Islam Can Islam be distinguished from Arabs

Yytz6

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Since Ibn Ishaq is the earliest surviving biography of Mohammeds life which in its original form also no longer survives (sadly), I’m free to quote information from it freely so long as it backs my practicular stance. Not to mention you freely ignored all the other narrations I put up there on racism other then Ibn Ishaq's.
You can quote anything you like, but the scholars that study hadith reject almost all the hadiths in it. It's just a collection of rumors.

Yes, recall many such hadith quoted here. But I haven't found one that is authentic and racistic. And then if you're in doubt, there is plenty in both the Qur'an and in the hadith that says the contrary. Why don't you ever quote those? Or take them into account? Why would a prophet be at the same time openly racistic and openly against all forms of racism and discrimination?
 
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Snoder

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Do I really have to tell you you're wrong or do you already know it yourself?

That's what is referred to as a loaded question.

Muhammad convinced his followers that he could actually speak for God. That when he said so, his words were the words of God spoken by him in Arabic. These were later written down and compiled into the Quran.
That's the basis of Islam. You didn't deny this, you just played games. You could refute what I wrote, but instead you made that post, which is to be expected.

We have the Quran to read and it's mostly incoherent ramblings. Muslims play this off as "poetry." We just don't get the beauty expressed in classical Arabic.

It's pretty angry, and God seems really interested in revealing Muhammad's personal issues with others, for a book written by God to mankind.

I have read many religious texts. There is a lot of beauty in the religions of the world.

The Quran is a series of disconnecting ramblings.

I clicked on an online Quran and found this randomly:
"And [remember, O Muhammad], when you said to the one on whom Allah bestowed favor and you bestowed favor, "Keep your wife and fear Allah," while you concealed within yourself that which Allah is to disclose. And you feared the people, while Allah has more right that you fear Him. So when Zayd had no longer any need for her, We married her to you in order that there not be upon the believers any discomfort concerning the wives of their adopted sons when they no longer have need of them. And ever is the command of Allah accomplished."

Who cares? You believe that this is something God wants all of humanity to know about? I don't care about this dude's wives. I don't care about Muhammad's sex life and the people that he hates. Who cares?

Thanks God, I really wanted to know this. I will go about my life as a better person having read what you wrote word for word here to all of humanity.
 
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Yytz6

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That when he said so, his words were the words of God spoken by him in Arabic.
Now you're making more sense.
"And [remember, O Muhammad], when you said to the one on whom Allah bestowed favor and you bestowed favor, "Keep your wife and fear Allah," while you concealed within yourself that which Allah is to disclose. And you feared the people, while Allah has more right that you fear Him. So when Zayd had no longer any need for her, We married her to you in order that there not be upon the believers any discomfort concerning the wives of their adopted sons when they no longer have need of them. And ever is the command of Allah accomplished."
The significance of the story is in that Zainab married Zayd, who was a former slave. It those days this was not socially acceptable. Muhammad (Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam) made it acceptable. Then they divorced. Divorce is taken seriously in Islam. However, that it is something prohibited or something to be avoided with the expense of the well-being of either spouse is false, and that is what we also learn from this story.
 
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mindlight

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That's complicated. When I study about Islam I don't look at the ethnicity of a scholar. And how do you define an Arab? Is someone born to Arab parents but in the west, for instance, an Arab to you? What about a theologian? Is an Islamic scholar automatically a theologian? What about Shia Muslims?

So no name then, which kind of proves the point of the OP. Islam is dominated by Arabs and its "orthodoxy" is determined by them.

Since I know Arabs that are Christians I would not define an Arab in terms of Islam though I guess many Sunni Arabs do. Someone who speaks Arabic is more an Arab than one that does not. Someone with a connection with Arabia or North Africa has a stronger claim than someone from elsewhere. It is clear a Turk or an Iranian or a black African is not an Arab. Indonesians are not Arabs.

So if you want to identify a non Arab scholar / theologian that is acceptable to the Sunni world as a whole then he probably needs to speak Arabic as his first language, be a Sunni and come from North Africa / Arabia / the Levant. Can you think of one serious scholar that you would regard as authoritative from outside these parameters?

