In Saudi Arabia it is punishable as a criminal act because it is sex outside of marriage. Sex with young girls is still sometimes allowed with the justification that Prophet Mo married Aisha when she was nine. I agree that the circumstances of the UK crimes do not seem to indicate that this aspect of Islam played much of a role or any role at all. It is merely an already demonstrated example that refutes Tom’s blanket statement.
I would have had to ignore Tom’s erroneous statement that “Nothing in Islam” promotes sexual abuse. I would much rather the discussion move on than engage in this back and forth. From my end there seems to be a continuous and vigilant crusade of sorts against anything critical of Islam, and even though I can sympathize with the skepticism from which this visceral response originates, it absolutely paralyzes discussions.
It is amazing how far some people will try to extend and export the Islamic taboo against the criticism of Mohammed.
I am reminded of the Muslim immigrant who ran out into the street and physically confronted a guy dressed as “zombie Mohammed”, even calling the police on him, assuming that insulting the prophet in such a manner could not possibly be allowed. I feel bad for the guy, according to what he has been taught, he was merely being a good citizen and stopping something horrible, as opposed to infringing on someones right to express themselves.
It’s not erroneous. Nothing in Islam promotes sexual abuse of children, just like nothing in Alabama law promotes sexual abuse of children.
Your continual insistence on bringing up a topic in this thread despite being directly and explicitly told not to by a mod makes me doubt that.
“The rape gangs in the UK did what they did because Muhammad was a pedo” is not anything remotely resembling a criticism of Islam.
I believe it has more to do with you behaving like Churchill’s definition of a fanatic: one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Oh, and I remember that case too. The judge who sympathized with the man had to have his office relocated and a police guard posted due to threats from angry Islamophobes.
It would be better to ignore my remark than to continually demonstrate your error. Islam is part of the Saudi culture, but it is no more a matter of “Islam” promoting sexual abuse than that “Christianity” promotes snake handling. Any culture will have members who look to odd parts of its religion or myth to rationalize bad behavior. Trying to blame the religion is simply an easy way to play the blame game while ignoring reality. If it was the religion that was responsible, it would be pervasive throughout all the places where the religion is practiced.
well then you need to correct the Wiki sites stating exactly that. Muhammad: Being in the habit of periodically retreating to a cave in the surrounding mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer, he later reported that it was there, at age 40,[11][14] that he received his first revelation from God. Three years after this event Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that “God is One”, that complete “surrender” to Him (lit. islām) is the only way (dīn)[n 2] acceptable to God, and that he himself was a prophet and messenger of God, in the same vein as other Islamic prophets.
The Quran is the central religious text of Islam and Muslims believe that it represents the words of God revealed to Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel
Quran: The Quran (English pronunciation: /kɔrˈɑːn/[n 1] kor-AHN ; Arabic: القرآن al-qurʼān, IPA: [qurˈʔaːn],[n 2] literally meaning “the recitation”, also transliterated Qurʼan or Koran) is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims believe to be the verbatim word of God (Arabic: الله, Allah).[1] It is widely regarded as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language.[2][3][4][5]
Muslims believe the Quran to be verbally revealed through angel Gabriel (Jibril) from God to Muhammad gradually over a period of approximately 23 years beginning on 22 December 609 CE,[6] when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in 632 CE, the year of his death.[1][7][8]
The part of Islam in which it is taught that the Prophet of Islam himself abused a child promotes sexual abuse of children, since he is held to be the most moral person ever. For a moderator in this discussion to post that “nothing in Islam” promotes child abuse, and then to try to eliminate references to Mohammed’s rape of Aisha when she was nine, in a sub forum dedicated to debate of contentious issues, including religious ones, is blatant apologetic bullshit. Nothing to do with fighting ignorance.
I only brought it up once in this thread, since then I have merely been responding to accusations.
I didn’t say that, which is why you were not able to quote me saying that. These are your words.
Yep. Whatever the author of Mark meant, he did not actually mean that anyone should juggle snakes in the sanctuary. That is the sort of silly nonsense that arose just in the last couple of hundred years among one or two odd sects. For over 1800 years, Christians were aware that the text was not intended to be taken literally. (Which was why I selected that point of comparison: ascribing any belief to the whole of a religion when it is actually limited to a specific sect is an example of bad logic.)
You keep making this error, you keep accusing those who criticize religion of ascribing beliefs to every last adherent to the faith. No one is ascribing a belief to “the whole of a religion”. Your claims are that nothing in the religions in question promote the behaviors in question, and those claims are plainly and demonstrably absurd.
At the point where you actually note that some beliefs among some Muslims are just that, limited to the people that hold them, then you might have a point. As long as you natter on about “Islam,” the points I make are the natural and necessary correctives to your spiel.
You are the one who insists that the different actions that occur in various cultures must be the result of the religions even when there is ample evidence that the cultures simply tacked religion onto existing cultural behavior. None of your claims stand up to historical scrutiny. I have never claimed that any culture could not use religion to bolster its actions. You have never provided a case where the actions arose from the religion rather existing before the religion and being “blessed” by some practitioners of the religion.
