Getting more information about the religious rules will make you somebody who will conduct according to those rules.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case when one learns about some other rules that aren't popular enough to be thought to children. Only as adults do we encounter some religious rules, that really don't have any purpose or use today, so no wonder how we can live without it. But it leaves out the whole picture.
With a complete view, we can give a better judgement. I am sure that vast majority of Muslims don't have the complete view, or at least a bigger picture. We are indoctrinated by our teachers, and our family - who had also been indoctrinated mostly. A few figures in your family are rebellious, they have figured out something better. But, we think, they misunderstood something. It's actually that we didn't have the larger picture, and that's why we're mistaken.
Even when we're presented with the facts previously unknown, our reflex is trying to quickly find justifications for the newly discovered things, which we don't like. Especially if the new facts reveal something bad about what we've been idolizing for the whole of our lives.
Let me be more precise.
I had been presented with hadiths about Muhammad allowing rape.
It was shocking. Rape? I searched the hadiths about it. I first found this one:
Yahya related to me from Malik from Rabia ibn Abi Abd ar-Rahman from Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Habban that Ibn Muhayriz said, "I went into the mosque and saw Abu Said al-Khudri and so I sat by him and asked him about coitus interruptus. Abu Said al-Khudri said, 'We went out with the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, on the expedition to the Banu al-Mustaliq. We took some Arabs prisoner, and we desired the women as celibacy was hard for us. We wanted the ransom, so we wanted to practise coitus interruptus. We said, 'Shall we practise coitus interruptus while the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is among us before we ask him?' We asked him about that and he said, 'You don't have to not do it. There is no self which is to come into existence up to the Day of Rising but that it will come into existence.' "
This was shocking to me. Muslim soldiers actually talking about "celibacy"? But this is a weak translation anyway, other versions - you can fin through link - speak a bit differently.
So, does the urge for women, the Muslims have had, justify every soldier's urge?
And do they quench the need with rape?
Here, the rape is a very normal part of the story. The question that Muhammad was answering was Coitus interruptus, also known as withdrawal or the pull-out method, is a method of birth control in which a man, during sexual intercourse, withdraws his penis from a woman's vagina prior to orgasm (and ejaculation) and then directs his ejaculate (semen) away from the vagina in an effort to avoid insemination.
I run to justify the event by disregarding this hadith as legit. Regardless of the fact that it was found in the legit hadiths collection, I couldn't believe it.
Then, two years after me being a Muslim without believing in most of the hadiths, and as me trying to live a life from the Qur'an only, well, made me focus on the Qur'an. I took hadiths with context only, and with possibility of them being made up. For example, I never believed that Muhammad had flew on a winged horse to the sky-dome - because there is no sky dome. As only truth could come out of his mouth, but the other people are fake sometimes, I attributed this hadith to be a mistake in chain of narrators, or an honest mistake that happened to somebody somewhere.
It was a humanly error to say something like that. But Muhammad surely never did it.
It was a spiritual journey of his, I thought, at least that.
But, even though the hadiths became something I disagreed with I realized that I have to go back to hadiths, to confirm a thing or two about the Qur'an. A lot of things, of course, didn't add up. So it proved to me more that the Qur'an is the book in which I can find something that I looked for. Only then, I realized, I never even looked for that. Nothing I asked was there. My answers were always in Islam, not the Qur'an. Islam, and the Qur'an don't share the same values. At least the Islam I knew.
Therefore, it is important for the Muslims to know the bad side of history of religion, to not fall into trap of antimuslims who can then easily persuade them to walk out of religion.
The Muslims should preserve the religion, but purify it from the bad side of it. A reform is what is needed. A better version of it. Not the ancient version that does no good today.
Young Wahhabis are worried that the youth is "dating" and hanging out with friends. But they ignore problems in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia - places where Islam is in peace, but the people are enslaved by power and women are enslaved by men?
Let's change this worldview.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case when one learns about some other rules that aren't popular enough to be thought to children. Only as adults do we encounter some religious rules, that really don't have any purpose or use today, so no wonder how we can live without it. But it leaves out the whole picture.
With a complete view, we can give a better judgement. I am sure that vast majority of Muslims don't have the complete view, or at least a bigger picture. We are indoctrinated by our teachers, and our family - who had also been indoctrinated mostly. A few figures in your family are rebellious, they have figured out something better. But, we think, they misunderstood something. It's actually that we didn't have the larger picture, and that's why we're mistaken.
Even when we're presented with the facts previously unknown, our reflex is trying to quickly find justifications for the newly discovered things, which we don't like. Especially if the new facts reveal something bad about what we've been idolizing for the whole of our lives.
Let me be more precise.
I had been presented with hadiths about Muhammad allowing rape.
It was shocking. Rape? I searched the hadiths about it. I first found this one:
Yahya related to me from Malik from Rabia ibn Abi Abd ar-Rahman from Muhammad ibn Yahya ibn Habban that Ibn Muhayriz said, "I went into the mosque and saw Abu Said al-Khudri and so I sat by him and asked him about coitus interruptus. Abu Said al-Khudri said, 'We went out with the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, on the expedition to the Banu al-Mustaliq. We took some Arabs prisoner, and we desired the women as celibacy was hard for us. We wanted the ransom, so we wanted to practise coitus interruptus. We said, 'Shall we practise coitus interruptus while the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, is among us before we ask him?' We asked him about that and he said, 'You don't have to not do it. There is no self which is to come into existence up to the Day of Rising but that it will come into existence.' "
This was shocking to me. Muslim soldiers actually talking about "celibacy"? But this is a weak translation anyway, other versions - you can fin through link - speak a bit differently.
So, does the urge for women, the Muslims have had, justify every soldier's urge?
And do they quench the need with rape?
Here, the rape is a very normal part of the story. The question that Muhammad was answering was Coitus interruptus, also known as withdrawal or the pull-out method, is a method of birth control in which a man, during sexual intercourse, withdraws his penis from a woman's vagina prior to orgasm (and ejaculation) and then directs his ejaculate (semen) away from the vagina in an effort to avoid insemination.
I run to justify the event by disregarding this hadith as legit. Regardless of the fact that it was found in the legit hadiths collection, I couldn't believe it.
Then, two years after me being a Muslim without believing in most of the hadiths, and as me trying to live a life from the Qur'an only, well, made me focus on the Qur'an. I took hadiths with context only, and with possibility of them being made up. For example, I never believed that Muhammad had flew on a winged horse to the sky-dome - because there is no sky dome. As only truth could come out of his mouth, but the other people are fake sometimes, I attributed this hadith to be a mistake in chain of narrators, or an honest mistake that happened to somebody somewhere.
It was a humanly error to say something like that. But Muhammad surely never did it.
It was a spiritual journey of his, I thought, at least that.
But, even though the hadiths became something I disagreed with I realized that I have to go back to hadiths, to confirm a thing or two about the Qur'an. A lot of things, of course, didn't add up. So it proved to me more that the Qur'an is the book in which I can find something that I looked for. Only then, I realized, I never even looked for that. Nothing I asked was there. My answers were always in Islam, not the Qur'an. Islam, and the Qur'an don't share the same values. At least the Islam I knew.
Therefore, it is important for the Muslims to know the bad side of history of religion, to not fall into trap of antimuslims who can then easily persuade them to walk out of religion.
The Muslims should preserve the religion, but purify it from the bad side of it. A reform is what is needed. A better version of it. Not the ancient version that does no good today.
Young Wahhabis are worried that the youth is "dating" and hanging out with friends. But they ignore problems in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia - places where Islam is in peace, but the people are enslaved by power and women are enslaved by men?
Let's change this worldview.
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