Dec 30
I don’t often make reviews of debates, but when I do, it’s usually when I hear a debate that was exceptionally good and is worth commenting on. Perhaps one of the best debates I’ve heard this year was the one between Dr. James White and Abdullah Kunde on the doctrine of the incarnation. The debate took place in Australia back in September 17 of this year. The video of the debate can be viewed below:
Dec 15
HT: Dr. James White
Sep 10
Dear Dr. Esposito,
I just recently read through your article New Narrative for 9-11 and Muslim Americans. It is an interesting piece of writing, and I am always looking for people who are willing to give an apologetic for their viewpoint. In your article, you try to make the case that fears of Islamic extremism in the Muslim American community are unfounded, and that Muslims in America as a whole are well integrated into the rest of western society. I must confess that I am not convinced of your article’s thesis, and I would like to explain why. Read the rest of this entry
Jun 19
This is what Muslims don’t want you to know about the textual history of the Qur’an.
”The application of simple forensic techniques reveal an earlier text that had been washed off and overwritten. Although the hidden text revealed no contradictory meanings, words have been changed, verses and whole chapters rearranged.”
-Narrator
Further Reading:
May 5
But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, an seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practise regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful (Sura at Tawba 9:5).[1]
Although there are over a hundred ayat (verses) in the Qur’an that that pertain to jihad and warfare against the unbelievers, Sura 9:5 is perhaps the most well known among these. For this reason, it has often been called the “Ayah of the Sword.” This comes right in the heels of Sura 9:1-4, which declares the cancellation of any treaties between the Muslims and the Pagans (except those who cooperate with the Muslims), as shown in the preceding four verses:
A (declaration) of immunity from Allah and His Apostle, to those of the Pagans with whom ye have contracted mutual alliances:- Go ye, then, for four months, backwards and forwards, (as ye will), throughout the land, but know ye that ye cannot frustrate Allah (by your falsehood) but that Allah will cover with shame those who reject Him. And an announcement from Allah and His Apostle, to the people (assembled) on the day of the Great Pilgrimage,- that Allah and His Apostle dissolve (treaty) obligations with the Pagans. If then, ye repent, it were best for you; but if ye turn away, know ye that ye cannot frustrate Allah. And proclaim a grievous penalty to those who reject Faith. (But the treaties are) not dissolved with those Pagans with whom ye have entered into alliance and who have not subsequently failed you in aught, nor aided any one against you. So fulfil your engagements with them to the end of their term: for Allah loveth the righteous (Sura at Tawba 9:1-4),
Apr 22
I have just recently finished my one year program at Toronto Baptist Seminary, and I’ve produced four essays for four different courses that I thought would be a good idea to publish online because of their value in Theology and Apologetics. I hope people find these articles useful in helping to better explain the issues at hand.
Apr 11
Earlier today, France has just put into effect a law banning the niqab and the burqa. This law was enacted about a month ago but has just been implemented now. It is the first in all of Europe, which is not surprising, given that France has the largest Muslim population in all of Europe (about 5 million of them at the very least).
Violations of this ban result in a fine of €150. Already, however, there are people within the Muslim community who are making efforts to undermine this law, such as Kenza Drider, who intends to travel from Avignon to Paris wearing a niqab. Another notable figure is Rachid Nekkaz, a tycoon who will be paying off the fines of the burqa law violators. So far, it seems that the French are keeping their word. Two women have already been arrested as a result of this burqa law.
So what are we supposed to make of all this? There are two ways of looking at the situation. The first way (which is the popular approach among those Liberal left and those who are steeped in political-correctness) is that this a violation of the French Muslims’ human rights. Funny since only 2000 women actually wear the veil. Also, if this was the case, then why do Muslims continue to immigrate in large droves to France? Truthfully, large sections of France have already been given over to them, as evidenced by the fact that there are now at least 751 no-go zones in France. Far from violating their rights, France has already bent over backwards to accommodate the Islamic population, and the latter seem to just want more and more.