How can one say to what extent any culture is the result of its religion and vice versa? It would seem to make sense that few religions are likely to survive that are not at least somewhat similar to the cultures they originate in. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence and reasoning that could lead one to the conclusion that religion also influences culture. Few would argue with this in many instances. We consider churches and mosques a part of a culture as much as a part of a religion. In the UK, other elements of religion are part of our culture. I’m not religious but I still celebrate Christmas. I think it would be difficult to argue that I, as an individual, celebrate Christmas because of a culture in this country that pre-dates Christianity’s existence here, rather than because of the centuries of the domination of our culture by Christianity. And yes, I am aware that there were other winter festivals before Christmas. This case is not watertight. There is no solid evidence on the matter because we can’t run experiments on the influence of religion and culture in a vacuum with control groups. But I think the issues are so important that we have to do the best we can with the evidence we do have.
My take is that, if any belief in the teachings of religion “miraculously” disappeared from everyone’s minds overnight, you would remove a huge part of the justification for many violent acts in people’s minds. How could a normal, balanced person believe the right response to the gossip that a young woman has been having sex outside of marriage is to stone her to death? No one of sound mind could act that way without a religious belief in the idea. It’s just not relevant to anyone else’s life. It only matters if you believe in a god that really cares about these things.
Wikipedia provides a brief gloss. If you want to understand the who, what, when, where, and why of the writing of the Qur’an, you’re going to have to expand your reading beyond a publically-editable website.
No, nothing in Islam promotes child abuse. Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha has no bearing or influence whatsoever on what these gangs in the UK did. Marriage laws in Saudi Arabia have no bearing or influence whatsoever on what these gangs in the UK did.
Just like nothing in Alabama law promotes child abuse, and the permissibility in this state of young girls marrying adult men has no bearing or influence whatsoever on what this man did.
How you can write this sentence after writing the above paragraph astonishes me.
It’s pretty much the core of your argument, that Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha promotes or permits the kind of behavior exhibited by the rape gangs in the UK. And, despite the fact that you yourself agree that Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha did not influence the behavior of those gangs, you persist in the unwarranted, illogical, and false accusation that Islam promotes child abuse like the kind carried out by the rape gangs in the UK because of Muhammad’s marriage to A’isha.
The Qur’an was assembled decades after Muhammad supposedly delivered his revelations.
Muslim tradition acknowledges that the Qur’an was assembled from the memory of those who survived the Wars of Riddah (where many who had memorized the revelations had been killed) and random scattered scraps that had been written down.
Muslim tradition acknowledges that, due to the above, many revelations had been lost (there’s a famous hadith recorded in ibn Kutayba’s The Interpretation of Conflicting Narrations where A’isha records how a “beast from the yard” got into her house and devoured some of the scraps on which ayat had been written, while everyone was distracted by the mortally-ill Muhammad).
Muslim tradition acknowledges that, due to the above, when the Qur’an was first compiled into a single work after Muhammad’s death, there were many different versions of it possessed by the Companions, who used their particular versions to push their own agendas during the early power struggles. The Sana’a Manuscript is probably one of these. These political divisions evolved into the Shia/Sunni divide, with the Shi’at Ali, or Partisans of Ali, supporting Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib as the one true rightful heir to the khilafat after the assassination of 'Uthman, and the followers of the governor of Syria, Muawiyah (who was supported by Muhammad’s widow, A’isha). The early Shias even accused their opponents of deliberately excluding two entire suwar from the “definitive” 'Uthmanic text because they were about Ali’s right to rule the Ummah.
Complicating this was the fact that even after 'Uthman collected the Qur’an into a definitive text, the text only existed as a consonantal skeleton, or rasm. Depending on what vowels and other diacritical marks for pronunciation that a reciter used when reading that text, it could have quite a wide variety of different meanings. In the tenth century, the number of “acceptable” readings was fixed at fourteen (seven “modes”, or ahruf, each one in two variants based on the rawi that transmitted them), though thanks to the immense popularity and widespread distribution of a Qur’an printed in 1924 using the Hafs transmission of al-Najud’s “mode”, that’s the one most commonly used today.
When 'Uthman picked his own compilation as the definitive one, and ordered all the other versions burned, the polemical intra-Muslim arguments about the content and interpretation of the Qur’an developed into the three doctrines of naskh, or abrogation, and the numerous competing (and contradictory) lists of what verses in the Qur’an had been abrogated and what hadn’t. This was extended into the debates about ahadith as well, with each of the various madh’hab making determinations of authenticity, unreliability, and forgery based on the particular positions on various points of jurisprudence that they held. At its most extreme, this manifested in the Shias having their own, virtually entirely separate canon of ahadith, rejecting the Sunni canon (and, in turn, having their canon rejected by the Sunni).
So no cite and no mention of who or where the “Companions” got this information. they were the companions of Muhammad and are their recollections of his life as he told it. From wiki: The Arabic term aṣ-Ṣaḥāba (Arabic: الصحابة, “the companions”; from the verb صَحِبَ, “accompany”, “keep company with”, “associate with”) refers to the companions, disciples, scribes and family of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This form is definite plural; the indefinite singular is masculine ṣaḥābiyy, feminine ṣaḥābiyyah.
Later scholars accepted their testimony of the words and deeds of Muhammad, the occasions on which the Qur’an was revealed and various important matters of Islamic history and practice. The testimony of the companions, as it was passed down through chains of trusted narrators (isnads).
It’s pretty clear that Muhammad is the driving force behind the religion and his words are accepted as being passed down from God into the writings of the Quran.