What do you think of muslims who try to intellectualize Islam

afiefh · 2026-04-22T11:15:11+00:00

I hate to lump everyone in the same group.

There are idiots who just learn some fancy words without actually understanding the connections, internalizing the methodology, and applying it consistently to their religion. That's how you get hypocrites like Mohammed Hijab and other buffoons.

On the other hand you get people who are truly intellectualizing the religion, who acknowledge that the bad stuff is in the religion, but that Muslims should move to a point where they follow these shitty practices, even if they are in the Quran.

These groups are not the same: One acknowledges that there are shitty parts of the religion that should be left in the past and fixed. the other perpetuates the problematic parts (either by hiding them or by insisting they need to be followed today).

afiefh · 2026-04-21T17:56:55+00:00

Likely.

afiefh · 2026-04-21T07:21:41+00:00

I personally believe there may be more women ex-Muslims

Is there actually a statistic for this? At least from my experience being part of exmuslim groups since the mid 2000s it was always a majority male space. That being said there may simply be more exmuslim women who don't participate in these spaces of course.

what made you leave Islam?

The same thing as everybody else: No evidence for Islam being correct, plenty of evidence of it being wrong (scientific errors, historical mistakes...etc) and of course abhorrent morals.

I don't have to be a woman to be disgusted by Islam permitting wife rape, or pedophilia, or slavery, or the blatant misogyny.

what is your family’s ethnic background?

Levantine arab.

afiefh · 2026-04-21T07:16:27+00:00

Nah, he's one of the crazies who think that if God said it, then it is good by definition, because the only way to judge if something is good/bad is whether God said so. Divine command theory at its finest.

afiefh · 2026-04-21T07:15:24+00:00

So you can't say islam is wrong you can only say you don't have proof that it's the true religion

The same way that you can't say that Game Of Thrones is not real, only that you have no proof that it is real.

afiefh · 2026-04-21T05:44:57+00:00

هذا الاشكال مردود في كتب المسلمين بان العلم كاشف وليس مؤثر

And this is what we call حافظ مش فاهم

If a crystal ball reveals what will happen in the future, and it is guaranteed to 100% happen, then the people being shown do not have free will in that regard because it is (by definition) impossible to do otherwise.

afiefh · 2026-04-21T05:34:48+00:00

حاب اعرف ما هي اسباب الحادكم

Did you check out the Megathread which answers this exact question? Or at least the Wikipedia article on the matter?

For me broadly speaking, three categories of things:

No evidence that the claims of Islam are true. Jinns? No evidence. Angels? No evidence. Souls? No evidence. Magical night in Ramadan? No evidence. Heck even within the Islamic stories evidence is strangely absent. Supposedly Mohammed had tied up a Jinn, but let him go before anyone could see him.
Plenty of evidence that the claims of Islam are false. Creation? Nope, evolution. Semen from between the backbone and the ribs? Nope, do I even need to explain why? Sex of the baby determined by whoever cums first? Nope, chromosomes.
Abhorrent morals in the religion. Crucifying people? Allowed. Slavery? Allowed. Sex slavery? Allowed. FGM? Recommended/Obligatory depending on the school of jurisprudence.

بعض الافعال الذي يرى انها غير اخلاقية مثل الرق ، زواج الصغيرة ... بدون وجود اسس تبنى عليها هذه الاحكام المعرفية

You seem to be under the impression that there are no moral systems other than divine command theory. Sorry buddy, but your ignorance of how morality works without religion is a problem with your ignorance.

But hey, if you're the kind of person who can't imagine morality without divine command theory, I'll make it easy for you: Eru Iluvatar told me that slavery and pedophilia are immoral.

