OK, OK, I'm convinced

Submitted by Jeff (United States), Sep 6, 2007 at 19:21

OK, Aliyah, you don't have to quote the Koran or anything else anymore, you've got me convinced that slavery is part of Islam, just as Imam Saleh Al-Fawzan, says.

That Dred Scott case you love to talk about was overturned by the 7th amendment to the U.S. Constitution several years later. Funny, you didn't know about that. The Dred Scott case was presented in my US public school history classes as one of the low points in our history, something none of us is proud of. Its one good aspect is that it helped to galvanize an already growing anti-slavery movement in the USA.

"…and many former military slaves, usually recruited from among the Central Asian Turks…" Recruited? They volunteered to be slaves? I think kidnapped is more the word.

"Eunuchs too served in important capacities…" And I suppose Muslims had to turn Africans away, there were so many lining up, clamoring to be castrated?

"Only children of slaves or non-Muslim prisoners of war can become slaves, never a freeborn Muslim…" Well that makes me feel much better. That's what we generally refer to as blatant, inexcusable discrimination based on religion (which is also against the law where I live). So, if the Pope announces that it's OK for Catholics to own slaves, as long as they're not Catholic, you'd have no problem with that, right? (Don't worry, that won't happen. The Pope is a priest, not an imam.)

So a Swiss journalist says Islam "tolerated" slavery but never "approved" of it? Imam Saleh Al-Fawzan clearly disagrees, and I think the Imam and professor of Islam knows what he's talking about. If Islam does not approve of slavery, why did Mohammed own slaves? Islam does not approve of how Mohammad lived? Interesting.

Aliyah, why do you choose to live in a Western country, run by infidels? Wouldn't you be happier in one of the Islamic paradises in the middle east? Or could it be that you like living with freedom of religion, freedom of expression, open self-criticism, rationalism, liberal democracy and other Western ideals that give us mechanisms to resist and eliminate evils, such as slavery, so we can progress past the norms and conditions of the 7th century? England outlawed slavery about 60 years before the USA, they're even more unIslamic than we are; doesn't that bother you? (Of course you can bring back slavery after it becomes the Islamic Republic of England.)

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