At 02:43 PM 1/2/2013, Jojo Jaro wrote:
Do you consider muhammed to be an infallible person?
No, explicitly not.
Is muhammed considered perfect and sinless by muslims like how
Jesus Christ is consider perfect and sinless by Christians?
Definitely not, by the majority of Muslims. There are Muslims who
fall into this error -- and I consider the denial of Jesus' humanity
to also be an error, the whole point of the incarnation (to put on my
Christian hat) was that "God became man," and to become man is to
become flawed, limited, powerless, and fallible. Eli Eli, lamma
sabachthani? So, when the chips were down, what name did Jesus call
God? Jesus spoke Aramaic, not Hebrew, and not Greek. That fragment is
the only snippet of his actual words that has been preserved. The
Aramaic gospels were back-translated from the Greek.
It's a question, not an argument, and this is only a reply on the
issue of sinlessness, not a challenge to Christians. It's a
*Christian question*, for Christians to address. The Qur'an is clear
on Jesus, he was human, *and* he was effectively unique, the Word of
God is the *Qur'anic term.*
If muhammed is not considered sinless, you should have just
disavowed that act and be done with it.
I'd have to know the act to disavow. Child molestation is highly
reprehensible, *by definition*. I did disavow child molestation, very
early on. I pointed to the enforcement of the prohibition in Islam,
as to the recent adjudicated case of a 10 year old girl, betrothed,
who was raped by her "husband."
If Muhammad consummated a marriage with a prepubescent or
early-pubescent Ayesha, it would be *rape*, as that case shows, and
the only Muslim I found who considered that this would be lawful was
Maududi, about whom my opinion is very low. Remarkably, he based his
opinion not on hadith, but on a verse on divorce which he interprets
in the same corrupt way as the Christian critics, showing how
fundamentalists think alike.
The only on-line argument I could find that considered the Muslim and
Bukhari reports of Ayesha's age -- which is a *separate issue,*
because of the range of age of maturation -- was a fundamentalist
site that treated hadith as infallible sources of law, which is a
minority position in Islam. For most of 1400 years the "age" issue
was not considered important, because what was important was
maturity, which is only correlated with age, not dependent on it (by
9 years old). So some recent scholarship has examined the issue, and
found the hadith to be unreliable. And the fundamentalists are
horrified, and that is what was really the point of the
fundamentalist site. Look at this horrible innovation, substituting
the judgment of historians for our beloved hadith!
I've said I'm Maliki, and that school de-emphasizes hadith. However,
I'm also Mu'tazili, a school that was dominant for a time, very early
on, and the Mu'tazili influence remained in Muslim science. Long
story, but the word is sometimes translated as "rationalist." The
literal meaning is "postponers." That is, when even a Qur'anic verse
seems difficult to interpret, when it seems to lead to irrationality,
we "postpone" judgment. We look to life itself, to test and result,
for understanding of the revelation. And I've found that this works.
My undertanding is practical, not that of one who adopts a
belief-system consisting of rigid ideas and conclusions.
Take a cue from Christians, we disavow the retrograde acts of
Solomon's polygamy. We do not insist and try to justify it.
I'm not going to dive into judgment of Solomon, nor polygamy, nor
polyandry, for that matter. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Keep to the point my friend. Maybe you'll even convince me.
If one is transformed, it will be through his surrender to God, to
Reality, not by me.
Jojo
PS. How can you call yourself an electronics "engineer" when you
haven't graduated from engineering school? So, you have no college
degree at all?
Two questions, last first. No. No degree at all. About three years,
over two of which were at the California Insitute of Technology.
Though I thought I'd be a nuclear physicist, by the third year I was
shifting my interests massively and declared a biochemistry major,
but never pursued it. I left in good standing, eligible to return,
but I never went back.
I call myself an electronics engineer because electronics design was
my longest-running self-employment; that business still continues,
but the design is now all being done in Brazil. I was totally
self-taught in that field, and, in certain narrow areas, became
internationally known. That, in fact, is how I ended up having an
engineer working for me in Brazil.
Jojo was responding to this post:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg75036.html
