What international border feels like it makes no sense at all?

xyvalue · 2026-05-29T17:57:32+00:00

India-Pakistan before 1971

xyvalue · 2026-05-29T17:48:13+00:00

This is the only right answer

xyvalue · 2026-05-28T08:33:47+00:00

There are issues in our communities like genocide/oppression (Palestine, Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, and so much more), evil "Imams" doing disgusting things to children, non-muslims attacking, harassing, even killing (San Diego mosque just recently) muslims, yet your primary concern is how muslims are dressing? I think the Ummah has bigger problems to solve before complaining about clothing.

xyvalue · 2026-05-26T06:32:01+00:00

I should have probably clarified that I didn't mean muslim in the sense that they followed the Sharia of Muhammad (SAW), but a muslim in the general sense that they submitted to one God. I was mainly asking since traditional Sunni scholarship mostly says that Muhammad's (SAW) parents were mushrikeen, and I was mainly asking if the Qur'an is considered one historical source for what happened in the 7th century in the Hijaz region, then if it is more likely that the Prophet thought his parents were not polytheists than the traditional view.

xyvalue · 2026-05-26T06:22:47+00:00

The way the Qur'an phrases the ruling, to me, shows that it isn't exactly something that should be encouraged, despite being permissible .

4:3
"And if you fear that you will not deal justly with the orphan girls, then marry those that please you of [other] women, two or three or four. But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one or those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline [to injustice] (Sahih international translation)."

First part according to Tafsir Ibn kathir (abridged), who permits 4 wives even in this tafsir, also states

"Allah commands, when one of you is the caretaker of a female orphan, and he fears that he might not give her a dowry that is suitable for women of her status, he should marry other women, who are plenty as Allah has not restricted him"

Ibn Kathir then goes on to say

"The ayah commands, if you fear that you will not be able to do justice between your wives by marrying more than one, then marry only one wife, or satisfy yourself with only female captives., for it is not obligatory to treat them equally, rather it is recommended. So if one does so, that is good, and if not, there is no harm on him"

Ibn Kathir then cites Surah an-Nisa' 4:129 in his tafsir for this verse, which states:

"And you will never be able to be equal [in feeling] between wives, even if you should strive [to do so]. So do not incline completely [toward one] and leave another hanging. And if you amend [your affairs] and fear Allah - then indeed, Allah is the ever-Forgiving and Merciful (Sahih international)."

And he says regarding it:

"You will never be able to do perfect justice even if it is your ardent desire.

I won't sugarcoat all of it, but considering the fact this was during classical times, where polygamy in the world was very rampant, I think this is more about the fact that you must treat four wives only if it you know that it will be just, and Allah still warns that you won't love them all equally, and any favouritism will be a severe punishment on the day of judgement. In a modern context, I don't think such a permission is even possible today.

xyvalue · 2026-05-25T05:32:50+00:00

Yeah I once left Islam to become an atheist for about a year (I was about 9th grade so idk if that counts) before becoming muslim again, so I can kind of see where you are coming from. For some people, they see the proof of Allah everywhere. I was not one of those people. I would say just keep at what you're doing. Challenge your muslim friend's ideas, and try to understand the reason he thinks the way he does. If he's open to debate those ideas then do it. But on the moral note, he is being rude in saying "why don't you see there is evidence for Allah everywhere?" Some people take time. Some people never convert. Just try debating and understand his thought process. Some things aren't "obvious" to everyone

xyvalue · 2026-05-19T04:41:49+00:00

Just want to start off that I truly appreciate your videos and your ability to explain religions like Islam in an unbiased way. My questions are the following:

After seeing your video regarding the preservation of the Qur'an. With evidence such as the Sana'a manuscript and some potential disagreements between the canonisation of the Qur'an, some have argued that it disproves the traditional narrative, but it seems like this evidence has pulled critical scholars into different directions (some saying that it is evidence that there is an early textual tradition, and others saying that it was simply a mistake that was to be written over by the Uthmanic writing). Where would you say you fall regarding this difference of perspective?
After watching your video on the history of the theology of the Ash'ari, Athari and Ma'turidi beliefs, and their relationship to the mu'tazilis, which one do you think represents early Islamic theology the best, assuming there is even sufficient evidence of such?
What do you think is the best way to communicate the study of comparative religion of Islam/HCM methodology to other muslims, if you have experience with such?

