₦airaland Forum

BetaThings: Hahahaha. Gloves!!! This is a discussion forum. So you can dish out the criticism. But no matter what you say or write,# I know what I know. When I discuss Islam, I am explaining my understanding to people, learning about the religion of others. But I never require validation from non-muslims.
Maybe it is illogical to you. To me it is not. And I really don't set so much store by the thinking of atheists

BetaThings: Sitting in judgement; sitting in judgment



I have no intention of validating or refuting your opinion. History is a teacher

fellis: I read that the Arabic word in the verse which was translated as "beat" can also be translated to mean "separate", as Arabic is a multi-meaning language, and as such no word has a fixed sole meaning. I think the interpretation of the verse would be to seperate and not to beat as there are some Hadith where the Prophet told Muslim men to not beat their wives. One of them;
Narrated Mu'awiyah al-Qushayri: "I went to the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) and asked him: What do you say (command) about our wives? He replied: Give them food what you have for yourself, and clothe them by which you clothe yourself, and do not beat them, and do not revile them."

justaqad: Wife beating anytime and for any reason is never allowed in Islam. There is however a questionable condition where Allah Almighty seems to allow the husband to beat his wife, and that is after he gives her two warnings to stop showing ill-conduct and disloyalty.

what about QURAN?

this is a weak reason.

maclatunji: I don't want or need atheist friends. It is not your fault that you are so hyperactive but your not curbing yourself is the problem.

justaqad: stop lying through your teeth. most muslims despise no-muslims.
you dont need lectures on this

BetaThings: To you, your ideas
To me, my beliefs

So you cannot deny me my right to hold on to what I believe in. Arguing that I must reform, I must reform holds is not binding
I don't come over to your own domain and insist that you must live your live as I want it

Paschal007: -maybe not properly applied but can't go around blaspheming against people's revered deities especially where there's no separation from state and religion. Such action may fall under hate speech, defamation which is a criminal offense. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
-face the consequences of her actions.
-punishment might be fair it's certainly not right to allow hate speech, defamation, etc
-it changes nothing. Us cannot afford to stop flying drones in Pakistan.

Paschal007: what's the right question?

musKeeto: Such an arrogant fellow..

tbaba1234: ^Give it up already, How long do you want to keep rejecting the truth that has been made plain to you??

i. There is no such thing as 'beyond doubt' in science. We are dealing with degrees of certainty. Many things were thought to be 'beyond doubt' until another theory came forward.

ii. Professor Fatima Jackson, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Director of the Institute of African-American Research (UK) is a far more reliable a source of information than wikipedia, wikiboy.

iii. Muslims have no problem with your postulations, we have a book that is beyond doubt for those willing to use their brains. So keep on postulating. The muslim position on evolution is clear and there are no room for debates.

Please read the muslim's position here:

https://www.nairaland.com/1158595/evolution-islamic-understanding

tbaba1234: 1. Is the Idea that humans evolved from non-human ancestors a theologically and scriptural acceptable position for muslims to hold in light of the Quran and the prophetic teachings?

Islamic texts are clear on the origins of man, both the Quran and the sunnah tell us that all of human kind descended from Adam and Eve. They were the first human created directly by Allah and were not born to parents nor did they evolve from previous life forms.

Any attempt to contradict or modify this Islamic argument is scripturally indefensible, historically flawed and methodologically shallow.

tbaba1234: I grew up thinking religion was ridiculous

Journey from Atheism to Islam stunned, disappointed parents

Five months before their marriage, Karen Meek's fiancé told her that he was becoming a Muslim. Ms. Meek, an atheist, was taken aback.
"I thought he was being brainwashed into something," she said. "All of a sudden he stopped drinking alcohol. He wanted to pray every day. He stopped eating pork."
For months, Eric Meek, a lapsed Baptist, had studied Islam without telling her. Now, when he went to work, Ms. Meek poured over his books and videos, trying to understand his faith.
She never expected to be attracted to Islam.

