My Imam is Better Than Yours

The Crisis of Authority Within Islam

One of the most profound differences between the Christian faith and Islam has to do with the doctrine of perspicacity.  The Christian faith declares that God's revelation to His people is, at root, simple and clear.  The plough-boy can discover understand the core, essential messages of the Scriptures--on his own.

For Islam this is not so.  The believer has no hope of understanding or interpreting the Koran, the hadith, and Sharia without an imam, a teacher.  This explains why it is that what is being declared or taught at particular mosques by particular imams is so significant.  Islam is not a perspicacious faith: it is a hidden and complex religion in which there is no certainty, and no universal clarity.

Can one "get by" in Islam without being tied in to a particular mosque and teaching tradition?  Only if one is content to be nominally Islamic; the fervent believer needs a chosen teacher to make things clear.  Otherwise, all is fog.

The Layman's Koran

If You Fear Your Wife is Disobedient . . . 

Sura 4 is a long rambling chapter in the Koran, although it bears the title "Women".  At 4.34 we read a "money quotation" which explains so much of Islamic society, social organisation, and jurisprudence.

Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the others, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them.  Good women are obedient.  They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them.  As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.  Then if they obey you, take no further action against them.  Allah is high, supreme.

 The Islamic doctrine of women being inferior to men is grounded in their respective being-in-itself.   Allah made the one superior, the other inferior.  The authority of men over women is grounded in one gender being superior in being than the other.  Then, to this ontological distinction, making males superior to females, is added an additional (economic) justification of male superiority--filthy lucre.  Men spend their wealth maintaining women, so women owe their obedience to men.  Like a slaves.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Wife Beating and the Idea of Revelation

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Revelation presupposes three things — a revealer, a recipient, and a message with an accompanying hermeneutic. There is one who speaks, there are the ones spoken to, and there is the message along with the medium that carries that message. That medium would include all the created world, with its atmosphere and sound waves, papyrus, paper, computer screens, ink, toner, ones and zeros, and . . . a hermeneutic. How many times did Jesus tell us that the one with ears should hear?

It is important to get the hermeneutic right. To illustrate how important this hermeneutic is (illustrated by two different versions of it, two distinct theologies of revelation) let us compare two very angular texts with regard to women. The first is from the Koran and the second from Exodus.

[Husbands] “are the protectors and maintainers of their [wives] because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient and guard in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. As to the women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them first, refuse to share their beds, spank them, if they return to obedience, seek not against them means of [annoyance]: for Allah is Most High, Great” (Surah 4:34).

“And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her” (Ex. 21:7–8).

The passage from the Koran instructs a husband on the process required in pious wife-beating. Begin with admonition, and then move on to a refusal to have sex with her. If that doesn’t work, then corporal punishment may be applied. And the modern world says eeeek, recoiling, and rightly so.

Will the Real Islamic Stand Up

10 verses from the Koran essential to understanding the Islamic State

Oct. 14, 2014 

Benjamin Weingarten

TheBlaze

[The president of the United States, Barack Obama has publicly declared that the Islamic State is not islamic.  It's claim to be faithfully following the teachings of Islam and Muhammad is spurious.  Its very name is a lie, Obama alleges.  The piece below suggests that it is Obama who is ignorant, not the Islamic State.  Ed.]

Counterjihadist and Christian apologist blogger David Wood, proprietor of the site, Answering Muslims, published a video recently that has become particularly timely in the wake of the Obama administration’s disavowal of the relationship between Islam and the Islamic State, and the recent spat between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck.

In the video, Wood, who heads the Act 17 Apologetics Missionary and routinely debates Muslims on Islam based upon the Koran and Hadith, argues that the ideological basis for the Islamic State lies explicitly in the Koran.

The Koran Cannot Be Its Own Interpreter

Perpetual Internecine Conflict

We have been re-reading Alfred Guillaume's Islam (Baltimore: Penguin, 1956).  It is well dated now and in many ways serves as a curio.  The author's hope for the future of Islam based upon certain modernising efforts he had observed in his lifetime has now been well and truly dashed by events in our generation.  But in other ways, Guillaume's volume remains relevant.

Some things stand out.  Islam's epistemological foundation is deeply compromised.  The text of the Koran is arranged in an arbitrary fashion,

. . . on the purely mechanical plan of putting the longest chapters first and the shortest last . . . (Ibid., p.58)

so that there is no certainty about which particular passages correspond to what time in the life of Muhammad.

. . . scholars, eastern and western alike, have been busy for centuries in trying to determine to what period of the prophet's ministry a particular sura belongs.  The problem is further complicated by the inclusion of verses which must have been spoken at Medina in suras which begin in Mecca. (Ibid.)

Why might this be a fatal problem?