It is also an interesting question whether European Arabs remain Arabs after a couple of generations of exposure to freedom and Christianity and the relative prosperity of Europe. Their first language is no longer Arabic after they have done school here, the freedoms they have are not available in the Arab world and they have more money and therefore more choices than most Arabs. So I would be surprised if you could find an "Arab" Scholar from Europe that most Arabs would accept as authoritative.
 
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dzheremi

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It is clear a Turk or an Iranian or a black African is not an Arab.

Dunno about Turks or Iranians, but how many Sudanese have you met?

I don't think the line is that clear. If a person identifies as Arab, that probably ought to be enough. There are 'Arabs without Arabic' (i.e., natives of Arabia who do not speak Arabic natively, like the Mehri and other speakers of Modern South Arabian languages), in addition to many who do speak Arabic natively who do not identify as Arabs (Copts, Maronites, some Syriacs and Chaldeans, etc).
 
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mindlight

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I'm equating 99,5% of Christians I have ever met (knowing they are Christians) with Christians. And I have met scores.

I have yet to meet a Muslim who understands and has had a real experience of Gods grace and mercy. I have met ones that are profound and have engaged with the world on a deeper level than secular atheists and agnostics (but that is not that hard) but never one that could compete with a mature Christian in terms of an experience of Gods love and a story of Gods personal concern. Most Muslims I meet are quite angry and bitter and love to blame others for their own faults. There is no personal evidence that God is at work in their lives and no assurance in them of salvation. But I could point to Christians who have given up alcohol, who have become better husbands , wives or mothers since their conversion or who have been miraculously cured of cancer after prayer. I even know one guy from the church I was in for 3 decades who was married to a Christian lady there. He clinically died as an atheist, met Jesus and was given a second chance coming back as a Christian. There are no real miracles in Islam and there is little love and little freedom. Also a major difference between Muslims and Christians , is that Muslims define righteousness from a cage of fear policed by angry Arab men while Christians define it in terms of a relationship with a God who forgives error and imputes righteousness and Christian live in the freedom of those who are truly forgiven their sin.
 
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mindlight

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Dunno about Turks or Iranians, but how many Sudanese have you met?

There was one in my Bible College from South Sudan, but he was black and wanted nothing to do with Arabs. My understanding is the North Sudanese by the Nile identify as Arabs and those in Dafur are more African in appearance. But please educate me on this.

I don't think the line is that clear. If a person identifies as Arab, that probably ought to be enough. There are 'Arabs without Arabic' (i.e., natives of Arabia who do not speak Arabic natively, like the Mehri and other speakers of Modern South Arabian languages), in addition to many who do speak Arabic natively who do not identify as Arabs (Copts, Maronites, some Syriacs and Chaldeans, etc).

With such a large and diverse group of people a precise definition is of course problematic and especially since the Arabic diaspora has blurred the boundaries on the language and location criteria. Could you give an alternate definition which our Muslim friend could then use to find a non Arabic scholar example?
 
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AlexDTX

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Islam started in Arabia, Muhammad was an Arab, his early companions were Arabs. The Qur'an itself is written in and read in Arabic.

So from its earliest days Arabs have been dominant in Islam. Today Hajj is to an Arabic country and Muslims bow to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Saudia Arabia spends billions promoting its view of Islam.

Given such strong Arabian roots Arabs have often insisted they know best in matters Muslim. Obviously Turks, Iranians and many others do not always see eye to eye with their Arab cousins in the faith. This is a root of many conflicts, historical and modern.

To what extent do non Arabian Muslims think Arabian dominance and authoritarianism is a problem?

Is the problem too deeply rooted in Islam's core texts and indeed in the life of Muhammad to be resolved?

Can true Islam exist without Arabs?
Some time ago I came across a school of thought that believes Islam is actually a Jewish child, and that the founders of Islam were Jewish in descent. I will have search through my archives to find the articles on that topic before I can get a link to it. But it is interesting and contrary to the narrative we have been told.
 