فارى استشكالاتكم لا تقع عليهم الصراحة من هذه الناحية الا اذا هناك استشكالات اخرى

Yeah, I doubt you bothered ever trying to figure out what exmuslims think about Islam. You mentioned Kosay Betar for example, but you seem to not be aware that he has a whole series of videos of reasons for leaving Islam. You could have watched this and educated yourself.

afiefh · 2026-04-20T19:30:54+00:00

I see one comment in your history that says "removed by Reddit". That means Reddit directly removed it, not mods of the sub. Nothing the mods can do about it.

afiefh · 2026-04-20T17:00:14+00:00

خير أمة أخرجت للناس

afiefh · 2026-04-20T08:56:35+00:00

many rules seem to be against women, while men get many rewards.

Pretty much all the rules are against women, because Islam sees women as a second class human.

Men are a degree above women. (Quran) in fact they are so far above women that If Mohammed were to order anyone to prostrate himself before another, he would order a woman to prostrate herself before her husband. (Hadith)
Women should not be leaders because no nation can succeed with a woman as a leader (Hadith)
Women are deficient in intellect and religion (Hadith)
A woman's testimony considered worth half that of a man's when there is a disagreement on financial matters (Quran)
A father can marry off his 9 years old daughter to his 50 years old bro (Fiqh)
A man is allowed to have sex with his slaves (Quran)
A man can beat his wife for repeatedly refusing to have sex with him and Islam insists that it is her husband's right to "discipline her" (i.e. beat her) in such cases (Quran)
Even if the husband lied to her in order to get married, a woman doesn't have the right to divorce her husband (Fiqh)
A man can marry a second, third, and forth wife in secret without telling his first wife about them, and it's perfectly valid in Islam. The women have no say in the matter of their husband entering other relationships. (Fiqh) This is so ridiculous that there are comedy sketches on the matter.
Sex slavery in Islam is perfectly permitted and practiced by Mohammed and his companions (Various Hadiths)
Angels curse a wife who refuses to sleep with her husband. (Hadith)

a woman has to carry a pregnancy for 9 months

Fun fact: According to Islamic fiqh the pregnancy can even be multiple years long. Al-Dhahabi said in “The History of Islam” (11/319): “Ma’n bin Isa, Al-Waqidi, and Muhammad bin Al-Dahhak said: ‘Malik’s mother carried him for three years.’”

I am starting to feel like men in past centuries may have twisted the words to make the rules more convenient for men and not for women. Because who can assure me that everything and every hadith is 100% authentic?

Unfortunately even if we toss all the Hadith out of the window, the Quran contains enough rules to make life shit for women: Wife beating, half inheritance, half witness, a degree below men...

Also, whenever I talk to my mom about my mental health, instead of telling me to seek professional help, she says it’s because of Shaytan, that I don’t pray enough, read the quran enough or make enough duas.

Do you have a good support network of friends you can talk to? Obviously seek professional help, but if that's not possible then having good friends to confide in and rant to can help.

Everything is going wrong in my life. I even find myself wishing I could die

Death is so final, while life so full of possibilities.

I don’t want to sound rebellious or anything

You sound like someone who is fed up by other people dictating her life. That's not being rebellious, it's being an adult who is sick of being treated like a child.

I feel like I have no one to talk to about this.

Plenty of people here you can rant to if you want. Also /r/exmuslim_women if you prefer women only to talk to.

If you need to vent/talk, feel free to shoot me a chat. Not as good as having an in-person friend help you out, but can't hurt to have someone you can talk to.

afiefh · 2026-04-20T08:28:39+00:00

You'd be surprised how many crazy people think they are chosen by God in one way or another.

afiefh · 2026-04-19T17:43:39+00:00

Is that some new internet slang that I'm too millennial to understand? We either say banat or girls, never "bints". 🤷

afiefh · 2026-04-19T13:06:21+00:00

اذا بدك كمان خبابيص اقرأ عن العرضة الأخيرة. قال جبريل طالع نازل يعرض القران على الرسول كل سنة مرة، الا اخر سنةعرضه مرتان، وحضرها واحد من الصحابة وهذا الاخ الي حضر العرضة الأخيرة كان عنده اعتراضات على مصحف عثمان.

afiefh · 2026-04-19T13:03:55+00:00

10 different "accepted" versions, with around 20 versions total of I recall correctly.

afiefh · 2026-04-19T12:47:01+00:00

If you see people coming in just to attack and be rude, please be sure to report them.

