Her "duty" is helping Muslim women who have been abused -- and spreading soothing myths about Islam

Sahi Al Bukhari
Book 62 #114

Narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should not hurt (trouble) his neighbor. And I advise you to take care of the women, for they are created from a rib and the most crooked portion of the rib is its upper part; if you try to straighten it, it will break, and if you leave it, it will remain crooked, so I urge you to take care of the women." (Book #62, Hadith #114)

Here is just one advice from the Prophet to be easy and kind and soft with women.

Peace
Abdullah

What does being "easy and kind and soft with women" mean in mahoundian epistemology?

Since "oppression" from a mahoundian perspective means "mahoundians being equal to the 'dirty kufr' before man-made laws", just as "injustice" means "giving women and men equal status before those very same man-made secular laws", so sharia-violating that they are, perhaps "being kind and easy and soft with women" in a-rab/mahoundian, inbred bedouin savage epistemology means "beating them, but without crippling them or hurting them so much so that they won't be able to perform their duties as jihadist-breeding mobile tents, mahound's imaginary alter-ego willing."

"Abuse happens everywhere," said Niaz. "It cuts across barriers of race, religion, culture."

That explains why an estimated 90% of the women in Pakistan report being beaten by their husbands.

Any comments, Abdullah Mikail?

What about that hadith where Mohammed (BBOH) hits Ayesha, his "favorite" wife?

"So why lie?"......

One thought from the article above.....

"A devout Muslim, Niaz stresses that..."

He wasn't too strong on biology, was he AM?

Created from rib? How intellectually subnormal would one have to be to believe that?

If it's purely a cultural issue then islam has to bear the brunt of the blame. It's the islamic culture that has by far the highest incidences of spousal abuse.

Even Google translates وَاضْرِبُوهُنَّ to 'beat them'....

I agree Champ...AM's attempt to sugar coat that verse is amusing. It essentially means that women are inherently "crooked" and if muslim men need to take care of that (but not too much so as to break) or she will remain crooked.

why didn't Allah make Muslim women with an equal intelligence, worth, and rights as a Muslim Man?....There are ample examples and evidence that he just didn't like women...

can a Muslim woman have more that one husband?
can a Muslim woman contol the destiny of her children should a husband die?
can a Muslim woman conrol the families finances and make important decisions without the Muslim males approval?
In many Muslim countries, can a Muslim woman speak privately with other males without approval?
Why is it so hard for a Muslim woman to prove that a rape occured, and if it did, why is she the one that is usually punished.?
Why is a Muslim woman punished if she refuses to give sex to her husband?
Why is it more difficult for a woman to divorce her husband than it is for the husband to divorce her?

well, the list is long and there are so many instances where a Muslim woman is essentially considered to be less than equal and certainly with few rights...Yes, I am sure of it...Allah does not like Muslim women...

Aw c'mon guys, we know Islam has no oppression of women, much less the beating of them, otherwise there woulda been a mountain of public outcry from JudeoChristian feminists.

*** 33:59 ***

And we've heard nary a peep from that vociferous crowd. Maybe the rules of feminism applies only to JudeoChristian white males, and maybe Afro-American JudeoChristians too?

*** 4:15 ***

Couldn't be, cuz almost all public spokesperson feminists have sinecures as college professors, and the rules for objectivity are strictly enforced in academe by way of vigorous peer review.

Question everything:
"It's the islamic culture that has by far the highest incidences of spousal abuse"

"U.N. Finds That 25% of Married Syrian Women Have Been Beaten":

nytimes.com/2006/04/11/world/middleeast/11syria.html?_r=1

"nearly 25% of [US] women...were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or dating partner/acquaintance at some time in their lifetime."

ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf

Muslims lie. But in this case this woman's lies only hurt those she seeks to help.

You need another plan, girlfriend.

Abdullah Mikail (AM) above quotes from a hadith --

The Prophet said, "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should not hurt (trouble) his neighbor. And I advise you to take care of the women, for they are created from a rib and the most crooked portion of the rib is its upper part; if you try to straighten it, it will break, and if you leave it, it will remain crooked, so I urge you to take care of the women." (Book #62, Hadith #114)

-- and then concludes:

"Here is just one advice from the Prophet to be easy and kind and soft with women."

No, this evidence adduced by AM does not show that Mohammed (i.e., "the Prophet") advised Muslim men "to be easy and kind and soft with women". What the evidence shows is that Mohammed advises Muslim men "to take care of the women". What does this mean? The subsequent text only clarifies a little:

"...for they [i.e., women] are created from a rib and the most crooked portion of the rib is its upper part; if you try to straighten it, it will break, and if you leave it, it will remain crooked, so I urge you to take care of the women."

This rather cryptic clarification uses a metaphor, a crooked rib. Mohammed then uses this metaphor to counsel against two ways of dealing with the crooked rib that is woman:

1) don't straighten it, or it will break

2) on the other hand, don't do nothing, else it will remain crooked.

It is reasonable to derive from Mohammed's metaphor what he is saying, and it comports well with other hadith and tafsirs -- and it boils down to this:

1) don't beat your women too hard, or you will break them;

2) but on the other hand, don't leave them unpunished when you feel they deserve it.

I.e., women are crooked, and it is up to you as the "protectors and maintainers" of your women to bend them into right shape as best you can, using beating if you see fit, but don't beat them black and blue into critical condition, because then you will break them.

Muhammad would never justify killing a woman because she slandered his Islamic duty, now would he?
This is what is taught...

"'You obey a stranger who encourages you to murder for booty. You are greedy men. Is there no honor among you?' Upon hearing those lines Muhammad said, ‘Will no one rid me of this woman?' Umayr, a zealous Muslim, decided to execute the Prophet's wishes. That very night he crept into the writer's home while she lay sleeping surrounded by her young children. There was one at her breast. Umayr removed the suckling babe and then plunged his sword into the poet. The next morning in the mosque, Muhammad, who was aware of the assassination, said, ‘You have helped Allah and His Apostle.' Umayr said. ‘She had five sons; should I feel guilty?' ‘No,' the Prophet answered. ‘Killing her was as meaningless as two goats butting heads."
Ishaq: 676

and Qur'an 4:15 says: "If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, take the evidence of four witnesses from amongst you against them; if they testify, confine them to houses until death [by starvation] claims them. If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and improve, leave them alone; for Allah is Oft-Returning."

and this...I am very unhappy. Our way of life is under attack. And we are not fighting back. Deep down, we know that when a woman has disgraced her family, nothing will restore honor except by killing her. More...

"Answer this one question please. It's a very simple question."

Perhaps not.

Options

1. agree
2. disagree
3. lie
4. avoid

Looks like number four is the islam-o-troll's current strategy

Here is what Shafi'i had to say on the subject:

"[Shafi'i] was aware of the contradictory reports transmitted in the traditions and tried to reconcile the differences between them by suggesting a chronological sequence. First, the Prophet forbade men to beat women; second, he received the revelation of Qur'an 4:34; and third, in accordance with this revelation, he allowed men, to beat their wives. However, al- Shafi'i continues, the Prophet's admonition 'the best of you will not beat them' qualifies his own permissive statement, because it implies that every man has the possibility of choosing not to beat. In concluding his reflection on the subject, al-Shafi'i says that according to the Prophet's words, beating is permitted, but it is not a religious duty (fard), adding finally: 'we choose what the Messenger of God chose himself, and we prefer that the husband does not beat his wife when she goes too far against him in her words and in similar things.'"

Here is the reference for the tradition:
"A similar tradition presents the Prophet saying: 'you may beat them, but the best of you will not beat women' (Abu Dawud, Sunan, ed. K. Y. al-Hut, Beirut, 1988, I, no 2146; Abu Bakr Ibn al-'Arabi, Akham al-Qur'an, I, ed. 'A. M. al- Bajawi, Cairo, 1988, p. 469)"

Disciplining Wives: A Historical Reading of Qur'ân 4:34
Author(s): Manuela Marín
Source: Studia Islamica, No. 97 (2003), pp. 5-40

A blanket statement forbidding beating would have been better, but this is quite progressive for the eighth century.

The white-washer of Islam from Dallas Abdullah Mikhail has been THOROUGHLY vanquished by YANKEL!

I posted this response to his latest idiocy and HE slithered back into his hole, never daring to face me. What a loser! I understand he gets paid to try and refute the truth that is disseminated here, but his latest white-wash job hit a new high on the stupidity index. Why does CAIR waste their money on him.

Anyway, here it is, again:

Good Old Abdullah Mikhail put forth a dooooozy on the thread "NY Women complain of Abuse"

He said that "daraba" which is a simple triliteral Arabic verb meaning "to beat" can also denote having sexual intercourse, and in the context of Sura 4:34 means "to have sexual intercouse." His exact words: "Daraba (to have intercourse, not to beat)"

Need I point out that "daraba" - to knock or strike, contextualized into meaning sexual intercourse would correspond to our using the English word "knock" or "bang" to denote sexual intercourse. But such a idiomatic stretching of the meaning would of course be very slangish and derogatory. As in "he 'knocked' her up" or "he 'banged' her." Not nice.

Anyway, if "daraba" can also mean to have sexual intercouse, then thinketh abdullah, Sura 4:34 can have a gentler, a better, a more infidel-friendly meaning.

Y'all following me here? Please don't spit your coffee or chablis all over your keyboard.

Abdullah has bowdlerized the Koran and given a kinder, gentler Sura 4:34.

Without further ado, here it is

Sura 4:34
...As to those women on whose part you see ill conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) rape them (lightly, if it is useful)...

You see, Abdullah is saying is that "rape" (Daraba: to have intercourse, not to beat) is the proper punishment for severely disobedient wives.

And CAIR pays him for this?

Peace Out
Yankel

Abdullah: Stop pretending to be a reasonable "moderate" person. YOU HAVE BEEN CAUGHT. You used an anti-Jewish racist slur and then lied about it being offensive.
http://www.englishclub.com/ref/esl/Slang/Y/yid_Yid_1251.htm
I replied with a link that proved that it was indeed and yet you never apologized. You have contentiously praised Shiara law practices of flogging and stoning as "deterants". Of Rushdie and Van Gogh you said ""Questioning" Islam, yeah, you are a bigot...a religious bigot...there is a difference between questioning and what these two people [Rushdie and Van Gogh) did...if you consider vile crap like theirs "questioning" that's a sad pathetic place to be from."

Then never answered my follow up question: "Tell me, AM do you think people like Rushdie and Van Gogh should not be legally allowed to criticize Islam in the way they do? What kind of questioning Islam is alright? Is it alright to question the historical facts behind his marriage of Aisha at age 9? That he raided and killed? That he declared Jews the "descendants of apes and pigs" and said that in the last days the rocks would call out to Muslims to kill them?"

You claim that Mr. Spencer and others are lairs and bigots, but you're the one who is both. I hope and pray that your beliefs will be challenged and that you will leave your hate.

Er. in my question them is of course, Jews. (Sorry for the abiguity) and Lairs=liars.

AM is very stupid, else, he would never have reverted to a pseudo religion with the WORLD'S MOST POORLY WRITTEN AND MOST UNHOLY BOOK. I'd rather lick out every urinal in Grand Central station than swear allegiance to such a pastiche of garbled, incoherent, evil nonsense as is the Quran.

To Abdullah, it smells like roses.

Abdullah has very little integrity...maybe none.

The only reason he posts here and whiffs and whiffs and whiffs the ball, in the long run causing more damage to the image of islam is because it is part of his "job responsibilities" (for which he gets paid.) Yup, he's a paid stooge.

Take a look at the thorough trouncing Abdullah got from me in response to his mind-bogglingly asinine post that "daraba" means "have sexual intercourse" in the context of Sura 4:34, so that the proper punishment for disobedient women is rape. And that's supposed to make the Sura more warm and fuzzy.

Is this guy nuts, dishonest, or both?

Well, both, but he gets paid for it.

CHA-CHING should be AM's signoff, not Peace.

Question everything:

“The group 'Syrian married women' is highly unlikely to contain U.S. citizens, however the U.S. figures undoubtedly contain Syrian married women”

The percentage of US citizens identifying themselves as Muslim is 0.6%. This is not going to affect any comparison:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

“then allow for corrupt ME police, the fact that women in the West have support groups to help them report the assaults, etc, etc..."

The study from Syria had nothing to do with police reports or government data. It was a survey conducted directly with Syrian citizens, the same as the US data. Did you know most violence against women in the US is also not reported? From the US report:

“Most intimate partner victimizations are not reported to the police. Approximately onefifth of all rapes, one-quarter of all physical assaults, and one-half of all stalkings perpetrated against female respondents by intimates were reported to the police. Even fewer rapes, physical assaults, and stalkings perpetrated against male respondents by intimates were reported. The majority of victims who did not report their victimization to the police thought the police would not or could not do anything on their behalf. These findings suggest that most victims of intimate partner violence do not consider the justice system an appropriate vehicle for resolving conflicts with intimates.”

Go ahead and do your mental gymnastics and spin it however you want, but the numbers are comparable.

Does a Muslim man beating his wife(ves)make for a happy home, a loving relationship? or does it just keep the fear of Islam embedded in the mind of the Muslim women?..

AM:
Of course, you weren't trying to insult Yankel, you were just spontaneously speaking Yiddish! Yeah, that's it! Even

if the word isn't in itself offensive, we all know you were using it offensively. You're not kidding anyone. If someone says "you yid" or "you Africian" (or perhaps "you people", hmm?) even though those words aren't necessity offensive it's clear what they mean. (And by the way, quite a few dictionaries online agree that 'yid' is offensive, it wasn't just one dictionary.)

Yeah, I guess I'm just "cherry picking" your quotes about saying flogging and stoning are "deterrents".
You never did answer my questions about sharia and freedom of speech.

Me: "Tell me, AM do you think people like Rushdie and Van Gogh should not be legally allowed to criticize Islam in the way they do? What kind of questioning Islam is alright? Is it alright to question the historical facts behind his marriage of Aisha at age 9? That he raided and killed? That he declared Jews the "descendants of apes and pigs" and said that in the last days the rocks would call out to Muslims to kill them?"

Do you beleive Rushdie and Van Gogh should be legally prevented from saying what they said/printing what they printed? If so, what should be the penalty? This is an important question.

Everybody, please take note that the obsessive-compulsive poster Abdullah Mikhail, who ALAWAYS has to have the last word, has been thoroughly thrashed by YANKEL.

No rebuttal, nothing. What a loser.

In Abdullah's "bowdlerized" Koran (Def-Koran by AM), the proper punishment for disobedient women is to "rape" them.

Abdullah:

"Daraba (to have intercourse, not to beat)"

Therefore Sura 4:34 really means:

...As to those women on whose part you see ill conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) rape them (lightly, if it is useful)...

Foolster,

"Do you beleive Rushdie and Van Gogh should be legally prevented from saying what they said/printing what they printed? If so, what should be the penalty? This is an important question."

Man are you thick headed...

: )

Read above....more than one sentence at a time, and try to keep that short term memory intact. (p.s. put the bong down for a while, okay?)

Peace
Abdullah

Abdullah wants to run, but he can't hide.

Abdullah considers himself some kind of an expert on muhammadanism.

Yet, he can't even read Arabic. He probably doesn't even know how to form the root of a simple triliteral verb.If he could, he'd realize that daraba (actually dharaba as the d "da" is emphatic) can never, except in slangy, vernacular speech, mean "bang" or "knock." Obviously, it is absurd to think that muhammad told his followers to "schtup" a woman who was being disobedient in the "holy" Quran. But nothing's too silly for Abdullah to post. He needs the job. He needs the money.

How is it that CAIR Dallas uses this guy to do damage control at infidel sites. He's whiffing.

A real loser is someone like AM, who, after he has lost and been publically humiliated, continues his "get the last word" behavior and says (like a broken record) "you'd be funny if you weren't so pathetic."

He brains have been beaten out on the floor of a mosque.

Great work as always Yankel,

I love to see AM's posts get more irrational and insulting as I scroll down.

"My parents ... made clear that they would disown me,"

Iqbal said. "My father even said ... 'You're lucky you live in America because if you lived back home, you would have been dead by now.'"

Big surprise, eh? Another Muslim "Father" [PUKE] making a death threat.

Women Beware: Islam, religion of Death and Threats, as sanctioned by the unholy Qur'an.

AM: Sorry. I didn't see your post above. I don't smoke anything, though bongs can be used on tobacco which isn't a hallucinogen. You seem to be projecting that all people use bongs are druggies, hmm.

AM: "Don't need to... Jew translates straight to "Yid" in Yiddish...see the reference above. There is no insult at all in calling someone a Jew or a Yid, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being Jewish."
I call bull. Do you normally speak Yiddish? If not, even if "yid" isn't specifically a racial slur, then it is obvious that you were being insulting the way you said it (i.e. "you yid"). See my post above.

AM: "Q "Then never answered my follow up question: "Tell me, AM do you think people like Rushdie and Van Gogh should not be legally allowed to criticize Islam in the way they do?”
A I never said they couldn’t, did I? They both did so with wild abandon and made money doing it, and, all things considered, do you think it was a wise thing for them to do?"
That was pretty unclear. Was that a "they should be allowed"? Ah, it's about wisdom now? That sounds like a veiled threat. "they CAN, but don't you know, something terrible might happen to them.". Let me ask it this way: do you beleive they should be able to without worrying for their lives? YES or NO.

AM: [On Aisha] "What is there to question? She was betrothed at a very young age, happens all the time in European society, he was married to her at a very young age and consummated the marriage when she was mature. "

YOU ARE A LIAR (Or ignorant)!
Tabari IX:131 "My mother came to me while I was being swung on a swing between two branches and got me down. My nurse took over and wiped my face with some water and started leading me. When I was at the door she stopped so I could catch my breath. I was brought in while Muhammad was sitting on a bed in our house. My mother made me sit on his lap. The other men and women got up and left. The Prophet consummated his marriage with me in my house when I was nine years old."
He had sex with her at the age of 9! These are Aisha's OWN WORDS. There are no records of that being acceptable in Jewish customs (i.e. the bible, talmud).