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dzheremi

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There was one in my Bible College from South Sudan, but he was black and wanted nothing to do with Arabs. My understanding is the North Sudanese by the Nile identify as Arabs and those in Dafur are more African in appearance. But please educate me on this.

South Sudanese are pretty different (hence the whole "two civil wars, succession from Sudan, and independence" arc of their history), but Sudanese from the North ("Sudan" proper, if you will), like you say, tend to identify as Arabs, though there are lots of different kinds of people in both places.

And then you have people like the Baggara Arabs who native to Chad, even further from the 'Arab' cultural center, and pretty much look like what most Westerners would say is a non-Arab black African, but they identify as Arabs and trace their lineage back to specific Arab tribes. Here's an example of one, photographed in Chad in 1910:

Cavalier_arabe_du_D%C3%A9kakir%C3%A9_sur_un_cheval_capara%C3%A7onn%C3%A9.jpg


And then if you make Arabic-speaking a criteria, what do you do with the ethnic Kakwa people of Uganda, some of whom speak Nubi, a Sudanese Arabic-based creole, and are descended from the Sudanese troops of Emin Pasha (1880s), who settled in Uganda during the British colonial period? This is the ethnic group that also includes people like Idi Amin, who nobody would mistake as an Arab.

Or, much more on point, what do you do with the Maltese? Maltese is basically a form of Arabic (rooted in what is called "Siculo-Arabic", the Arabic dialect once spoken on the Italian island of Sicily; even though it hasn't been spoken in centuries, there is a book-length grammatical description of it by Dionsius A. Agius), but very, very influenced by European languages like Italian, English, and French, to the point of losing all of its 'emphatic' consonants (ص ض ط ظ ع غ). There are additionally forms of Arabic that are native to Afghanistan (Balkh) and elsewhere in Central Asia, to Iran, to Turkey (Mardin and Hatay), to Cyprus (Cypriot Maronite Arabic, which might be the most divergent of Arabic dialects, being written in Greek and heavily influenced by it), and to Nigeria. Check out the book Arabic as a Minority Language (ed. Jonathan Owens, published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2000) to see case studies of Arabic as it exists outside of the Arab countries, if you're interested. The language criteria actually makes this a very fascinating question, as you're immediately dragged far away from Arabia proper, even before Muhammad. The first ever Arab kingdom was founded in what is now Iraq by the Lakhmids, at al-Hira in about 300 AD.

With such a large and diverse group of people a precise definition is of course problematic and especially since the Arabic diaspora has blurred the boundaries on the language and location criteria.

They always have. Arabs are essentially nomads. Some academics even separate the Arabs from the Aramaeans in the pre-Islamic period in Arabia not based on language, but on whether they were nomadic (Arab) or sedentary (Aramaeans). Spencer J. Trimingham does this in his fascinating book Christianity Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (Longman & Librarie Du Liban, 1979). There are historical/linguistic motivations to do this, as there are ancient peoples who are pretty solidly identified as Arabs who wrote in and presumably spoke Aramaic or Syriac, like the Nabateans. (See here John F. Healey "Were the Nabateans Arabs?" in Aram Periodical 1:1, 1989, 38-44.)

Could you give an alternate definition which our Muslim friend could then use to find a non Arabic scholar example?

An alternate definition of an Arab? No. Again, I think if someone identifies as one, that ought to be enough. Conversely, if someone does not identify as one despite speaking Arabic natively and coming from an Arab-aligned country (e.g., Egypt, Syria, etc.), they ought not to be grouped together with the Arabs. Let everyone be whatever they are. Who really cares? The Islamic religion may privilege Arabness, but I am not a Muslim, and I think that's a really foolish mindset anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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buzuxi02

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Many people who claim they are arabs are not arabs at all. Originally those from truly Arab tribes were required to convert to Islam when the caliphate took over but not non-arab subjects. Egyptians are not truly arabs, neither are Syrians or Palestinians or Lebanese. All these peoples spoke a different language and had a different religion before islamization. The only group that withstood the adoption of both Arabic and the Muslim religion are the people on the island of Cyprus. Arabs and muslims were never sea peoples they had difficulty subjugating islands.
 
