to many.
The answer is no, both of those portions of the Quran are quite sexist.
Unfortunately all of the world’s major religions are fairly sexist.
Obviously many clerics who dislike the idea of polygamy point out that Muslims are commanded to treat all the wives equally and those clerics argue that since it would be impossible to treat each wife equally that it would be wrong for them to marry more than one.
As for the second, while its hardly a defense, even the most hardcore fundamentalist says that only “light” beatings. For example, in Iran the law specifies that men will be arrested “if marks are left, blood is spilled, or bones are broken.”
This has unfortunately led to what one Muslim feminist termed “the culture of cables”.
Of course, while it hardly makes it okay, all the holy books of the Abrahamic faiths make similar claims.
You do not have to hate Muslims to have criticism of their religious ideas. In some ways you might say the the harshness of Islamic indoctrination does give people bad qualities some might hate. But difficult circumstances also have a tendancy to bring out the most beautiful aspects of humanity.
[QUOTE=Ramira]
But I think I can add a useful real point of data for what in a Muslim country where the real majority feelings are. It is the case of the Morocco where a few years ago an Imam on his own issues a fatwa to legitimate religiously the marriage of girls from 6 to 9 years of age.
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That’s a useful data point all right. From your link: “Speaking in his defence on television channel 2M, Al Maghraoui explained that his fatwa had been wrongly interpreted. He stressed that he was talking only of a few rare cases where nine-year-old girls could be married, in the tradition of the Prophet Mohammed.”
The page linked from there has the opposing opinion, which is, as we would hope and expect, more popular with Moroccon’s: “Islamic scholar Abdelbari Zemzem told reporters that the fatwa is unacceptable from a religious point of view. The marriage of underage girls is inapplicable to modern societies, he said, where no ethical, religious or social interest could possibly authorise the marriage of a nine-year-old girl.”
So we have a scholar who issued a fatwa allowing rape of children as young as nine, based on the traditionally accepted understanding of Aisha’s story. And this opinion is opposed by other more influential scholars and the bulk of the population. If the guy issuing the unpopular opinion was using any story other than the traditionally agreed upon interpretation, then surely Abdelbari Zemzem would have mentioned this in his criticism, don’t you think?
No where does it challenge that age nine is the age Aisha was raped, just that it is wrong to rape children today because we live in “modern societies”. This by implication communicates that is acceptable under some circumstances. When you add in the fact that the person said to have done it is someone who’s behavior is emulated by so many people to the point of fetishism, you can see how certain it is that this story leads to child rape.
When these details are elaborated on, when it is explained why it is was OK in the case of Mo and Aisha, the excuses given are right out of To Catch a Predator: she was exceptionable mature, it was a special relationship, he treated her so well, he was given to her by God in a dream, they had a “ceremony”.
This does not refute the OP, it confirms it, since the claim is not that it is the majority opinion of Muslims is to allow rape of nine year olds. It does refute the simplistic idea, which is a straw man in this thread but an actual opinion of some bigots, that Muslims are somehow more inclined to be immoral or that Islamic indoctrination turns every last one into a maniac. Most Muslims manage to be perfectly fine people despite Islam.
Your post shows how the story of Aisha is like a usually dormant disease, most of the time and in most places it is in remission, but the fact that it is in there is dangerous because it provides a justification built into the religion, even if it isn’t used that way by a majority of Muslims. There are many kinds of cancer with high survival rates, but they remain a factor in mortality.
No, that’s not true at all. In fact, Bernard Lewis(not exactly an apologist for Islam) pointed out that one of the major complaints many Jewish and Christian leaders had under the Ottoman Empire was that Jewish and Christian women wanting to divorce their husbands would convert to Islam because they got a much better deal under Islamic divorce rules than Jewish women and unlike Christian women could divorce.
Thanks for the reply IBN_WARRAQ. Other religions have reformed or evolved over the time or have been subjugated by modernity, economical progress etc. Countries(esp. the rich ones) where people practice this sort of sexism and attribute it to religion are exclusively Islamic. Why do you think this is the case? Rich Saudis literally purchasing under-aged Muslim girls to be one of their wives from India(my country) and Pakistan or the case of this Pakistani marrying 2 of his cousins in single ceremony. Or this Egyptian man with his 4 wives…