AM Said: ""You have contentiously praised Shiara law practices of flogging and stoning as "deterants". They are deterents...what is there to argue about?"
Yes, flogging and stoning could be called "deterrents" but where as I, and most here call them abominable and horrible practices, you refuse to denounce them as such. Well, will you?

"This is from the revelation of the Quran and it is an apocalyptic…Mohammad didn’t “say it.” "
Uh, it's in the Quran and it came from somewhere. If Mohammad didn't have it recorded, then who did? He said that Jews would be killed in the end times, not disbelievers or bad Jews, but Jews, and what's more they will be slain by Muslims ON EARTH. It is practicly a promise/command to slay Jews to bring on the end times and it is disgusting.
There is no such thing in the Christian Revelation. Yes, people will be killed, but it is the armies gathering to conquer Jerusalem, or wars between nations. There are no decelerations that Christians in the end will kill anyone of any religious or racial group. Where as the Jewish/Christian god only commanded specific peoples at specific times be attacked, this is FUTURE TENSE.

AM: "On a case by case basis and only when I can prove it, and I have proved it or I wouldn’t say it."
No, you haven't. You argue the alcoholic point (over and over again), but that is far from conclusive. As I (and others) have said: (1) Prove the first statement was untrue and (2) prove that he changed it DIRECTLY from your post and then I'll beleive you. I haven't seen proof of either.

AM Said:" “ I hope and pray that your beliefs will be challenged and that you will leave your hate.” A I have no hate at all…that’s your bias projection, not mine…my belief is challenged all the time and every time it is simply reinforced."
No, I have no hate. I follow my master's teachings of "love your neighbor" and "pray for your enemies". However, I hate suppremisism (floggings and stoinings for apostocy that your co-religionists practice) that is in your religion, enforced by your master's teachings in the Quran/Hadiths.
It's been asked before, and I wonder; why not go after the fellow Muslims who do these evil things instead of the ones who are reporting them? Surely you beleive that slavery, apostosy/blashpomy laws, death fatwas are bad, right?

"dave" adduces the Shafi tradition of Islamic law. That's only one school out of 4 schools of Islamic law. Even if the interpretation of it he supplies is correct, that seems to mean that the other 3 traditions of Islamic law are not so favorable to his Islamic apolegetics (else surely he would have adduced them too, eh?).

Secondly, I am now reading the article "dave" used --

Disciplining Wives: A Historical Reading of Qur'ân 4:34
Author(s): Manuela Marín
Source: Studia Islamica, No. 97 (2003), pp. 5-40.

Although the scholar, Ms. Marín, seems MESA-Nostra-esque, her presentation (at least thus far) is in some respects sufficiently rational to undermine, rather than bolster, dave's apologetics for Islam. In her first couple of pages, using as a jumping-off point the infamous Islamic cleric of Spain, Mohamed Kamal Mostafa, who in 2000 published a book justifiying beating wives, Ms. Marín concedes that wifebeating and misogynistic attitudes against, and mistreatment of women is a major problem in the contemporary Muslim world and has direct roots in Islamic texts among which is Koran 4:34.

Thus, her tap-dance is subtler than those who simply deny this massive fact. She attempts to argue that the contemporary Muslim world has become beholden to "conservative" renderings of those Islamic texts, renderings that tend to ignore the suppler methodology of "classical" Islam wherein one can find a development of a more humane way of treating women. Exactly why the contemporary Muslim world is getting their own tradition so wrong on this issue (other than the few exceptions she notes which tend to prove the rule), Ms. Marín never answers -- though doubtless she would find a way to blame the West for it, somehow.

At any rate, in my reading of her article thus far, I note two interesting things:

1) the earlier Islamic traditions (as far back as the 9th century A.D.) of exegetical contextualization of Koran 4:34 do not contain dave's exculpatory and "progressive" exegesis: in fact, quite the opposite: the nucleus of the context is of a woman who along with her father complains to Mohammed that her husband beat her; Mohammed's impromptu response that they should seek retaliation against her husband; then Mohammed suddenly saying -- "Wait a sec, I'm getting a fax" -- i.e., a revelation from Allah, which was Koran 4:34. The tradition records this divine correction of Mohammed's impromptu opinion in Mohammed's words as: "I wanted something, and God wanted something else. What God wanted is better." (p. 10).

2) Ms. Marín makes the remarkable observation that this particular early tradition -- i.e., of replacing the possibility of the women getting retaliation for being beat with the divine revelation that she has no right and that in fact the husband has the right to beat her -- reflects a progressive development -- at least she implies this with her adorning language:

Thus, the Qur'ânic revelation is the occasion, not only of establishing a new framework for the relationships between husband and wife, but also of abolishing the pre-islamic practice of retaliation within the life of a married couple.

A "new framework for the relationships between husband and wife"! God says to men you can beat your wives. That's not a "new framework for the relationships between husband and wife" -- it's a divine carte blanche for wifebeating.

And note her final phrase, that this "new framework" helped to "abolish the pre-islamic practice of retaliation within the life of a married couple": notice her sleight-of-hand, eliminating the wife from the "married couple" and thus deflecting from this "pre-islamic practice" the specific fact that it accorded the wife the right to redress the wrong of being beaten. And also notice her sly phrase "pre-islamic practice", connoting an Islamic progress away from a time of savage Bedouin tribalism.

More later, when I finish the article.

AM: "Darabha is a tap, and lightly as explained by the Prophet such that it does not even leave a mark and never on the face, he wa asked to explain it, and he held up a miswak, a tooth brush, and said, "With this." It is the last step in the series of actions prior to divorce. It does not mean "beat" in respect to what you are meaning."

Muhammad had NO business instructing men, or women, for that matter, on what is proper and respectful treatment of women. Nor did he have any business instructing anyone on human behaviors, in general. Muhammad was criminally insane, so why give any of his thoughts and opinions an audience. All he ever taught any of us was on how NOT to behave. Everything he ever did or said must be properly framed as coming from a con man and a complete lunatic, so you must keep things in their proper perspective.

And I cannot think of an occasion where even a "light tap" with a toothbrush is neither appropriate or acceptable. Suggesting a man take said action on a woman, or on any human being, only speaks ILL of the person making the suggestion. And it also speaks ILL of the person who endorses it. Plus, it only shows that Muhammad was a coward and afraid of women, and that he did not respect them -- and it also shows the cowardess and disrespect of men who endorse this humiliating and unholy rite-of-passage.

Also, if you didn't agree with in Ahmed, then why would you post his material in the first place? You obviously agree with his position, so I'm not at all sure what point you are trying to make by correcting Yankel -- other than to show just how LOW you're willing to go to avoid being confronted, and confront you he did!!! ...good job, btw, Yankel!!

Anyway, all I can say is that you and your false prophet, Motard, deserve one another, AM. You know, birds of a feather flock together....

Ah, AM takes the last resort...it wasn't me who said it...he's just reporting on it. Sounds a lot like what Robert Spencer does, except AM is on the wrong side of right. I can see why cair pays AM...he's very good at deflecting and obfuscating a simple question by providing answers that makes no sense. Apparently, per his last post, now he admits it's OK to tap lightly as long as you don't leave a mark (especially on the face since that would show in public). Always amusing, AM can have my Comic Relief posting name.

champ,

The miswak is disingenuously translated by Islam apologists as a "toothbrush", trying to mislead us into thinking a little implement like our modern toothbrush is meant; but actually the miswak is a strip from a plant used, among other things, in its smaller forms as a kind of floss for the teeth. It resembles more what is known in the American South as a "switch". (This incidentally may shed light on the manner of the physical violence prescribed by Koran 4:34 and may mean that two of the Muslim translators, Pickthall and Sheri Ali, may have been on the mark in implying whipping when the former used the word "scourge" to translate while the latter used "chastise" -- both terms in older usage definitely implying whipping.)

Wow, AM working overtime today...must of got tapped out donating to the cause over ramadamadingdong.

Mo Foe,

AM finally did answer your question. Not sure which thread. He said "No." As a follow-up question, I'd suggest you ask him what would be the suitable punishment for Nonie Darwish.

AM: My "Fellow Muslims" don't commit crimes.

Funniest thing you've ever posted, liar.

AM: Generally speaking, yes, it seems bad that someone would put out a fatwa against just one person for something...[SNIP]

Wow......only 'generally speaking? Typical psychotic moslem mindset.

AM: but I still point out Salman has been under a “death fatwa!” for what, like twenty one years?

So because of the ineptitude of your moslem assassins we should take the threat more seriously?

Moe Foe -- your last question "What would she have to do?" -- excellent follow-up question.

AM: "Robert was proven a liar in the alcohol incident. It happened in real time. I posted the rebuttal that crushed his premise. He suddenly changed the article. When I called him on it he tried to bring up darura and I defeated that argument of his as well. End of story. Let’s never bring this up again, okay? It’s very old news."
>You're the one who keeps bringing up and pretending you "won" but I haven't seen very convincing proof it was at all a lie, only that it was vague.

AM said: "Yes, slavery was a vile scourge that existed before the advent of Islam and it still does today. When properly followed slavery has been abolished by Islam."
>This is a lie. Slavery is practiced widely in the Muslim world. And yet, you complain of "bioggotry" when we report this here.

"Try speaking out against the Chinese or Egyptian government…or in fact almost any Central European government and see what happens. I am saying be cognizant of what one says, there may be ramifications, like it or not, the world is an ugly place."
>I of course hate any kind of tyrany anywhere, and I do speak out against it when I see it. Yes the world is an ugly place, but don't forget it is your co-religionists who are the ones who make people who speak out against Islam and those religious minorities in Islamic lands like the copts in Egypt afraid.

>I've told you why I've decided to not e-mail you. I prefer the openness of the internet. I don't trust you to later twist my e-mails or claim I did the same, as with the claims you have with Mr. Spencer.

AM Said: "I noted before the usual tactic for those here at JW is to put pre-conditions that are impossible to meet on their challenges…yes, I can not prove that Robert changed the article because of what I wrote."
>Ha! Notice, these "impossible pre-conditions" is EVIDENCE. If you can't back up what you say, then don't say it. It MAKES NO SENSE to complain and say my asking for the proof is an "impossible pre-condition".

Truth is so annoying, isn't it?

Champ: That wood is still used in some countries for cleaning teeth. I have a photo of a man selling it by the roadside, cut up into pieces a few inches long. Left uncut, the wood would be able to be used to inflict a lot of pain. Yes, it is amazing that the sneaky "toothbrush" translation has worked so well for the Islamic apologists, as if Mohammed was being ironic and making admonishment of women seem a bit of a joke. In any case, beating was (and is) only one aspect of Islamic cruelty to women. Raping captured slaves, polygamy, "honour killing", FGM...and so on, quite a few incentives for women to deny their own nature and submit to the fantasies of their lords and masters.
AlKidya's example of Mohammed's "kindness" to women (his cold approval of the killing of the poetess) probably says enough. Who needs to know more? If Mohammed ever TALKED about "kindness" to women then he was simply being vilely hypocritical.

Hesperado:
“Ms. Marín concedes that wifebeating and misogynistic attitudes against, and mistreatment of women is a major problem in the contemporary Muslim world and has direct roots in Islamic texts among which is Koran 4:34.” -Hesperado

Wrong. She does not say that wifebeating and misogyny are “a major problem.” If you think she does, show me where. She says “the offending paragraphs in the book by M. K. Mostafa are hardly original. Similar statements can be found in Islamist literature all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages.” She also says that “at present, more liberal or even progressive interpretations of this controversial Qur'anic verse are not uncommon.”

So she says that there are varying interpretations of 4:34. She is talking about interpretations, not actions. Nowhere does she talk about actual conduct of contemporary Muslims. I brought up actual conduct on this thread, and the problem is not bigger in Muslim society than in the US. It is a problem with humans, not Islam.

“Exactly why the contemporary Muslim world is getting their own tradition so wrong on this issue (other than the few exceptions she notes which tend to prove the rule), Ms. Marín never answers”-Hesperado

Yes, she does. First, she details how contemporary conservative Muslims read 4:34 literally and ignore the classical debate on the subject:

“Similar statements [to Mostafa’s] can be found in Islamist literature all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages. As a rule, this kind of literature offers literal readings of Qur'an, 4:34, a verse used to justify male domination over women in the family as well as in the social sphere. Following the traditional exegesis of this verse, contemporary Islamists and conservative Muslim scholars understand it as God's will to give husbands the authority to beat their disobedient wives. Characteristically, this kind of commentary disregards the classical debate on the subject, and focuses instead on defining the essential inferiority of women, who need to be guided by the male members of their families and, if necessary, to be physically chastised by them.”

She explains how this approach ignores the complexity of the subject in Islamic history:

“A literal interpretation of Qur'an 4:34, such as the one proposed by [Mostafa] quoted at the beginning of this article (or by anti-Muslim propagandists) overlooks the historical complexity of the subject under discussion.”

An anti-Muslim propagandist would ignore the historical complexity of Islamic law and instead insist on a literal interpretation?!? What anti-Muslim propagandist would do such a thing? Those anti-Muslim propagandists who insist on literal interpretations and cannot bother themselves with Islamic history have a lot in common with the extramist clerics like Mostafa.

She then says that progressive Muslims do take into account the historical debate on the subject:

“Methodologically, what distinguishes modern ‘progressive’ exegesis from its conservative counterpart, is mainly the insistence on taking into account the historicity of the Qur'an.”

She explains how taking into account the history of debate within Islamic law has always been a feature of Islamic law. Too bad it is not a feature of the "anti-Muslim propagandists":

“But if awareness of the problem of ‘battered wives’ is a very recent one in Western societies, in Muslim societies it was already discussed from early times. These discussions have to be placed, as the Qur'anic revelation itself, in their historical context. It should be noted that the emphasis on ‘historical circumstances’ surrounding the revelation is not, by any means, new. In fact, a well developed part of the traditional curriculum in Qur'anic sciences’ is that of asbab al-nuzal (‘occasions of revelation’).”

“Exactly why the contemporary Muslim world is getting their own tradition so wrong on this issue (other than the few exceptions she notes which tend to prove the rule), Ms. Marín never answers”????-Hesperado

I really don’t know how she could be any clearer. Maybe you need to reread the article.

Here is an example of the early history:

“That violence against women was a matter discussed in early Islamic times is clearly shown by the short chapter entitled ‘on beating women’ (dhikr darb al-nisd) in the volume of women's biographies that ends the Tabaqdt of Ibn Sa'd. The chapter begins with a terse statement by 'A'isha: the Prophet never struck a woman or a servant girl, or anybody else, unless he was engaged in a military campaign. The rest of the chapter is divided in two different types of traditions. In the first one, the Prophet unequivocally and in strong terms condemns men who beat their wives; in the second one, he allows beatings but pointing out that only the worst men in the community would mistreat treat their wives. Of the two traditions belonging to the first group, one is of a positive character: ‘the best of you - said the Prophet - is the one who is the best for his womenfolk (ahl), and I am the best of you for my womenfolk.’ In another account, the Prophet shows his displeasure when a woman complained to him that her husband had beat her severely. In the Prophet's words, men like this husband should be ashamed of beating their wives as if they were their slaves and later having intercourse with them.”

Regardless of interpretations, the simple conclusion is that men beat their wives worldwide. When people have the power to physically dominate another human, they frequently take advantage of it, and use physical methods to address their issues. They do not need a book to tell them it is OK or not. This is a problem with humans that will take millennia to solve.

These same human issues also manifest themselves in the actions of nations, since nations are composed of humans. Some nations seem to want the rest of the world to submit to their military dominance, and to follow their orders, rather than allow less militarily advanced nations to find their own path. Do you know any nations like this?

I get a lot of requests for donating to charity. Here is one I received about a week ago:

"September 2009
Punjab, Pakistan

Dear friend,

My name is Mukhtar Mai. In 2002, I was gang raped on the orders of a village council to avenge my brother's supposed misconduct. I fought for justice against the men who raped me and won, and used the money to help women in my community. Among other things, I opened schools for girls so that future generations would not grow up illiterate, as I had.

Mercy Corps has been a great partner to me in this effort. More than 4,700 people have given $628,000 through Mercy Corps to support my work. For that, I say thank you.

My case is not unique, and neither is the help I've received from Mercy Corps. They support women like me around the world — women fighting against oppression, hunger, poverty and hopelessness. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including here in Pakistan, they are empowering women to be change agents in their families and communities.

As Muslims around the world celebrate Ramadan through fasting, reflection and charity, I invite you to support Mercy Corps and help millions of women like me see a brighter future.

Thank you."
.................

I have enormous respect for Mukhtar Mai, a woman *ordered gang raped* by an Islamic council, who fought back. But even she cannot bring herself to mention Islam--the cause of her horrendous and unjust suffering, in anything other than a wholly positive manner.

Until the boot of Islam is off the necks of Muslim village women like Mukhtar Mai, it will always be true that cases like hers are "not unique".

I will only respond for now to two points raised by dave742, in response to what I wrote :

1) dave742 wrote, in response to my statement that -- “Ms. Marín concedes that wifebeating and misogynistic attitudes against, and mistreatm of women is a major problem in the contemporary Muslim world and has direct roots in Islamic texts among which is Koran 4:34” --:

“Wrong. She does not say that wifebeating and misogyny are “a major problem.” ”

I didn’t write that she said that; I wrote that she concedes that, meaning through the force of her presentation. She writes more than what dave742 reported: Aside from writing that “Similar statements [similar to the Muslim imam M.K. Mostafa’s justification of wifebeating and the more general dominance over women which this entails and reflects] can be found in Islamist literature all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages. As a rule, this kind of literature offers literal readings of Qur’ân, 4:34, a verse used to justify male domination over women in the family as well as in the social sphere. Following the traditional exegesis of this verse, contemporary Islamists and conservative Muslim scholars understand it as God’s will to give husbands the authority to beat their disobedient wives. Characteristically, this kind of commentary disregards the classical debate on the subject, and focuses instead on defining the essential inferiority of women, who need to be guided by the male members of their families and, if necessary, to be physically chastised by them.”