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JosephZ

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IslamQA is probably the most reliable Islamic website when it comes to rulings and fiqh and etc, because it always quotes sources to back it’s information or rulings.
When getting information from IslamQA it's important to know that the material on that site is produced by Muhammad Al-Munajjid. He is a Salafi cleric who applies the teachings from the Salafi school of thought and Hanbali jurisprudence, both of which take a literal, strict, and puritanical approach to Islam, to answer questions on his website. Since his opinions and rulings come from a Salafi perspective/interpretation (A minority in Islam) and from Hanabali (An even smaller minority), much of what is found on his site would not be accepted as being representative of Islam by the majority of the world's Muslims.
 
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mindlight

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Some time ago I came across a school of thought that believes Islam is actually a Jewish child, and that the founders of Islam were Jewish in descent. I will have search through my archives to find the articles on that topic before I can get a link to it. But it is interesting and contrary to the narrative we have been told.

There were a lot of Jewish tribes out in the desert. The Byzantines had expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and prohibited them from even reading the Pentateuch in Hebrew. Only Greek was allowed. So many of these Jews enjoyed the freedom of the desert while not being particularly orthodox. Muhammads portrayal of Jews as of Christians does not present a particularly orthodox picture quoting from heretical texts and misunderstanding key beliefs and stories. Muhammad did not find them easy converts and lots of problems with them. He resolved these by conquest , massacres and ultimately by forced conversions. They have thus been absorbed into the Arab peoples or fled elsewhere from that.
 
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Many people who claim they are arabs are not arabs at all. Originally those from truly Arab tribes were required to convert to Islam when the caliphate took over but not non-arab subjects. Egyptians are not truly arabs, neither are Syrians or Palestinians or Lebanese. All these peoples spoke a different language and had a different religion before islamization. The only group that withstood the adoption of both Arabic and the Muslim religion are the people on the island of Cyprus. Arabs and muslims were never sea peoples they had difficulty subjugating islands.

If you push it back to the children of Ishmael this is a smaller group. But a lot of Arabs migrated to the places you mentioned and then outbred the locals

Kudos to the Cypriots but the loss of Alexandria 644 AD and the battle of the masts 655 AD broke Byzantine control of the Mare Nostrum. Both the early Caliphate and the later Ottomans had formidable navies
 
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South Sudanese are pretty different (hence the whole "two civil wars, succession from Sudan, and independence" arc of their history), but Sudanese from the North ("Sudan" proper, if you will), like you say, tend to identify as Arabs, though there are lots of different kinds of people in both places.

And then you have people like the Baggara Arabs who native to Chad, even further from the 'Arab' cultural center, and pretty much look like what most Westerners would say is a non-Arab black African, but they identify as Arabs and trace their lineage back to specific Arab tribes. Here's an example of one, photographed in Chad in 1910:

Cavalier_arabe_du_D%C3%A9kakir%C3%A9_sur_un_cheval_capara%C3%A7onn%C3%A9.jpg


And then if you make Arabic-speaking a criteria, what do you do with the ethnic Kakwa people of Uganda, some of whom speak Nubi, a Sudanese Arabic-based creole, and are descended from the Sudanese troops of Emin Pasha (1880s), who settled in Uganda during the British colonial period? This is the ethnic group that also includes people like Idi Amin, who nobody would mistake as an Arab.

Or, much more on point, what do you do with the Maltese? Maltese is basically a form of Arabic (rooted in what is called "Siculo-Arabic", the Arabic dialect once spoken on the Italian island of Sicily; even though it hasn't been spoken in centuries, there is a book-length grammatical description of it by Dionsius A. Agius), but very, very influenced by European languages like Italian, English, and French, to the point of losing all of its 'emphatic' consonants (ص ض ط ظ ع غ). There are additionally forms of Arabic that are native to Afghanistan (Balkh) and elsewhere in Central Asia, to Iran, to Turkey (Mardin and Hatay), to Cyprus (Cypriot Maronite Arabic, which might be the most divergent of Arabic dialects, being written in Greek and heavily influenced by it), and to Nigeria. Check out the book Arabic as a Minority Language (ed. Jonathan Owens, published by Mouton de Gruyter in 2000) to see case studies of Arabic as it exists outside of the Arab countries, if you're interested. The language criteria actually makes this a very fascinating question, as you're immediately dragged far away from Arabia proper, even before Muhammad. The first ever Arab kingdom was founded in what is now Iraq by the Lakhmids, at al-Hira in about 300 AD.



