Auz,
you just proved the BRF right about bakis and their obsession with four-fathers!(Turks!!!)
You seem to be prone to wild exaggerations about malsI. It is not at all the greatest threat or the most evil thing. It is very similar to hundreds of other creeds & ideologies that were created in the past. Nothing special or different. Thats why I gave you the example of X-ism. X-ism was same as the malsI. Now, it has become more sophisticated and has learnt to new tools. malsI has stopped evolving. So, strictly speaking, its is X-ism that is a bigger threat than malsI. Some believe that malsI still survives because the western elites finds it useful for their purposes. They find it as a easy way to control the masses.
Anyway, if you are serious about the discussion of flaws and defects of malsI, then I am sure you will find plenty of material on net. You say that criticizing Mo( or malsI) can have violent reactions and hence something that cannot be done. It was precisely my point. The main problem is the attempts to suppress valid criticism.
But its just a scare tactic and short-term reaction. It is an attempt to stop people from telling the truth. Sometimes, its just an emotional reaction to a bitter truth. If someone is told the bitter truth, they would not want to hear it. They will rather hate the truth-teller for telling the truth. All this is just short-term reaction. One should not be deterred by such short-term reactions. In the long term, sustained criticism does hit its mark and followers will start to accept and acknowledge the defects. This will then have two types of reactions:
a) some will try to 'reform' it.
b) others will just abandon it.
Even today, malsI tries to suppress other ideologies by banning them and persecuting the followers. It usually works. Even within the so-called malsI, there are different schools that seek to suppress each other. What do they do? They ban it, persecute the followers,...etc. And it usually works. So, you are quite wrong that it is not possible to ban it. The so-called history of malsI is filled with assassinations or murders to suppress a particular thought process(of course, many a times, it may have to do with the simple lust for power).
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malsI is replete with defects and deficiencies. The first basic problem is authenticity of various stories floating around about the Mo. Strictly speaking there is no way to determine whether these stories about Mo are authentic or not.
Though the non-Muslim world is not as familiar with the Sunnah, or HadIs, as with the QurAn, the former even more than the latter is the most important single source of Islamic laws, precepts, and practices. Ever since the lifetime of the Prophet, millions of Muslims have tried to imitate him in their dress, diet, hair-style, sartorial fashions, toilet mores, and sexual and marital habits. Whether one visits Arabia or Central Asia, India or Malaysia, one meets certain conformities, such as the veil, polygamy, ablution, and istinjA (abstersion of the private parts). These derive from the Sunnah, reinforced by the QurAn. All are accepted not as changing social usages but as divinely ordained forms, as categorical moral imperatives.
The subjects that the HadIs treats are multiple and diverse. It gives the Prophet�s views of Allah, of the here and the hereafter, of hell and heaven, of the Last Day of Judgment, of ImAn (faith), salAt (prayer), zakAt (poor tax), sawm (fast), and hajj (pilgrimage), popularly known as religious subjects; but it also includes his pronouncements on jihAd (holy war), al-anfAl (war booty), and khums (the holy fifth); as well as on crime and punishment, on food, drink, clothing, and personal decoration, on hunting and sacrifices, on poets and soothsayers, on women and slaves, on gifts, inheritances, and dowries, on toilet, ablution, and bathing; on dreams, christianing, and medicine, on vows and oaths and testaments, on images and pictures, on dogs, lizards, and ants.
The HadIs constitutes a voluminous literature. It gives even insignificant details of the Prophet�s life. Every word from his lips, every nod or shake of his head, every one of his gestures and mannerisms was important to his followers. These are remembered by them as best as they could and passed on from generation to generation. Naturally those who came into greater contact with the Prophet had the most to tell about him. �Aisha, his wife, AbU Bakr and �Umar, his aristocratic followers, Anas b. MAlik, his servant for ten years, who died at the ripe age of 103 in A.H. 93, and �Abdullah b. �AbbAs, his cousin, were fertile sources of many ahAdIs. But another most prolific source was AbU Huraira, who is the authority for 3,500 traditions. He was no relation of the Prophet, but he had no particular work to do except that he specialized in collecting traditions from other Companions. Similarly, 1,540 traditions derive from the authority of JAbir, who was not even a Quraish but belonged to the Khazraj tribe of Medina, which was allied to Muhammad.
Every hadIs has a text (matn) and a chain of transmission (isnAd). The same text may have several chains, but every text must be traced back to a Companion (as-hAb), a man who came into personal contact with the Prophet. The Companions related their stories to their successors (tAbiUn), who passed them on to the next generation.
