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Theme Changer

 Topic: Dawah Carriers Are Destroying Your Faith…And Having A Good Time In The Process

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  • Dawah Carriers Are Destroying Your Faith…And Having A Good Time In The Process
     OP - July 29, 2014, 11:07 AM

    Just found this, it's actually not a bad read and some of the comments are interesting. I spied The Rationalizer as well.

    Dawah Carriers Are Destroying Your Faith…And Having A Good Time In The Process

    Quote
    Back by popular demand like the ‘Hunger Games’, SuedeNikita caused a massive stir when I published her ‘response’ to Hamza Tzortzis earlier in the year:

    http://asharisassemble.com/2013/10/14/hamza-tzortzis-wants-to-love-you-or-else/

    I don’t necessarily endorse her views but I do like them…


    I can already hear it: hostility, wailing, gnashing of teeth, suggestions for exorcism, even threats of violence. Masked takfir is a must. And the inevitable call for ‘unity’ against the onslaught of ‘the kuffaar’. There may even be emotional appeals such as ‘it affected my iman, how could you?!’

    And of course: ‘These people defend Islam! They make huge sacrifices! What do you do eh?!’…’She’s a hater, she’s jealous’…’Ignore her’…’lets see you do better then’…’at least they are doing something! What have YOU ever done for Islam!?’…etc, etc, ad nauseum.

    I actually sympathise (a bit): many Muslims, especially the young, feel under siege from the barrage of negativity and criticism they face about their religion. They can’t catch a break – whether it’s Islamophobic You-tubers, bloggers, serious journalists, the national press or the latest Hollywood movies, they must feel like they have a target on their back. In fact, young Muslims can’t go to the library, newsagents or cinema without catching grief about their religion. People like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins can say things about Muslims that if they uttered them about Jews, would get them arrested faster than Miley Cyrus can get her skirt off.

    And their religious establishment, such as it is, does’t help much either: the first generation of largely immigrant Muslims had necessarily limited interaction with the ‘host’ society: they did not want to rock the boat, saw their stay as limited and faced hostility, violence or indifference and were ignored by their hosts. Their children and grandchildren however, expected better treatment, or at least more visibility and ‘attention’. Well, in the case of Muslims, they sure got it. But the Imams and scholars were not equipped or willing to deal with the problems of Muslims in a non-Muslim society and questions ranging from the Quranic stance on evolution to how to find a boy or a girl, what type of sex to have with them when you did and whether there is any good reason to oppose gay marriage were asked to a cohort of people not comfortable with being questioned about anything. At all.

    Access to information also increased exponentially during that time, the internet was born and like Frankenstein’s monster, went to account its makers – all manner of questions came into the minds of Muslims that had never done so before – some due to the ‘free thinking’ attitude of the educational institutions that they attended (that their parents, like most immigrant communities, had not) and some due to the hostility towards Islam by secularists and Christians alike, especially in the ‘safe zone’ (for bigots that is) of the internet – questions like was Aisha (RA) really nine years old at the time of marriage and does the Quran actually tell you to beat your wife, as well as technical questions such as is the Quran really preserved and philosophical ones like what really is the proof that Islam is not just made up hokum?

    It was a tough time, and it was made suddenly worse by 9/11. Things went into fast forward: the Muslim community had no time to adapt, no voice, no representative. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made things worse still, radicalising host communities and Muslims alike. Hostility to Muslim Taliban or Muslim insurgents translated into inevitable hostility to local Muslims. More questions were asked, more doubts were raised. Some people left Islam all together and then railed against it, being offered immunity from the usual political correctness in the media due to their ‘ex-Muslim’ status. They could get away with saying what they wanted, generalising their personal experiences to a whole community in a way that would be instantly recognised for what it was were they Jewish. They took full licence and again, through the internet and other media, the doubts, questions and general anxiety of Muslims increased.

    The ‘scholars’ tried – or rather, they saw an opening: a chance to leave their mosques and to enter the elysian fields of British or American academia: trouble with Islam meant Islamic societies, student bodies and organisations needing speakers to argue their corner and satisfy their body of students, away from home, horny and alone with their doubts and guilts in student accommodation. So a new era was ushered in: no longer would Riyadh Ul Haq, Haitham Haddad and too many others to mention, be confined to their mosques or to weekend seminars and evening classes. No – they would emerge and rescue the young Muslims from both their interrogators and their own doubts. Now the scholars would inspire a new generation of Muslims to be self confidant and at the same time show how stupid the kufaar were, university or not.