All this indicates that, as I characterized it, she concedes that in fact wifebeating and misogyny are a major problem throughout the Muslim world. She had ample opportunity to leaven her description of the problem with nice mitigating terms like “tiny minority”, etc., but she chose not to. The coexistent fact that contrary voices of “progress” are “not uncommon” does not mitigate the problem nor its magnitude. Nor should the dubious allegation that the problem is no greater in the Muslim world than in the West, even if true, mitigate the problem or its magnitude. Furthermore, if all Ms. Marín's initial presentation is doing is talking about "interpretations" to the exclusion of behavior among Muslims, why are all these "progressive" Muslims she adduces so busy working against them? Social activists busy tilting at the windmills of dusty "traditional" texts that nobody is acting upon? Of course not.

2) dave742 wrote in response to my rhetorical question -- “Exactly why the contemporary Muslim world is getting their own tradition so wrong on this issue... Ms. Marín never answers” -- “Yes she does.”

No, she doesn’t. She answers how they get it so wrong (and dave742's re-presentation of it only reiterates the how, not the why). She does not tackle the problem of why.

Hesperado:
"I didn’t write that she said that; I wrote that she concedes that"

I guess it takes a scholar like you to tease that out of her paper. You say that "She writes more than what dave742 reported," and then go on to quote the EXACT quote that I did.If she wrote more than what I quoted that is relevant, then quote that. Saying that she said more, then quoting what I did, is nonsensical.

"She had ample opportunity to leaven her description of the problem with nice mitigating terms like “tiny minority”, etc., but she chose not to."

Sometimes I wonder why I post here. No, she didn't write that only a tiny minority of Muslims beat their wives, because that is not true. That is not true anywhere in the world, including the US. No sane person would write that a "tiny minority" of US men beat their wives. Using your logic, that means that wife beating is a "major problem" in the US. If you don't say "tiny minority,' then it is a "major problem." Grow up. Whatever term you want to use, the problem of wife beating is approximately equal in the US and Muslim countries. Call the problem "Steve".

"She answers how they get it so wrong (and dave742's re-presentation of it only reiterates the how, not the why). She does not tackle the problem of why."

You are very obnoxious. I don't think you are even impressing your fellow JW readers with your inane parsing of words. OK. she shows how they get it wrong. She says that Islamic extremist conservatives and anti-Muslim propagandists both read the text literally and ignore the entire history of Islamic law surrounding the issue. I'll give you the "why" for this. Both these groups are imbeciles.

Hesperado:
I think I got sucked into your nonsense game of pertending like Marin said something about the extent that spousal abuse occurs in Muslim countries. She did not say a word about that. Not a word. Her paper concerns interpretation of Islamic law surrounding a particular issue. She was comparing interpretations, and to an extent, how widespread different interpretations are. She said one interpretion "can be found in Islamist literature all over the Arab-speaking world," and another view is "not uncommon." I doubt that she put nearly as much effort into choosing these terms as you are putting into analyzing them. There are different interpretations. That's all she was saying. The point of her entire paper is that one of these interpretations is wrong, because it concentrates on analyzing a few words rather than discussing the entire history of the issue in Islamic law. This is the same thing you are doing in this thread. You are focusing all your attention on what a couple of words, and trying to figure out the hidden meaning of those words in the mind of the author. Meanwhile, you ignore the entire body of the paper. This is exactly what she says the problem is with the Islamic conservatives.

You JW readers will spend hours looking up what a stupid word means, or what type of stick a person meant, and ignore a thousand years worth of history. When she said that "anti-Muslim propandists" have the same problem as Muslim conservatives regarding ignoring history and focusing on a few words, she sure had JW readers pegged.

AM: I'm not going to respond to your last post, because a lot of it seems to rely heavily on knowledge of the issue of darura, which I don't know enough about but hope more knowledgeable posters like Hugh will answer.

You never did answer me a few of my questions in the earlier post, that I didn't really notice until now.

I'd like to know do you usually speak yiddish? If so, how often do you speak it? Do you know anyone who does?
Do you think saying "you jew" or "you arab" (and I think you know what tone I mean) is insulting, even though the terms "jew" and "arab" is not offensive?

You also didn't respond in any way to my catching you on the lie about Aisha. When I said made the claim the Mohammad had sex with a minor you said "What is there to question? She was betrothed at a very young age, happens all the time in European society, he was married to her at a very young age and consummated the marriage when she was mature. "
you say he was "betrothed", and perhaps it is true that it was common in those days to be betrothed so young as 6, but you didn't mention that he had sex with her when she was 9! (Tabari IX:131 in Aisha's own words!) do you consider 9 to be "mature"? If so, you're a pedophile! As I said before, there is no proof of anything like this in the Torah/Old Testament.

You also never answered my challenge to denounce floggings and stoning as abominable. Will you?

Also, I have a follow up question to freedom of speach issue: You talked about accountability and mention Nazi propagandist Joseph Gobbels Do you think this accountability should be enforced by the government? If so, how much is going too far for example in a case of "insulting Islam"? Would it have to be outright call for violence (i.e. saying something direct like "kill the Muslims")? If it is something less severe that that, then What should the penalty be in those cases?

Abdullah:

Thanks for the info. The reference I read this in was not a "Hanafi reference," but simply a book on Islamic law by an American author (I do not know Arabic). The author, however, is not anti-Islamic, and is what I consider a reputable source. As I remember, there was no Arabic source for this statement, but it was just made in passing. I was certainly shocked when I read it. From what you say, it is likely simply incorrect. I will look it up tonight.

dave742 wrote -- in response my writing that "She [Ms. Marín] writes more than what dave742 reported..." --

that I "then go on to quote the EXACT quote that I [i.e., that dave742] did.If she wrote more than what I quoted that is relevant, then quote that. Saying that she said more, then quoting what I did, is nonsensical."

Here is what dave742 had quoted with regard to the problem I was referring to (not, of course, with regard to the solution in the "not uncommon" reformers which is not pertinent in this regard):

She says “the offending paragraphs in the book by M. K. Mostafa are hardly original. Similar statements can be found in Islamist literature all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages.”

Here is what I quoted:

“Similar statements [similar to the Muslim imam M.K. Mostafa’s justification of wifebeating and the more general dominance over women which this entails and reflects] can be found in Islamist literature all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages. As a rule, this kind of literature offers literal readings of Qur’ân, 4:34, a verse used to justify male domination over women in the family as well as in the social sphere. Following the traditional exegesis of this verse, contemporary Islamists and conservative Muslim scholars understand it as God’s will to give husbands the authority to beat their disobedient wives. Characteristically, this kind of commentary disregards the classical debate on the subject, and focuses instead on defining the essential inferiority of women, who need to be guided by the male members of their families and, if necessary, to be physically chastised by them.”

Obviously, I quoted more. Is the more I quoted relevant? I think so. Who are these "Islamists" she mentions who purvey this approval of wifebeating and the misogyny that undergirds it, and indeed, purvey it "all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages" (notice how dave742 left out the "Western languages" part)? Evidently, they are distinct from the other category she adduces, the "conservative Muslim scholars". When you have two related yet distinct categories of Muslims, and you magnify them by saying their influence is "all over the Arab-speaking world as well as in Western languages", and when you imply that progressive social activists are struggling against them (which they would not do were this a merely a dusty academic question and not also a sociopolitical problem), then there's no other way to slice this than to interpret it as a major problem in the Muslim world. Saying that it's a major problem in the Muslim world doesn't necessarily mean it's worse than in the West -- but I guess it's too negative for dave742's Islam-defensive sensibilities. Only mild superficial problems must pertain to the Muslim world -- since, as we all know, only Western culture has major pathologies.

As for dave742's attempts to render the treatment of women equivalent between the Muslim world and the West:

Afghanistan:

Nearly 90% of women in Afghanistan suffer physical abuse.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/09/23/afghanistan.women.abuse/index.html

Pakistan:

Human Rights Watch: Between 50 percent and 90 percent of Pakistan's 82 million girls and women are victims of violence.

http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2008/07/pakistani_women_defy_society_t.html

Its [the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan] figures show that this year between January and August, 175 women including 24 minors were gang raped and 225 were raped, of which 38 were minors.

Ten women were stripped naked publicly - a practice sometimes used to punish women considered to have brought shame on their communities... For example, in 2002, 12 women were stripped in public places - in 2003, the number rose to 40.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4017441.stm

Also see:

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache%3A-fxNINtsNvMJ%3Awww.du.edu%2Fintl%2Fhumanrights%2Fviolencepkstn.pdf+pakistan+women+abuse&hl=en&gl=us&sig=AFQjCNFvikpzkKkCnpiTX5ujRkKs3yNTyg

Egypt:

"Brutal husbands can be a problem anywhere in the world, but in some countries domestic violence is so common that it's almost an institution.

A survey conducted for the Egyptian government a few years ago found that one woman in three had been beaten at some time by her husband. Of those women, 45% had been beaten at least once in the past year and 17% had been beaten three or more times during the same period."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/30/worlddispatch.brianwhitaker

Iran:

"According to the NGO [the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW)], domestic abuse is common in Egypt. A 2001 survey conducted in low-income neighbourhoods found that 96 percent of women had been beaten..."

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=26139

And from a book by Margi Laird McCue Domestic violence: a reference handbook:

"Many countries -- including Iran, Syria, and Yemen -- extend leniency to men who commit honor killings or honor crimes, which are violent acts against women for alleged sexual misconduct. In Lebanon, the penal code allows a defendent to commute a life sentence or the death penalty to one to seven years in prison if his offense was proved to be an honor crime." (p. 92)

This also is the case in Jordan:

http://english.aljazeera.net/archive/2003/09/2008410102158508644.html

Lest dave742 at this precise juncture have an elbow spasm of "that's just "culture" and has nothing to do with Islam" -- we note that the Al Jazeera report linked above notes that "Islamists and conservatives said the laws [to stiffen penalties against honor killings] violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values" -- those darned "Islamists and conservatives" again! They sure do seem to sprout up a lot throughout the Muslim world, as Ms. Marín herself indicates! And furthermore we also have the immediately preceding paragraph to the one I quoted from McCue's book where she discusses honor killing in several Muslim countries:

"Throughout the region, Islamic law has been adopted as the basis for legal matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, child custody, inheritance, ability to travel, and the legal status of women." (p. 92)

With such comprehensive Islamic legal influence over the conduct and treatment of women, one cannot continue the canard that honor killings there have nothing to do with Islamic law and with Islamic atmospherics.

Then we have the problem of under-reporting of abuse in Muslim countries, where the stigma of reporting, the danger of reporting, and the laggard progress in institutionalizing awareness and reporting are markedly inferior to what pertains throughout the West. A tip of the iceberg is indicated in this report, again quoting McCue:

Algeria: "...in Algeria, spousal abuse is criminalized...; however, the victim must be incapacitated for at least 15 days and must have a doctor verify injuries sustained to prosecute the abuser..."

Imagine what fun a man could have beating his wife but only so that she is "incapacitated" for less than 15 days! Why, you could beat your wife for 50 years regularly, and yet never "incapacitate" her for 15 straight days at a time! That's a loophole you could march a whole caravan through!

Egypt: "Egyptian law permits women to divorce their husbands because of physical abuse, but women are required to produce medical certification from a government hospital and at least two witnesses (the Egypt court system requires the testimony of two women to equal the testimony of one man) of the assault (Human Rights Watch 2004). These legal barriers have discouraged women from reporting violence perpetrated against them."

(pp. 91-92)

http://books.google.com/books?id=30G_awoS4DIC&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=yemen+women+abuse&source=bl&ots=sfBscMr0pY&sig=_2w9e5V9mVslPGf6WBbabk37cU4&hl=en&ei=tGDCSr6OA5GW8AbZor3-CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7#v=onepage&q=yemen%20women%20abuse&f=false

Gee, I wonder where modern Egyptian law got the idea that a woman's testimony is only worth half of a man's...? Oh wait, yes! -- from that "progressive" document, the Koran! See 2:282.

One could go on an on adducing the mountains of appalling pathologies of the Muslim world with regard to women. Not that it would do much good for dave742 and his outrageously preposterous attempts at equivalency between the treatment of women in the Muslim world and the West. The West indeed has a major problem with the treatment of women and we have been progressing with regard to it and making great strides; the problem in the Muslim world, however, is demonstrably, monstrously worse.

“Obviously, I quoted more.”

Read my entire post at 4:52. I initially quoted a shorter version of what you quoted, then I quote EXACTLY WHAT YOU QUOTED soon afterwards. You are such a complete imbecile. Once again, there is a difference in interpretations. The actual incidence of wife beating between the West and Islamic countries, however, is similar. As I showed. Last time I showed you this, you made up similar lame apologies. I showed you how 20% of people in the UK think it is OK to hit a woman if she wears sexy clothes in public:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/violence-against-women-poll?view=Binary

Your response was that all those in the UK who said that were Muslim, even though only 2% of the people in the UK are Muslim. You are insane.

I have started looking up your refs. I am glad you decided to bring up actual information. I am proud of you. I already am having difficulty:

“Nearly 90% of women in Afghanistan suffer physical abuse.”

This supposedly comes from UNIFEM. The only report I can find from UNIFEM on Afghanistan is this:

http://afghanistan.unifem.org/docs/pubs/06/uncounted_discounted_EN.pdf

This only analyzes known cases, as does not have a percentage.

Malalai Joya makes the claim, but does not say where it came from:

“She claims that although liberating women was one of the main moral arguments for invading Afghanistan in 2001, the situation for women has continued to deteriorate. ‘Ninety per cent of women in Afghanistan suffer from domestic violence, 80 per cent of marriages are forced, and the average life expectancy for women is 44 years,’ she says.”

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/04/13/1239474816110.html

Notice how she says the situation is getting worse. I guess bombing them is not helping them. I don’t want to brush this off, but I cannot find this UNIFEM report, and cannot find another source for the info. Can you? I'll keep looking, and will eventually get to the rest of your stuff. I doubt it will happen on this thread, though.

Hesperado:

I have been looking for this report on Lexis. Even VOA News brings up the UNIFEM report, but says nothing about the 90 percent number:

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-1172013281.html

(You can't read the entire article, but it says nothing).

You would think that VOA News would bring up the 90 percent number, wouldn't you?

Abdullah:

What was your lie? It was more a lie of omission. You said "What is there to question? She was betrothed at a very young age, happens all the time in European society, he was married to her at a very young age and consummated the marriage when she was mature." leaving the age of consummation purposefully vague to try to hide the fact that THEY CONSUMMATED (had sex) when she was 9. Of course, a normal western person would assume that "mature" means at least 16 or as old as 18.

When you say "consummated when she was mature" I don't think of NINE as being "mature" in the context of having sex, but it appears you do since that was the age she consummated. THAT'S SICK.

Abdullah said: "In respect ot the possible age of Aisha look up the hadith in which the Prophet was pryaing in the Kabba and some Quraish dumped goat intestines on his back. Aisha was a child of enough age in years to see this was bad and she was the one who removed them from his back...this happened in the very early days of the revelatoin in Mecca. How old was she then?"
Me: NINE! For the Had-iths tell me so! Nine is plenty old enough to know.

Nice non-answer antidote. Come on, you accuse others of dishonesty and then you give a sidelong antidote about dumping intestines that proves nothing? I think you need to go back to LOGIC 101.

Just because she's old enough to know this is wrong, that doesn't mean she's mature enough to have sex with a 53 year old. I imagine a kid at the age of 6 would know dumping icky things on people would be wrong. Does that mean 6 is "mature enough" to have sex in your mind then? Where specifically does it say that her age is something other than 9? How is it more reliable than the verse I quoted?

Hesperaso:
The AP had a story about the UNIFEM report, and nothing about the 90 percent number. It does say this:

“Domestic violence, which accounts for 82 percent of the cases, is the most prevalent form of violence against women reported. Partners are responsible for 47 percent of the cases, Aslan said.”

(A reprint is available here: http://www.iran-daily.com/1385/2641/html/panorama.htm )

The more I read about this, the more I realize that the UNIFEM report I linked to above is the actual source that the BBC article you linked to is quoting from. Whoever wrote that BBC article misread the report. The report is only looking at violence case, and does not look at percentage of violence victims within the general population. This first reference is either a mistake or intentional propaganda. I will look at the others.

Oh yeah, and since Question Everything mentioned these already I didn't but since you didn't reply I'm going to repeat them:

AM: "My "Fellow Muslims" don't commit crimes."
Complete bullsh*t. Do you really beleive that Muslims don't EVER commit crimes? That not only is everything here "out of proportion" but completely false? Can you prove it?

AM: "Generally speaking, yes, it seems bad that someone would put out a fatwa against just one person for something..."
I thought the same thing as QE when I read this, "generally speaking"? You can't say fatwas are inequitably bad?

AM: "but I still point out Salman has been under a “death fatwa!” for what, like twenty one years?"
Ineptitude =/= meaningless. If fact it sounds like you're saying Rushdie and others with fatwas should just go to sleep and let their guard down (which would happen to coincide with the Jihadist assassin's goals. Hmm.)

Abdullah:
Here is the quote:

This is in the section titled: "Classical Doctrine":

"The Shafi'ites follow the example of the Prophet and make drinking alcohol punishable with forty lashes. The other schools follow the example of 'Umar, who increased the punishments to eighty lashes. For non-Muslims, drinking alcohol is no hadd offense. There is some controversy about drinking alcoholic beverages other than wine. Most schools put them on a par with wine and hold that their consumption in whatever quantities is punishable, but the Hanafites hold that if a person drinks these beverages, he will only be punished if he actually gets intoxicated."

Peters, Rudolph, "Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law," (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 64

No reference!!

Very eloquently put DDA,

I think we can both agree that AM's defense of a child molester should concern any decent person.

dave742 says he can't find a UNIFEM source confirming the "at least 90%" of Afghanistan women suffering domestic abuse.

