Afghan schoolgirls are weeping as they finish sixth grade, knowing their education is over. Under Taliban rule, they are unlikely to ever step foot in a classroom again.
Hey There, I appreciate you citing sources and doing some research yourself! However I would like to clarify the things that I feel are wrong in your argument, I am on mobile so please forgive if the comment is not formatted well
The first thing here is that as far as basic human dignity is considered, both men and women are equal in islam, if anything is permitted for men, it is also permitted for women and vice versa unless explicitly stated otherwise (and innovation is a huge in sin islam)[1]
Nowhere is education banned for women specifically, and it is in fact encouraged (which means for women as well)[2][3]
This is also a nice segue into the fact that islam doesn’t really ‘prohibit’ critical thinking, it deals with supernatural things, nowhere in islam you are taught calculus (cringe analogy i know, but it gets the point across), specifically islam talks about life after death, which we have no idea of, it’s completely open to interpretation, so there is really no answer to what happens after death or why life exists in the first place. Also nowhere in the quran will you find absurd statements like the sky is red like the thread suggests, most of the things that it talks about are established science or real life experiences (sun rising from the east, fruits growing from plants etc), or advice on how to handle situations like loans, marriage, divorces and so on, every institute has some sort of set of rules it is governed by, and you can read through the quran and won’t find anything that straight up contradicts common knowledge or established science, you can just think of it as a general set of rules, also it tackles a lot of things that the arabs of that time dealt with so it alienates some people, but the general rules which apply to everyone are very ‘naturalistic’/real life based, so saying that islam does not allow critical thinking is just wrong imo
Now on the most sensitive issue, the status of women in islam, i would like to point out that any hadith or verse from quran should be taken in context of the time and place it was revealed in the case of quran or said/performed in the case of hadith, things can change quite substantially depending on time and location, there are multiple examples of this of which i’ll add a source later
So in the hadith you mentioned about degeneration of women, i’ll first point out some reasons as to why it was probably said
With regard to a woman’s lack of reason, it is because women are easily swayed by emotions, which make them unable to deal appropriately with new issues that arise.
As for a woman’s lack of religious commitment, it is because women do not pray and fast during the days of their menses and when they are bleeding following childbirth.
As for them complaining, Surah Al Mujadilah (The first few verses) specifically talks about a women who complained to the prophet about the way her husband acted, and she was not the one criticized, instead all men warned about sinful divorce and the compensations they will have to complete(You can read it here https://quran.com/al-mujadila)
Also islam talk a lot about women rights in various other places[4][5][6][7], hence maintaining a sort of equilibrium, both men and women are warned about their wrongdoings
On the last topic of suckling, it has nothing to do with segregation, it was a different matter which this [8]
explains quite well
I would like to end by saying that there is a reason scholars exist who spend their lives studying hadiths and quran, they both have to interpreted carefully to not arrive at the wrong conclusions, your understanding of hadith isn’t perfect, nor is mine, the best I can do is try to explain the best I can, no society is perfect, there are of course of a lot of extremist on any sort of ‘following’, you will even find atheists who don’t want any person who follows any religion to exist, but it is important to understand there are good people and scholars as well, while our opinions might differ, the best thing to do is to try to adopt the good qualities from both sides
And really the point I am trying to make from all of this is that ‘organizations’ like taliban or ‘some’ governments don’t really represent Islam, for them religion is just a tool they can use to bring a ton of people on their sides who will not bother to fact check their claims or even bother to learn about their own beliefs, the perfect example of this is the fact that in photo in the article, you can see a male teacher teaching an all-female class, the more appropriate thing here is to actually have a female teacher, but I guarantee that the taliban doesn’t hire female teachers, which is just enough for any reasonable person to understand the hypocrisy of these (talibani) people
One major problem with the Abrahamic religions is that they are too scholarly in regard to their religious texts. It is horrifying how much collective brainpower has been wasted on this complete and utter bullshit, that could instead have been spent discovering the true nature of the universe.
You say that there are atheists who wish religious people to not exist. That is true, but perhaps not in the way you imply. The vast majority of atheists don’t want to see religious people killed, but rather freed from the bonds of religion, not only for their own good, but for the good of humanity. Religion is in the same category as poverty in terms of degradation and the wasting of human potential. Like poverty, it needs to be eradicated, not by eradicating the impoverished, but by improving education and social conditions.