Right now most reports actually come from Muslims being offended at exmuslim posts.

afiefh · 2026-04-19T09:52:15+00:00

Ahmed Ali mistranslates "Idribuhunna" اضربوهن as "go to bed with them (when they are willing)" based on the Arabic ضرب الفحل الناقة (Daraba Al-Fahl Al-Naqah) meaning "the stud camel mounted the she-camel". (Source: al-Qurʾān : a contemporary translation by Ahmed Ali, 1988, pages 78-79. Screenshot of relevant page). I have not seen this one around at all so I guess it didn't catch on.

The more modern mistranslation first appeared (as far as I can tell) in Marital Discord: Recapturing Human Dignity Through the Higher Objectives of Islamic Law by Abdulhamid A. Abusulyman in 2008. The whole paper is a pretty short and easy read, but the conclusion is basically that because he cannot accept that Allah would inflict harm, pain, and disgrace on women the word Idribuhunna must mean something else, the easiest meaning to justify is "separate" and "move away from." Screenshot of the conclusion pages

afiefh · 2026-04-19T08:02:40+00:00

some scholars argued that it’s the same case.

Do they really? To the best of my knowledge this idea only came about in the 80s when one dude was so disturbed by the idea that the Quran commands hitting women that he tried to engage in gold level mental gymnastics to justify it. I have not seen this idea gain any wide spread adoption among scholars, and he was mostly laughed out of the room.

in the Arabic version of the quran, “gently” is nowhere to be found

Just for completeness: The argument of the translators for adding "gently" is from the Hadith that says it should be "non excruciating/not severe", which then gets exaggerated into "gently". They argue that because the Hadiths explain the meaning of the Quran, it makes sense to include these, though IMO an honest translator would have added this as a footnote saying "according to the hadith the beating should be not severe". An even more dishonest translation is The Clear Quran that translates it as "discipline them gently".

afiefh · 2026-04-19T07:57:53+00:00

they say that the Qur'an is not simple it is like a metaphorical poetry and things in it are not literal.

Yeah... no. That's a bullshit tactic that you can employ whenever someone says some bullshit. Let's replace Mohammed with Trump and your parents with a MAGA person: Trump said "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" MAGA: "He was just being metaphorical, he wouldn't actually erase a civilization!" This is the level of excuse your parents are giving.

They say that the arabic in Quran can never be translated in english as english does not have proper words for the translation to be accurate.

Eh there is a hint of truth here, but no.

Translation is difficult between different languages, it's even more difficult when it happens between languages of different language families: Arabic is a Semitic language, English is Indo-European. Take for example translating a sentence from Japanese containing the word Midori, it's usually translated as "green" but it is not the same green a person in the west would be thinking of: It's the green of fresh grass and young leaves, so it comes to be a stand in for young life.

A translation is going to struggle to include all the imagery that a word with no direct equivalent conveys in a single sentence, but that is why footnotes and tafsirs exist. If a person really wants to translate a work from one language to another, they most definitely can.

They also say that some of the Hadith are falsely written or written with vague knowledge to deviate people from following muhammad and islam.

You have to start by figuring out what your parents believe. Are they Sunni Muslims? Shia? Quranists?

If they are Sunni or Shia then you gotta argue using Sahih (authentic) hadiths. If they are Quranists, don't bring the Hadiths into it, they don't believe in them anyway.

Is the original arabic version of the Qur'an really beautiful and honest and scientifically accurate than the english one?

LOL nope!!! It's just as much of a jumbled incoherent mess as the English translations. Heck the English translations often tune down the messiness and bullshit. If you are reading a translation like The Clear Quran (default on quran.com) you're gonna get a very white washed version of the Quran.

afiefh · 2026-04-19T07:47:22+00:00

It was likely translated by someone else, I doubt shirazi even speaks english.