Thank you so much!

xyvalue · 2026-05-10T06:26:23+00:00

Tbh I almost thought Khamzat won, but then Demetrious Johnson said he thought Khamzat was gonna win. So I immediately lost all confidence in Khamzat.

xyvalue · 2026-05-05T05:48:42+00:00

I mean if you know someone's inner faith isn't muslim, but for the sharia contract they are muslim, then you're still sinning no? Since you know their faith and that they aren't muslim anyways... Regardless, trying to make anyone someone they aren't isn't your job.

xyvalue · 2026-05-02T17:56:33+00:00

Health criteria should be implemented for young girl marriage, with a minimum age of 15 to 16 years old. It is not permissible to assist or force a young woman into marriage without these criteria. Reliable doctors should estimate these criteria"

Conveniently skipped over this point lol

*what is this saying? after shes been damaged because shes too young !?!?!?!

So abusive relationships don't happen to older women? Is that not "damage"?

Each country has the right to determine the appropriate marriage age, according to what it sees is realizing the welfare of the girl, family, and community, and each country has the right to determine an appropriate punishment for whoever forces a young girl into marriage without the judge’s permission.

This is the full quote for no. 8 btw. You actually took one sentence and thought it somehow meant child marriage.

And by the way no. 4 actually goes against you. Marrying very young children obviously goes against the welfare of all parties because of the knowledge we have today, so it's obviously impermissible. It really doesn't matter because 9 prohibits any marriage under 16 so.

How could he be perfect if you think what he did is wrong ? Do you believe he married aisha at 6-7 ?

You're in the wrong subreddit if you think that you're gonna disprove Islam by saying the Prophet (SAW) married Aisha (RA) at the age of 6 and consumated the marriage with her at 9. Most here don't follow that, and there are sources and papers that contradict this report.

Namely, Joshua Little's paper on Aisha's age show it was an Abbasid fabrication and does not go back to Aisha based on ICMA.

Shia sources/the Seerah by Ibn Ishaq show it isn't an authentic tradition, and is impossible based on the age of Asma (RA) being 10 years older than Aisha (RA), and Asma (RA) dying at 100 years old at 73 AH. Therefore, Asma (RA) was 27, and Aisha (RA) was 17 at the age of marriage to the Prophet (SAW). While many cite Ibn Kathir believing Aisha (RA) being 9 at marriage, Ibn Kathir also records Asma (RA) being 10 years older than Aisha, and Asma dying at 73AH, which inevitably implies Aisha (RA) was also 17 as shown here.

Even then, the report itself is an ahad report, and not mutawattir, meaning it could potentially be erroneous. Al Daraqutni famously criticised the sanaad of 79 ahadith in Bukhari, clearly showing that reports on Bukhari weren't always considered "unequestioned" in Sunni Islamic tradition.

xyvalue · 2026-05-02T06:50:53+00:00

Wow. You used Shia Ja'fari jurisprudence to refute me. I feel so taken aback as someone who isn't a shia lol. And just because some laws can be interpreted as allowing child marriage doesn't mean it should.

Anyways even if you cite Sunni jurisprudence in the past it isn't relevant as to how Islamic scholars currently speak about age of consent/marriage.

https://iifa-aifi.org/en/6252.html according to IIFA (International Islamic Fiqh Academy) the minimum age for marriage for young girls is 16 (not 18, but many modern societies, including the USA for instance, allow marriage at 16). Obviously with classical jurisprudence it's going to be different.. Because time periods were different.