The second way of looking at the situation is it aims to “protect women from Islamic fundamentalism and improve public security” (link). After all, what better symbol of Islam’s subjugation of women is there than the veil? Also, there is also the security concerns involved, since men have been known to disguise themselves with burqas to commit crimes (as in the case of two armed men in Sarajevo and one radical cleric in Pakistan). Finally, why the total face veil in the first place? For the vast majority of Muslim women in the west, the hijab is already sufficient, and it is only stricter interpretations of Islamic doctrine (the same stricter interpretations one would normally find groups such as the Wahabbis and Deobandis) that advocate going further than that.
Personally, I think the wearing of the veil does the exact opposite of what it’s alleged to do. Muslim apologists say it is for the sake of modesty and to divert attention away from the woman. Yet far from diverting attention away from them, it actually attracts the attention of many of those around them, especially when the women who wear the niqab/burqa is necessary. Also, France has made its move a little too late. The nation as a whole is already on the fast track to becoming a Muslim majority country (possibly the first to go in western Europe), and the burqa ban is just a small bump on the road for those who are advocating the implementation of Shari’a in France and the rest of Europe. Aside from the few instances where the police have successfully arrested offenders, I highly doubt that this law will be enforced with any degree of effectiveness.
Apr 5
The other night, 60 Minutes Australia ran a story on multiculturalism and focused on Islamic fundamentalism. See here for a transcript of the story. The story looked mainly at Islam in Britain and how a group of non-Muslims are fighting for the British way of life against the invasion of Islamic extremism. As evidence of this, 60 Minutes had some secret footage of an Islamic school in Birmingham which showed Muslim children being taught to hate anything non-Muslim.
This sentiment was also shown in the story to exist here in Australia where a similar story of Islamic extremism was told. The thing that got my attention was the response from a young Muslim woman Samah Hadid. Samah was Australia’s youth representative to the UN in 2010. What always seems to happen is that the media here in Australia will go to someone like Samah as a sample of the Islamic community here in Australia for their opinion. Her response to the presence of extremist Islamic ideology amongst the Muslim population was:
SAMAH HADID: I wouldn’t identify with that sort of ideology at all.
MICHAEL USHER: Would many Muslims identify with that?
SAMAH HADID: Absolutely not, not the ones that I know anyway. You know, there was a play about the Cronulla riots…
MICHAEL USHER: Samah Hadid is among the vast majority of Australian Muslims who embrace our social diversity and agree with the Federal Government that multiculturalism has been a stunning success here.
SAMAH HADID: I’d say I’m a product of multiculturalism and so I find it quite interesting when people say that multiculturalism has failed. The majority of young Muslims, Australian young Muslims, that I know do not care for political Islamic or Islamist ideology. They’re just going about their day-to-day existence, trying to contribute to their own professional fields, trying to, you know, make their communities a better place.
MICHAEL USHER: So they’re not out to force Islam on to everyone?
SAMAH HADID: Not the ones that I know and –
MICHAEL USHER: They’re not out to turn Australia into an Islamic state?
SAMAH HADID: Absolutely not. That’s really my representation of the majority of Australian Muslims that I know.
She then goes on to say at the end of the story:
SAMAH HADID: If we ever want to work towards a multiculturalism that works for everyone, we need to stamp out racism and we need to stake a stand on religious prejudices, but also take a stand on those who, you know, do peddle extremist views and say to them very clearly, “You do not represent us.”
While I would much prefer the ideology of Muslims like Samah to be the dominant Islamic ideology in this country – in any country for that matter – I do wonder how reflective her views are of the Islamic community. I don’t know the sample size of people she knows, but my concern is that this kind of reporting seems like a smokescreen designed to distract us from the real possibility that extreme Islam is present, and of considerable concern, in this country.
I also found her last statement quite interesting. The views of these extremist Islamic Muslims may not represent Samah, her friends or even the majority of the Muslim population, but are they representative of the Islamic religion? From my study of the Qur’an, there are ample texts to support “extremist” or “fundamentalist” ideology. So her statement is, perhaps, more revealing than she would have liked. It reveals how nominal her Islamic faith really is. The same is found in Christianity too. Nominal Christians, who associate with the religion but have really no idea of the tenets of that religion. In my opinion, nominal Christians are not really Christians at all and perhaps the same would apply to nominal Islamists.
Personally though, I would much rather be living next to a Muslim like Samah than a Muslim who actually knows and reads their Qur’an, and is committed to carrying out its precepts.