"Statistics indicate that in Afghanistan more than 87 percent of all women suffer from domestic abuse, making the country one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman. "

-- from the UNIFEM website
http://www.unifem.org/worldwide/asia_pacific/

I guess "more than 87 percent" isn't close enough to "at least 90%" to satisfy dave742's sophistical apologetics for Islam. In fact, "more than 87 percent" is a house on fire and there is not one Western country even remotely approaching that monstrous degree of violence against women.

AM: I fear no injustice before God...

Certainly a god who assists his faithful Desert bandit, child molesting, psychopathic, brain damaged, cult starting fraud to molest children and kill indiscriminately for mere gain would look upon you favorably.

"You have vile opinions…these come from you and your imagined fantasies your mind has run away with. You are a sick person to think like you do, and further more a disgusting person to express it in writing."

Whoa, do I hear an echo in here?!

You used that same line on me last week, AM! Jeez, are you running out of original material? ...or are all of these cookie-cutter-comebacks courtesy CAIR. My, you lack originality.

DDA, consider his scorn and platitudes a compliment. You're in good company, my friend :)

Hey Champ,

Typical moslem rantings. If you bashed your head on the floor five times a day you'd lack imagination and have to resort to cut-and-paste insults too.

Oh, and when AM says "peace" to us in his posts he really means the type of peace you get when you finally submit to allah. Imagine? A god that supports and allows pedophilia?

Perfect man? Pretty low bar.

AM contorts: "You know nothing of the life I lead and the works I do, and God is aware of all things."

We certainly know enough of your "work" on Jihad Watch to find you completely and utterly repulsive, AM.

And as far as God is concerned, may He graciously spare us the knowledge of your noxious and perverted devotion for a liar, thief, rapist, pedophile and murderer; ie, Muhammad. Such a devotion to evil on your part most certainly turns Gods stomach, and will in fact warrant some kind of a "reward" in the end, to be sure.

Hesperado:
"Statistics indicate that in Afghanistan more than 87 percent of all women suffer from domestic abuse, making the country one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman."

I actually thought you had something. Not really.

The exact same quote is in their anual report:

http://www.unifem.org/attachments/products/AnnualReport_2008_2009.pdf

STATISTICS FROM WHERE??? Where in the hell does this statistic come from?

"It is estimated that more than 87 percent of women in Afghanistan are subjected to domestic violence."
States News Service
March 6, 2009 Friday
WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN TO MARK INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY WITH PUBLIC PRAYER FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
BYLINE: States News Service

ESTIMATED BY WHO???

Then I found this:
"More than 87 percent of all women in Afghanistan, for instance, are victims of some form of domestic violence, according a 2008 publication by the Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs and United Nations Development Fund for Women, known as Unifem."
http://www.unausa.org/Page.aspx?pid=1212

OK. The "estimate" does not come from UNIFEM, or else they would have said so, or cited their own report. This "estimate" really comes from the "Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs."

So what the hell is that?? To Lexis Nexis:

"The United States Government should provide strong support for the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, both of which were created by the Agreement on Provisional Agreements in Afghanistan Pending the Establishment of Permanent Governing Institutions, done in Bonn, December 5, 2001 (commonly known as the `Bonn Agreement'), to remedy past violations of women's rights and human rights and to establish institutions and programs to ensure policies that advance such rights."
US Fed News
May 8, 2009 Friday 2:58 PM EST
Introduces Afghan Women Empowerment Act

Sounds like when the US set up their ICTY kangaroo court to try Milosevic. This organization was founded by the US government after invading their country. Now we give this group tons of money:

"Launched at a joint press conference with Afghan Deputy Minister of Women's Affairs Syeda Mojgan Mostafavi, this three-year, $26.3 million program will provide technical assistance and small grants to women-focused Afghan NGOs in accordance with the National Action Plan for the Women of Afghanistan. Working in coordination with the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs, the Ambassador's Small Grants Program will increase gender equality and build the capacity of women-led civil society organizations to deliver services to Afghan citizens."
US State News
June 29, 2009 Monday 5:55 PM EST
U.S. GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCES $26.3 MILLION SMALL GRANTS FUND TO SUPPORT AFGHAN WOMEN

And so does Europe:
“In order to further support the promotion of women's rights, the EP is calling on the Commission to provide direct funding and assistance to the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs.”
States News Service
April 24, 2009 Friday
HUMAN RIGHTS: WOMEN IN AFGHANISTAN, SITUATION IN CAMP ASHRAF, SPECIAL COURT OF SIERRA LEONE

And good old USAID started it off:

"At a signing ceremony at the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs today, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) representative Jim Kunder, announced two grants totaling $64,000 for the rehabilitation of the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs building complex."
USAID Supports Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs and Indigenous Afghan Women's Humanitarian Organization
U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PRESS RELEASE
February 19, 2002

And now members from the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs hang out at Bagram:

"Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs Dr. Husn Banu Ghazanfar and Afghan national army Gen. Khatool Mohammadzai participated in the ceremony."

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123089100

This is a freaking joke. The US invades a country, sets up a Womens Rights organization and gives them millions so they can party at Bagram. Then they put out propaganda about how evil Musllims are. They give "estimates" of domestic abuse, but nobody knows where it came from. The head of the Women's Affairs Ministry, making I'd say about $220,000, probably "estimated" it off the top of her head. This is a complete joke. I want a real number from a real source.

Imagine if China invaded and occupied the US, and then set up a women's human rights organization. They fund it, and their members hang out at Chinese bases in Washington DC. Then this Chinese funded organization says they "estimate" that 87 percent of those evil Americans beat their wives, and this propaganda is fed to the Chinese civilians back home. Freaking joke.

Hesperado:
I almost forgot. Here is the website for the "Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs":

http://www.mowa.gov.af/

Funny.

Hesperado:
You next reference is from “Cleveland.com” (not a good start):

“Between 50 percent and 90 percent of Pakistan's 82 million girls and women are victims of violence.”

Wow. That’s a big range. I looked this article up in Lexis. “Cleveland.com” got the article straight from this source (word for word):

Newhouse News Service
July 14, 2008 Monday 3:02 PM EDT
Pakistani women defy society to flee endemic abuse
BYLINE: By JAMES PALMER
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL

I use Lexis all the time. I never in my life saw Newhouse News Service, What the hell is Newhouse News Service?? If you doubt the source, do this:

Google: "Newhouse News Service" "abuse of girls and women"

Click on the cached link of the title “Hundreds of migrant workers riot in east China,” which will take you to this site:

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:ctpDdu2ts7MJ:www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2008/07/14/+%22Newhouse+News+Service%22+%22abuse+of+girls+and+women%22&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Halfway down the page you will see:

Pakistani women must endure endless abuse
by James Palmer / Newhouse News Service

When you click on the link, it will take you to the link you supplied.

So what in the hell is Newhouse News Service?
Here’s what you find when you Google it:

http://www.newhousenews.com/

National Federation of Republican Women? What the hell does that mean? Why doesn’t this webpage work? It doesn’t work because Newhouse News Service closed:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003832716

They closed two weeks after the article you posted. It must have been quite an operation: “NNS has 24 staffers.” Awesome.

Anyway, I can find no other information about the Human Rights Watch report claiming that “50 to 90 percent” of women in Pakistan are abused. It does not exist at hrw.org/ If you find it, let me know.

I research right wing stuff all the time. Why does it always have to be this wild goose chase that leads nowhere?

dave742 denigrates the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs. The head of the Afghan Ministry of Women's Affairs is --

"Husn Banu Ghazanfar daughter of Abdul Ghafar was born in Balkh on February 1, 1957 (Dalwa 1336 of the local calendar) she graduated from Sultan Razia High School in Mazar-e-sharif and obtained her BA and Master's degree on Literature and Sociology from Stawarpool Qafqaaz in 1362 (of the local calendar). Right after she obtained her Master's degree she became the scientific cadre of the Literature Faculty of Kabul University.

After two years of service as a lecturer in the literature faculty of Kabul University, she went to Petersburg to obtain her Doctrine on Philology. She obtained her doctrine and returned to the country. In 1382, she was appointed as the Head of the Literature Faculty and was working in this post until she was appointed as the Minister for the Ministry of Women's Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. In addition to the above-mentioned posts, she has worked as a member of the High Council of the Ministry of Higher Education, member of Speranto International Association of Women, member of the International Association of Turk Zabanan and member of the Board of Directors of Hakim Naser Khesro Balkhi Association.

She is fluent in Dari, Pashto, Uzbek and Russian and she knows a little Turkish and English.

http://www.afghan-web.com/politics/cabinet_members.html#women

Yes, with evil Western intruders like this, the Afghan people stand no chance of a better life! How evil of us to help talented reform-minded locals like this try to reform their country! Funny, Ms. Ghazanfar seems to be precisely the kind of progressive reformist that Ms. Marín referred to as among those seeking to stem the tide of the "Islamists" (though it is likely that she, like dave742, would take umbrage at Ms. Gahazanfar for noticing too much disease to seek to cure). People like dave724, by minimizing what needs to be reformed and how, are the ones shooting the more credible Muslim reformists in the foot. According to dave724's logic, if a Muslim reformer commits the sin of saying the Islamic problem is too large, and if furthermore that Muslim reformer accepts the help of the West, they suddenly become discredited. That's the apologist's two-tiered formula for Islamic reform:

1) There's nothing much to reform in Islam, since Islam is so great by itself

2) Any aspects that seem to need reforming are all mostly caused by the evil West.

Gotcha.

dave's repetitive use of question marks is staggering. The chore of thinking and analyzing data must be taxing his brainstem.

Hesperado:
It's hilarious that you are trying to defend the Afghan Ministry. Really funny. Let's look at your next reference:

“Its [the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan] figures show that this year between January and August, 175 women including 24 minors were gang raped and 225 were raped, of which 38 were minors."

I will take these figures as accurate. Let's look at gang rape first. 175 were gang raped in 7 months in Pakistan, which is 300 per year. The US does not keep stats for gang rape, so we cannot compare. Australia (a non-Muslim country), does keep stats. This article says that “In the last financial year, 63 cases were reported.”:

(The Sun Herald: http://www.nswrapecrisis.com.au/LatestNews/Media-Articles/SunHeraldArticle_6-2-05.htm )

300 in Pakistan, 63 in Australia. We need to look at rates of gang rape, however. Pakistan has more people than Australia:

Pakistan population = 172 million
Australia population = 21 million

If we look at the number of gang rapes per million citizens we get:

Australia = 3 gang rapes per million people
Pakistan = 1.75 gang rapes per million people

THE INCIDENCE OF GANG RAPE IN AUSTRALIA IS 70% HIGHER THAN IN PAKISTAN
____________________________________________________________
OK. What about rape. In Pakistan, 225 were raped in 7 months. That is 386 in a year. In the US, the number of actual rape victims (not including attempted rape or sexual assault), the number is 113,290:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cvus/current/cv0627.pdf

Of course, the US has more people than Pakistan (pop = 304 million)

Here are the number of rapes per million people:

US = 372 rapes per million people
Pakistan = 2.2 rapes per million people.

Using your numbers, THE RAPE RATE IN THE US IS 169 TIMES HIGHER THAN IN PAKISTAN.
________________________________________________________
OK. What about child rape? For Pakistan, there were 62 in 7 months (we will include the ones who were gang raped). That is 106 per year. In the US, only 12 states kept stats for child rape in the reference I found:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/crv92.pdf

The issue here is: What is a “Minor”? It doesn’t say what age was used for Pakistan. Let’s be safe and use 13. We will compare cases of rape of “minors” in Pakistan to cases of rape in the US of children under 13 years old. Not even teenagers. Surely this is very generous. If you look at the chart in my link, numbers are given for rape of 13 year olds or less for 8 states. The following list contains those states, followed by the percentage of rapes in that state which are of children under 13, followed by the total number of rapes, followed by the number of rapes of children under 13 (the two previous numbers multiplied):

Alabama: 10% 1404 140
Delaware: 29% 78 22
Idaho: 9% 221 19
Michigan: 35% 4731 1655
North Dakota: 35% 124 43
Pennsylvania: 14% 2996 419
South Carolina: 16% 2193 350
Wisconsin:10% 1314 131

The total number of rapes in these states of women under 13 is 2779. These states contain 13.2% of the total US population. If the rate of rape under 13 is approximately equal in these states compared to the entire country, then the total number of women under 13 who are raped in one year in the US is about 21,000.

Here are the rates of rape per million (minors for Pakistan, children under 13 for the US):

Pakistan: 0.624 rapes of minors per million people
US: 69 rapes of children under 13 per million people

THE US RAPES OVER 100 TIMES AS MANY CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 13 AS PAKISTAN RAPES MINORS

Nice reference, nitwit. Feel free to check my math,

Hesperado:
Next reference:
“A survey conducted for the Egyptian government a few years ago found that one woman in three had been beaten at some time by her husband.”

I won’t even look this up. 33% for Egypt, 25% for the US. So what.

Next reference:

You say that the following quote is for Iran:
"According to the NGO [the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW)], domestic abuse is common in Egypt.”

I don’t know how you can determine the rate of domestic abuse in Iran by looking at an article about Egypt. Your quote continues:

“A 2001 survey conducted in low-income neighbourhoods found that 96 percent of women had been beaten..."

So you give one quote for Egypt that says 33%, and another that says 96%. This has gotten so pathetic I don’t know whether to laugh or puke. I’m going to bed.

dave, statistics and percentages aside, lets get down to brass tacks....

Muhammad, the Qur'an, and other Islamic texts support and encourage wife beating -- so you're completely dancing around the issue by creating a smoke screen to hide behind. Stats & percentages can ebb and flow, but what's written in the Qur'an DOES NOT ebb and flow. Muhammad was a wife beater, plain and simple(among other horrors), so put that in a pipe and smoke it. At least that would be a more Honest smoke screen. Hey, I hope you didn't puke while IN bed. Whatta mess, eh?

Any defense of Muhammad at this point will only serve to make you look even more foolish than you already do.

AM: You know, it disturbs me that while you admit you were wrong about who the person was in the offal story, that you won't acknowledge that it was a non-sequester argument that I showed had no bearing on the issue (i.e. mature about offal/goodness =/= mature enough for sex). Doesn't it bother you at all when you use logical fallacys like "no true Scotsman"? I MIGHT actually beleive you are being honest, but misguided (from my POV) but when you use such arguments it looks foolish, and hypocritical when you call others dishonest.

As for the issue of Fatwa. Forgive me for phrasing the question vaguely. I will ask you directly: Do you beleive any Fatwa that is issued against some one for merely criticizing Islam/The Koran, or saying something bad about the prophet, no matter how bad (but mind, not saying Muslims should be killed or any actions) is just? YES or NO.

(And I realize you may have answered this question above before, but I don't know where it would be and I would like an answer)

Also, having sex with a 9 year old is sick no matter what time or culture, despite your praising of it. Jesus never did it, Abraham never did, nor did any of the other patriarchs of the Old Testament.

(Sorry for the triple post. Hitting send too soon then thought hits me)

AM the pouter said:
“I accept none of your argument unless you produce multiple verified Hadith references quoting the Pagan Quraish as condemning the marriage of Aisha to Mohammad as something bad, unheard of, unusual, or just plain wrong.”

This is just bad sportsmanship, and you know it AM. You can't provide any proof that she was an age other than 9 from Hadiths or the Koran, so you give a large list of possible ages and then pout.

I showed a verse that said she had sex with her when she was 9. Unless you can show another verse (YOU HAVN'T) that shows her age is something other then 9 is the number we should go with. Any other speculation on possible ages is just that, SPECULATION. THIS IS CALLED LOGIC BY THE WAY. You argue that no matter the age she was "mature" because she went through puberty, but dumbledore's army I think answered this well:

"a nine-year-old girl, even if she - very unusually - has begun to menstruate, is not fit, psychologically or physically, to sustain full penetration by an adult male. 'Mature', indeed. The poor child hasn't even finished getting an adult set of teeth!

Biology says a nine-year-old girl is simply NOT as mature as a twelve-year-old, even, let alone as mature as a woman of eighteen who has completed her skeletal growth, finished laying down her calcium stores, and so on."

Champ:
“ statistics and percentages aside”:

That’s what people say who are end the wrong side of the statistics. I doubt that the rape rate in the US is over 100 times that of Pakistan (I don’t believe that any two cultures on the same planet could be that different – but if the statistics were reversed I am sure you would be able to believe it), but there are no credible statistics at all that say the situation in Islamic countries regarding domestic violence or rape are any different than in the West. I think my discussion with Hesperado has shown that quite conclusively for anyone but the extremists. Statistics are not always accurate and do not always tell the whole story, but they do say a lot. The US has by far the highest incidence of rape and domestic violence in the World, certainly in the Western world. Our rape rate is four times that of Germany, and 20 times that of Japan. How someone in this society could point a finger at any other is the height of arrogance and hubris. But you know what is worse than statistics? Focusing on individual stories. The main purpose of the JW website is to detail the worst individual acts performed by the one billion plus Muslims worldwide, and to then allow readers to assume that they are all, or the majority are, like this. This is far more deceiving than any statistic ever was. The US has 20,000 rapes per year of children under 13. From looking at the DOJ graph, I estimate that at least 5,000 are children under 10. A Pakistani could start a website and post 5,000 stories a year talking about each case of an American raping a child under the age of 10, along with all the gory details. That’s just rape. He could also post every story of mass murder, wife beatings, mutilations, etc. Would this be an accurate way for a Pakistani to portray US society? I don’t think so.