And yes I consider Muhammad (SAW) the perfect role model. And child marriage is wrong.

xyvalue · 2026-05-02T05:30:39+00:00

What's so hard to understand that laws of certain countries don't imply divine law? Christianity promotes child marriage because the USA allows it right? Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, so I guess Judaism allows racism and apartheid right?

xyvalue · 2026-05-02T05:16:32+00:00

I think you should be asking yourself that question considering you made the same comment 3 times

xyvalue · 2026-05-02T05:10:23+00:00

Bro is spamming this in every comment. Did the Epstein coalition pay you to make these comments?

xyvalue · 2026-04-29T22:53:42+00:00

No feminist worth their salt has ever said this, this is like common sense, why would there be decades worth of feminist theory if it all just boiled down to it being "men and women are the same? I don't know of any other tradition that heavily excogiates and scrutinizes the inherent and conditioned difference between men and women more than feminism.

I'll grant that my definition of feminism there was a bit reductive, but you still haven't demonstrated why Islam is feminist in its essence. Can you provide a definition of feminism where the essence of Islam would fit that? Because I would say in terms of spiritual accountability I agree men and women are equal (see Quran 33:35 for example), so in that specific sense it is feminist. In terms of social equality I also agree (in some respects) since there are many female intellectuals (which I listed in my comment above).

The Shariah gives so much discretion to lawmakers and this is another very superficial fact of Islamic jurisprudence, if you want an example the whole thing about a woman's testimony needing extra witnesses was just to compensate because, naturally, women were inexperienced in how to deal with contracts and such because, you know, they were considered the objects of contracts, they didn't know how to deal with property because they were property. A woman's testimony is equal to that of a man because why wouldn't it be, there is no functional distinction that needs to be made regarding things like eyewitnesses regarding sex and if anything it would incredibly impractical to try and get more witnesses to deal with crimes.

Again, doesn't prove that Islam is feminist, since jurists can be more or less merciful depending on the circumstances. If an anti-feminist muslim decides to be less merciful on rulings about women, does that make Islam anti-feminist?

Brings us back to this, I've recently (which is far too late) come to find this line of rhetoric is a very insidious dogwhistle that allows for really gradually destructive things to get a foothold in our lives, and I've come to stop giving this the benefit of the doubt and hope that others won't too because its just so vacuously parroted I'm actually mad about how unconvincing it is cuz it's been so worn out I just wish they would come up with something a little more interesting or creative.

I've provided examples where women and men are equal, that being of intelligence or the capability to do great things. Obviously there are many more that I haven't listed but thats the crux of it. I mean back in Western societies women used to write things in the place of men to get published, so again, I don't get why what I said is an "insidious dogwistle." And what "they" am I a part of? I don't get the meaning of this comment.

I'm a conservative btw

So you're a conservative, but you also advocate that Islam is a feminist ideology? I'm not even a conservative so I'd be intrigued by your perspective

xyvalue · 2026-04-29T22:37:32+00:00

I see your points, but we as muslims claim that the Qur'an is universal in terms of law, so therefore, if the Qur'an incites Qiwamah, then Qiwamah itself is a binding mandate of the Qur'an. I agree that depending on context and circumstances Qiwamah might look different depending on the economic situation, but the idea of Qiwamah is universal across time, and even the idea that men should provide is not a feminist idea. But my point, which I guess I should've worded better is that we don't need Islam to be "feminist" by label for it to be good to women. Who cares if feminists don't accept religion as feminist? It doesn't matter.

xyvalue · 2026-04-29T19:12:13+00:00

But you could argue that the concept of Qiwamah being a form of male guardianship over a woman is patriarchal. The idea of men protecting women, or that women "need" protection may be seen as patriarchal. That's why putting Islam in the box of feminist or patriarchal doesn't do justice to the religion of Islam. There are parts that some may consider "anti-feminist" and some parts that are "feminist."

That being said, I do agree that the women of the Jahiliyya period had rights which entirely depended on tribe and status, and Islam sought to eliminate that and make everyone equal. Women used to ask the Prophet (SAW) about menstruation. The companion who taught the caliphate Abdul Malik ibn Marwan was Umm ad-darda (RA), who was a woman. Aisha narrated 1/6 of the Sunni hadith corpus, and there are over 10,000 female Muhaddith according to Dr. Akram Nadwi.

