A woman who refuses to wear the hijab is disobeying Allah and committing a serious sin, putting worldly pleasures above spiritual attainment, and neglecting her duty to the religion of Islam. Many scholars agree that the only reason a Muslim may live in a non-Muslim country is to conduct dawah and bring people to the true religion. How can a woman perform dawah for Islam when she is not even practicing it herself? To do this would be a form of hypocrisy and it will not be successful.
Tag: Islam
Islamic Terrorism
Looks like the San Bernardino shooting is another incident of Islamic Terrorism on United States soil.
Sorry to all the 99.9 percent “good” Muslims. They too have a responsibility. It sure appears as if their religion and their God consistently motivated the believers to kill innocent people to further the control of the religion over its people. Islam appears to me to be a very violent and deadly religion.
Christianity was just like that, but mostly between the years 800 through 1600, at its height during the crusades. It kind of got over this tendency, except in the United States where there are still a few Christians who think it’s a good thing to kill providers of certain medical services in the name of their God. But Christian terrorism is nowadays fairly small.
Muslims, however, should clean up their ranks and straighten out their religion. This is not working very well for them right now. Their extremist arm is obviously trying to pull the world into WW III. Nothing would suit them more than everyone dead, and the caliphate flourishing, keeping women dumb and enslaved, keeping the elite rich, and making peasants of everyone else. Let’s all go back to the year 1200.
Reason in Exile – Excerpt from The End of Faith – by Sam Harris
Here is the first page, the two introductory paragraphs, of The End of Faith by Sam Harris.
THE young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings, and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat beside a middle-aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries that it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a button he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and twenty others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings, and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street and in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan.
The young man’s parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man’s parents by giving them gifts of food and money. These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he of low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort, and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then, so trivially easy— you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it easy— to guess the young man’s religion?
— Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
The End of Faith – and a View of Islam
Over six years ago I reviewed the book by Sam Harris titled The End of Faith.
More relevant today than ever, it is a searing indictment of all religions and how they counteract progress, science and the good and peace in our modern societies. The Muslim religion is lately singled out as one of the strongest culprits. It’s the one religion that somehow gets teenagers to put on suicide belts and blow themselves up in public places. It’s the one religion that does pseudo-medieval reality shows showing YouTube videos of choreographed beheadings. It’s the one that’s associated with atrocities today.
That was not always true. Christianity had its share of killing, genocide, persecution and corruption on a gargantuan scale over the centuries. Fortunately Christians stopped committing atrocities on a large scale around the 1600s or so (for the most part).
Muslims never stopped, and they continue to commit them now, with the help of social media, automatic weapons, and shipments of oil. So, yes, the “good Muslims” are not happy with this, and I understand them. Yet, without a doubt, the fundamental tenets of Islam foment the insanity we are witnessing today.
I invite you to read The End of Faith to educate yourself about all the adverse effects of religion in general and Islam in particular.
The Question of Islam
We will not allow these people to claim they are religious leaders. They have nothing to do with Islam.
— President Obama speaking about ISIS
I differ with President Obama. ‘ISIS’ stands for “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” does it not?
It does not matter what we call it. Let me repeat: It does not matter what WE call it. They call themselves Islamic. That’s what matters. We’re just giving it labels that are convenient to us, and Obama is not just receiving criticism by me but by the majority of the American people.
ISIS is Islamic fundamentalism in the radical extreme. These people are killers, thieves, bigots and rapists, and they are justifying their deeds by telling themselves and their victims that they are on a mission from God.
They are hijacking the Muslim religion, I grant you that, but it is nonetheless Islam that they are using, and that makes it hard for other Muslims to deal with, I must admit.
It is religion in general that often has a message that makes its subscribers think they are better than everyone else. Christians had their turn for a couple of thousand years now, and until just a few hundred years ago Christians murdered, imprisoned, tortured, raped and plundered in the name of their God. The Salem Witch Trials ended in 1692, only when the Governor’s wife was accused of witchcraft. Even the Nazis professed they were Christians, and that’s not very long ago at all.