“Muhammad, the Qur'an, and other Islamic texts support and encourage wife beating”:

This is untrue, as the Marin article I referred to shows. The Marin article goes into the history of 4:34, and shows that this is not true. She also says that Muslim conservatives and anti-Muslim propagandists (i.e., you) ignore the history. You ignore a thousand years of history, and focus on 5 words. You search out the worst, and then extrapolate that to the entire religion. You will never understand the truth, because you will never tear yourself away from the JW website long enough to read anything that can remotely be considered objective. The Prophets teachings spoke out against hitting wives. The Qur’an allows it, but from what I have read seems to limit it as well. I am an atheist (I know you JW readers think I am a Muslim, because they cannot fathom the idea of an objective American, but you are wrong), and I do not believe that the Qur’an is the word of God. (Sorry, Abdullah). So in the early days of Islam, the tradition of Mohammad was not to hit wives, then the practice was somehow permitted to a certain extent in the Qur’an, but then immediately afterwards, jurists began limiting it again. Shafi’i, as I said, taught that “the best of you will not hit your wives.” Once again, that hitting wives was even a debate in the eighth century is extremely progressive. I cannot imagine that this question was being debated at the time in the West. There wasn't much debate on this in the West in the 1950's! And 4:34 is certainly more progressive than another book I know teaching that you should kill homosexuals. There is a lot of Islamic history that comes after the eighth century. Maybe you should read about it.

“what's written in the Qur'an DOES NOT ebb and flow”
Other than a few rules such as fasting, what is written in the Qur’an is open to interpretation, and Islamic society developed just like any other. Islamic society was far more advanced until the West colonized Islamic lands. We couldn’t compete, so we conquered.

“ Muhammad was a wife beater, plain and simple”:
This goes against everything I have read. I am sure you will tell me otherwise. My quote above talks about a book by Ibn Said:

“That violence against women was a matter discussed in early Islamic times is clearly shown by the short chapter entitled ‘on beating women’ (dhikr darb al-nisd) in the volume of women's biographies that ends the Tabaqdt of Ibn Sa'd. The chapter begins with a terse statement by 'A'isha: the Prophet never struck a woman or a servant girl, or anybody else, unless he was engaged in a military campaign. The rest of the chapter is divided in two different types of traditions. In the first one, the Prophet unequivocally and in strong terms condemns men who beat their wives; in the second one, he allows beatings but pointing out that only the worst men in the community would mistreat treat their wives. Of the two traditions belonging to the first group, one is of a positive character: ‘the best of you - said the Prophet - is the one who is the best for his womenfolk (ahl), and I am the best of you for my womenfolk.’ In another account, the Prophet shows his displeasure when a woman complained to him that her husband had beat her severely. In the Prophet's words, men like this husband should be ashamed of beating their wives as if they were their slaves and later having intercourse with them.”

Was Sa’d mistaken?

“be a more Honest smoke screen”:

Hesperado brought up all the lame “stats”. Responding to something is not setting up a smoke screen. What I brought up is credible, and not fabricated.

“Any defense of Muhammad at this point will only serve to make you look even more foolish than you already do.”:
Sure. Any average person (i.e., non-extremist) who reads this thread would conclude that I am the fool. Funny.

No, you brought up stats as well -- LOTS of them! ...and to say that Hesperado "started it!" sounds rather childish, don't you think?

Anyway, you are most certainly foolish for two reasons, and perhaps there are more reasons, but two jump out at me:

1) claiming that Americans rape more women than anyone in the world, when their is nothing written in ANY of our American texts which support or encourage such a crime. Nothing.

2) your own "prophet" and Islamic texts supporting such evil. Get it, fool, this is all in writing, and it is all in your own unholy books. Hello!!

THAT is the 'key' difference here. If you want to level the playing field on this issue, then instead of producing more statistics (and such), provide American texts, like our Constitution, or our law books, anything, anything in writing which gives "permission" to rape women, anything in writing that is ON PAR with the Qur'an. Ha! You won't find it, will you? See, this is why you're foolish, because you don't fight fair.

You're a flaming hypocrite.

dave742 performs a little statistical experiment, and sets up a comparison between two countries -- Pakistan and Australia. What he is comparing is incidence of gang-rapes, and rapes, factoring in respective populations.

dave742 links to a page from the NSW Rape Crisis Centre --

http://www.nswrapecrisis.com.au/LatestNews/Media-Articles/SunHeraldArticle_6-2-05.htm

which reprints this Sydney Morning Herald article from 2005:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Party-rape--the-rise-of-a-disturbing-new-trend/2005/02/05/1107476853247.html

It appears that dave742's conscientiously dogged standards for evidence have selectively abandoned him, as the figures adduced for Australia's gang-rapes -- 63 in a "financial year" -- derive only from this sole statement in that SMH article:

"In the last financial year, 63 cases were reported."

The reader assumes that the reporters are referring to the experience of the staff at the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, about which in two paragraphs previously they note that "[d]uring the past 18 months, NSW Rape Crisis Centre officials have been inundated with calls from young women."

That's it. No study. Where is dave742's deluge of question marks for the dearth of actual evidence here??? Furthermore, the report indicates that the vast majority of those "calls" were never followed through:

"But the overwhelming majority refused to follow through with their complaints and make reports to police, fearing ridicule by friends and family."

Without follow-through to gain not only certainty but also details about the nature of the incidents, the evidence upon which to base a survey and statistical comparison is flimy at best.

Furthermore, when reading the report, one realizes that a goodly proportion of the "calls" pertained to girls who go to a party with other young people, get drunk, consent to fool around with one guy they sort of know (maybe from school, etc., probably knowing it will lead to sex), then get surprised by two more more of his friends who join in and have sex with her also, against her will. This kind of gang-rape, while reprehensible, is hardly comparable to the monstrous rapes that go on in Pakistan. And it is ironic that the reporters in the same article allude to the more virile, robust type of gang-rape which they report that the police distinguish from these "party rapes" which the NSW Rape Crisis Centre is getting "calls" about:

"Police agree the wave of offences are different in nature to the horrific gang rapes which shocked Sydney four years ago."

And guess who perpetrated those horrific gang rapes? A gang of fourteen Lebanese Muslims. In one of the seven rapes committed during a 3-week spree --

"One 18-year-old girl was lured from a railway station and assaulted up to 25 times by 14 men. The trial judge called the ringleader "a menace to civilised society" and said the rapes were of a nature usually seen only in war zones."

"The gang leader, known only as X, was jailed for 55 years for his part in the rapes, which were carried out by 14 youths, all of Lebanese Muslim origin. The group terrorised western Sydney in August 2000, attacking seven women during a three-week spree that was planned and co-ordinated by mobile phone."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/sydney-gang-rapes-trigger-race-tension-640894.html

The other crucial aspect to the problem of comparing Pakistan to Australia -- the former a grotesquely backward and fanatical country (e.g., up to 78% of its population believing it is right to kill apostates and 83% favor stoning adulterers according to a Pew report last month), the latter one of the most progressive and liberal countries on the planet -- is the problem of under-reporting. In the NSW Rape Crisis Centre's report, they note this problem, but the reader cannot help noticing the way it is characterized:

"...the overwhelming majority refused to follow through with their complaints and make reports to police, fearing ridicule by friends and family."

Compare this relatively mild white suburban ostracization with the utter ruination of a woman's entire life that usually happens in societies like Pakistan if she were to report a rape without the requisite male four witnesses (and even then it might get dicey) -- and this is at best: there is the all too real danger of getting physically punished with beatings, torture, further rapes, or murder; or in a cruelly grotesque irony, being charged with zina and suffering a lynch mob stoning or official capital punishment at worst, miserable jail time in frightful Pakistani prisons or Dickensian mental asylum (and "Dickensian" is probably painting a rosy picture) at best with, again, utter ruination of the woman's life and utter ostracization from her family, friends, workplace, school, etc.

Champ:
"claiming that Americans rape more women than anyone in the world, when their is nothing written in ANY of our American texts which support or encourage such a crime."

There does not have to be a correlation between rape and the availability of texts that condone rape. People rape women without being told tha it is OK to do so by some text.

I should not have said that the US is number one in rape statistics, but we do have a very high incidence. This list from the UN has the US at number 9:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita

The Qur'an is not mine. I am not Islamic. The Qur'an does not permit rape. The Bible, however, does permit killing homosexuals and prohibits wearing cotton/polyester blended shirts. Nice book.

AM said:

"Absolutley not...you should have been able to infer this from what I wrote before."
Yes, but I wanted to be absolutely sure. This is good to hear.

"The point is, Aisha was mature and the marriage was a noble union, period. Now move on, okay?"
NO. It really bothers me that you list the ages of 7 or 9 as possible ages and then say it was all good, and tell me to shut up. Dumbledore has pointed out why 7-9 is too young. You use the leap logic (another logical fallacy, funny how those keep popping up) that dispite her age the mere fact that she was married is proof she was mature. You're willing to excuse it because he's the prophet who can do no wrong(sm). SICK.

Also, why are there directly conflicting ages in the Hadiths/Koran?
I'd think this would be very inconvenient. How do you know which one is correct in cases of conflict? Why were conflicting verses allowed into the canon of the Hadiths/Koran in the first place?

Hesperado:
I hope that didn't take you too long. You were able to find some Muslims that raped some women in Australia. Good job. Now you can use that incident to assume all rapes everywhere in the world are perpetrated by Muslims. Awesome mind you have. But I know that's how it works.
You are right, that there is no "study" backing up gang rapes in Australia. I will withdraw my comparison of gang rapes. This stat is simply too underreported worldwide to find anything useful. Everything else stands, including the stat that Americans rape children under 13 at a rate 100 times higher than Pakistanis rape minors. This is using your reference. Twenty thousand children under 13 get raped in the US every year. Your goal is to find one that was committed by a Muslim, and then you can assume that all 20,000 are committed by Muslims. Get to work!

Hesperado:
Using the same DOJ chart and your numbers, I compared the rate of rape in Pakistan of ALL women of ALL age groups to the rate of rape in the US of ONLY children under 10. THE US RATE OF RAPE OF CHILDREN UNDER 10 IS 22 TIMES HIGHER THAT THE RAPE RATE IN PAKISTAN OF ***ALL*** WOMEN.

Nice society.

Abdullah:
I find another article that seems to indicate more permissive attitudes by Hanafi's. This one has a source for the comment. I would appreciate any comment you might have:

“Hanafi jurists argue that a Muslim residing in a non-Muslim territory may deal in usury (ribd) with non-Muslims, may sell or buy prohibited substances such as alcohol, pork or an animal killed by Islamically unacceptable means such as suffocation or clubbing (mayta), and may engage in gambling or questionable financial dealings such as insurance schemes and the like - on the condition that such transactions are legal under the laws of the host territory and that the transactions are between a Muslim and a non-Muslim."

Ref. for above:
(Al-Shaybani, al-Siyar, vol. 4, 1486-90, 1492; vol. 5, 1884; al-Kasani, Badd'i', vol. 7, 132; Ibn 'Abidin, Radd, vol. 3, 247, 249-250; al-Sarakhsi, al- Mabsut, vol. 10, 21-22; al-Fatdwd al-Hindiyya, vol. 2, 227. Abu Yusuf once again dissents from the Hanafi position.)

Islamic Law and Muslim Minorities: The Juristic Discourse on Muslim Minorities from the Second/Eighth to the Eleventh/Seventeenth Centuries Author(s): Khaled Abou El Fadl Source: Islamic Law and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1994), pp. 141-187

Statistics about rape are useless to guage Muslim societies. The penalties for reporting rape are too monstrous to guarantee that we are getting even a fraction of the actual numbers committed. Better to go by those who have escaped the Gulag and tell us of the harrowing, horrible disease of Islam.

(‬waidriboohunna) وَاضْرِبُوهُنَّ comes from the root D R B meaning "to beat, to strike, to hit", according to "The Hans Wehr dictionary of modern written Arabic" (Urbana, IL). To have a correct idea of the kind of hitting we are speaking about, "daraba 'aunuqahu" (to hit somebody's neck) means to behead somebody.

All the best

Hesperado:
"Statistics about rape are useless to guage Muslim societies."

When I first brought up a statistic regarding rape in Syria, you did not respond with this. Instead, you brought up statistics of your own. It was only after I showed that your statistics were bogus that you now adopt the position that statistics are useless. That's funny.

I understand that it is impossible for you to ever see anything differently. My only point is to bring up reality and watch people here do their mental gymnastics to justify ignoring it. This thread was very entertaining in that respect.

You say statistics in Muslim countries are useless. Here is a stat involving only "civilized" Western countries:

Our rate of rape only considering children 13 or under is 0.0658 per 100 people. You can compare this rate directly with this list, which is the rape rate for ALL women in the respective countries:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita)

People in the US rape children 13 or under at a greater rate than the rate of rape of ALL women in countries like Ireland and Switzerland. I guess it must be because of the Muslims.

"Our rate of rape only considering children 13 or under is 0.0658 per 100 people"

Should say "per 1000 people"

Abdullah:
Regarding Rudolph Peters' quote above on alcohol, I E-mailed the author to ask about a reference. He maintains that the ruling is not just a minority opinion, but is the "prevailing view". He gave the following as an example of a ref., but said that similar views can be found in any Hanafi book on fiqh:

Shaykhzadeh, Majma`al-Anhur sharh Multaqa al-Abhur (Istanbul: Matba`a-yi `Amira, 1301 H.), vol. 1, pp. 558-560 (Bab Hadd al-Shurb).

Abdullah:
Regarding Rudolph Peters' quote above on alcohol, I E-mailed the author to ask about a reference. He maintains that the ruling is not just a minority opinion, but is the "prevailing view". He gave the following as an example of a ref., but said that similar views can be found in any Hanafi book on fiqh:

Shaykhzadeh, Majma`al-Anhur sharh Multaqa al-Abhur (Istanbul: Matba`a-yi `Amira, 1301 H.), vol. 1, pp. 558-560 (Bab Hadd al-Shurb).

dave742's snide, and unfair, sarcasm, in his rhetorical statement that "it must be because of the Muslims" after he adduced statistics about the rapes of girls under 13 in the USA ignores what I have said. I already said the West, including the USA, has a "major problem" with its treatment of women, including on the issue of rape, and the subcategory of rape of minors. Indeed, the West, including the USA, has a major problem with a whole host of sociopolitical issues beyond the treatment of women.

But the Muslim world is grotesquely, monstrously, horrifically worse. And we will never be able to get proper statistics from a Muslim society, due to the following factors, among others I may neglect to list:

a) the ultra-violence that threaten any woman or girl who might come forward to report their abuse

b) the primitive stigmas of utter and shameful ostracization -- on a social level of being disowned by your own family and your own village, as well as legal-politically by being fired from your job (if the woman is even allowed one) or ruined in your career (those few women who have such), as well as psychologically by the shame and puritanical fanaticism that has been insinuated into the women's heads from childhood forward

c) a good deal of Stockholm Syndrome-type codependent enabling of their own abusers that also afflict probably most Muslim women

d) and the markedly laggard by 21st century standards (let alone 20th or even 19th or 18th century standards) of progress in the sociopolitico-legal area one could subsume under the broad category of a society "airing its own dirty laundry" in order to try to correct its own faults -- a sociopolitico-legal area that the modern West has excelled at, and continues to excel at (for progress is an ongoing never-ending project as long as humans are imperfect), more than any other culture on earth now and throughout all history. The markedly laggard behavior of Muslim societies in this regard -- due to their own fanatical sense of being perfect and superior to non-Muslims, coupled with their psychotic paranoia of having "enemies" who are the cause of all ills in their society -- in this specific regard manifests itself in having little or no proper, efficient institutional mechanisms and processes by which to ferret out abuse of women, give women maximum ability to protect themselves beforehand and attain redress after the fact, and punish the malefactors including those who would try to punish the woman physically or through ostracization or discrimination.

One sees in various parts of the Muslim world the odd appearance of some rudimentary apparatus of these institutional mechanisms and processes: it is reasonable to suppose, however, that the vast majority of these are due to the intrusion of the West beginning in Colonial times and continuing into the post-Colonial era where Western influence (more and more American) continues to pressure the despotisms that are the main sociopolitical representation of Muslim societies now (and throughout its history).

Wherever, and whenever, Islam tries to reassert itself through Sharia -- and it always tries, and has been trying to reassert its rightful hegemony of earth which belongs to Allah alone according to Muslims not just symbolically or theologically or mystically but also in concrete political and military terms--, ever since the modern West ascended into the stratosphere of stupendous superiority in all fields of human endeavor beginning in the 17th century and progressing exponentially with each century after that, the treatment of women will become jeopardized. We thus see throughout the Muslim world a complex pastiche of types which can be simplified by seeing that they reflect the combination basically of three forces:

1) the fanatical zeal for Sharia

2) the intrusion of the West into the Muslim world (over the last 300-odd years) exerting pressure to change by the sheer force of the superiority of the West and the necessitities of globalist interrelationships, and also remedially offering to help them change (the latter arousing as much paranoid hostility as the former)

3) the tendency for Muslim societies to be ruled by "strong men" -- i.e., despots of one flavor or another, whose fanatical zeal for Islam might sometimes be compromised by their own personal corruption, greed, lust for power, and the constant fear of violent coups-d'etat from fanatical Muslims -- and thus these despots in one way or another find it expedient to cooperate with the Western powers, though most of them try to play both sides in this regard, at best, thus hampering any beneficial effects the Western influence might have.

(About #2 above: The global superiority of the West unavoidably impinging upon the Muslim world through the interrelations of globalism which no country can isolate itself from, and to which inferior countries (which are inferior in terms of accomplishment and in terms of internal injustice and corruption) are related necessarily in ways that aggravate members of their societies who are psychologically incapable of looking at themselves in the mirror, owning their faults in order to try to better themselves, and airing their own dirty laundry as part of this process -- this brings into relief a sociopolitico-psychological debility that probably most non-Western countries have in contrast to Western countries, but which Muslim countries among them have to a remarkable degree, due to the peculiar nature of Islam.)

Due to the above factors, until we actually militarily invade and occupy a Muslim country, as we have done in Afghanistan or Iraq, where we have begun to glimpse the true horror -- at least 87% of women horribly abused, not just mildly abused, in the case of Afghanistan -- we will tend to remain incognizant of the welter of Islamic pathology as reflected not only in its treatment of women but in many other areas -- its treatment of children, of the poor, of what it considers inferior races and classes of people, of its animal abuse, its suppression and oppression of free thought and expression; and on and on.