"I grew up thinking religion was ridiculous," said Ms. Meek, 33, of Lewisville. "I didn't believe in God. I had no idea how the universe was created and, frankly, didn't care."
She said Islam had a logic to it that she couldn't resist.

"Coming from an atheist background, I had an easier time accepting Islam than a Christian because I didn't have to unlearn or give up any beliefs," she said.
After getting married, she prayed for the first time while her husband was at work. She learned how from a book.
"Until this point, I had done everything privately, without telling him," she said. "I did not want to join a religion just because he did. I wanted to discover it on my own."
She and her husband began meeting with other Muslims to study the Quran, the holy book of Islam. Eventually, she made her profession of faith.
Her choice of religions stunned her parents.

"One day she came and she wearing a scarf and a dress down to her ankles," said her father, Ray Allred of Carrollton. "I was shocked."
He said he was estranged from his daughter for a time because of her religion. They're close now, though he fears for her safety since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"You want to love your child, but when they do something so foreign to you, it's very difficult," he said. "I'd give anything if she hadn't adopted this religion."
Those comments were echoed by Jane Barrett of Flower Mound, who's Ms. Meek's mother. She said she especially dislikes the hijab, or head covering, that her daughter wears.
"Karen is such a pretty girl with beautiful hair," she said.

Ms. Meek said she understands. After becoming a Muslim, it took her many months to adopt Islamic dress.
"I would wear the hijab places where people didn't know me," she said and laughed. Now, she wears it all the time -- even to work, where she is an accounting clerk for a restaurant chain.
She said embracing Islam has caused her to see life in a new way.

"Going from not believing in God to believing in God is amazing," she said. "Islam opened my eyes to so many things I had taken for granted, mostly that life is a gift."

http://www.muslimconverts.com/newmuslims/Karen_Meek.htm

deols: exactly what do u want us to do about this?

masonkz: Religion has no role in politics.

musKeeto: That's why the Dalai Lama is more Christ-like than the Pope.. ;-)

musKeeto: Love using them on Black Ops 2 though.. Would be really horrible to see first hand the damage they can cause in real life..

musKeeto: Not a fan, neither am I a hater. But I respect his achievements.

Ihedinobi: @lb

The op puzzled over the inconsistency of atheists who are so combatant on faceless Internet forums about their disbelief but lack the courage to remain so in real life with their friends and family. You atheists have been trying to say that it is not cowardice because you face real danger showing your atheism. (Actually, this is funny because cowardice is the very meaning of running from possible, likely or actual danger especially in the face of something you feel strongly about.) You were asked to show this danger but you have only kept saying that it is there or it must be there, anything but show it to us.

Christians and Moslems could be so antagonistic to each other as to not care about or recognize any more real or greater danger in atheism. That is as good a possibility and maybe even better than the one you propose about the two practically ganging up on atheists.


The point about the second bolded, again, is thatit is cowardice to not speak up about something you're so convinced about when you're dealing with flesh-and-blood people but go ballistic on faceless forums with "proofs", "watertight arguments" and heaven-knows-whatt-else and all you did with the bolded paragraph was prove it true.

The third paragraph is a worse waste of time than the other two. It still did not prove that atheists are in real danger in Nigeria for their disbelief or that they are not cowards. It only said that they should be because Nigeria is more religious than the USA a country where, avcording to you, atheists are discriminated against for their disbelief. Question is, are they?

(Actually, this is funny because cowardice is the very meaning of running from possible, likely or actual danger especially in the face of something you feel strongly about.)

I was born in India. I spent my early childhood in Saudi Arabia. My parents are well educated and they raised me with a strong emphasis on Islam. I learned to read the Quran like most young Muslims do. I went to tajweed classes, I attended halaqas, I went on umrah and hajj. When I was still quite young, my family moved to Canada.

After moving to the West, my parents began to place an even heavier emphasis on Islam. We were always what most would consider a moderate family. We thought suicide bombings were haraam, we did not agree with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, but nonetheless we were not too fond of America either.