What baffles me is that the Islamic message is so strong that it gets teenage girls in North America and Europe to sneak onto airplanes to Syria so they can participate in deeds like beheading innocent victims, mass slaughter of members of other religions, shutting down of schools, destruction of art, and the raping and pillaging of conquered villages. What value systems do these teenage girls have to start with that rape and murder sounds desirable and honorable?
I say it here: Islam is a very dangerous and destructive religion, and we are watching its results on YouTube and TV worldwide.
L’Amour est Plus Fort Que la Haine
Love is stronger than hate. Twelve people working at this magazine died for saying this. Another twelve or more were seriously injured.
If you don’t buy into the sky fairy delusions of Islamist fundamentalists, they kill you.
Religious fundamentalists often don’t like the light of day of free speech, when open debate occurs and puts a spotlight on activities perpetrated in the name of their sky fairies.
They take it upon themselves to try, convict, sentence and execute others – whom they call infidels.
I have been annoyed by Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christians judging others, and trying to push their sky fairy tales on the rest of us. But I haven’t heard of anyone but Muslims beheading people on TV, or shooting them in the offices of cartoon editors, or killing children because they are going to school.
Islam must truly be a messed-up religion to keep causing this stuff to happen, over and over again.
We hear outrage from Muslims all over the world condemning these atrocities, distancing themselves from them. Sorry. I am not buying it. Why is it that their religion spawns such criminals?
Islam – the religion that causes death to those that don’t buy into it.
Great stuff to be proud of and teach your children!
The Difference between Sunni and Shia
When the original Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, there was a dispute over the succession.
The early leaders of the Muslim nation were called Khalifat Rasul Allah, the political successors to the messenger of God. Some academics transliterate the term as Khalīfah.
Sunnis believe that Abu Bakr, the father of Muhammad’s wife Aisha, was Muhammad’s rightful successor and that the method of choosing or electing leaders endorsed by the Quran is the consensus of the Muslim community.
Shias believe that Muhammad divinely ordained his cousin and son-in-law Ali (the father of his grandsons Hasan ibn Ali and Hussein ibn Ali) in accordance with the command of God to be the next caliph, making Ali and his direct descendants Muhammad’s successors. Ali was married to Fatimah, Muhammad’s daughter from his wife Khadijah bint Khuwaylid.
The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
[I encapsulated these details from Wikipedia. Learn more details here.]
And thus the dispute started over 1300 years ago and continues to this day.
The two main sects still hate each other sufficiently, at least at the power and leadership level, that they are willing to kill each other and innocent bystanders for it.
Today 87–89% of the world’s Muslims are Sunni and 11-12% are Shia.
Did we really believe that by toppling Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, by the way, in Iraq, one of the countries where the Sunni were actually a minority, we would once and for good solve the ancient dispute between the two Muslim sects? Bush and Cheney, with presumably access to the advice of the best experts on Islam in the world, did apparently not consider this situation sufficiently before they dismantled the power structure in Iraq and the surrounding region. All they did was stir up the powder keg.
Cheney recently remarked that by 2007 or 2008, they had pretty much sewed up the situation in Iraq.
This is history we’re talking about. Things don’t happen in a matter of days, weeks or even months. History sometimes takes years or decades or more to “resolve” situations. The Shia – Sunni situation has taken more than a millennium now. Do we really think they’ll come together now just because the imperialist United States would like them to?
While many Americans now blast Obama for passivity, I applaud him. He actually seems to understand that further meddling with a situation that we don’t even properly comprehend can not result in any satisfactory outcome other than more innocent dead, more American soldiers dead, more billions of American money (that we don’t have) spent, and more anti-American sentiment around the world. Finally, there would be more terrorism directed against the United States as the great Satan, fomenting religious zealotry and escalating world-wide terrorism as a result.
If the Middle East were not rich in oil, none of us would care about it. We would not even be able to point to Iraq on a map. Do you need proof? Point to Liberia or Namibia on a map.
Now that oil as a valuable resource is in decline and the world is rapidly (on a historic timescale) converting to renewable energies, we will see the Middle Eastern countries revert to feudalism and religious irrelevance. I predict it will take no longer than a couple of hundred years and nobody in the industrialized world will give a hoot about the difference between Sunni and Shia – and they will still be killing each other.
Thus are the benefits of religion to mankind.