They always have. Arabs are essentially nomads. Some academics even separate the Arabs from the Aramaeans in the pre-Islamic period in Arabia not based on language, but on whether they were nomadic (Arab) or sedentary (Aramaeans). Spencer J. Trimingham does this in his fascinating book Christianity Among the Arabs in Pre-Islamic Times (Longman & Librarie Du Liban, 1979). There are historical/linguistic motivations to do this, as there are ancient peoples who are pretty solidly identified as Arabs who wrote in and presumably spoke Aramaic or Syriac, like the Nabateans. (See here John F. Healey "Were the Nabateans Arabs?" in Aram Periodical 1:1, 1989, 38-44.)



An alternate definition of an Arab? No. Again, I think if someone identifies as one, that ought to be enough. Conversely, if someone does not identify as one despite speaking Arabic natively and coming from an Arab-aligned country (e.g., Egypt, Syria, etc.), they ought not to be grouped together with the Arabs. Let everyone be whatever they are. Who really cares? The Islamic religion may privilege Arabness, but I am not a Muslim, and I think that's a really foolish mindset anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How about the children of Ishmael , described by the blessing given to Ishmael as opposed to Isaac. It is the only way indeed I can explain why Islam has any power at all as it has so many errors and absurdities as to be self sabotaging otherwise. But why non Arabs would want to attach onto this foolishness when the whole religion is Arabic in culture, origin and history is a mystery to me. They will not share in Ishmaels blessing but receive the full curse of his falleness without the grace and mercy to climb back out of the hole.
 
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To be fair I'd hesitate to name any Arab Islamic scholars either.

But then your sources are still 100% Arabic since Muhammad himself was an Arab , the Koran is Arabic and all the early companions who inform the Hadith and Sunna with their Arab reflections on an Arab man are Arabic.
 
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Yytz6

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But then your sources are still 100% Arabic since Muhammad himself was an Arab , the Koran is Arabic and all the early companions who inform the Hadith and Sunna with their Arab reflections on an Arab man are Arabic.
You mean it all comes in the Arabic language?
 
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You mean it all comes in the Arabic language?

By Arabs about Arabs in Arabic, in an Arabic way. So a little more than just the language. Muhammad had a Christian sex slave with a Coptic Christian background - Mariyah the Copt and a Jewish wife from a tribe he conquered (Safiyah bint Huyayy) neither of whom were probably that influential on his thought life. So non Arabic influences were sparse indeed. He had a Nestorian priest friend but that guy was probably an Arab too. So yes it was a very closed system.
 
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Well, check out that video I posted to know more about it. It's pretty much impossible to think otherwise after you see the evidence.

They are covering the entire city of Mecca, not the Kaba. By doing so they will cover all the original "house of Mohammed", "house of Khadija", "house of Abu Bakr" and so on. Because otherwise it will show that those places didn't even exist in the 7th century.



this one should be the final result


future-mecca-upload1.jpg

The picture is quite an ambitious vision I must say. It is one reason that I prefer Muslims to Atheists that they are prepared to invest so much of their wealth towards the glory of God. Even the hotels are shaped like mini Qurans that would open towards the Kaaba. But then other civilisations have also been as zealous for God without having a clue about who He really is. Some people argue that the Saudis are investing in their revenue stream from Meccan pilgrimages here. Probably a shrewd policy given that the oil is bound to run out one day.

The Saudis do have a tradition of wiping out Christian history and revising archaeological finds and even pictures in the Kaaba according to their strict Wahabbi understandings. I understand they whitewashed a picture of Mary away for instance in the Kaaba. If a copy of the bible from the first century AD was ever found in Saudi Arabia they would probably burn it.
 
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