My parents bought me Islamic literature, they took me to talks given by local imams and shiekhs. They bought me books by Harun Yahya (imagine a Muslim Ken Ham), I spent hours and hours watching videos on the internet by preachers and evangelizers such as Zakir Naik. I was enthralled. I read about the scientific miracles of the Quran. Embryology being in the Quran before scientists discovered it. The miracle of the two bodies of water not mixing, mountains being pegs, the seven layers of the atmosphere, and the big bang. All of these amazing bits of "science" were in my holy book!

When I was about 12, a supply science teacher put on a video in science class. The movie mentioned human history and made a cursory mention of how humans had evolved from other life forms. Right there, in the middle of class, I pulled out a book by Harun Yahya that I had been reading. I called out the teacher. I told him evolution was a lie and that he was making a mistake teaching it to us. I was a shy kid, but I was not going to sit back and let this man lie to my classmates. The poor teacher, I saw his face sink, he was going to say something, but he bit his tongue and turned the movie off. I had won. This was all the proof I needed to reaffirm what Harun Yahya had told me in his books - the scientists all knew evolution was 'just a theory' and all lies. The evil scientists just did not admit the lies they knew they were telling. I felt vindicated.

When I was 13, I enrolled in a Hifz program to make my family proud. My mother had told me how a Hafiz would be asked on judgement day to say the names of ten people he wanted in heaven with him. At first I thought, wait a second, I thought there was no intercession on judgement day. But what my ami-jaan was saying was amazing enough to push the doubt to the back of my head.

At 14, I met a boy in high school. He was a hardcore Salafi. He told me he supported the Taliban. He told me Bin Laden was framed for 9/11 and the West just hated Islam and wanted to kill Muslims. America and the Yahood wanted to start a new crusade against Islam. They would not rest until they conquered all Muslim lands. He told me that the Islam I followed was a "pussified, westernized" version of Islam. Muslims like me were like house negroes. He told me that unless we followed the Sunnah and Quran in its complete entirety, that our faith was lacking. After all, the prophet was the best of men, and that we had to follow him exactly. Up till now, all that meant to me was maybe growing a beard when I was older, entering the washroom with my right foot (yes, Islam has some ridiculous and mundane rules meant to control every little detail of your life), doing dawah, and other such benign things. To me Jihad was an inner struggle. My friend told me it was an inner struggle against Shaitan and an outer struggle against Shaitan's agents - the westerners and the liberal Muslims.

I was confused. My friend told me that his Islam was pure. It came directly from the source. Other sects were based on bida'a. Of course, I knew what bida'a was, but my idea of bida'a was celebrating birthdays and celebrating Halloween. I knew bida'a was used to refer to label the practices of wayward Muslims, but I'd never heard anyone (let alone a young teenager) say the entire world was in jahilliya.

I was torn. As a Muslim, his case for Islam was strong. After all, who was I to question God's own messenger or his message. I decided to do some research. If this was the true Islam, then I would have to become a true Muslim. Not a grocery store Muslim, picking and choosing what to follow.
I read, I read and I read. I read for months. I spent time on forums. I read books. I read everything I could get my hands on.
It sickened me.
This so-called real Islam was disgusting. The stories of Mohammad made my stomach churn. I had a Sahih Bukhari book in my house. It came with commentary. I read it. There were stories about taking sex slaves, the history of the Mohammad's behaviours. I read more about the Ummah, the taba and the taba tabi'en. I tried to find different interpretations, but they didnt satisfy me.
It made me want to throw up. No. This could not be the real Islam. Islam was peace. Islam was submission to God. Islam was getting up early on Eid and watching my mother make kheer. Islam was long nights of taraweeh. Islam was samosas in Ramadan. Islam was science. Islam was a miracle.
I was 16. I couldnt handle it. I stopped reading. I stopped learning. I just focused on school for a bit. I stumbled on a forum of liberal Muslims. They called themselves the Submitters, or Quranists. The Quranist rejected the hadith. Not just some hadith, but the entire corpus of Sunni Hadith and scholarship could be tossed. Every book and every collection. Bukhari, Tirmidhi, Muslim, Abu Dawood, Al-Nasai, Ibn Majah - all out the window. They the believed only in the Quran. I read about how the hadith were corrupt. Allah did not guarantee their authenticity. I read some more. They claimed that the hadith were lies, the Quran was the only truth. Without the hadith, I could reject all the stories about Mohammad's misadventures. I could reject the infighting after his death. I could turn a blind eye to the obvious political maneuvering and posturing the entire ummah took part in from the day Mohammad became a prophet, to the Rashidun Khalifas. After all, we learned what happened there mainly from the Sirah and the Hadith, and the Quranists said it was all bogus. I did not need to hear their proofs. I just wanted a cop out. I needed a way to reconcile the Islam I grew up with and the Islam I had learned about in the past year.

