I love the smell of religious napalm in the late evening.

"Those who claim that these are men’s teachings are wrong and they are denying the femininity of these great women."
Sura 24: Women receive the order to veil themselves.
Women should cover their “adornment” (v. 31). Contrary to what Keysar Trad claims, this is not a matter of choice, but a divine commandment [by an alpha-male deity]. Ibn Kathir explains: “This is a command from Allah to the believing women, and jealousy on His part over the wives of His believing servants. It is also to distinguish the believing women from the women of the Jahiliyyah [kafirs/pre-Islam] and the deeds of the pagan women.”
What should they cover? In a hadith, Aisha recounts that Mohammed said that “when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands.” Even today some Muslims use this hadith to justify mandating the hijab, or headscarf, for women. The Tafsir al-Jalalayn agrees that v. 31 means that when in public women should cover “all that is other than the face and the hands.

One man's perversity is another man's ideology.
Talking of Aisha......
Sahih Bukhari, Volume 7, Book 62, Number 64:
Narrated Aisha: that the Prophet married her when she was six years old [he was 50ish] and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e., till his death).
This was not a dynastic marriage, that of Mohammed and Aisha. He had his eye on her since she was six, and when she picked up her toys and moved to his house, the intent was clear. Don't just take my word for it - read the Ahadith and the Sira. They make no bones about it.
The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight. He called marriage to a prepubescent girl “a divine blessing,” and advised the faithful: “Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house.” Misogynistic? Sure looks that way.
Mohammed in his Quran promises sensuous, "virgin-rich" Gardens for [male] martyrs dying in military holy war against kafirs (Suras 44:51-56, 52:17-29, 55:46-78, 61:10, 4:74, 9:111). Female martyrs, however, have to make do with being 'attended to by dwarfs' in Paradise. So the men get wine, hot chicks and yummy snacks for dying in the cause of Allah, but women get..... dwarfs?! Misogynistic? You tell me.
Mohammed took for granted that his [male] followers would be having sex with the women that they captured in battle — the wives of the pagan warriors and the wives of the Jewish tribes that they had killed. In the Qur'an it says that a Muslim may marry up to four wives and have sex with the captives that his right hand possesses, which refers to slave girls captured in battle....
So, to sum up - Men in Islam get multiple sex-partners and really good perks and women get the 'freedom sack', loads of kids and most of the housework. Misogynistic? Doh!

Dear_Bushbasher

I welcome your contribution, but

POINT OF DISAGREEMENT.

<<the same silly game can be played with the bible,
and
with any centuries old religious text.
and
it says nothing of modern practitioners of that religion,
unless
those practitioners ascribe an absolute and literal truth to the text.>>

Your primary difficulty is the issue of "literalness" and "modern practitioners".

Bear with me here, as it will take a bit to develop this.

MARX. I doubt that practioners of Marxism/Communism do not take quite literally much of what Marx said about Economic and Social ideas.

JESUS. There were things Jesus said...which clearly were not mean't to be taken "literally" based on context, reason and culture.

EXAMPLE 1. "if your eye sins against you, GOUGE it out" etc. (Symbolic)
MEANING: "Sin is extremely serious, treat it as you would a gangrenous hand.. remove it from your life"

EXAMPLE 2. "If any man would follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and come after me"
MEANING: 'Self denial, self sacrifice are essential for true discipleship- Christ must be first in our lives.

PAUL: When Paul says pastorally "men, treat the younger women as sisters in all purity" he means exactly that...literally.

When he says "Christ died" he is stating a historical fact. But when he adds "for our sins" he is applying the theological/Gospel truth to that indisputable event.

"Christianity" as a faith, is about 'relationship' rather than "regulation and rules". It is based on the idea "If we walk with Christ, we will not 'want' to do immoral or illegal things"

ISLAM="Sharia LAW"
and contains both the relational (more about 'submission' to law than love)and the regulational in the legal/social/state sense.
If you commit adultery, you will be stoned (if married) or lashed 100 times (if ur single)
'proscribed punishments'.

DIVORCE. is based "literally" on surah 4 and Surah 65 and some hadiths.

It's all about 'context' and intent at 'ground zero' until now.

The following is the text of an email I've sent Keysar Trad. I have sent the same email to a number of Islamic Institutes and university-based scholars of Islam.

I await their replies if any.

Dear Mr. Trad,

For many years, in fact for many decades, Muslims have been telling me about what they call "scientific miracles" in the Koran. They assert that the Koran contains scientifically accurate statements that were not known to science until many centuries later.

Prominent among these are Koran 23:12-14 which, so I am told, contains details about the development of the human embryo that were not discovered by "Western*" science until the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century. One Dr. Keith L. Moore is prominently associated with this point of view.

Another commonly quoted example of a scientific miracle is Koran 51:47. This Aya apparently describes the expansion of the universe 13 centuries before Edwin Hubble discovered (re-discovered?) this fact.

Numerous websites now devote themselves to publicising what the authors believe are scientific miracles in the Koran. It seems to have become a sort of global cottage industry.

With that background, a simple question:

--Are the scientific miracles of the Koran part of mainstream Islamic scholarship?

--Or are the proponents of the scientific miracles a fringe group?

To put it another way, are the Koran's alleged scientific miracles a generally accepted truth among Muslim scholars; or are they ideas espoused by the Muslim equivalents of Pat Robertson and John Hagee?

Yours sincerely,

paul l, you address your last post to me.

1) you refer to "christian haters". does this refer to me? if so, on what basis?

2) in reference to an "ugly passages in both" quote, you conclude the message is "ergo [the bible and the koran] are both the same". you declare that this is infantile. have i suggested that the bible and koran are the same in any substantive manner?

it seems to me that what is infantile is to label your opponents haters, and to manufacture your opponents' non-existent stance in order to attack it.

what i wrote, which seems to me uncontestable, is that the bible and the koran both contain absurduties, contain nasty bits that any modern moral and intelligent person would reject. what i wrote was that many modern christians and many modern muslims do so reject this, and that it is infantile to pretend otherwise.

does the koran have more nasty bits than the bible? maybe. who cares? you saying i can't find a truckload of nasty cherries in the bible? if you have two truckloads and i have one, you think that negates my argument?

why do you write such nonsense? you later write "The problem we face is those people who do take the book literally." and this is correct. this is exactly the point.

if you want to argue that today fundamentalist islam is more of a problem than fundamentalist christianity, i would agree. you may even argue that it is in the nature of islam that it is more prone to fundamentalism, and i may even agree to that. the overwhelming majority of muslims (and christians) i have met have been admirable, loving people, but i don't deny the nastiness of fundamentalist islam.

what you cannot do in good conscience is argue that islam is defined totally by what the koran says, rather than by how modern islamic practitioners behave and how they view their own text.

and to do this in bad faith, by cherry-picking the silliest and the nastiest lines, that IS infantile, and it is really nasty.