Aaron ...Thank you for your invitation to this website; you told me it was different but i must disagree with you, despite having only had an exchange with a few people...because i have spend these days reading other posts and can assure you that my desire for sincere dialouge will not happen here.
Besides, the internet is not my thing... Thanks again..

Let me leave you with something I read the other day

"...Contemporary muslim intellectuals..those at least whose voices are most often heard...seek scapegoats for the fact that Islam never developed the means of destroying the world and dehumanizing man. They have been maimed by their sense of inferiority, vis-avis Western technological achievements. Some blame the rigidity of the ulama, some blame sufism and others Asharism. Islam, they point out, gave science to Europe and raced with it towards the goal of power and imperial domination.
It is true enough that Islam passed onto western europe the Greek virus, an organism that muslims had proved immune to but christiendom succumbed; but the muslims of our own time must be the only people on earth who have ever complained of their ancestorers immunity to disease. They refuse to admit that neither the science they admire, nor the technology they covet could ever have arisen in a truly islamic climate....

"....Islamic science..in the great age of islamic science...was concerned on the one hand with discerning the signs of Allah in natural phenomena, and on the other with observing the forces and laws of nature, the better to cooperate with them, so the human family might be more fitted into the God given enviornemnt. Until the whole pattern was thrown off balance in recent times, it was never the Muslims way to work, as it were, against the grain, to force the natural world out of shape and abuse its riches. His world was regulated in accordance with human proportion; he built nothing that might overwhelm him in terms of its size or grandeur; he never became the servant of his own tools, and as long as he obeyed the command to "walk gently on the earth",... he and his horses and camels and his cattle..it seems unlikely that he ever could have designed bulldozers to rip it up.
His pure science was the knowledge of essences rather than phenomena as such. Stars and stones, mountains and the earths vegatation, the waves of the ocean and the clouds in the sky were not a random collection of objects, but a sequence of pictures contained in a single volume. These pictures and "signs" were all the more comprehensible for being simple, free from complexities and distortions which human inventivness introduces into the phenomena of the natural world. If modern science has destroyed the normal human capacity to think in terms of symbols, it is also true that modern technology has obscured the symbolism inherent in the natural enviornment and therefore made comprehension more difficult...."

I hope you will see that you are wasting your time with these very ignorant people. If you only knew how deep things really are, how much more to Islam and life is here than what all of these people are quacking about.

No need to respond on this website for i will not be opening up to this website again. You have my email address if you want further contact. Peace

I Salam

I beleive these ayats destroy any hope that Western style democracy and equality can be reconciled to the quran. And thank God for that.

When the quran speaks of taking counsel among the people, have you asked yourself taking consel, among WHOM? Not the majority!

The quran is a theocentric religionand its political system , when working in accordance with the quran, will be a theocentric society. (TOO BE DISTINGUSIHED FROM THEOCRATIC), It is a society that recognizes the natural, God given ,superiority of some over others. When this system works, all are equal before God by virtue of their piety; in fact, that is how man is to be judged, by how conscious he is of the absolute..of God, and how pious he is; what other equality can their be?

If one looks around, there is a hierarchial struture to EVERYTHING..(.even within yourself)
Show me one organization, one animal group, show me anything that is not hierarchial in its struture. Even God, as he relates to us as his creatures, descends in a hierarichal fashion, but that is a different story.
I would only add that no system has ever worked; there is something in human society that defies definition, but when a society most prospers (and i do not mean economically or in the modern sense of "human rights") it has been a theocentric system, where God and not man is at the center. "(Demo" meaning people, and Theo meaning "God"

salam

"......But one may ask, if the reading of the quran is so arduous and precarious, even for men who know arabic,how is it that islam can win so many followers amongst peoples who do not know the language, and are as far removed from the arabs as the Negros, the Chinese and the malays? The reason is that Islam expands, not through the reading of the quran, but by its human, spiritual, psychological and social manifestations if afriacan negros embrace the muslim religion, it is because they observe the kind of life led by the believers, see them praying, hear the call of the muezzin, observe a certain generositycommon to believers, and also the serenity of the pious; and it is only afterwards that they learn the minimum of arabic neccessary for the cannonical prayers. The immense majority of no arab muslims will never be able to read the Quran, still less, appreicate its literary qualities; they live in the effect, without knowing the cause......"

Gee, imagine if all the muslims we ever met were cut-throat, cunning, womanizing and viloent terrorists...just a few of the wests sterotypes..would the present day converts have seen through all that human ugliness to find the beautiful message in the Quran?
The point is my beloved point you cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater; whether you like it or not, islam is more than the quran.

peace