I was happy! I was excited. I started reading about Islam again, I thanked God for opening my eyes to the truth. What a relief. Cognitive dissonance was driving me insane, and how better to stop it than becoming a Quran-only Muslim.
It did not last long. I was at the Masjid, I stayed after Isha to listen to the Imam give a talk on friday nights as he usually did. Today was about wife beating. He read out from the Quran. He explained that wife beating was not allowed in Islam. The Quran simply told us to lightly tap our wives with something like a miswak when she misbehaved, but only after following some other steps.
I knew bullshit when I heard it. I went home and and asked on the liberal Muslim forum. Their answer was the same as the imam. I did not buy it. I read some older English translations and I read that beating was allowed. I remembered what my friend had told me before. My Islam was a "pussified, westernized" Islam. It was changed to fit the time I was in. Wife beating was not allowed in Western society. It was a disgusting crime, so of course it had to be explained away from the Quran. The Quranist's explanation made no sense. They were arguing against history.

Growing up, I was taught every other religion was wrong. If Islam was wrong too, then what else was there? I did not know what to do, so I did nothing.
A few months later, I stumbled across a video on YouTube. It was by a biologist named Kenneth Miller. Miller gave an hour long lecture in support of evolution. I watched. The video was not even over before I knew this was it. It was over. I could not consider myself a Muslim in any sense of the word any more.
Everything I knew. My entire faith. My community. It was built on a lie told centuries ago. Its been five years now. I'm happy. I'm about to graduate from university. I've come to accept the way the world is. I majored in evolutionary biology. (Syed Qutb must be turning in his grave.)My parents do not know anything, but they have their suspicions.I'll be applying to some graduate programs that are really exciting. Whatever happens,I'll be happy. I'll try to live my life without harming anyone. In the past five years, four of my friends have told me they no longer believe in the faith anymore. They came to me because they remember me as the religious one. They were hoping I could soothe their doubts and convince them to come back to Islam.

Hah!
Edit: I wrote this while including Islamic terminology because I wanted to reach out to those Muslims on reddit having doubts and looking for people who can understand where they are coming form. Please join us on /r/exmuslim.

sino: @tbaba, JazakumuLLAHU khayran!

Very solid submissions from the Muslim scholars, science still have a lot to prove in terms of evolution, talkless of origin of life. Alhamdulilah for the blessings of Islam.

tbaba1234: @Sino

Details of the Evolution conference (summary from the conference by Jamshed Javed)

Alhumdulillah, the Evolution Conference in London was a great event, masha'Allah. I think Sh Yasir Qadhi laid the position of Islam very clearly from a theological perspective, which HAS to carry significant weight, not only for the sheer number of reasons why the Qur'an can be demonstrated to be the verbatim Speech of Allah, but also the amount of times science had to take a u-turn to match the Qur'an when it previously opposed it!

Remember, it was less than 100 years ago that it was "FACT" that the universe was static, to the point Albert Einstein invented the 'cosmological constant' for his theory of general relativity in 1915 to fix it from showing the universe as expanding. It was only when Prof Edwin Hubble observed the red-shift in distant galaxies in 1927 (published in 1929) did it become apparent that the universe is expanding... scientists did a u-turn, Einstein called it his biggest blunder ever... and the Qur'an was once again vindicated as being the authoritative truth! It confidently mentioned the universe as expanding over 1400 years ago!