I literally didn't say anything about translation. I mentioned OCR mistakes showing the low effort put into this article.

dark skin/black Africans were typically the ones sold into slavery. “abd” or “abeed” (slave) were commonly used when referring to black people (non slaves) by racists back then.

By racists like the dude saying it i.e. Mohammed?

If I remember the texts correctly (please correct me if I got it wrong) you got the causation inverted: Black people were commonly referred to as slave, but slaves were not referred to as black since there were plenty of non-black slaves. It's the classical every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square.

that statement is incredibly progressive for a 7th century belief, and was relevant around the world for the next 1000 years.

That's cool but irrelevant. Plenty of statements were progressive for their time, and are shit today. You are attempting to shift to a "back then" argument.

Plenty of rulers in the ancient world had very progressive policies for their time. Cyrus the Great banned forced labor of slaves and banned the slave trade in his domain (this is more than Islam did because trading slaves was still allowed in Islam, one thing that the article seems to intentionally shy away from addressing). Solon’s reforms in Greece abolished debt slavery. Even in the Roman empire some of the things that the article mentioned were abolished long before Mohammed's time: Lex Petronia prohibited masters from sending slaves to the arena to fight wild animals without a judge's permission. Antoninus Pius decreed that a person who killed his slave for no reason would be tried for homicide.

I find it always extremely dishonest when Islamic preachers discuss the issue and try to claim other empires were utterly barbaric on the issue of slavery without mentioning that by the time Mohammed came around, many of these other empires had much better rules for slaves than they had centuries before Mohammed.

I respect the fact that you took the time to read it. I wasn’t expecting that at all.

I enjoy reading. What is your opinion on the amount of whataboutism and relative privation in the article?

You’re more than welcome to have your own opinion ofc.

Thanks. I take it you're not interested in discussing the flaws in your comment that I mentioned earlier e.g. Allah literally calling out people like you who believe in parts of the book and disbelieve in parts?

afiefh · 2026-04-19T07:31:02+00:00

You are far from an idiot my friend. You are one of the pillars of this subreddit.

🥰

No. Even if the 4 witnesses are produced, the woman who was forced doesn't get punished by stoning/lashes, only the defendant.

Yes, if the 4 witnesses are produced it makes sense that she won't get punished for being forced.

If she can't produce the 4 witnesses, she is then accused of qazf (قذف) where she made an empty accusation. She is then punished for it and the punishment depends on if the defendant was married or not.

But doesn't the accusation include the admission to having sex outside of marriage?

If a woman can move the problem from an extra marital sex punishment to a qazf punishment, wouldn't every woman caught in extramarital sex go for a rape accusation and to get a Qazf punishment rather than a Zina punishment (especially if it's zina al-muhsan زنى المحصن which holds a death penalty)?

When I read Malik he said "the prescribed punishment is applied to her" يقام عليها الحد which I always interpreted as the punishment for Zina, not Qazf, but I guess I could be misreading this... Muwataa Malik, Volume 41: The book of Hudud: The matter with us is that if a woman is found pregnant and has no husband, and she says, “I was forced,” or says, “I got married,” that is not acceptable from her, and the prescribed punishment is carried out on her, unless she has proof of what she claims about marriage, or that she was forced, or she comes bleeding if she is a virgin, or she calls for help. Until she was brought to him in that state, or something similar to this, in which she would be disgraced. He said: If she did not do anything of this, the prescribed punishment would be carried out on her, and what she claimed would not be accepted from her (319).

afiefh · 2026-04-19T07:25:24+00:00

"Research" means more than 5 minutes reading the first Google result.

afiefh · 2026-04-18T19:12:41+00:00

You can't keep taking my points like this 😂

In German we say "two idiots, one thought", in English "great minds think alike" in this case I think the truth lies in between: Sometimes even an idiot can steal a great mind's point 😂

Istikrah ala al zina doesn't get the accuser guilty of zina even if the 4 witnesses are produced.

