Obviously, Hindus don’t need anyone to convince them about child marriage, since it’s not unusual; I’m sure you know this, but you probably rightly assume that most people outside of India don’t. On “auspicious” days of the Hindu calendar, many thousands of children - including babies - are married in public mass marriages. This past year, a woman had her had chopped off for trying to stop some of them.

(Like the millions of girls missing in India because they’re either aborted or killed soon after birth - which for some reason doesn’t get much media attention. In some areas, there are only 7 girls for every 10 boys, while the norm would be 10. If only they were forced to wear veils before they were killed, I’m sure the women’s rights and human rights organizations would look into it.)

Anonymous said, “The Prophets are the doctors of the soul, the books they brought are the manual. Frankly, these manual are not very useful without the Teacher.”

Well, maybe so, but aren’t plenty of young Muslims — both in the West and the East — being indoctrinated with precisely this kind of “shallow” understanding? And as recent events have shown, the rest of the world is having to pay the price of such indoctrination. An individual might try to get a proper understanding of the Quran through the guidance of an enlightened Teacher, but how feasible is this strategy for an entire mass movement? Are there enough such high-minded teachers to go around? And who will decide what version of Islam is to be taught? What if xenophobic and puritanical brands of Islam, such as Wahhabism, have powerful state patronage (e.g., Saudi Arabia)? Who will bell the cat, then?

“religion of the book”, …erm… not quite. There’s no such thing as the “religion of the book”. At least, I am not aware of that terminology. Perhaps what you meant to say is “people of the book”: Jews, Christians are referred to as “People of the book”, i.e people who follow a revealed scriptural religion.

The revealed books are best understood according to the interpretation of the Prophets to which they were revealed. The Gospel to Jesus (peace be upon him), from whom the disciples learnt, and so on until there were no longer any disciples and people started learning from books - chopping it up as their fancy dictates. Similarly, the Torah was revealed to Moses. And indeed the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (Sayyidu’l Mursaleen - The Masters of the Messengers).

Reading the Koran without reference to the examples of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and those who learnt from him (i.e. his companions, etc) will be like reading a book on brain surgery without the guidiance of a brain surgeon and then attempting to operate on your patient. The Prophets are the doctors of the soul, the books they brought are the manual. Frankly, these manual are not very useful without the Teacher (except for few rare human beings who perhaps may have some how “incarnated” the Master!).

You can cut yourself and other people really badly without a Teacher! Just like the Terrorists!

So, yes, it is context dependent. And where the context is seemingly not relevant to today, qiyas (analogical reasoning) and mantiq (logic) are tools for deriving rulings. The full story is elaborate.

No, it’s not like what “Kaktuz” said; I know plenty of non-Muslims who understand correctly the Qur’an and ahadeeth. All they’ve done is what Muslims do: use their brain to understand the Qur’an and ahadeeth in the light of the historical, religious and linguistic contexts. If you read the Qur’an or ahadeeth in a shallow manner, you’ll wind up with a shallow understanding. In Kaktuz’s case, he reads the Qur’an and ahadeeth in a biased manner. For example, he had written, “You read a hadith about the prophet of Islam amputating hands, then burning eyes with hot nails, then finally letting the victim die from thirst and Muslims will look at you with a blank stare and say ‘So what?’” But he had brought up this same hadith on another blog, and was immediately called out by myself and another Muslim for his intellectual dishonesty. You see, he had used only a fraction of the hadith (as he does above), pulling it out of context. What he hadn’t said (and doesn’t say here) was that the so-called victim was in fact a murderer who was being executed for his punishment. It’s not just “So what?” Using Kaktuz as your source of reference is a bad move on your part because, at least in my eyes, Kaktuz has no credibility. To criticize blindly, as you and Kaktuz are doing, is only to lower yourself in our eyes because we Muslims do study the Qur’an and ahadeeth, and we know them far better than you do.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t understand them too. All it takes is study.

If I have some time tomorrow, I’ll attempt a reply to John Arthur (whom you have quoted above).

In the meantime, it is worth mentioning that the condition/criterion for understanding the true meanings of the text is not formal smartness (as you are thinking). Rather, the criterion is education, and perhaps purity of heart. And what does these mean?

In simple exoteric terms, it means that you at least some sort of connection back to the Author of these texts, with a continuum of teachers back to teachers, back to teachers until you reach the Prophetic source. So, for instance if you are reading your Islam from a text book or hearing from Television news, it behoves you to have some modesty about your enlightened interpretation of the teaches. This is because you never know, your interpretation may just fall few notches below the required mark. However, if your source of Islamic knowledge is from a teacher who has sat with a teacher, who has sat with his teacher, and so on, who has sat with the Prophet (peace be upon him). Here, you have a higher probability of coming out with right interpretation of the text.

John Arthur said, August 5, 2005 @ 10:15 pm

So, you say that “non-Muslims have a very deep misconception/ignorance concerning Islam/Muslims.” No. Non. Nao. I think it would be better (and more honest) to say instead that most “Muslims have a very deep misconception/ignorance concerning Islam/Muslims.”

The fact is that, as we see here, Muslims are in denial. You can read a Koranic verse that tells men to beat their wives and Muslims will say we don’t understand the ‘true’ meaning of the text. You read a hadith about the prophet of Islam amputating hands, then burning eyes with hot nails, then finally letting the victim die from thirst and Muslims will look at you with a blank stare and say “So what?” You point that violence is characteristic of Muslims all over the world and they say that is “absurd” even as they reading about the latest (Muslim) terror. When you talk about Koranic verses justifying violence against non-believers and designating a clearly inferior role for women, they deny the obvious, or, as above, may admit that it “seems” this may be true, but then they tell us that we don’t really “understand.”

Yes, the world is wrong and only Muslims can see the true Islam, obviously. We all know that the Koran itself claims that it is simple, clear, detailed and perfect, so why would anybody not accept the obvious and actually believe what the book says it means? Like I said, it is not non-Muslims that don’t understand Islam, it is the Muslims that can’t see the obvious.

Kactuz “

It’s Faloodaputra again. Like Kactuz says, whenever their attention is drawn to the not-so-nice parts of the Koran or the Hadiths, Muslim folks have a tendency of saying that we’re not smart enough to “understand” the true meanings of the text. Which is kind of funny, because the message of Islam is relatively simple and straightforward, not as philosophically complicated as, say, Buddhism. Would be interesting to know what your response to such critiques would be.

Regards, F-putra

All the best!

Aloo-da-putr? Oh, you must be Punjabi! Doesn’t “aloo” mean potato? So aloo-da-putr could be translated as “son of a potato,” right? Doesn’t make me feel bad at all: I love potatoes. Actually, you shouldn’t have had so much difficulty in pronouncing my name. Falooda+putra. Y’all eat Falooda (a dessert, like custard) in Pakistan, don’t you?

Best regards

Menj is only requesting to issue an authorized Fatwa (Islamic opinion) against these retarded individuals who know nothing ‘bout Islam. I don’t know why the hell people think Fatwas as some death threat as you had put forward in you above statement??