To Moderate Muslim:

You have given Maududi's translation. How many wives did Maududi have? I am willing to bet a buck that he had more than one. If as you say no none except the Prophet can treat all wives with justice then why does the all-knowing Allah allow four instead of enforcing monogamy. How could Allah not know that men cannot treat their wives with justice. As to the prophet being the exception, his partiality towards the teenager Aisha is well-known.

So time has abrogated a law of Allah. You now believe in the equality of women. Why cannot other commandments of Allah be abrogated by time. And most surely time is mightier than Allah. Even the Saudi's were forced to abolish slavery, explicitly allowed by Allah in his verse allowing booty, as late as 1960. So allah is a creation of time and not the other way around!

The words 'misquoted and misunderstood' are the most commonly occurring words used by Muslim apologists. Moderate Muslim why don't you ask yourself why the message of Allah can be so easliy misquoted and misunderstood by his own creatures? Are Allah's messages a lot of gobbledygook requiring detailed analysis and voluminous commentaries to make them intelligible? Has Allah no power to make his messages clearly understood? Since as you claim Allah knows everything beforehand did he not realise that his 'pure Islam' will be misunderstood by the vast majority of people? Which means that Allah has no objection to it being misunderstood!

To conclude that 'intelligence' specific legal testimony is stretching the meaning of synochdoche a bit but the good thing about this attempt is that the attempt is being made at all. That a Muslim is trying hard to soften the unkind words of the prophet about women is itself encouraging. If this can be extended to bring about a more humane interpretation of Muslim scriptures it will bring some respite to a world living in fear of Islam. Like your statement that many of the commandments of Allah were only for people who were directly addressed by his prophets these kinds of interpretations will help bring Islam out of seventh centurty Arabia into the new millennium.

What he said does not look like a challenge but sounds more like a threat.

Apart from intelligence now a new weakness has been added, memory, due to which witnessing requires two women. And it is nice to know that this does not imply inferiority of women. Now try and convince your brothers in religion. It is not infidels who conduct what you call ' false anti-islamic argument that men are superior to women in intelligence and religion,..." but Muslims themselves who interpret Islam in the manner you consider is unfair.

You have specified 'people of the book' to respect. Does it not mean that you disrespect Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists etc? If not why did you not say people of other faiths instead of specifing Jews and Christians?