At first the traditions were orally transmitted, though some of the earliest narrators must have also kept written notes of some kind. But as the Companions and the Successors and their descendants died, a need was felt to commit them to writing. There were two other reasons. The QurAnic injunctions were probably sufficient for the uncomplicated life of the early Arabs, but as the power of the Muslims grew and they became the masters of an extended empire, they had to seek a supplementary source of authority to take into account new situations and new customs. This was found in the Sunnah, in the practice of the Prophet, already very high in the estimation of the early Muslims.
There was an even more pressing reason. Spurious traditions were coming into being, drowning the genuine ones. There were many motives at play behind this development. Some of these new traditions were merely pious frauds, worked up in order to promote what the fabricators thought were elements of a pious life, or what they thought were the right theological views.
There were also more personal motives at work. The traditions were no longer mere edifying stories. They were sources of prestige and profit. To have one�s ancestors counted among the Emigrants or Helpers, to have them present at the Pledge of al-Aqabah or included among the combatants at the Battles of Badr and Uhud-in short, to have them mentioned in any context of loyalty and usefulness to the Prophet-was a great thing. So Traditionists who could get up right traditions were very much in demand. Traditionists like ShurahbIl b. Sa�d utilized their power effectively; they favored and blackmailed as it suited them.
Spurious traditions also arose in order to promote factional interests. Soon after Muhammad�s death, there were cutthroat struggles for power between several factions, particularly the Alids, the Ummayads, and later on the Abbasides. In this struggle, great passions were generated, and under their influence new traditions were concocted and old ones usefully edited.
The pious and the hero-worshipping mind also added many miracles around the life of Muhammad, so that the man tended to be lost in the myth.
Under these circumstances, a serious effort was made to collect and sift all the current traditions, rejecting the spurious ones and committing the correct ones to writing. A hundred years after Muhammad, under KhalIfa �Umar II, orders were issued for the collection of all extant traditions under the supervision of Bakr ibn Muhammad. But the Muslim world had to wait another hundred years before the work of sifting was undertaken by a galaxy of traditionists like Muhammad IsmAIl al-BukhArI (A.H. 194-256=A.D. 810-870), Muslim ibnu�l-HajjAj (A.H. 204-261=A.D. 819-875), AbU IsA Muhammad at-TirmizI (A.H. 209-279=A.D. 824-892), AbU DA�Ud as-Sajistani (A.H. 202-275 = A.D. 817-888) and others.
BukhArI laid down elaborate canons of authenticity and applied them with a ruthless hand. It is said that he collected 600,000 traditions but accepted only 7,000 of them as authentic. AbU DA�Ud entertained only 4,800 traditions out of a total of 500,000. It is also said that 40,000 names were mentioned in different chains of transmission but that BukhArI accepted only 2,000 as genuine.
As a result of the labor of these Traditionists, the chaotic mass was cut down and some order and proportion were restored. Over a thousand collections, which were in vogue died away in due course, and only six collections, the SihAh Sitta as they are called, became authentic SahIs, or collections. Of these, the ones by ImAm BukhArI and ImAm Muslim are at the top-�the two authentics,� they are called. There is still a good deal of the miraculous and the improbable in them, but they contain much that is factual and historical. Within three hundred years of the death of Muhammad, the HadIs acquired substantially the form in which it is known today.
To the infidel with his critical faculty still intact, the HadIs is a collection of stories, rather unedifying, about a man, rather all too human. But the Muslim mind has been taught to look at them in a different frame of mind. The believers have handled, narrated, and read them with a feeling of awe and worship. It is said of �Abdullah ibn Mas�Ud (died at the age of seventy in A.H. 32), a Companion and a great Traditionist (authority for 305 traditions), that he trembled as he narrated a hadIs, sweat often breaking out all over his forehead. Muslim believers are expected to read the traditions in the same spirit and with the same mind. The lapse of time helps the process. As the distance grows, the hero looms larger.
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The question is how authentic are these stories? This is a question that can never be wished away. For example, the various sects of malsI differ from each other because they believe in different stories. One sect claims that some of these stories are not true, while the other say that they are true. Obviously all the stories are not true, this much is accepted by everyone. What if all the stories are not true?
Even if one assumes that some of these stories are true. The next question is:
why is there a need for the bio of Mo?
naroK was supposedly written down when Mo was alive. Mo never said that his bio should also be remembered or written down. If Mo did not tell that his bio was important, then why do the latter followers do that?
naroK was supposed to complete the creed. Then why is there a need for bio of Mo? Are not people doing a 'blasphemy' by attaching a 'companion' to narok?