The video you linked has uh, let’s say a lot of problems
The first red flag being that the individual claims that ‘he is more knowledgeable about islam than anybody else’ which is a major red flag, but let’s put that aside for now
The very first hadith he quotes is da’eef (weak) so that is pretty much irrelevant considering there are sahih(correct) contradictory hadith(s) one of them being this Riyad as-Salihin 1390
https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1390 (Sahih)(Correct), this hadith specifically mentions religious knowledge, and doesn’t specify who gets this knowledge or not
But he uses the weak hadith to push his point anyway, and the reason is because the feeling i get is that this guy is trying to say we should not share any of our knowledge with people of other faiths
Second issue he mentions is that women are not allowed to come to colleges with non mehrams and not learn anything that takes them away from islam and uses it as the reason girls are not supposed to study in Islam, what he conveniently misses out though is that men are also subject to these rulings, and i don’t think men have any problem going to colleges, flip this guy from atheist to religious and this is the type of guy who would ban women from education, I think i don’t need to explain the mentality this guy has, also there is a thing called ‘concessions’ which are granted by scholars, and most of the (decent) scholars are of the opinion that studying in co-ed schools and colleges is permissible as long both the sides stay within the prescribed rulings
Third: This guy picks a random guys book who I have never heard of and starts quoting whatever he has written, safe to say i don’t care what ‘Ashraf Ali Thanvi’ has to say, he never seems to derive any of his opinions from quran and sunnah, i have already mentioned that no society is perfect, while I have never even seen the book, let alone heard this guys name, I will admit that there maybe some places where this guy is popular, and I will wholeheartedly admit that this is a problem, the source of sharia is hadith and quran, and ijma (see the last part) (and to some extent the four imam’s of fiqh) anyone who starts saying whatever they think is best/appropriate is dishonest
Then at 15:50, he says the most ridiculous thing possible, he shows a fatwa where IT CLEARLY STATES THAT IT IS PERMISSIBLE FOR HER TO STUDY IF THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES and then he proceeds to ask what if these laws are not met, what laws are not met? I don’t know about any college that forces male and female people to sit together, or make them talk forcefully, because if something like that exists, it is an issue on a state level, people are given freedom of expression, no women (or men) should be forced to do anything.
He then proceeds to say the prophet only took help from women in those things which the women were able to do, what? How can someone do something they can’t do, the statement doesn’t even make sense, this was really the point where I was about to close the video but then he said some other things that i think could be clarified, you can learn more about women treating men in battle here: https://www.islamweb.net/en/fatwa/156919/the-life-of-rufaydah-al-aslamiyyah
His argument about The university of qarawiyyin is also so ignorant it’s hilarious, he didn’t even bother to read the Wikipedia page which clearly states that there is lack of documentation about who used to study there and what type of studies were there, regardless if it’s fake or not, he used this to try to prove his point anyway, if you dig deeper into wiki you will find this:
Students were male, but traditionally it has been said that “facilities were at times provided for interested women to listen to the discourse while accommodated in a special gallery (riwaq) overlooking the scholars’ circle”.
Like I said, that there is a lack of documentation, so really anything is to be taken with a grain of salt, it also shows that there was period of decline until the early 1900’s meaning there were probably fewer students, it was finally reformed in the early-mid 1900s until it was finally integrated into the state educational system in 1947, and women have been studying there since 1940’s.
Overall this is just a pathetic source when you are trying to prove something.
I would also like to add that a hypothesis is not given by a conducting one experiment, a lot of factors are taken into account and the experiment is repeated multiple times with different conditions, similarly picking one ayah from the quran and using it to prove a point doesn’t make a lot of sense, you need look at the context, and the other verses and hadiths as well, which i have already provided a few and you can look for more yourself, or if you want I can list them, which will take a lot of time on my side
The next slave girl concept has been long obliterated in today’s modern world, you have to remember like i said in my previous comment, quran also has a lot of laws for the arabs of that time which have been called illiterate a variety of times, people really used to marry practically infinite amount of women and even their mothers, there are many hadiths that talk about releasing slaves and how rewarding it is [1][2][3] in fact it is a compensation in many cases where you miss important religious duties, to the point where the system has died (i am not saying Islam did it, it happened due to a variety of reasons)
Also even in that time you just couldn’t make any girl a slave, this was only for the prisoners of war, you were supposed to share your food and wealth with them and help them in tough works, I am not saying that having a slave is even remotely justified today, but what i am saying is that there is a lot more nuance to it
Also in response to some other replies, I am not really trying to influence or change your opinion, you are absolutely entitled to your opinions, I am just writing this to speak about how many muslims I see who are discriminated by people because of terrorist organizations or an incomplete understanding of Islam, even if you don’t agree with the teachings, it doesn’t even remotely justify people using terrible words and accusing them of actions they didn’t do in the first place, not just about islam, i could make a similar case about judaism, christianity or any other religion for that matter.