Hesperado:
blah blah blah.
Do you think even JW readers are going to read that?

AM: "...and in Islam the mis-treatement of disbelievers is stressed as being A more SEVERE CRIME than the MIS-treatment of believers..."

Well, if that's true, then why waste your time pushing your perverted-prophet-from-the-pitofhell propoganda on Jihad Watch? No, seriously!

Why haven't you taken your message -- as in your ABOVE message, on the road? Why are you on JW? When right now you should be sitting down with the heads of terrorist organizations and explaining to THEM that they need to shape-up?! Huh? Your time spent on JW is so damn backwards and nonsensical, Abduuuuulah. You bitch and moan about Robert by keeping track of his supposed lies....O what, he's up to lie #5 now, lol....I mean good gawd, what a waste of time, especially since what you really need to do is hit the road and rattle the cages of your fellow followers from hell.

You need to take your show on the road, Jack! ...and don't ya come back no more, no more, no more, no more! Hit the road, Jack, and don't ya come back no more!

...I'll sing it again if ya want me to...

Ah, you're a fool, AM ..and a con man and a drug pusher, of sorts, too. You're stoned on Islam and you don't even know it. Pathetic.

...take your Muhammad poopaganda and flush it, druggie...

Muhammad was an evil man-whore, and so are You for selling his perversion here, or anywhere! Hope the truth hurts like hell.

"Muhammad was an evil man-whore, and so are You for selling his perversion here, or anywhere! Hope the truth hurts like hell."

...same goes for you, druggie-dave...

"I BET YOU NEVER HEARD THAT DID YOU?" ...O, shut up!

AM likes to yell by using all caps ...OK then, here goes...

MUHAMMAD WAS AN EVIL MAN-WHORE, AND SO ARE YOU FOR SELLING HIS PERVERSION HERE, OR ANYWHERE! HOPE THE TRUTH HURTS LIKE HELL.

...a more appropriate use for caps...

Abdullah:
If there are different ages given for when she consumated her marrage with mohammad, that sounds like conflicting information. You lecture me with this example:

"For instance, a person came to the Prophet to ask what was the best thing he could do in Islam, "Control your temper." yet in other places in response to seemingly the same question the Prophet said, "Pray early at the designated time." Seems to conflict, doesn't it? But it doesn't." [White spaces snipped for space]

But there's no way to have multiple answers for the question: "At what age did Aisha consumate her marrage with mohammad?" same with there's only one answer to "who was the sixteenth president of the united states?". Your reply makes no sense, and once again is using anctidotes to try to distract me from the question.

Maybe what I should have asked is why are there weak hadiths? Wasn't there a process to weed out passages that were not as likely of being true? How do you tell weak passages from strong passages? Does chronology play into it (Medina vs. Mecca)?

Abdullah said: "That all being said, I have not studied the differences in age reported in hadiths because it does not concern me as Aisha was mature when the marriage was consummated and the marriage brought the greatest good to many people as Aisha was a major hadith source for fifty years after the Prophet passed away."

Ah, that's the problem. You think it doesn't matter, but It'd matter to me to know whether the prophet I'm following who had these revelations was a CHILD MOLESTOR or not. You keep saying that it was good, and that she was mature, but that sounds like an assumption if you're not even considering what age she ACTUALLY WAS. If she was 7-9, then then she was NOT mature.

Notice, I'm not saying that she was neccierly 7-9, if you can provide proof otherwise I'd be willing to beleive it, but it's imaterial. What bothers me more is that it's POSSIBLE in YOUR MIND that she was 7-9 and it's still "good and proper". BLECK.

"And in closing this issue, hopefully, I note that what is most important on the day of Judgement is how we treated one another, and in Islam the mis-treatement of disbelievers is stressed as being A more SEVERE CRIME than the MIS-treatment of believers...

I BET YOU NEVER HEARD THAT DID YOU?"

No I didn't. I've heard plenty about how non-believers are the worst people, but not that. Chapter and verse, please.

"Only the weak of mind and faith"
Again, you use insults and act all condescending pretend I'm the ignorant one when you resort to logical fallacies such as no true Scotsman, and stupid anecdotal stories ("She was mature enough about pouring offal being bad, therefore she was old enough for sex!"). You apologize when you misatribute a story. but you don't even acknowledge when you get caught using a logical fallacy, but keep on going as if it never happened and you're the smartest guy on the planet!

champ said: "Why haven't you taken your message -- as in your ABOVE message, on the road? Why are you on JW? When right now you should be sitting down with the heads of terrorist organizations and explaining to THEM that they need to shape-up?! Huh? Your time spent on JW is so damn backwards and nonsensical, Abduuuuulah. You bitch and moan about Robert by keeping track of his supposed lies....O what, he's up to lie #5 now, lol....I mean good gawd, what a waste of time, especially since what you really need to do is hit the road and rattle the cages of your fellow followers from hell."
He believes that Muslims magically stop being Muslims while their killing, even if it's obeying their master's orders. (Koran 9:111 and many others) Don't ask me how that works.

Also for AM on the lies thing: I only keep hearing over and over again about the alcohol thing (which you STILL haven't proven by the way and called it a "impossible pre-condition" to prove!) what are the others?

Hesperado:

"due to the intrusion of the West beginning in Colonial times"

Ever look into the status of the legal systems in the West vs that of Islam just prior to the colonial period? I did. The following is taken from a paper I am writing. Due to word version issues, my footnotes did not come out. All of my quotes are not footnoted, but you will see the full paper wventually anyway.

So let’s compare the legal systems of the West with that of Islam just prior to the colonial period. This is the only point a fair comparison can be made because “between 1790 and 1807 the British transformed Islamic criminal law totally and beyond recognition.” Islamic law ceased to exist two centuries ago. At that point in time, Islamic lands that had been invaded and subjugated by the West had their law system replace by the codified systems of the invaders. A fair comparison of the Shari’a with the legal systems of the West can only be made before the colonial period, and before the Shari’a was completely mangled by the West.

Access to courts and court decisions

To begin with, we will look at who used the court systems, and who prevailed. In colonial New England, it was the rich who were suing the poor, and they were winning:

“A study of colonial New England…has shown that the class structure of the society was clearly supplicated in the working of the court: most of the suits were initiated by members of the aristocratic elite and were against members of the lower classes. Moreover, members of the elite won proportionately more cases than did common people and got away with lighter penalties when sued in criminal charges. The conclusion is reached that the elite received distinctly preferential treatment.”

The situation in the Ottoman Empire was the exact opposite:

“If, in colonial New Haven the court was mainly used by the aristocracy to regulate and control the lower classes, this was definitely not so in the case under study, where the court was used mainly by the common people themselves simply to smooth the flow of their daily lives…In all but a few cases, it was the social underdog who initiated the case – women versus men, non-Muslims versus Muslims, commoners versus members of the elite. The court is seen mainly as a tool of the common people to defend a modicum of legal rights…Women won seventeen of twenty-two cases against men; non-Muslims won seven of eight cases against Muslims; commoners won six of eight cases against askeris. Only in the category of commoners against religious doctors do we find a tie of ten cases each.”

Unlike in colonial New England, in Islam it was most often commoners suing the rich, and they won the majority of cases. Even members of the government were not safe in the Shari’a court:

“There is…no shortage of cases where government officials themselves were involved in court cases with ordinary citizens and lost them.”

As examples of this, Gerber describes a case where villagers sued high state officials serving the sultan claiming that they had taken over their pasture land to use for the sultan’s court. The villagers won. (The shari’a did not have an equivalent for “eminent domain.”)
Another example was when ordinary citizens charged a fiefholder with murder. In that case, the fiefholder was convicted and condemned to death. The shari’a did not allow the rich to get away with murder by hiring an expensive lawyer. (See O.J. Simpson).

Hallaq’s research shows much of the same:

“It was particularly the court’s open and informal forum that permitted the individual and defenders from within his or her micro-community to argue their cases and special circumstances from a moral perspective. But it was also the commitment to universal principals of law and justice that created a legal culture wherein everyone expected that injustices against the weak would be redressed and the wrongdoing of the powerful curbed. This was an expectation based on a centuries-long proven practice where peasants almost always won cases against their oppressive overlords, and where Jews and Christians often prevailed in court not only over Muslim business partners and neighbors but also against no less powerful figures than the provincial governor himself. The Muslim court thus afforded a sort of public arena for anyone who chose toutilize that space for his of her defense. The highly formalized processes of the modern court and its structure of legal representation (costly and tending to suppress the individual voices of the litigants, let alone their sense of morality) were unknown to Islam. So were lawyers and the escessive costs of litigation that prevent the weak and poor from pressing their rights. A case in point was women. Considerable recent research has shown that this group received not only fair treatment in the Muslim court but also even greater protection than other groups…That those who initiated the litigation at the court were the social underdogs is now beyond debate. They were women versus men, non-Muslims versus Muslims, and commoners versus the economic and political elite. That they won the great majority of cases and that they found in the court a defender of their rights is likewise clear from the evidence.”

In terms of fairness with respect to class structure, the Shari’a courts were far more advanced than those in the colonial US or England at that time; or the present time as well, for that matter. Winner: Islam.

Cruel punishments

But what about the cruel hadd offenses? Specifically, what about the cruel practices of cutting off people’s hands for theft and executing them for sex outside of marriage?
First, a few general statements about hadd offenses. Hadd offenses can only be proven by witness testimony or by confession of the accused. Circumstantial evidence is generally not allowed. There must be at least two male eyewitnesses (or one male and two female), and the witness testimony must not conflict at all. (For example, witness testimony in one case was not admitted because one witness said that the accused kicked the victim with his right foot, and the other one said it was his left foot). For hadd crimes, witnesses are neither morally or legally obliged to give testimony, so there is no pressure at all to do so. Any confessions made outside the courtroom are not valid. The accused must confess at the trial, so the judge can see if he is acting voluntarily. The defendant is free to retract his confession at any time before the punishment, in which case the hadd punishment will not be delivered. This is still true today in Saudi Arabia:

“If, during the trial of a hadd case, the accused retracts his confession, alleging that he was coerced into confessing, the case is dropped.”

For zina offenses, the rules were even more strict. In that case, four eyewitnesses were needed, and “they must have seen the act in its most intimate details, i.e. the penetration, or, in terms of certain hadiths, the witnesses must have observed the act just like ‘a pencil going into a kohl container (ka-l-mil fi al-mikhala) or a bucket into a well (ka-l-rasha fi al-bi’r)’.” Unless you decide to have sex before marriage in front of four males, and those four males all see the man’s bucket enter the woman’s well, and all four decide to testify against you in court, you will not be found guilty of zina. Guess what? This does not happen often. For these reasons, in the “cases of zina and theft, the only offenses that required, respectively, capital punishment or mutilation – aside from highway robbery – were, short of confession, nearly impossible to establish.”

The following is a good example of how easy it is to avoid hadd punishment. According to Malikite doctrine, circumstantial evidence is allowed in the following situation: if an unmarried woman has a child, she can be charged with zina. Having a child is pretty good circumstantial proof of having had sex, correct? Even in this case, the woman can avoid the hadd penalty by saying that she got pregnant in her sleep without her knowledge, or that the pregnancy was the result of heavy petting without penetration! It is clear that hadd penalties were easy to avoid.

Another example:

“Hanafis were willing to accept statements from the accused such as ‘you married me’ or ‘I married her,’ even though there had been no legal marriage, as sufficient for establishing shubha [judicial doubt]. Although a man owed his partner monetary compensation in this case equivalent to the amount of a fair dower, the judicial doubt established by these claims voided hadd penalties.”
Here is an example of a male who actually was convicted of zina in the seventeenth century, and how it happened:

“A man voluntarily admitted having had sex at a time when he was unmarried (the exact time was not mentioned) and demanded to be punished. The qadi proceeded to investigate the man’s mental health by questioning people who knew him. The mental capacity was also tested by asking him simple questions, such as what day, month, and year it was. Finally, the qadi gave the man a chance to reconsider his claims. When he persisted, he was sentenced.”

It is true, then, that if you really wanted to be punished, the Shari’a had some harsh penalties. However, if you did not want to be punished, hadd penalties were very easy to avoid.

As for homosexual sex, most schools considered it the same as zina, and the same rules, and the same rules of avoiding hadd penalties, were followed. As with heterosexual sex, penetration must have occurred, and anything less did not incur the hadd penalty. Hanafites, however, considered homosexual sex less of an offense than zina, and left the punishment up to the qadi instead of the automatic hadd penalty.

As we move from the realm of theory to reality we find that just prior to the colonial period, zina penalties had loosened up quite a bit beyond what was stipulated by the Qur’an:

“While the Ottoman qanun paid lip service to the penalties prescribed by the shari’a, which might be imposed in any given case, it also instituted a broad range of alternative penalties, primarily fines. Sultan Sularman’s criminal code, for example, listed a series of graduated fines incurred by perpetrators of zina, to be calibrated by the status of the perpetrator, whether a virgin or not, and by his or her assets. In the case on consensual zina, only a recurrent offender, such as a habitual prostitute, incurred stiffer penalties of flogging, ridiculing in public, or banishment. The law specified that a prostitute could have her face blackened or smeared with dirt and be led through the streets sitting backwards on a donkey, holding its tail instead of its reins…In brief, the Ottoman criminal code effectively eliminated execution as a penalty for zina, prescribed only monetary fines for consensual sexual intercourse, and received a range of non-lethal corporal punishments for those who were violent or habitual offenders…Same-sex intercourse between males was to be punished like zina, with the same system of graduated fines.”

Usually only habitual offenders were punished, and even then only by fines. Even for homosexual sex. Islamic law was static and unchanging??

To summarize, very few were put to death for unlawful intercourse (unless they really wanted to be), and in reality only repeat offenders, such as prostitutes, were punished. And even then usually with fines. As for hand amputation for theft, because the requirements were so exacting, “amputation, at least in the eighteenth century, was rarely practised as a fixed penalty.” Instead, a common result is that the victim would bring the thief to court and the thief would have to repay the victim the stolen money.

So what did the British do to the “cruel” practices of Islamic law when they replaced it with their own law? Did they change the primitive practices of Islamic law and make them less cruel and more “civilized”?

Actually, the exact opposite happened. When the British took over, their problem was with how lenient Islamic law was, not how cruel:

“Hastings argued that government would have to intervene to ensure adequate punishment, because Islamic law was ‘founded on the most lenient principles and on an abhorrence of bloodshed.’”

Peters finds the same:

“The main objection of the British to Islamic criminal law as administered in northern India was that it restricted the power of the courts to hand down capital sentences. Under Islamic criminal law, as compared to contemporary British law, there were relatively few capital offences and, in addition, there were so many defenses available that convictions for such capital offenses were difficult to obtain.”

According to the British, Islamic law left too much discretion to the qadi, who usually looked for reasons to diminish the penalty. The British wanted “fixed and immutable” penalties.” (But remember, it was Islamic law that was rigid):

“Contemporary European views on the greater efficacy of fixed and immutable penalties, as against ancient regime practices of discretionary selection for punishment and ‘cruel spectacles’ were posed in India as a contrast between arbitrary justice of the oriental despot and due process of law under the Company. However, it was the laxity which indigenous rulers seemed to display in exercising their punitive rights, rather than the ‘barbarity’ with which they did so which drew the more strident criticism.”

The British problem with theft was that they wanted the Muslims to be executing thieves, like they did in “civilized” England, and not just cutting their hands off:

“[Hastings] believed strongly in the necessity, and greater efficacy, of fixed and immutable penalties. Yet the actual record of Company justice by no means indicates that arbitrary and discretionary were disavowed. British justice turned out to be far more draconian-in practice as well as in principle-than Islamic justice had been, resorting much more frequently to capital punishment, and much less often to community-based methods of enforcement and reconciliation. As it happened, the Company state was far more concerned with public order, and with the specific use of the law to protect its own trade and commerce as well as authority, than was the old regime.”

Cutting thieves hands off was barbaric. The “civilized” thing to do was to execute the thief instead:

“The British were very outspoken in their opposition to mutilating penalties. Paradoxically, they seemed to values limbs more than lives, as they attached great value to capital punishment as a deterrent, introduced it for a variety of offenses and used it widely.”

It should also be noted that amputation for theft was a rare event, as it still is today in Saudi Arabia:

“Hadd sentences cannot be rashly pronounced. Judges usually award discretionary punishments: in the year 1403 (1982-3), for example, 4,925 ta’zir sentences for theft were pronounced, as against two sentences of amputation for theft.”

The British were shocked at the rare case of amputation, so they replace the practice with widespread executions. How civilized!

Taking someone elses property was the most heinous crime that one could commit in England at that time, and people were executed for it often. For example, in Surrey County from 1660 to 1800, 84% of those who were hanged had committed property offenses, as compared to 8% for murder, and 0.4% for rape. Stealing was obviously far more objectionable to the “civilized” West than murder or rape. The English had many capital crimes, but theft was the priority, not murder;

“There were more than two hundred crimes punishable with death. If a man stole a sheep or a horse, or forty shillings from a dwelling house, five shillings from a shop or twelve and a half pence from a pocket, he was hanged. If a man broke down a fish pond where fish might be lost or cut down trees in an avenue or garden, he was hanged. If he falsely swore, pretended to be a Greenwich pensioner, he was hanged. If he destroyed a turnpike gate, or was found before the expiration of his term of transportation, or if he counterfeited coin, he was hanged. But manslaughter was a clergyable felony until 1822 and an attempt to murder merely a Common law misdemeanor until 1803.”

As we saw previously, in the West the courts existed for the benefit of the rich. The rich were obviously much more concerned about punishing theft than the poor were, and the death penalty was mainly used for thieves. The English were not afraid to use the death penalty either: “From 1771 to 1783, for instance, there were 467 executions in London and Middlesex.”

