Wednesday, October 23, 2019

What It Means - Day 219

"Hi _____. Thank you very much for your comments. I'm going to very respectfully disagree however, mainly based on your very valid point about God's law versus human law. All religions, Islam included, have traditions that are much more man-made than divine, based more on the viewpoints of traditional patriarchal societies than revelation. I would argue that this is one of those instances. There are no passages in the Quran which directly deal with this issue, the references in the ahadith and the sunnah are few and contradictory, and there was never been consensus among religious scholars. As one moves further from revelation by definition it becomes more about very human perceptions and traditions; my main point is that the issue is not as definitively as it seems. Again, I'm disagreeing with you but very respectfully."
GS on FB

What you see above is the rarest of rare occurrences: me involved in an argument, even a very gentle one, on Facebook. Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I'm very opinionated, but that doesn't carryover to Facebook. When I'm on Facebook I'm mainly interested in seeing if my friends are still alive and reveling in pictures of their dogs and grandkids. I avoid political, and especially religious, arguments like the plague. In this case I made an exception. I had shared a story about a US mosque that had been founded and was led by a woman. A Muslim woman from overseas jumped in and told me that what the story represented was wrong, and that we needed to follow God's laws and not that of man. You can see how my response responded to that allegation, while also trying to be polite. Why did I respond? First off, it was not to try and tell another Muslim what to believe. Rather, I wanted to let anyone reading the exchange that Islam is a complicated faith and that it allowed for debate. Plus, as you know, the issue of the treatment of our sisters is something that almost qualifies as a trigger issue with me (apparently I'm the Bud White of my masjid, although a much gentler one).


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