Somebody who joined the Taliban should appreciate that, surely he's happy that he's still alive, considering the value system he embraced.

Irfan's attempts at trying to "taqqiya" us by claiming nonsense about the caliphate being the condition for it to happen, that there are alternative verses is laughable.

I've read the Hadiths Irfan, those that are widely accepted by Muslim scholars. They reveal Mohammed to be nothing short of a paedophile, maniac, dictator, who indulged in child rape and massacred people.

Now, that's in the past I know, although I still don't see how he stands up as a role model, and frankly, that he does explains the state of the Arab world (Oh, that's right, Muslim cultures are intensely racist, tribal, cruel, misogynist because the west colonised them!) but Irfan you can't dismiss his teachings. What are you, a heretic? Off with his head!

Irfan seems to be the type of Muslim that picks & chooses what he wants from Islam, which I believe is good & Islam needs more of those who denounce the barbaric aspects of Islam, but Irfan doesn't denounce anything.

His last article was one of support for Sharia, which made him a NAZI to anybody who values western developed human rights. How can one deny the logic of universal human rights, where there are no caste systems, no disgusting racist tribalism, misogyny?

His rant about different interpretations of Sharia is pointless too. All that matters Irfan is how Muslims are living right now, and it's nothing short of utter barbarism.

Honour killings, female genital mutilation, burqa's, misogyny, arranged marriages (what a joke that some Muslims point out the divorce rates are extremely low from arranged marriages. Yes, they are, and domestic violence and paedophilia is non-existant too! Um.....they just don't report it for fear of death. When Islam confronts paedophilia, as one documentary maker in Afghanistan tried to do - it's rampant but a forbidden topic as it would shame family honour, what honour?) as well as disgustingly xenophobic marriage practises where it's uncommon for an Iraqi to marry an Afghani, and so on.

Benji says: "We can't have courts with western standards in these instances as they are too technical."

Which I guess is another way of saying: "The best way to protect our freedom anbd liberty is to get rid of our freedom and liberty."

And that's exactly what Ossama wants you to do.

Methinks it isn't just extreme interpretations of Islam that's the problem ...

BOAZY

Though you are of the "godbotherer" persuasion the points in your post above are, as usual, thought provoking.

- particularly how the viewpionts of Muslims relate to the particular country they live in.

If young Irfy has a relatively liberal view of Islam because he is a highly educated Australian does that give cause for hope that Islam is not the monolithic set of customs and beliefs that so many in OLO assume.

Are the young Lebanese-Australian gangsters in Sydney unlike many Muslims in Sydney (including aforesaid Irfy) because their parents came from a wartorn, near tribal, country were levels of education were low? Are their religious belefs governed by this background.

The Afghani case implies the same thing. The shade of a person's Islam depends on their upbringing, education and former (or current) country.

The generalisation ("Islam bad") of so many posters does not reduce conflict or assist security bodies in nailing the right people.

GALTY

Thank for your relevant comments. "Galantant" is a new word which I take to mean one who is "nobly or selflessly resolute." If I made passing comments about you petal I'd have to be an Entomologist.

Pete

"Guess what,Muslims in the news again."

I think Muslims like being noticed since then they can surrepticiously push their agendas through the thrust and parry of debate and we will eventually placate them through sheer weakness and exhaustion.

Irfan cleverly plays both sides of the fence,without making real commitments to either and then often slips his Muslim agenda under the covers in a seemingly more palitable form.The "beaker frog"is at work,slowly simmering at our freedoms in the name of a dictorial religion.

You labelled us the "armchair nazis" Irfan,the free thinkers,who have a philosophy of people being able think for themselves.Do you see some irony here?

Dear Erfan, as an expert in Sharia Criminal law who advocates a paradigm shift in understanding of Sharia, I have been impressed by this new interpretation on the classical theory of Al Maqased Al Sharia (Theory of Sharia Ultimate Goals) by professor Fallakh. But this kind of interpretation though is encouraging is not compatible with the classical understanding of the theory from Ghazaly to Al Shatebi totally. Al Shateby who professionally developed this theory has never given such a freedom based articulation of it. He just says that protection of religion, for instance, is the ultimate goal of Sharia and in his main book, Al Movafeghat, describes that Apostasy in its classical terms has been provided by Allah because he or she wanted to protect the religion. Al Shateby gives no space for freedom of religion or religion change. So methodologically seen, we are not allowed to cut off the historical roots of a theory and still say this is what earlier has been argued. This is a fallacy.

Therefore, I think that more than wishful interpretation of Sharia rulings we need a sophisticated new theory of Ijtihad, i.e. a methodology of Islamic law that highlights, both in theory and practice, how political power-based reading of Sharia and criminal law in some Islamic countries has led to violence. Without a profound understanding of legal and political tradition in Islam, moreover, we cannot hope to quell the region’s intolerable level of violence.
I believe that the original place of the question is not in jurisprudence, rather in the ontology of Islamic legal thought. From this point, the discussion draws on the scope of ontology of understanding and interpretation of Islamic criminal justice jurisprudents. The ontology of understanding and interpretation, in its turn, draws our focus to the study of prejudices, questions and expectations of Fuqaha and Mutkkallemin (Theologians). According to this perspective, which could be regarded as a new paradigm in Islamic legal theory, the right response to the present crisis of Islamic criminal justice can only be expected when changes in those prejudices, questions and expectations have occurred

Sanity in this world is but an island battered in an ocean of frothing delusion where one increasingly sees an older and deeper enmity ....... i.e. a world full of insane people reduced from being citizens to being infected hosts imprisoned by their fairytales and magic. This is teddy (god) wars driven by rival concepts of absolutism. We are seeing another age of orchestrated global absolutism.

Absolutism grows from the two baser instincts of humans ........ fear of death and desire for power. History always tells us that people in times of stress will first turn to these spooky beliefs of silly religious magic for answers which as we always find, simply leads to self fullfilling prophesies of destruction. There are no solutions in pure selfishness and ignorance.

Truth, like everything else, can only be relative because truth is only truth in relation to things that are untrue. For truth to exist, something must be proven false. For all these unfortunates infected with some variant of the teddy (god) mind virus, like Irfan Yusuf, one needs to say that absolute truth has no place in the real world ....... moderately infected or not.

e.g.
When people discuss any issue, they are likely to do so through different ..... even mutually exclusive ..... a priori sets of assumptions or beliefs about the nature of reality and the human place in it. For all perceptual, emotional, and behavioral purposes, people in fact can live in quite different realities. With such species dissociation, it is not unusual for different groups to be psychologically unable to draw compatible conclusions from the same fact.

How do people then cope with this situation? Certainly not with an inflexible set of belief stamped absolutes supposedly coming from some fantasy teddy (god). Democratic processes alone offer sanity because we cannot ignore the imperfections produced by INFINITY.