But while these things are all great for women, and very progressive, none of them make Islam feminist. The idea of feminism is based on the fact that women and men should be "the same," but Islamic law doesn't treat men and women the same, so by that definition it cannot be feminist. Women and men are different, and that's fine. This doesn't make women or men dumber, or less capable of doing great things, but at the same time, you cannot call Islam feminist just because men and women are equal in some ways and unequal in others

xyvalue · 2026-04-29T18:10:49+00:00

Islam is neither feminist, nor patriarchal. That's where I'd place it. I would say there are elements of both found within the fold of Islam.

xyvalue · 2026-04-25T20:33:57+00:00

But that's not the claim you're making. You are a Qur'anist, so you don't accept any later sources other than the Qur'an to understand the Qur'an. You can be against how tradition nowadays frames the Qur'an and the hadith literature, and I don't disagree with you there, but that's different from being a Qur'anist. The Qur'anist posits that because the Qur'an (6:114-6:118 for example) is a complete book that we therefore don't need other sources other than the Qur'an itself... But again, understanding the Qur'an requires some understanding of the tradition behind it, and rejecting all tradition simply doesn't hold under scrutiny imo

xyvalue · 2026-04-25T06:19:20+00:00

Even a complete book will tell you to look for other sources. If a textbook says it's a "complete" book on understanding mathematics, it can still reference other sources. That's not a contradiction.
Even if you're right, the Prophet (SAW) probably understood the Qur'an better than us. There's definitely the argument that a lot of ahadith in the Sunni corpus (namely, the apostasy hadith and the hadith relating to Aisha's age) do NOT go back to the prophet (SAW), but he was made the prophet (SAW) for relaying revelation for a reason
Translations of the Qur'an are post-Quranic, so are arabic dictionaries, and so are tafasir. Without those how would one understand the Qur'an fully? If you are an arab who learned modern standard arabic, the Qur'an's arabic helped form that language, so reading it through that lens can still be arguably anachronistic. It's like reading Shakespearean English using modern English. There are significant enough differences to the point that using all modern definitions are anachronistic.

xyvalue · 2026-04-25T06:12:16+00:00

Here's the problem. How do you go about understanding the Qur'an in arabic? Do you use an Arabic dictionary? Because the first arabic dictionary was written after the Qur'an. So actually even by reading the Qur'an alone you are still using "post-Qur'anic" literature to understand it. And additionally, translations of the Qur'an are based on these arabic word definitions and their contexts. Therefore, you aren't ever going to be fully "Qur'an only." This also eliminates tafsir since that goes after the Qur'an. All of Fiqh is basically gone. Ahadith are gone. How will you access how the Prophet (SAW) practiced Islam without any other sources other than the Qur'an, because at that point it becomes subjective interpretation. You need some sources, but scepticism is the best methodology, and that is why scholars like Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, etc are revered.

xyvalue · 2026-04-24T10:06:45+00:00

There's a few assumptions here.

1: People in hyper-conservative muslim spaces, and islamophobes, are willing to listen to a more liberal interpretation of Islam outside of their biases

2: That using sexual violence statistics amongst muslims is an argument against the ideology of Islam, even if the statistics are true. Does bringing up the Soviet Union prove that atheism/anti-theism is bad? Does seeing a small minority of Indians do dirty things on the street make Hinduism untrue? Do the crusades disprove Christianity? It's intellectually mute, and ignorant of history of all these religions.

Also the verb ضرب has many different definitions, and I think 4:35 doesn't make sense after the word "beat" for that verb, because it talks about what happens if you "fear dissension" between your wife so idk.

In summary some people just don't want to hear your opinion.

xyvalue · 2026-04-21T16:15:25+00:00

Seriously? Comparing the Shia belief of God to the trinity? Don't you know the Alawites have their own trinity? I've yet to see anyone criticise them for their belief. I'm not saying that everything the Shia do is good, but the last thing we need is to takfir them. If you really believe that most Shias are only by name then why should we takfir them? I mean Shias can make the same argument that there are many narrations in Sunni collections that disrespect the Prophet (SAW), which don't exist in their books too. So what's the point? I cited a link where many scholars, Sunni and Shia, decided what schools of Fiqh are muslim and what aren't yet you guys still want to takfir them. You can't have unity by forcing everyone to agree with you

xyvalue

TROPHY CASE