Some people need to start seeing other people as people first not muslim/christian/jew/atheist
Side-note: Ijma is “ Ijmāʿ (Arabic: إجماع ʾiǧmāʿ [ʔɪd͡ʒˈmæːʕ], “consensus”) is an Arabic term referring to the consensus or agreement of the Islamic community on a point of Islamic law.”, not something a random guy said on youtube
It isn’t about religion with any of these types. Rather, it’s about religion being a tool they can use so that those who do think it’s all about religion allow them to have authority.
Religion is the second worst plague visited on humanity. As you say, the worst is the lust for power over others. Religion, especially the Abrahamic religions, is second because it is uniquely positioned to facilitate the ambitions of those who lust for power. Pure violence can subjugate a population for a while, but real, long-lasting, self-regulating, trans-generational oppression has usually required religion.
I don’t disagree with you but I think it’s important to draw a distinction between the motives for that influence, which I believe falls primarily between three possibilities: someone seeking to save souls (or true believers with no personal motive other than maybe getting points for their own soul), someone seeking to manipulate others into being good to each other, and someone just seeking personal power and who will adjust the “good” their religion supports based on their situation.
They can all blur into each other, so reality is a bit more complicated than that, but what I wanted to express was that most (if not all) religious leaders present as the first, but some not insignificant portion of them (if not all) actually fall more into the 2nd or 3rd categories. They don’t believe in the same god that their followers believe in.
No where in Islam does it say that girls are not allowed to study, what a fucking bunch of dimwits these people are…
Edit: Narcissist would be the right word here
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Hey There, I appreciate you citing sources and doing some research yourself! However I would like to clarify the things that I feel are wrong in your argument, I am on mobile so please forgive if the comment is not formatted well
The first thing here is that as far as basic human dignity is considered, both men and women are equal in islam, if anything is permitted for men, it is also permitted for women and vice versa unless explicitly stated otherwise (and innovation is a huge in sin islam)[1]
Nowhere is education banned for women specifically, and it is in fact encouraged (which means for women as well)[2][3]
This is also a nice segue into the fact that islam doesn’t really ‘prohibit’ critical thinking, it deals with supernatural things, nowhere in islam you are taught calculus (cringe analogy i know, but it gets the point across), specifically islam talks about life after death, which we have no idea of, it’s completely open to interpretation, so there is really no answer to what happens after death or why life exists in the first place. Also nowhere in the quran will you find absurd statements like the sky is red like the thread suggests, most of the things that it talks about are established science or real life experiences (sun rising from the east, fruits growing from plants etc), or advice on how to handle situations like loans, marriage, divorces and so on, every institute has some sort of set of rules it is governed by, and you can read through the quran and won’t find anything that straight up contradicts common knowledge or established science, you can just think of it as a general set of rules, also it tackles a lot of things that the arabs of that time dealt with so it alienates some people, but the general rules which apply to everyone are very ‘naturalistic’/real life based, so saying that islam does not allow critical thinking is just wrong imo
Now on the most sensitive issue, the status of women in islam, i would like to point out that any hadith or verse from quran should be taken in context of the time and place it was revealed in the case of quran or said/performed in the case of hadith, things can change quite substantially depending on time and location, there are multiple examples of this of which i’ll add a source later
So in the hadith you mentioned about degeneration of women, i’ll first point out some reasons as to why it was probably said
With regard to a woman’s lack of reason, it is because women are easily swayed by emotions, which make them unable to deal appropriately with new issues that arise.
As for a woman’s lack of religious commitment, it is because women do not pray and fast during the days of their menses and when they are bleeding following childbirth.