Mar 10
Abdu Murray is a Muslim who converted from Islam to Christianity. In an interview (Oct 17, 2010) with Greg Koukl on his radio show at Stand to Reason, Abdu shares a conundrum he had which triggered his journey from Islam and, eventually, into Christianity.
Abdu was reading the Qur’an when he came across Surah 5:47 “Let the people of the gospel judge according to what God has revealed in it. And whoever judges not by what God has sent down, those are the transgressors.” Having been raised to believe that the Qur’an is God’s dictation in Arabic – which means that every word, verb tense, and grammar is perfect, and that the Bible had been corrupted before the Qur’an came and that the Qur’an had come to correct those corruptions - Abdu realises this is saying, in 7th-Century Saudi Arabia, the gospel existed for people to go and look at, and to judge it as the word of God; as a source of divine truth.
His conundrum was this: Why would God refer them to a corrupted version of the gospel? If the Bible was once God’s Word and it then became corrupted, two things follow. Either God couldn’t keep it from being corrupted or He wouldn’t keep it from being corrupted. If He couldn’t, then He is inept and not omnipotent but rather impotent. If He wouldn’t, then the very revelation in the Qur’an, that affirms the Bible, may not be revelation and why would we trust anything He has to say.
Therefore, Abdu concluded that the Bible had not been corrupted at the time of the writing of the Qur’an in the 7th century. From there it was a simple task to find out if the Bible of the 7th century is the same as the Bible we have today. It was. And the evidence pointed to it being the same for centuries before as well.
At this point Abdu was forced to believe, based on his faith in the Qur’an and his faith in evidence, that the Bible is the uncorrupted Word.
This conundrum is explored further in Alan Shlemon’s “Ambassadors’ guide to Islam” booklet (available from Stand to Reason www.str.org). In this booklet Alan identifies a logical argument with regard to the Qur’an and Islamic teachings and is highly recommended by Abdu Murray.
If you would like to learn more about Abdu Murray and his ministry – Aletheia International, you can visit his website at http://embracethetruth.org/
Feb 26
The Qur’an says that “Allah has made men superior to women” (Sura 4:34). It should be no surprise, therefore, when barbaric actions such as the recent sexual assault of Lara Logan take place where there is strong pro-Sharia sentiment. This is the kind of thing that we hope and pray will be prevented from becoming widespread here in the west, if we do something about it.
For the world’s billion-plus Sunni Muslims, al-Azhar University in Cairo is the center of the theological universe, its faculty and scholars the most authoritative voice on the meaning of Islam. It is not very far from Tahrir Square, ground zero of Egypt’s revolution.
It was in Tahrir Square last Friday that the Muslim Brotherhood began shunting aside other opposition leaders, including Google executive Wael Ghonim. The million Muslims jamming the square hadn’t turned out to hear a good corporate citizen of the Left. In this nation, where a strong majority of the population desires the implementation of sharia, Islam’s legal and political system, the throng turned out to hear and hail Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s top adviser — who, with his al-Azhar doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence, is sharia personified.
Tahrir Square is also the place where, in the frenzy after Hosni Mubarak’s fall, CBS news correspondent Lara Logan was seized and subjected to a savage sexual assault by an Egyptian gang. Coverage of the attack has been muted. There have been testimonials to Ms. Logan’s courage, and one anti-American leftist lost his comfortable fellowship at NYU Law School for failing to conceal his glee over the atrocity. We have heard much about the attack, but have heard next to nothing about the attackers. You are just supposed to assume it was a “mob” — the sort of thing that could have happened in any setting where raw emotion erupts, say, Wisconsin’s capitol.
Except it doesn’t happen in Madison. It happens in Egypt. It happened in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, in the riots that led to Suharto’s fall — as Sharon Lapkin recounts, human-rights groups interviewed more than 100 women who had been captured and gang raped, including many Chinese women, who were told this was their fate as non-Muslims. It happens in Muslim countries and in the Muslim enclaves of Europe and Australia, perpetrated by Islamic supremacists acting on a sense of entitlement derived from their scriptures, fueled by the rage of their jihad, and enabled by the deafening silence of the media.