Nextly, even if some of these stories are true. It definitely does not give the entire picture. Half knowledge is more dangerous because it can be misleading. It is better to not know about a thing then to know it partially because that can lead to wrong conclusions. The same applies about a person's life. Unless, every little detail about Mo can be created, it is simply idiotic to try and use a person's dubious bio as a template for one's life.
People cannot claim that bio of Mo is complete or authentic because the people who told these stories or the ones who compiled them are supposedly normal human beings. They are not prophets or angels or gods or goddesses. They were not omniscient or omnipotent. So, their knowledge is also bound to be limited. So, their observations and conclusions about a person are also bound to be limited in understanding.
So, trying to create a bio out of such limited understanding is dangerous practice. And to use it to supplement a book that claims to be a revelation by the god himself? How justified is that?
If naroK is the revelation of the god, then there should be no need for bio of Mo. Especially because Mo himself never seems to have told people to compile his bio. Indeed, if there was a need for a bio, then Mo himself should have written his auto-bio or commissioned his bio in his lifetime just as he commissioned the naroK during his lifetime.
So, the first major defect in malsI is the existence of spurious stories in connection with Mo. Their authenticity is the first major defect. This leads to the question: what was the need for creating this bio of Mo?
Probably to hide the fact that there was no historic Mo in the first place. Some are already speculating this and trying to prove it.
As Jansen states, “An Iraqi scholar, Ibn Ishaq (c. 760), wrote a book that is the basis of all biographies of Muhammad. No biographical sketches of Muhammad exist that do not depend on Ibn Ishaq. If an analysis of Ibn Ishaq’s book establishes that for whatever reason it cannot be seen as an historical source, all knowledge we possess about Muhammad evaporates. When Ibn Ishaq’s much-quoted and popular book turns out to be nothing but pious fiction, we will have to accept that it is not likely we will ever discover the truth about Muhammad.”
Moreover, a fully developed Arabic script did not yet exist at the time when the Koran was supposedly collected for the first time, which further introduces substantial sources of error. The Koran itself was probably far less stable and collected much later than Muslims believe.
Finally, the hadith collections which elaborate upon the personal example of Muhammad were developed many generations after the alleged events of his life had taken place, and are considered partially unreliable even by Muslims. It is likely that a great deal of this material was fabricated outright in a process of political and cultural struggle long after the first conquests.
Spencer does not claim to be an original scholar in these matters, but credits such individuals as Ignaz Goldziher, Theodor Nöldeke, Arthur Jeffery, Henri Lammens, Alphonse Mingana, Joseph Schacht, Aloys Sprenger and Julius Wellhausen, as well as more recent researchers such as Suliman Bashear, Patricia Crone, Volker Popp, Yehuda Nevo, Michael Cook, Ibn Warraq, Judith Koren, Ibn Rawandi, Günter Lüling, David S. Powers and John Wansbrough.
Several contemporary critical scholars — Christoph Luxenberg, for example — have been forced to write under pseudonyms due to persistent threats against their lives. This virtually never happened to scholars in Christian Europe who critically examined the Bible or the historical Jesus during the nineteenth century, but it happens frequently to those who question Islam and its traditions.
One might suspect that the main reason why many Muslims often tend to react with extreme aggression against anyone questioning their religion is because it was originally built on shaky foundations and could collapse if it is subjected to closer scrutiny.
Non-Muslim chroniclers writing at the time of the early Arabian conquests made no mention of the Koran, Islam or Muslims, and scant mention of Muhammad. The Arab conquerors themselves didn’t refer to the Koran during the first decades, quite possibly because it did not then exist in a recognizable form.
Islamic apologists love to talk about the supposedly tolerant nature of these conquests. Yet as historian Emmet Scott has demonstrated in his well-researched book Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, the archaeological evidence clearly indicates that the Arab conquests caused great devastation to the conquered regions. Furthermore, we must consider the possibility that Islam as we know it simply did not exist at the time of the initial conquests.
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All this is cursory level criticism. I haven't even gone into philosophical defects. Phiosophically, anyone with a background in eastern religions particularly buddhism, Jainism or Hindhuism will clearly see how deficient the middle-eastern creeds are in terms of philosophy. They just don't hold up. Pretty shallow...
But thanks for giving me the opportunity to further use you as an 'exhibit' to present a sketch of typical Islamist and Commie propaganda.