As for them complaining, Surah Al Mujadilah (The first few verses) specifically talks about a women who complained to the prophet about the way her husband acted, and she was not the one criticized, instead all men warned about sinful divorce and the compensations they will have to complete(You can read it here https://quran.com/al-mujadila)
Also islam talk a lot about women rights in various other places[4][5][6][7], hence maintaining a sort of equilibrium, both men and women are warned about their wrongdoings
On the last topic of suckling, it has nothing to do with segregation, it was a different matter which this [8] explains quite well
I would like to end by saying that there is a reason scholars exist who spend their lives studying hadiths and quran, they both have to interpreted carefully to not arrive at the wrong conclusions, your understanding of hadith isn’t perfect, nor is mine, the best I can do is try to explain the best I can, no society is perfect, there are of course of a lot of extremist on any sort of ‘following’, you will even find atheists who don’t want any person who follows any religion to exist, but it is important to understand there are good people and scholars as well, while our opinions might differ, the best thing to do is to try to adopt the good qualities from both sides
And really the point I am trying to make from all of this is that ‘organizations’ like taliban or ‘some’ governments don’t really represent Islam, for them religion is just a tool they can use to bring a ton of people on their sides who will not bother to fact check their claims or even bother to learn about their own beliefs, the perfect example of this is the fact that in photo in the article, you can see a male teacher teaching an all-female class, the more appropriate thing here is to actually have a female teacher, but I guarantee that the taliban doesn’t hire female teachers, which is just enough for any reasonable person to understand the hypocrisy of these (talibani) people
[1] https://sunnah.com/nasai:1578
[2] https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1388
[3]https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1383, https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1385
[4] https://quran.com/an-nisa/19
[5] https://quran.com/an-nisa/32
[6] https://sunnah.com/muslim:1468a
[7] https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:3895
[8] https://islamqa.org/hanafi/daruliftaa/8424/clarification-of-hadith-about-the-suckling-of-a-grown-man/
One major problem with the Abrahamic religions is that they are too scholarly in regard to their religious texts. It is horrifying how much collective brainpower has been wasted on this complete and utter bullshit, that could instead have been spent discovering the true nature of the universe.
You say that there are atheists who wish religious people to not exist. That is true, but perhaps not in the way you imply. The vast majority of atheists don’t want to see religious people killed, but rather freed from the bonds of religion, not only for their own good, but for the good of humanity. Religion is in the same category as poverty in terms of degradation and the wasting of human potential. Like poverty, it needs to be eradicated, not by eradicating the impoverished, but by improving education and social conditions.
He is not wrong lol. His interpretation is just more “originalist”
You can reform islam all you want but the text says what it says.
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The video you linked has uh, let’s say a lot of problems The first red flag being that the individual claims that ‘he is more knowledgeable about islam than anybody else’ which is a major red flag, but let’s put that aside for now
The very first hadith he quotes is da’eef (weak) so that is pretty much irrelevant considering there are sahih(correct) contradictory hadith(s) one of them being this Riyad as-Salihin 1390 https://sunnah.com/riyadussalihin:1390 (Sahih)(Correct), this hadith specifically mentions religious knowledge, and doesn’t specify who gets this knowledge or not
But he uses the weak hadith to push his point anyway, and the reason is because the feeling i get is that this guy is trying to say we should not share any of our knowledge with people of other faiths
Second issue he mentions is that women are not allowed to come to colleges with non mehrams and not learn anything that takes them away from islam and uses it as the reason girls are not supposed to study in Islam, what he conveniently misses out though is that men are also subject to these rulings, and i don’t think men have any problem going to colleges, flip this guy from atheist to religious and this is the type of guy who would ban women from education, I think i don’t need to explain the mentality this guy has, also there is a thing called ‘concessions’ which are granted by scholars, and most of the (decent) scholars are of the opinion that studying in co-ed schools and colleges is permissible as long both the sides stay within the prescribed rulings
Third: This guy picks a random guys book who I have never heard of and starts quoting whatever he has written, safe to say i don’t care what ‘Ashraf Ali Thanvi’ has to say, he never seems to derive any of his opinions from quran and sunnah, i have already mentioned that no society is perfect, while I have never even seen the book, let alone heard this guys name, I will admit that there maybe some places where this guy is popular, and I will wholeheartedly admit that this is a problem, the source of sharia is hadith and quran, and ijma (see the last part) (and to some extent the four imam’s of fiqh) anyone who starts saying whatever they think is best/appropriate is dishonest
Then at 15:50, he says the most ridiculous thing possible, he shows a fatwa where IT CLEARLY STATES THAT IT IS PERMISSIBLE FOR HER TO STUDY IF THERE ARE NO ALTERNATIVES and then he proceeds to ask what if these laws are not met, what laws are not met? I don’t know about any college that forces male and female people to sit together, or make them talk forcefully, because if something like that exists, it is an issue on a state level, people are given freedom of expression, no women (or men) should be forced to do anything.
