Submitted by Firas Abbassi, Mar 11, 2007 11:48

Assuming that no westerner can write critically about Islam without a bias, (E. Said), then we will go straight to the main Islamic sources in Arabic to get the facts, and this is exactly what many educated Arab Muslims have been doing recently and it is very revealing. They are challenging the autocratic structure that has been imposed on all Muslims for centuries, along with "sacred interpretations" of the text, and thousands of "hadiths" that are contradictory, fanciful, and belong more to the literature of fairy-tales than objective reporting of history. But, since these hadiths have been recorded by people like Bukhari and Muslim, they are beyond criticism and are to be accepted without question.

Unfortunately, most Muslims simply accept what they have been taught and very few of them study their Qur'an or challenge the religious authorities. It is incredible to think that about three-fourths of the Muslim world cannot even read their sacred text in the original Arabic, or the standard commentaries like Al Tabari, Ibn Kathir, and Al Qurtubi, which, in effect, nullifies any intelligent input that they might have to objective criticism.

It is true that any enlightened Muslim who dares to openly challenge the sacred myths will face the ultimate "persuasion" in Islam, and that is force—whether it be exile, forcible divorce, or imprisonment, torture, and death. Islam has never been willing, historically, to engage in any honest debate which would challenge the authority of the Qur'an or the prophet. This is forbidden territory, and so, yes, one must be "politically correct" when speaking or writing about Islam. One would never question the Uthmanic text, for instance, although anyone who studies how this text came to be the "eternal text inscribed on the ‘lawh mahfuz'" in heaven, finds this preposterous. It is a fact that most Muslims know little or nothing about how this text came to be in its present form.

Could a person, for instance, ever challenge the "given fact" that the prophet Muhammad made a night journey to the seventh heaven? It is forbidden for a Muslim to even question the historicity of this, and yet this "fact" is based, not on the Qur'an, but on a whole web of fanciful hadiths that contradict each other in many of the fundamental facts. One wonders, for instance, how many Muslims know that the 5 prayers they are required to pray every day, are the result of the prophet Muhammad negotiating back and forth with Allah, when he was supposedly escorted to the 7th heaven, at the suggestion Moses (in the 6th heaven) who knew that Allah's original intention of prescribing 50 prayers a day was way beyond the ability of a person to handle. Incredible!

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