Sh Yasir Qadhi made it abundantly clear that the Qur'an and Sunnah can only be interpreted to mean Adam (as) was created without any parents (i.e. directly), thus Sh Yasir adopted the (what I believe to be strong) position of Adam being created independently of the evolution of other animals (that may or may not have evolved), and placed him such that there's no visible difference from a genetic perspective. He just fits! And by virtue of his special creation, he also has characteristics unlike the animals, e.g. intelligence, reason, speech, etc.

This position also seemed to be further supported by Prof Fatima Jackson who stated, from an evolutionary biological perspective, that all the 'Y' chromosomes (present in males) can be traced back to a specific originator aka "genetic Adam", and the mitochondria that are inherited exclusively from the mothers can also all be traced back to a single originator, aka "genetic eve." As for where these two individuals came from, and are they the Adam & Huwa that is mentioned in the Qur'an, Allah knows best. Science can't answer that.

I also felt Dr Babuna was sadly misunderstood. His comments regarding transient fossils was repeatedly dismissed without, in my humble opinion, understanding or explaining it properly. If a bird had an ancestor which was a type of fish, there should be a significant range of fossils showing the formation of the fins into wings? When evolution was discussed by the biologists, it was with the air that the final forms are here and we can ignore their common origin, which is what Dr Babuna wanted to explore. Unless you can demonstrate through the fossil record that species A evolved from species B, all you have are two distinct points (species A & B) and speculation as to how to join them. To a certain degree, I agree, because the fossil record also contains (in the words of Prof Brian Cox) "an evolutionary Big Bang where a variety of species just appeared." That, to me, is a very strong indication of creation right there, over evolution! Then there's the argument of the origin of life, the soul, etc, which evolution has yet to attempt to explain.

In short, Adam (as) was created, genetics confirm mankind originated from a single male and single female (see Qur'an 49:13), the rest of the animal world may or may not have evolved from a common ancestor, but it seems Adam was placed within the 'mix' as not to look alien to it. And Allah knows best.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE8RyJk-2sE

[size=14pt]Common misconceptions[/size]

Not the only woman
One of the misconceptions of mitochondrial Eve is that since all women alive today descended in a direct unbroken female line from her that she was the only woman alive at the time.[11][12] Nuclear DNA studies indicate that the size of the ancient human population never dropped below tens of thousands. Other women alive at Eve's time have descendants alive today, but sometime in the past, each of their lines of descent included at least one male, thereby breaking the mitochondrial DNA lines of descent. By contrast, Eve's lines of descent to each person alive today includes precisely one purely matrilineal line.[11]

Not a contemporary of "Adam"
Sometimes mitochondrial Eve is assumed to have lived at the same time as Y-chromosomal Adam, who all living people are descended from patrilineally, perhaps even meeting and mating with him. Like mitochondrial "Eve", Y-chromosomal "Adam" probably lived in Africa; however, this "Eve" lived much earlier than this "Adam" – perhaps even some 50,000 to 80,000 years earlier.[13] though recent studies have suggested that the difference may be less than previously thought.[14]

Ihedinobi: You could show me what I missed.

MacDaddy01: If there is social discrimination of atheists, how does it not enter politics? Muslims discriminate against christians in politics/employment in Nigeria and vice versa- however, atheists are loved by both sides? <---- Is this what you believe?


Fela and Soyinka were not atheists. Soyinka vies are shared with millions of Nigerians who are traditionalists.


Furthermore, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There are many atheists who dont speak out in Nigeria and that is why we dont have concrete cases of atheist discrimination.


One can model America is that is slightly less religious than Nigeria with a lot of atheist discrimination in employment, military and politics (with hard evidence, please dont go to the foolish route of Davidylan denying this). Are you now saying that such discrimination can not happen in Nigeria that is more religious than the USA? You trolling?

Ihedinobi: You guys, where is the proof off-Nairaland, among real, living Nigerians not hiding behind anonymity, atheists are discriminated against or face any kind of danger for their disbelief?