He then proceeds to say the prophet only took help from women in those things which the women were able to do, what? How can someone do something they can’t do, the statement doesn’t even make sense, this was really the point where I was about to close the video but then he said some other things that i think could be clarified, you can learn more about women treating men in battle here: https://www.islamweb.net/en/fatwa/156919/the-life-of-rufaydah-al-aslamiyyah
His argument about The university of qarawiyyin is also so ignorant it’s hilarious, he didn’t even bother to read the Wikipedia page which clearly states that there is lack of documentation about who used to study there and what type of studies were there, regardless if it’s fake or not, he used this to try to prove his point anyway, if you dig deeper into wiki you will find this:
Overall this is just a pathetic source when you are trying to prove something.
I would also like to add that a hypothesis is not given by a conducting one experiment, a lot of factors are taken into account and the experiment is repeated multiple times with different conditions, similarly picking one ayah from the quran and using it to prove a point doesn’t make a lot of sense, you need look at the context, and the other verses and hadiths as well, which i have already provided a few and you can look for more yourself, or if you want I can list them, which will take a lot of time on my side
The next slave girl concept has been long obliterated in today’s modern world, you have to remember like i said in my previous comment, quran also has a lot of laws for the arabs of that time which have been called illiterate a variety of times, people really used to marry practically infinite amount of women and even their mothers, there are many hadiths that talk about releasing slaves and how rewarding it is [1][2][3] in fact it is a compensation in many cases where you miss important religious duties, to the point where the system has died (i am not saying Islam did it, it happened due to a variety of reasons)
Also even in that time you just couldn’t make any girl a slave, this was only for the prisoners of war, you were supposed to share your food and wealth with them and help them in tough works, I am not saying that having a slave is even remotely justified today, but what i am saying is that there is a lot more nuance to it
Also in response to some other replies, I am not really trying to influence or change your opinion, you are absolutely entitled to your opinions, I am just writing this to speak about how many muslims I see who are discriminated by people because of terrorist organizations or an incomplete understanding of Islam, even if you don’t agree with the teachings, it doesn’t even remotely justify people using terrible words and accusing them of actions they didn’t do in the first place, not just about islam, i could make a similar case about judaism, christianity or any other religion for that matter.
Some people need to start seeing other people as people first not muslim/christian/jew/atheist
[1] Sahih al-Bukhari 2517 https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2517
[2] Sahih al-Bukhari 2518 https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2518
[3] Sahih al-Bukhari 2519 https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2519, Sahih al-Bukhari 2520 https://sunnah.com/bukhari:2520
Side-note: Ijma is “ Ijmāʿ (Arabic: إجماع ʾiǧmāʿ [ʔɪd͡ʒˈmæːʕ], “consensus”) is an Arabic term referring to the consensus or agreement of the Islamic community on a point of Islamic law.”, not something a random guy said on youtube
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Insightful!
Infact, in thr quran, Allah encourages everyone to gather knowledge.
These fuckers are making a mockery of Islam
The religulous are always the worst at all things, ironically including being religious.
rampant misogynists would be appropriate too.
It isn’t about religion with any of these types. Rather, it’s about religion being a tool they can use so that those who do think it’s all about religion allow them to have authority.
Religion is the second worst plague visited on humanity. As you say, the worst is the lust for power over others. Religion, especially the Abrahamic religions, is second because it is uniquely positioned to facilitate the ambitions of those who lust for power. Pure violence can subjugate a population for a while, but real, long-lasting, self-regulating, trans-generational oppression has usually required religion.
Brother, that’s literally the point of all religion. Religion is by definition a social institution intended as a tool for public influence.
I don’t disagree with you but I think it’s important to draw a distinction between the motives for that influence, which I believe falls primarily between three possibilities: someone seeking to save souls (or true believers with no personal motive other than maybe getting points for their own soul), someone seeking to manipulate others into being good to each other, and someone just seeking personal power and who will adjust the “good” their religion supports based on their situation.
They can all blur into each other, so reality is a bit more complicated than that, but what I wanted to express was that most (if not all) religious leaders present as the first, but some not insignificant portion of them (if not all) actually fall more into the 2nd or 3rd categories. They don’t believe in the same god that their followers believe in.
I think most assume that they are true believers.