The great Belgian orientalist Dr. Koenraad Elst, an expert on Islamic atrocities in India, has published a post at The Brussels Journal about stoning in Islam as a response to my essay Why Christians Accepted Greek Natural Philosophy, But Muslims Did Not. Here is what he has to say:
In his article on how the Greco-Roman heritage impacted Christianity but not Islam, Fjordman has mentioned the different treatment of adulterers in the two religions. He correctly relates how Jewish law prescribed death by stoning as punishment for adultery (Deut.22:19-23), how Jesus overruled this law, how the Jews gradually let it lapse, and how Mohammed chose to uphold it, as his more zealous followers do until today. But the contrast is even sharper than this.- - - - - - - - -
In the Hadith collection of Al-Muslim (4211 and 4214), Mohammed’s intervention in a dispute over the punishment of an adulterous couple is described. The Jewish couple was brought before Mohammed, who, though an immigrant, had just established himself as the sole ruler of Medina. He asked Jewish bystanders what punishment the Torah prescribed for this offence. They said: “We blacken their faces and make them ride on a donkey with their faces turned backwards.” Mohammed ordered a copy of the Torah brought, and the prescribed punishment was found to be death by stoning. So he ordered the couple to be stoned. The companion who passed on this story, Abdullah ibn Umar, testifies: “I was one of those who stoned them, and I saw him protecting her with his body.” Wow, that was true passion, until both died under the pious rain of stones.
That is why even under the onslaught of modernity, Muslims are reluctant to relax this stone-age punishment for adultery. That is why the enlightened Islamic spokesman Tariq Ramadan will only go as far as considering a “moratorium” on stoning but not its abolition. After all, Mohammed not merely prescribed this punishment: he specifically reversed an attempt at relaxing it. Islam is essentially an imitation of Mohammed’s model behaviour. Therefore, a true Muslim must emulate the Prophet’s resistance against any “progressive” tendency towards laxer modes of punishment.
But let us conclude on a lighter note. A jolly Australian lady friend used this topic to explain to me the difference between Iran and Australia: “In Iran, you fornicate and then you get stoned. In Australia, you first get stoned and then you fornicate.”
9 comments:
It isn't really IMHO the Koran. You have to look deeper than "Mohammed did this" because most Muslims have not the foggiest idea of what Mohammed did or did not do.
Instead, you have to go the heart of Islam, which is polygamy. Instead of the West, where historically a man was at little risk of his wife being abducted as a sex slave, and was reasonably confident that once he wooed and won a woman who had to at least assent, in the Muslim world marriages are arranged.
Women don't love their husbands, at best they don't actively despise them and must share them with other women. Along with the dynastic struggles among half brothers this brings.
Islam is violent, dangerous, and repressive in all aspects of human behavior but especially sexuality because of the polygamy creating a permanent class of men who seek to simply overthrow the big men and take their harems.
Rather, it is more accurate to say that the West became "Greek" in the sense of one wife to a man, and the woman fairly and openly won (she must at least assent) creates a different foundation, a different family, than a sheik with arranged/forced marriages to a lot of women.
Not the least of which is that in the West, most men were married and had a stake thus in a fair, open, honest, and moderate legal system. Not the harshness of hard murder to keep the polygamous system going.
Whiskey,
You should read The Secret History by Procopius - a contemporary account of Byzantine life in the sixth century under the Emperor Justinian by a great writer.
In the Byzantine society of that era any man who objected to his wife's infidelity risked being ruined by the Emperor's mad wife Theodora (a former prostitute and bawdy circus performer) and in consequence the majority of women took as many lovers as they desired and adultery became a social norm.
In his introduction to The Secret History the British scholar G.A. Williamson warns the modern reader that you need a strong stomach to read it. I initially scoffed at this but I changed my mind after actually reading it. It's the only history book I've ever read, indeed the only non-fiction book I've read, that gave me nightmares.
But they'll stone you when you're tryin' to be so good!Seriously, it's difficult for me to understand how anyone could take the Islamic "religion" seriously. Muhammad, if the historical records are accurate, brought all the worst vices and failings of which Man is capable together into one body. His legendary bloodthirstiness is only the most dramatic example.
It would appear that Islam had one and only one thing going for it: It licenses its followers to kill, take slaves, concubines, and booty, and to claim that these things are mandated and approved by God. That's a lure for the envious, the vicious, and the subnormal, cohorts that are always generously populated. In this it's on all fours with Nazism and Communism -- two other "religions" that created mass poverty, oppression, and destruction.
Mohammed ordered a copy of the Torah brought, and the prescribed punishment was found to be death by stoning. So he ordered the couple to be stoned.
...
After all, Mohammed not merely prescribed this punishment: he specifically reversed an attempt at relaxing it. Islam is essentially an imitation of Mohammed’s model behaviour. Therefore, a true Muslim must emulate the Prophet’s resistance against any “progressive” tendency towards laxer modes of punishment.
How much longer will the West endure Islam's predatory conduct until we finally begin to serve the gander its own sauce?
If Muslims are so Hell bent on exporting shari'a law to every corner of the earth, let them be on the receiving end of it at all times, in all places. Let them show not one whit of agitation at having to endure such barbaric punishments and austere strictures. If their beloved Mohammad was, indeed, the Perfect Man™, then by all means, let them lead by example by ruthlessly applying his same obsessively puritanical and cruel despotism to themselves. AND DO IT WITHOUT A PEEP OF PROTEST.
No alcohol, no non-liturgical music, no singing or dancing, all business halted during hours of prayer, women arrested for dispaying too much ankle, no haram foods, no coed schools, no camera cell phones, no dissent, no political opposition, amputations for petty theft, no eating during the daylight hours of Ramadan, no mingling of the sexes and every other lunatic prohibition these lamb eating sand-loving goons profess to admire so much.
Should their little colonies among us blossom forth into stable and contented enclaves of healthy, productive and harmonious people, only then may they propose that we in the West should live under shari'a law as well.
If, as is so often the historical case, their hives of Islamic perfidy fester into the usual cesspits of vendetta, despair, corruption, abject gender apartheid, stagnation and violence, then they can take their Qu'ran, their Hadith plus every inch of shari'a law and stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
Mohammad had rocks in his head.
And a scorpion where his heart should have been.
I totlally agree with Z. Let them live under their precious sharia. Let them live as mo, no cell phones, no cars, no electricity or running water, no tv or satellite dishes, no technology whatsoever. Let them like the Amish in their own enclaves. Like the Amish but adding their cruel punishments and practices. Then they can enjoy their small little dar al-islam conclaves to the fullest while we the rest of us enjoys our secular moder life in the larger dar al-harb areas.
Oooops a little correction:
Let them LIVE like the Amish in their own enclaves
and moder should of course be moden in the last sentence. Pardon me for my typonese.
aaaaaaaarrrrrggghhhhh!!!!! MODERN***
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