Islamic law acted as a check on the imposed Western law from being too harsh:

“In the long run the principles of Islamic law were simply replaced by European ones. Nor was there any important direct influence of the Islamic law on the new law as introduced by the Company’s legislation. There was, however, a remarkable indirect influence. The new law was, right from the beginning, not the English criminal law of the time. It was a law developed more or less independently out of European principles. One of its prominent features was its comparative mildness if the contemporary criminal law of England or other European countries was taken as a standard. This mildness was not the mildness of the Islamic law. But it was a kind of dialectical consequence of it. The Islamic law was in many respects excessively mild. The purpose of British legislation was to limit this mildness. But at the same time the original mildness was a check on the new law being too harsh.”

The court system in England was far more brutal than under the Shari’a. Winner: Islam

Divorce

Maybe now JW readers would bring up talaq. According to Mr. Spencer, “all a Muslim husband has to say is ‘Talaq,’ and he has divorced his wife. This is just one element of an institutionalized system of oppression of women…” . First of all, Mr. Spencer leaves out the part that after the man proclaims talaq, the divorce is not final until three months later. During those three months, the man can change his mind at any point, which leaves open the possibility of reconciliation. If the three months passed and the divorce did become final, the couple was allowed to remarry if they chose to do so. This type of divorce was called talaq al-ahsan , and was the preferred method of divorce. Mr. Spencer calls this type of divorce “oppression of women”. I don’t understand why a man saying he wants a divorce and getting one after a three month period, is considered oppression. I was under the impression that even in the West today a man can divorce his wife if he desires. Is it more honorable in the West because the man must hire a lawyer and pay him large amounts of money in order to get the divorce? It is true that women should have the same procedure available to them, but women did have a route to divorce, which we will discuss in a minute.
Another type of divorce brought up often in the JW website is the triple talaq, which is called talaq al-bid’a. In this type of divorce, a man can say talaq three times at once and divorce his wife immediately. This type of divorce was irrevocable, meaning the woman must remarry another man before the original couple can remarry. Although this type of divorce was generally valid, it is not usually discussed on the JW website that this type of divorce was “severely criticized since it goes against the rules laid down by the Quran.” Malik even said that this type of divorce was forbidden. Ahmed explains how this type of divorce originated, even though “this form of divorce was clearly not approved by the Prophet.” During the reign of Caliph Umar, “loose tendencies” had become commonplace with respect to the approved form of divorce. Umar’s attempt to curb these tendencies was to allow the triple talaq, the object of which was “to warn the man that he would have to take the evil consequences of following an un-Islamic practice to pronounce divorce thrice on one occasion.” Umar’s goal was to get people to take divorce more seriously, but it had the opposite effect, and the people began to use the triple talaq rather than avoid it. The triple talaq is not favored by Islam, and it use originated in an attempt to encourage the favored type of divorce.
Spencer says that “men can divorce their wives simply by saying, ‘Talaq’ – I divorce you – but women may not do this.” This is not wholly true. It is true that talaq was a male initiated divorce, but the wife “could acquire the ability to choose her divorce if her husband delegated this power of talaq to her. Jurists from the main Sunni schools of law recognized the right of the husband to delegate such power.” The act of delegating to the wife various stipulations in marriage contracts started over a thousand years ago, and by the 17th century had become common:

“Adult women could better protect themselves by taking advantage of the right to insert stipulations into the marriage contract, with the agreement of the groom to be sure. We have the most consistent information on this practice in the case of Egypt, where a marriage contract drawn up as early as the ninth century conferred upon the bride the power to effect the divorce of any second wife her husband might acquire and sell or manumit any slave woman he took as a concubine…One study of seventeenth–century marriage contracts estimates that a third of them included stipulations.”

Although the different schools placed various limitations of the stipulations in regard to a wife’s right to a unilateral divorce (stipulations were used more often to give the woman a right to divorce if the man took another wife or a concubine, or if he forced her to move where she didn’t want to, or if he failed to pay child support, or if he beat her ), the “conditional delegation conferred some real powers on a woman.”

Also, the financial consequences of talaq should also be understood:

“Talaq, as the jurists understood very well, and as legal practice testifies, was a very costly financial enterprise for the husband, let alone that in many cases it was effectively ruinous (a fact which may explain the rarity of polygamy). Upon talaq, the ex-wife was entitled to maintenance for at least three months (‘idda), delayed dower, children’s maintenance, any debts the husband incurred to her during the marriage (a relatively frequent occurrence), and, if the children were young, a fee for nursing. And if the husband had not been consistent in paying for marital obligations (also a relatively frequent occurrence), he would owe the total sum due upon the initiation of his talaq. In this context, it must be clear that when women entered marriage, they frequently did so with a fair amount of capital, which explains why they were a source of lending for many husbands and why so many of them engaged in the business of money-lending in the first place. In addition to the immediate dower and the financial and material guarantees for her livelihood, the wife secured a postponed payment, but one that she could retrieve at any time she wished (unless otherwise stipulated in the contract). But more financially significant was the trousseau that she received from her parents, customarily consisting of her share of her natal family’s inheritance paid in the form of furniture, clothing, jewelry and at times cash. Many women, before or during marriage, were endowed with a waqf portion, giving them further income. Whatever the form of the trousseau and the total wealth they could accumulate, women were entirely aware of their exclusive right to this wealth, and understood well that they were under no obligation to spend any portion of it on others or even on themselves. They apparently spent their own money on themselves only if they chose to do so, since such expenses as pertained to sustenance, shelter and clothing (in the expansive meaning of these terms if the husband was prosperous) were entirely his responsibility, not hers. In other words, unlike that of husbands, the property of wives was not subject to the chipping effect of expenditure, but could instead be saved, invested and augmented.”

The man had the right to talaq, but the woman ended up with all the money.

Although talaq is brought up quite often on JW, the khul divorce is rarely discussed. Khul divorce is a divorce initiated by the woman,and it was “apparently more widespread than talaq.” Tucker states the commonplace nature of kuhl divorce:

“The majority of divorces in Mamluk society were apparently khul divorce, and this trend seems to continue during Ottoman times…for example, Madeline Zilfi found that ten to twelve women came to a court in eighteenth-century Istanbul every month seeking khul, and this was in just one of several courts in the city…In Jerusalem, Nablus, and Damscus, khul was the type of divorce most frequently encountered in court by far”

Khul divorce was initiated by the woman, and involved paying the man compensation, usually an amount equal to the dower that she had been given. An extraordinary explanation for the khul request was not necessary:

“In Istanbul and Sofia, most khul requests were preceded by ‘we don’t have a good life together,’ ‘there was no understanding between us,’ or ‘there were quarrels and dissention between us’. In Syria and Palestine in the eighteenth century, khul requests did not usually mention reasons or background; rather, a woman simply ‘asks’ her husband to divorce her for a compensation.”

Gerber finds much of the same:
“One of the most widespread types of cases involving family law that appear in the records is khul’ divorce – that is, divorce initiated by the wife, whether of her own free will or as a consequence of a prior agreement between her and her husband. Such an initiative on the part of the woman would entail the automatic waiver of her financial privileges, In most of the cases cited in the records, the reason adduced for the request is quarrelsome relations. In some cases women even paid sums out of their own pockets to obtain the divorce. No cases were found where the court tried to dissuade women from pursuing their effort to obtain a divorce.”

The woman could initiate a divorce, and the practice was common. More common than talaq. It is not surprising that this is not a topic on JW.

Now for the comparison. What was divorce like in England at the time? Basically, divorce was only allowed by one group of people: wealthy males! What a surprise:

“In England marital controversies were judged by the ecclesiastical courts, and these courts applied canon law, under which a valid marriage was regarded as indissoluble. True divorce (divortium a vinculo matrimonii), allowing the partners to remarry, was never granted unless a marriage was judged null to begin with, on grounds such as consanguinity, bigamy, or sexual incapacity. Such causes as adultery, desertion, or cruelty warranted only separation from bed and board (divortium a mensa et thoro), which sustained the legal obligations of marriage, excepting cohabitation, and did not allow either partner to remarry. At the end of the seventeenth century, in order to relieve the stringency of ecclesiastical rule for noblemen whose wives were adulterous, the House of Lords began to dissolve marriages by private act. Only a select group could take advantage of this avenue to divorce. The cost often amounted to several thousand pounds, because a petitioner was expected to have first obtained a decree of divorce a mensa and a civil judgment against the adulterers. The Lords passed only about ninety private acts of divorce between 1697 and 1785, all resting on adultery charges and all awarded to husbands.”

Within a span of 88 years, all of England awarded 90 divorces, all to rich males. Now that’s how a civilized country deals with divorce! The situation in the colonies was not much better:

“Divorce a vinculo from a valid marriage was more frequent in Massachusetts during the same period. Between 1692 and 1786, 110 divorces were granted in the province on grounds other than those considered legitimate by the English ecclesiastical courts-63 to men, 47 to women- and England and Wales had a population of almost seven million in 1765, when the Massachusetts population was under 250,000.”
In Massachusetts during a span of 94 years, 47 divorces were granted to women. One every other year for a population of 250,000. Let’s compare that to what we already quoted above:

“Madeline Zilfi found that ten to twelve women came to a court in eighteenth-century Istanbul every month seeking khul, and this was in just one of several courts in the city”

Let’s conservatively estimate 30 divorces every month initiated by women in Istanbul, whose population in the eighteenth century was about 500,000.

The following, then, is the number of divorces granted to women per year per million women in three different areas:

England: 0
Colonial US: 2
Istanbul: 720

Quiz: Under what legal system did women have the easiest access to divorce? Winner: Islam.

Inheritance

Since we just brought up the subject of women’s financial rights in the contexts of talaq, it is a good time to bring up another common concern on JW, which is the stipulation that a male stands to inherit twice the amount that a female would.

In effect, though, all this law did was to balance the financial advantage that women had in receiving the dower:
“The privileged female access to property through the dower system was counterbalanced, however, by an inheritance law that discriminated against the females.”

On balance, it was the women that had the overall financial advantage:

“When a woman’s many property entitlements (mahr, maintenance, and the absence of any material responsibility to her family members) were taken into account, women stood to acquire more property through the operation of Islamic rules for property transfers than did men.”

And what was inheritance like for women in England? Eileen Spring finds that under English common law, “when indirect inheritance by collateral females is added to direct inheritance by daughters, twenty-five percent of all inheritances would at common law go to females.” If my math is correct, a two to one inheritance disadvantage for females under Islamic law (neglecting the mitigating factors mentioned above), is still better than twenty-five percent. Also, Spring finds the inheritance situation for females got worse over time (the English inheritance gates had not only closed, but stuff was being thrown out of the gates as well), and reached its nadir in the eighteenth century. She points out some statistics published by Lawrence Stone:

“In An Open Elite?, a book that focuses on the relations between businessmen and landowners, the Stones have presented as thorough a study of landed inheritance as we are ever likely to have. They have analyzed the dispositions of over 2,000 owners of 362 country houses in 3 English counties from 1540 to 1879…In one table the Stones indicate what proportion of those inheritances that went directly from father to child went to daughters and what proportion to sons. If the average is taken over the period 1540 to 1780 then 6 percent of such inheritances went to daughters and 94 percent to sons. In a second table the Stones indicate what proportion of all inheritances, direct and indirect, went to women. If a similar average is taken, then 8 percent went to women and 92 percent to men…Their table showing how often women inherited also shows how often women had inheritance go through them. Taking the average, thirteen percent of inheritances between 1540 and 1760 went either to or through women. This is a rate little above what was biologically unavoidable. It is clear then not only that landowners had much reduced female inheritance, but also that they had reduced it almost as far as nature permitted.”

Tucker finds much the same:
“[Muslim] women were designated by law to inherit from many of their male relatives and could not legally be disinherited; women, although they often inherited one-half the share of their male relatives, enjoyed unfettered control of the family property they thus received; and finally, there were no constraints placed on the kinds of property women might inherit. We see some marked contrasts here to the rules for female dowers and inheritance in places like England and China. In England, the practice of primogeniture when it came to real property had become firmly ensconced in theory and practice by the early modern period: the eldest male child stood to inherit the family’s real property while female children and younger males were typically allotted maintenance incomes. Although historians have pointed out some variations in this pattern, most significantly among classes, the fact remains that ‘property continued to be transmitted between men to secure patriarchal social structures.’”
Winner: Islamic law.

Women’s Financial Inependence

Muslim married women were financially independent. In the West, they were not:

“It is worthy of note that, unlike in much of the western legal tradition, the marital status of a [Muslim] woman had no impact on her legal competence. European legal systems of the early modern period had placed most women and their property under the legal authority of their husbands: in the extreme case of the English tradition of coverture, a husband exercised almost total control over his wife’s property; on the continent, dowry systems protected the assets the wife brought to the marriage but usually gave the husband broad powers to manage this property…The Muslim jurists, with only a few school-specific exceptions, took the contrary position that marital status held no ramifications for legal capacity for either spouse, and a husband had no right to manage or dispose of his wife’s property.”

This is another case where Islamic law was clearly ahead of the West. Married women in Great Britain did not gain the right to own property until 1882, about a thousand years after Islamic women had that right.

At this point I will make one more point regarding women’s rightsin general. Many Islamic women find the Qur’an to be the source of needed reforms, not the source of the problem:
“Several women scholars have focused recently on the Qur’an as the fount of discourse on gender, and argued that responsible and scholarly Qur’anic interpretation (tafsir) leads inexorably to an egalitarian view of gender relations, not the male dominance expressed in some aspects of the legal tradition. As the number and sophistication of these works increase, they are entering into serious contention for the hearts and minds of believing Muslim women and men alike, and they are acquiring the potential to supply the necessary foundations for more extensive legal reforms.”

Winner: Islam.

Women’s dress
But the JW reader says “What about the dreaded hijab!!” Once again, the situation over a century ago is probably different than what a JW reader might think:

“So we are left with the distinct impression that, prior to the late nineteenth century, women’s dress in general, and the practice of veiling in particular, were not matters that much engaged the attention of Islamic jurists and courts. Women (and men) no doubt dressed modestly, at least in large parts of the Islamic heartland, but a wide range of degrees of covering, reflecting differences in class and setting, appears to have been the norm.”

Muslim women wore modest dress, but probably not much different from Puritan women were wearing in the American colonies. Overall, women in the West still had much more freedom to wear more revealing clothes, so if less clothing is a mark of a better society, we will give the win to the West.

Winner: the West.

Apostasy and Forced Convesion

I will still make a few comments about this subject. A more complete treatment will come later.

In brief, the Qur’an gives no punishment for apostasy except in the afterlife, so the fringe right has to find evidence for Islam’s sanctioning of apostasy in ahad ahadith. In response to this argument, it is clear that a solitary hadith cannot overrule the Qur’an. Secondly, examples of apostasy resulting in the death penalty involve treason as well. Treason was a crime that was dealt with severely in many cultures at the time. For instance, this is an example of how the English punished those convicted of treason:

“For high treason the punishment was solemn and terrible. The statute stated that before the offender was beheaded, he should be half hanged and that his entrails should be drawn out of his body and burnt before his very eyes. This shocking punishment actually was meted out to eight officers on Kennington Common in 1746. When one David Tyrie was so executed on August 24, 1782, the Gentleman's Magazine remarked: ‘It was astonishing to see what numbers of women there were in the crowd to see such a savage process, the bare relation of which is shocking to humanity.’ The heads of traitors in the first half of the century were hung on Temple Bar, the only remaining gate of the city of London. The heads thus exposed were allowed to bleach for years in the sun and rain until the wind hurled them in the footway.”

When looking at the issue of apostasy, it will be important to consider it in situations that are divorced from any other issues such as treason.
The related issue of forced conversions will also be covered separately. In general, non-Muslims in the Ottoman empire were treated as second-class citizens, and conversion to Islam was motivated by a desire to assimilate in order to overcome this. There were no mass forced conversions:

“Although there were obvious cases of enforced conversions, most were nonenforced. These, often euphemistically called ‘voluntary,’ were the result of indirect economic and social, but not administrative, pressure. They were stimulated primarily by the desire to achieve a distinct kind of integration.”

Ocak agrees:

“The Ottoman Empire never considered the official religion as a belief that was to be imposed on its non-Muslim subjects, and it never carried out any activity in this regard.”

Ocak does point out that Muslims who challenged the prevailing orthodoxy were dealt with harshly, however:

“The Ottoman center never used Islam as a weapon for the conversion of non-Muslims, in fact it deliberately avoided doing so. [However] Sunni Islam was used, as an ideology of suppression in the most unremitting fashion, against deviants or heretics that sprang from among their own ranks.”

This was, of course, in response to keeping unity within Islam, and not allowing splinter groups to destroy the religion. The issue of conversion in the Ottoman Empire was never a central feature, as it was in the Spanish empire, for example:

“the Ottoman Empire never had a ’Propaganda Fide,’ or an ‘Agency for Convert Affairs,’ nor did it have any press which was used by the Propaganda Fide to such good effect.”

Winner: Islam

Overall conditions

In conclusion, I would like to compare some general observations about what is was like in the Ottoman Empire as compared to the West. European observers of the Ottoman Empire made the usual comments about Muslims attaching little value to life and limb (ironically, they were making these comments at the same time they were executing 35 people per year in London alone). However, they also made the following observations:

“European observers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were impressed by the efficiency, effectiveness, and even fairness of the Ottoman administration of criminal justice. In their view, it compared favorably with the long drawn out and very costly lawsuits and trial in Europe. They noticed with astonishment that in the Ottoman courts a case was generally dealt with in a single session; there were no lawyers who would drag out the procedure unnecessarily, and appeals were relatively rare. The speedy and often severe punishment meted out, together with the efficient police methods and the collective responsibility at the whole village or town-quarter for any crime committed there, were in their opinion the main reasons for the amazingly low crime rate, especially in the cities".