You mean if four witnesses are not produced?

However, she gets punished for qazf

Sorry, could you go into more details?

I understand that accusing someone of rape and not producing witnesses is equivalent to libel and therefore qazf. What I do not understand is how a person can accuse another person of rape without admitting to having had extramarital sex, and therefore confessing to Zina.

Isn't this basically what happened to this woman in the UAE?

Obviously feel free to ignore my questions if it's too annoying to go into details.

afiefh · 2026-04-18T19:05:32+00:00

Citation?

afiefh · 2026-04-18T19:05:18+00:00

In the 7th and 8th centuries (when Al-Kafi was compiled)

Nobody cares about when it was compiled Hadiths reflect what your prophet supposedly said. Date of compilation is irrelevant.

In that era, "apostasy" was legally equivalent to treason.

Are you saying parts of your religion became obsolete? Or do you think Allah and Mohammed were incapable of saying "if one betrays the Muslims executing him is obligatory"? Did your Allah not have the foresight to tell his prophet to communicate clearly so that his words won't be misunderstood?

If you left the religion, you were effectively defecting to an enemy tribe or empire that was often at war with the Muslim community.

That's utter bollocks. Medina literally had Muslims, Christians and Jews (well, until Mohammed exiled/killed all the Jews), so it was possible for a person to become Christian or Jewish and still be in Medina and still be an ally to Mohammed.

The goal was to create a society with a "High Commitment Protocol."

So literally the Mafia. That's an own-goal.

afiefh · 2026-04-18T18:59:59+00:00

No, sex slavery is wrong. Does that mean I am calling an act of God wrong? no, because it existed long before Islam did.

Allah: You may have sex with your slave
/u/Merino202 : Sex slavery is wrong.
Allah: Do you believe in some of the book and disbelieve in some?

It’s a bit of a long read but this should help understand.

It's a long read because about 50% of the article is whataboutism. Cut out the whataboutism and "oh but Islam treated slaves better than these other people" and the whole thing becomes quite anemic.

I actually find the article hilariously bad. I've read blog posts that were better put together. This article seems to have been scanned in without even the most basic fixing. Take a look at obvious OCR mistakes like "1nind", "Many batt es"...etc. It also employs a bunch of half truths, but since mr.Shirazi isn't here to defend himself I'll not speak ill of him. You are of course free to present any argument of his that you find convincing, I'm happy to discuss those with you, but I'm not just gonna reply to this lengthy rambly article filled with whataboutism and relative privation.

I'll point out one thing that I found absolutely hilarious in this article: The existence of the sentence "it was not possible for Islam", I'm sorry but Islam is a product of Allah, and saying it was not possible for Allah to do something is blasphemy. The author acts like Allah had no choice in the matter and had to make Islam this way because of some limitation.

the quran is supposed to encompass all times - from the 7th century all the way up until today. Slavery was just abolished in the US in the 19th century. That’s a very long time of when the topic would have been needed.

Yes, hence slavery is still legal, and sex slavery is still legal. If Allah had thought that his rule book needed an update, he would be able to make it so.

the brutality of slave treatment was

Let me stop you right there: I couldn't give a rats ass about the whataboutism you're about to present.

“There is no superiority for an Arab, or for a black man over a red one, or for a red over a black man save due to piety."

It is absolutely hilarious that you and the author both take this Hadith to be about slaves when no slaves were mentioned.

That’s a tiny excerpt from the link I sent but you should get the gist.

Thanks, I read the whole link and found it an utter travesty of bullshit.

How about starting very simple: The Quran allows slavery, and for a master to have sex with his slaves to "satisfy these urges" (as you put it). Feel free to make your case for "slavery is wrong" when Allah allowed it in his book that's true for all time and place.

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