OK Irfan, thanks for not contradicting my assertion that Islam has a clergy class. Your reply only asks whether any of the flock listen, asking for poll results.
If you have any reliable results to hand, would you like to share them with us? Were they done by non-Muslims? Were they done by Muslims? Would the respondents known about the likely uses to be made by the results? Was Islam polled, or other religions too?
In the meantime, we should not forget that it was Hilaly who made the statements which have provoked such outrage among the Australian community, with many in Australia's Muslim community joining in. I noticed that the non-Muslim comments pointed out that Hilaly's comments were wrong. The Muslim commentary was much more like 'unfortunate' or 'misplaced'. A quick reading of Islamic theory and practice shows why: Hilaly was stating Islamic theory and practice, dating back over 1,000 years. Islam blames rape on women, rather than on men. Come on Irfan - show me the places where it does not.
Thanks for the update on Aisha's age when married, I hadn't come across her being only 6 when married, if 9 when (technically) raped (I say technically because a 9 year old cannot consent to sex: no-one is in a position to say anything about what happened between the two then or afterward).
And a nice posting br TR, I look forward to reading your material again.

Camo, you alleged that Islam has a clerical class. You haven't yet provided any evidence that this is the case. If you make an inherently absurd claim, is it proven just because I don't specifically reject it?

The Mufti of Bosnia is currently in Australia on a lecture tour. He has recently called upon Europea Muslims to become more institutionalised than they already are. He encourages them to follow the example of churches, though not to the extent of having popes or archbishops.

I note with some amusement claims that the Prophet married a 9 year old girl. It especially amuses me that these claims come from those who claim to belong to Christian churches. Seriously, if I had the same lack of intelligence that some of the armchair Nazis on these forums possess, I'd be suggesting pedophilia is a Christian teaching! After all, many churches don't exactly have a sterling record on that front.

Still, just as I insist a small band of lunatic terrorists don't represent Islam, I also insist that a small band of pedophile priests (and the bishops and archbishop who protect them) don't represent Christianity.

Snappy writes: "I prefer my reading to come from all over the political spectrum. Salman Rushdie used to be a Muslim too but check out what he has to say about his former faith."

Salman Rushdie contnues to regard himself as a Muslim. You see, there are many kinds of Muslims. Some practise the faith, others believe in its tenets without practising and still others have a cultural affinity to it. Rushdie belongs to one of the latter groups.

As for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her credibility was thrown out the door when she admitted to lying in order to obtain asylum in the Netherlands. Her book "The Caged Virgin" is also believed to be a literary fraud in that she did not write all the speeches she claims to have. If I'd have known about the controversy surrounding the authorship of her book currently raging in the Netherlands, I'd have mentioned it in my review of the book.

Ali's book does, however, contain important information about undesirable pratices in certain nominally Muslim cultures. These practices need to be dealt with by certain African Muslim communities.

David Boaz wrote;

'TR thanx for that extra info on the various documents. I hasten to add though, on your reliability claim, its much much stronger than you suggest. I've looked at key hadith which have been passed down though various diverse chains of narrators (different narrators, locations etc) and have been astounded at the accuracy'.

I seriously think that you need to do some more reading David!

The Orientalists Ignatz Goldziher and Joseph Schacht put the hadith to the sword more than 50 years ago. Their work was so meticulous that it is now taken for granted by modern Orientalists.

Schacht wrote the following in the 'Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society' in 1949;

'We must therefore abandon the gratuitous assumptions that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet....

The imposing appearance of the isnads in the classical collections of traditions ought not to blind us to the true character of these traditions, which is that of a comparatively recent systemization of the "living tradition". The same is true in the field of history; here, too, the vague collective memory of the community was formalised, systematized, replenished with details, and shaped into formal traditions with proper isnads only in the second century A.H.'

- Cited in 'The Quest for the Historical Muhammad' (Prometheus Books, 2000) page 366. Edited by Ibn Warraq.

What this all means David is that the various isnad ('chain of transmission') grew with the fiction of the oral traditions. The isnad were manufactured in retrospect to fit the particular biographic story. In fact it has often been noted by Orientalists that the more 'perfect' the isnad the more likely it is to be a forgery.

In short - I wouldn't trust the words of the Hadith, or their Isnad, any more than I would trust the words of Sheik Hilali. They are all phoney and out of touch with reality.

Bon jour Irfan,

Salman Rushdie was interviewed by the American magazine Reason in 2005. The interview by Shikha Dalmia, appeared in the August/September edition (see http://www.reason.com/0508/fe.sd.the.shtml).

In the introduction to the interview, the following is stated: "Rushdie’s literary iconoclasm derives not merely from the demands of his subject matter but from a deep personal instinct: his hatred of all orthodoxies, especially religious ones. Although he grew up in a Muslim household, he rejected his faith at a young age and still remains a resolute unbeliever. ... His 1988 book The Satanic Verses included a parody of Islam that incensed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who charged Rushdie with apostasy and issued a fatwa calling for his death.

... [the fatwa] cost him his marriage and isolated him from his young son. The book was banned in India and he was barred from his homeland. Desperate to resume normal life, Rushdie apologized to Muslims and even formally converted to Islam, a move that he later repudiated".

I would suggest that as Rushdie has rejected his faith he belongs to a subset of "lapsed Muslims" who have an Islamic background. Of course his Islamic background also places him in a unique position to offer constructive criticism as to how Islam might take the giant leap from the seveth century to the 21st. See his Washington Post article of August 7, 2005 ("The Right Time for An Islamic Reformation"). The URL is http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/05/AR2005080501483.html

As he notes: "Traditional Islam is a broad church that certainly includes millions of tolerant, civilized men and women but also encompasses many whose views on women's rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views and who, in the case of the Muslim diaspora, are -- it has to be said -- in many ways at odds with the Christian, Hindu, non-believing or Jewish cultures among which they live".

The trouble with people like Yvonne is that they want to sweep this assessment of Islam under the carpet, as it does not accord with their PC views.

David: sorry, but it is not your post that is the scariest thing. It is the Christian Zionists. Many Christian churches think so too. They distance themselves from their philosophy.

Snappy Tom: I respect you are a history teacher and hope you can understand that I learned my history not from your context, but from a very different viewpoint. My entire education was in Dutch and I lived in 3rd world countries in South America and West Africa. Perhaps you can take comfort that my education was therefore shockingly lacking.

When I was 15 years old I had an epiphany when I read a history book written in English. I was puzzled by how much was absolutely false and wrong, till it dawned on me that it was written for and by another people, not the Dutch view! If you really want to have it out re the Barbary Coast we can, but perhaps separately.

There are many, many different books, as I said. I only named two. I named these because I felt they gave a reasoned opposing view to yours. They are not apologists for fundamental radical beliefs, or condone the violence.

Salman Rushdie is not condemning Muslims, neither is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Incidentally, she was 'outed' by someone in her own party, which is centre Right. Theo van Gogh was unknown until the controversy surrounding his movie. He was an anarchist and hated everything. He was a Republican and thought the Royal family ridiculous. Not a pin up boy for the Right and too weird for the left.