An amazlingly low crime rate. So what was crime like in London at the time?:

“In some respects Dr. Johnson was right. Crime did pay in the eighteenth century. Thieving, smuggling, and highway robbery were the fashion of the day. The danger people ran of being robbed or murdered in the streets was great. As soon as night fell, highwaymen and footpads emerged from their retreats in the capital like so many bats in order to begin the work of depredation and plunder. The contempt for the law was great. Horace Walpole complained that in London ‘one is forced to travel even at noon as if one was going to battle,’ and he expected to be robbed one night in his own garden at Strawberry Hill.”

Another important observation is the use of Shari’a courts by dhimmis. Although both Christians and Jews had their own communal courts available to them, it turns out that quite a few decided to use the Shari’a courts voluntarily for cases involving other dhimmis as well as their own families. This is especially true for women, who found that the rules under Islamic Law were far more favorable than under their own religious rules. For example:

“In Ottoman Egypt, Copts as well as other minorities sought the auspices of the sharia’s court. Marriages concluded in the court were, as a consequence, dissolvable therein, and Coptic women also appear to have benefitted from the practice - widespread among Muslim women in Egypt - of adding protecting clauses to their marriage contracts (clauses dealing with the rights of children from previous marriages, material support, etc.). A similar perception appears to have attracted Jews to the Muslim court. This is particularly interesting insofar as it seems to have appealed primarily to women who, for example, used the shari’a courts in order to obtain a share of their patrimony, denied them in Jewish law. Jewish women also appear to have sought shari’a marriages, which guaranteed material support (nafaqa) as well as divorce, especially when attempting to annul marriages made insupportable by deserting husbands.”

If Islamic Law was so primitive, why were so many Christians and Jews going to the Shari’a court when they had their own courts available to them?

I would like to make one last point which relates to contemporary Islamic law. Western media like to find extreme cases of punishment in Islamic countries and report on them endlessy. To the extent that these stories are true (which is certainly not the case for all the stories), they do not represent the Shari’a:

“Certainly, most if not all of the incidents reported in the Western press as examples of the implementation of Shari’ah provisions in many Muslim countries have been gross miscarriages of justice according to most traditional Shari’ah conventions, carried out by people with only a slogan-like knowledge of traditional mainstream fiqh.”

Conclusion

Overall winner: Islamic law

That Islamic law surpassed the legal systems of the West at the time should hardly be a surprise, and this is accepted by scholarship. William McNeill notes that…:

“an intelligent and informed observer of the fifteenth century could hardly have avoided the conclusion that Islam, rather than the remote and still comparatively crude society of the European Far West, was destined to dominate the world in the following centuries.”

Makdisi:
“Readers familiar with the intellectual history of the Christian West can hardly fail to see its development as following that of Islam on parallel lines with a time lag of a century or so…It is inconceivable that two cultures could develop side by side for literally centuries without being aware of developments on either side. That Islam cared little for what was going on in the West is proof of its indifference to a lesser developed culture. On the other hand, it is common knowledge that the West was not oblivious of the higher civilization of Islam: it learned its language and translated its works in order to bring itself up to the level of the higher culture, the better to defend itself against it.”

W.M. Watt:
“When one keeps hold of all the facets of the medieval confrontation of Christianity and Islam, it is clear that the influence of Islam on Western Christendom is greater than is usually realized. Not only did Islam share with Western Europe many material products and technological discoveries; not only did it stimulate Europe intellectually in the fields of science and philosophy; but it provoked Europe into forming a new image of itself. Because Europe was reacting against Islam, it belittled the influence of the Saracens and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today, an important task for our Western Europeans, as we move into the era of the one world, is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world.”

Even Count Ostrorog, the Orientalist who was the first to use the “gates of ijtihad” terminology, had this to say about Islamic law in the same presentation containing his “gates” garbage:

“Considered from the point of view of its logical structure the [Islamic law] system is one of rare perfection, and to this day it commands the admiration of the student…Those Eastern thinkers of the IXth century laid down, on the basis of their theology, the principle of the Rights of Man, in those very terms, comprehending the rights of individual liberty, and of inviolability of person and property; described the supreme power in Islam, or Caliphate, as based on a contract, implying conditions of capacity and performance, and subject to cancellation if the conditions under the contract were not fulfilled; elaborated a Law of War of which the humane, chivalrous prescriptions would have put to the blush certain belligerents in the Great War; expounded a doctrine of toleration of non-Moslem creeds so liberal that our West had to wait a thousand years before seeing equivalent principles adopted.”

Even Orientalists sometimes tell the truth in order to appear scholarly.

The quran called allah the greatest deceiver, liar, schemer, and planner to do it all. The Bible had said in Reve, 12:9 that Satan the devil was the deceiver of the world 600 yrs before Mo was conceived.
AM
the books said she was 6 when married and thighed from 6-9 and had intercourse at 9. She lost her hair. In Islam they consider girls mature at first mentral. A girl in peru was 5 and got pregnant by her brother. They were not Muslims in 1925. In the 7th century a little arab girl was raped and thus when the Arabs sold African black slaves to Europeans, it was not rape because slaves are property or whatever your right hand posessed, right AM.

You lying son of Allah the greatest.

The quran called allah the greatest deceiver, liar, schemer, and planner to do it all. The Bible had said in Reve, 12:9 that Satan the devil was the deceiver of the world 600 yrs before Mo was conceived.
AM
the books said she was 6 when married and thighed from 6-9 and had intercourse at 9. She lost her hair. In Islam they consider girls mature at first mentral. A girl in peru was 5 and got pregnant by her brother. They were not Muslims in 1925. In the 7th century a little arab girl was raped and thus when the Arabs sold African black slaves to Europeans, it was not rape because slaves are property or whatever your right hand posessed, right AM.

You lying son of Allah the greatest.

AM is certifiably insane!!! ...as demonstrated by his latest gobstopper post.

Wow, he's done his darndest to defend his pedophile prophet with yet another perverse defense outline of Muhammad. I mean, I'm shocked! ...and I don't even know where to begin; and I'm surprised that AM doesn't work for ACORN, or worse yet, helping NAMBLA with their perv-projects. O, maybe NAMBLA is too rich for AM's self-righteous blood.

I didn't think it was possible for AM to stoop any lower -- but big surprise, he has. Boy, will wonders never cease. Amazing and gross!

A creep like you should be behind BARS, AM, and not allowed near children of any age. Shame on you for promoting pedophilia through your perverted pedophile prophet. Double shame. He's not a lover of God, but a lover of evil.

chimp? ...way too original ...yawn :-O

Hmm, I believe you stand alone in your opinion of me, AM. I have yet to read a single comment from anyone, which the exception of you, of course, that considers me to be...uh, perverted? ...is that right? Right! Nope, you would be the first.

Whereas you have received comments from innumerable posters making this same observation of you. Hey, the numbers don't lie, now do they?

Pashaw!

champ:
youre perverted

ah, well that's two posters, anyone else think I'm perverted?

BTW, it's a compliment coming from Muhammad's Fan Club. Man-whores, all of ya!

Abdullah:
You misunderstand, or purposefully misstate my motives. I am a seeker of the truth, and my opinion is based on the evidence I have seen so far. Of course, I may be mistaken, but though you have shown time and time again that you cannot be civil and refrain from being insulting, as Mr. Spencer has been civil to you regardless. This alone makes it pretty clear who the reasonable one is.

I am willing to perhaps concede points 1 and 2.

As for 3 (Aisha's maturity), I think you don't bring compelling proof. I still contend that regardless of whether Aisha had gone through puberty, or her own words (Do you really think someone so young's going to be a good judge about who's an adult, do you?) I think it's a pretty far stretch to call a 9 year old an adult. Do you think a 9 year old who have entered puberty should be considered an adult, or do you think Aisha was a special case? Whether or not she gave consent is pointless if she is a minor, because a minor isn't old enough to have knowledge to make such a consent. This isn't about textual analysis but common sense.

You don't just humbly point out an error, but you do so in a such way to paint yourself the expert and everyone else as dishonest. If you're so right, then why do you so often resort to dirty tactics such as fallacies ("no true scottsman") and false dichotomy arguments ("She knew pouring offal was wrong, so she must have been mature enough for sex" which I debunked)? If you'd just admit these are fallacies I MIGHT take you more seriously in the future, but so far you've ignored it as pretend it never happened.

I did read all the arguments part of your post (I admit, I skimmed the references at the end), so I apologize if you already answered these questions in there:

* Could you give a reference that says that's it's a more severe crime to mistreat unbelievers than believers? Also, is it from the Medina or mecca period?

* Also, could you answer my question about the age of Aisha when she consummated. (though this is more from curiosity of how information is sorted in the koran/hadiths and not really about the disagreement about Aisha)

AM said: "There is no conflicting information in the Quran." ... "For instance, a person came to the Prophet to ask what was the best thing he could do in Islam, "Control your temper." yet in other places in response to seemingly the same question the Prophet said, "Pray early at the designated time." Seems to conflict, doesn't it? But it doesn't." [White spaces snipped for space]

But there's no way to have multiple answers for the question: "At what age did Aisha consummate her marriage with mohammad?" same with there's only one answer to "who was the sixteenth president of the united states?" If there are multiple ages, doesn't that conflict? How do you know which is the most reliable?

(By the way, Abraham Lincoln)

So far I've received two comments stating that I am a pervert -- whereas AM has received, by my guesstimation, at least 4,000 such comments. Hmm.

Well, I really wanted this to be a fair fight, but like I said before, the numbers don't lie. Sorry, but the winner appears to be AM by a screaming landslide.

So Congratz, AM! ...go buy yourself an ice cream cone, or treat yourself to a eyebrow wax & trim. Hell, treat yourself to both -- because you're worth it!

I am going to bring up a couple of anecdotal points, which I understand are completely meaningless, but I will say them anyway. One: I work with a two Muslims, one shiite, one Sunna. I asked the Shiite about rape and wife beating. She said that wife beating is very prevalent in her country (Iran), i.e., it is about the same as it is here. Regarding rape, however, she said that it is very rare compared to the West (she has lived in Europe and now in the US for decades).

Foolster:
"As for 3 (Aisha's maturity), I think you don't bring compelling proof."

I asked the Sunni Muslim that I know what age Aisha was when Muhammad married her, or consumated the marriage. She had no idea. Do you think actual Muslims dwell on this crap to the extent you extremists do? Their religion has nothing to do with the insane minutiae that people on JW devote their lives to.

Good Lord, dave742 pastes in thousands of words to tell us that the West was bad in the old days. How about a few words to show us that the Muslim world is better than the West today?

dave742 asked some Muslim he knew about Aisha, and lo and behold they told him something that obfuscated what the most authoritative Sunnis source, Bukhari, documents! Gee, I wonder why that was? The Muslim that dave spoke to was either woefully ignorant of his own tradition, or was lying. There is no third choice. In fact, Bukhari records more than once that Mohammed FUCKED Aisha when she was 9. And Muslims continue to revere Mohammed today.

Meanwhile, the West wants to prosecute Roman Polanski for raping a 13 year old (at least, the West other than the same Hollywood elites who agree with dave742 that Islam is a wonderful religion...)

If I were the judge in the Polanski case, I would demand that all the people who condemn Polanski should first condemn Mohammed. Then, if they do, I would prosecute Polanski.

Hesperado:
“Good Lord, dave742 pastes in thousands of words to tell us that the West was bad in the old days. How about a few words to show us that the Muslim world is better than the West today?”

With respect to personal freedoms and rights of their *own* citizens, I think the West is more advanced than Muslim countries. I think it is important to think about why. I showed that just before the colonial period, it was Islamic society that was far more advanced in these same areas. You make ridiculous comments about how lucky Muslims are that we colonized them, because then have benefited from our “civilized” culture. I showed that this is wrong, and what they did when they colonized Islamic lands was to screw up their system of law, and their culture as well. Islam was the leading culture for a thousand years. Had the West not invaded and conquered their lands and screwed up their system of law, there is no reason to think that Islam would not have continued to develop, and continued to lead the West. Instead, the West colonized Islamic lands, screwed up their law system, and screwed up their society in general. The West has developed (in some areas) faster that Islam since then because they were militarily subjugating Islamic countries. When a society has to deal with an invading people, it affects the development of the society. If China had invaded the US in the 18th century and systematically screwed up our system of law, raped our country of its natural resources, etc., our society would look much different today. You say Islamic society benefits from the occupation of the West, but if they were ahead of the West just prior to colonization, and are now behind, what can the reason for this other than the retarding effect of colonization? The West was unable to compete with Islamic society, so we invaded, colonized, and screwed them up by force. And when I say the West is ahead, it is only in some areas such as personal rights, and only of its own citizens. Obviously, the personal rights of people outside the West are trampled on by the West, including their right to live. The fact that the West continually starts wars to subjugate and dominate other people and to take their land, resources, etc., makes the West, overall, by far the more primitive society. Persians, for example, have not started a war in a thousand years. Ironically, the country that starts a new war every year is trying to portray a country that has not started a war in a thousand years to be a threat to peace. How funny. Also, it is interesting that personal freedoms are worst in Islamic countries that are ruled by puppet governments of the West.

“Meanwhile, the West wants to prosecute Roman Polanski for raping a 13 year old”

Yes, the West is so moral. Now let’s go nuke Iran.

Champ:
“Crap? Minutiae? Wow, dave just trivialized the fact that Muhammad had SEXUAL INTERCOURSE with a 9 year-old child?!”

This is not true, and Abdullah showed you in great detail that it is not true. You are unable to absorb information, however, for a simple reason. When a country kills hundreds of thousand of people in other countries, the people of the invading country have to pretend like the people they are killing are less than human. It is a coping mechanism. You have to ignore the fact that your country is killing hundreds of thousands of humans, so you pretend that they are not humans, and something perhaps close to insects. (Just like the native Americans, who were primitive savages. Just like the Japanese, who were crazed monkeys during WWII, but are now accepted as "civilized." How quickly they evolved). So you construct a worldview that accepts any type of BS info that portrays these people as insects, and systematically ignore all real info that shows they are not. It is probably best, at least for yourself, that you do this. If you ever started paying attention to reality, and started to realize what your country is doing, you would feel sick, and perhaps start drinking a lot of vodka like I do. So ignore reality and stay in your dream world. It is probably better for your health. Why not pretend Aisha was 4 years old, that’s even better.

"the callous and blithe nature of most Muslims"
Muslims know the truth about their religion, and do not believe your lies. They have no reason to believe in the lies that you fabricate in order to construct your screwed up worldview.

dave deliberately overlooked this part of my comment:

"Muhammad is the cornerstone of Islam, and yet Muslims don't want to talk about, or even think about, his evil deeds. Weird. Very weird."

Hmm, wonder why? Perhaps because it's impossible to defend the indefensible? Yep! ...nothing else makes sense.

Muhammad was a man-whore, and warmongering slave to allah, er, I mean satan. Muslims carry a LOT of shame due to his evil deeds, so of course they avoid questions surrounding him. O, the shame!

champ:
When you are writing your posts, do you feel like an imbecile?

Abdullah:
A reference for that rams verse please? Thanks.

AM said: "I have invited you many times to exchange e-mails privately and given you permission to post of them whatever you like...I really don't care for this public forum...it brings out the worst in people including myself (i.e. the insults...only have so much patience, you know...)"
I don't like adding unnecessary layers. You could easily accuse me of editing my emails, as I said before. unless you can think of a system that would prevent this, no thanks.

Also, related to your last comment:

AM said: "No injury or insult is ever intend toward you as long as you do not intend one towards me."
This is another LIE. I have been civil with you, I'm posting just as I would if I were e-mailing you and you're the one who's been insulting. Do you want to go back and count insults between us, hmm?

AM said: "This I agree with, but it is a question that is loaded such that the answer qualifies many other evil thoughts in people. The truthful answer as noted in the proofs I posted is why I noted it is immaterial...she was physically and mentally mature, her family noted her as such, her relatives noted her as such, her father and mother noted her as such, the Prophet noted her as such, and all legislation on the manner of marriageable women who are able to cohabit ate all hinge upon her being mature.

Aisha was mature when the marriage was consummated as noted by every single person of interest in the event. Period."
That's interesting about the other people saying she's mature and I'm going to look that up. I still beleive it's wrong at any time for a man to have sex with a 9 year old though.

AM: ""such as fallacies ("no true scottsman")

I am sorry but this was another posters spin on an actual fiqh ruling... not my opinion, but a legal Islamic Jurists ruling on a matter."

You stated it as your own opinion, giving no citations, so it's not "spin" to beleive what people post. So do you:
(1) not beleive that this is true?
(2) beleive this is true and mean to say, here is someone else who also believes this?
(3) something else?
It doesn't really matter how many people beleive this, or what their credentials are it's still a logical fallacy.

Also, I mentioned your false dichotomy of the "mature enough about pouring offal on someone/mature enough for sex" as well, but you ignored that.

I said: "But there's no way to have multiple answers for the question: "At what age did Aisha consummate her marriage with mohammad?" same with there's only one answer to "who was the sixteenth president of the united states?" If there are multiple ages, doesn't that conflict? How do you know which is the most reliable? (By the way, Abraham Lincoln"

AM said: "This I agree with, but it is a question that is loaded such that the answer qualifies many other evil thoughts in people."

It was not "loaded" but I was honestly curious about how information is sorted between "weak" and "strong" in the Koran in cases of conflict. You yourself seemed to indicate that there are multiple ages given for Aisha's age at consummation.
You are "projecting" (your favorite word) intent of this question that doesn't exist.

If you'd rather not have to explain it, then it's fine, just say so. I'll try looking it up elsewhere.

Also, as I pointed out your previous non-answer before about there being multiple answers makes no sense in this case since there is only one answer to the questions "how old was Aisha when she consummated her marraige to Mohammad" and "Who was the 16th president of the united states."

AM is so vile, that he would have us believe that 9 year old Aisha was "mature" enough for sexual intercourse. Muslims are so willing to create outrageous Impossibilities in order to support their filthy and perverted prophet, ManWhore-Muhammad. You are disgusting, AM, and so are you, dave -- for defending this evil man you amire and call perfect. Shame on you both for promoting such garbage and lies! ...and the whole of Islam is a filthy lie, too.