    Except it didn’t quite work out that way.

    Because the scholars, when faced with a critical university audience which often included combative non-Muslims, basically sucked.

    Haddad soon got caught out for his frighteningly uninformed comments on Jews, and just about everything else. Other scholars, who for the sake of brevity can remain nameless, were shamed by simple questions on whether the Quran said one was allowed to beat ones wife. Far from being fonts of knowledge, their presentations consisted of authoritarian posturing, reminding the audience that they did not have the requisite Islamic ‘qualifications’ and telling them that that’s what Islam said and if they didn’t like it then ‘that’s the bottom line’ like some kind of bearded Steve Austin (yes, I am a girl and yes I watched pro wrestling).

    They behaved strangely, unfamiliar with Western universities or even the wider society. They dressed strangely, spoke as if preaching to the converted and the struggled to contain their indignation at the mildest criticism or cross examination. Many threw public tantrums. But most persisted, drawn by the allure of influencing the young (what more worthwhile group to influence after all!) and perhaps even an appearance on ‘Newsnight’ to tell Paxman that Islam really was a religion of peace (or something reheated like that).

    Of course, it ended badly: the scholars were famous amongst their own sectarian groups only, they usually did not have even a cursory mastery of the English idiom (or cultural quirks) and were frightfully out of touch with the issues of the day as well as the controversial questions of Islam and even religion and the belief in God that had been asked from time immemorial. At worst, some, like our friend Haddad, made it into the national press for their gaffes and earned, along with many of his colleagues, bans from educational institutes (and he was one of the Western educated ones).

    But if only a desire or a wish being unfulfilled led to its withering away, humanity would be a much more peaceful race. Despite the failure of the migration of the ‘scholars’ from their courses and evening classes into the universities, the young Muslims need for ‘answers’ or at least a shield, a defence, remained as great as ever, if not more so, as calamities such 7/7 and the War on Terror kept arriving like London buses: all at once.

    Exeunt scholars and enter our new heroes: the ‘Dawah carriers’. On the face of it, an evolved form of talented amateurs such as Sheikh Ahmed Deedat, these new defenders had the beginnings of their current incarnation in Zakir Naik – an apparently gifted (gifted at what was soon to be made clear) amateur who rallied huge crowds in India and the Middle East by explaining Islam to ‘non-Muslims’ and taking their questions. Conversions and warm feelings invariably followed (the similarity between his conferences and Midwestern televangelists with people being possessed by the ‘Holy Spirit’ was of course lost on the Muslims).

    Moreover, he had an affable style with his ill-fitted suit and constant smile, denied the existence of any Sunni-Shia split, made liberal use of scientific facts and used them to ‘establish’ the truth of the Quran. Muslims felt confident, they felt armed with intellectual weapons with which to not only fight back but to win, win converts. A television channel and millions of adoring fans followed.

    And like Kurt Cobain’s suicide, he inspired a multitude of copycats.

    His own Indian organisation, IRF (Islamic Research Foundation), gave birth to IERA in the UK, which rapidly rose to become a behemoth in terms of speaking engagements, ‘Dawah’ and ‘spreading the message of Islam’ on campuses and the streets. And the lesson had been learnt from the near Biblical exodus of the Muslim scholars: the front men were to people such as Hamza Tzortzis and Abdur Raheem Green – converts, with English as their first language and trained to be politically correct (that didn’t work out for Green though) and moreover raised on a diet of rhetoric, dialectic and debate. They would do what Naik had and the scholars had not – they would give the Muslims intellectual shields and offensive weapons. Not only would the Muslims defend themselves in university and in life but they would strengthen Islam with converts. And if these converts were photogenic ‘white people’, so much the better. After all, what better proof could there be for the truth of Islam then that a child of European civilization and materialism had overcome all of the obstacles placed in it’s way and embraced the TRUTH! (the fact that the same argument could be used to establish the ‘truth’ of Scientology was not forthcoming). And if this child of the Enlightenment that had found it way back to the truth, converted…no, REVERTED was a European woman, then so much the better, for what greater proof could there be against those who claimed that Islam oppressed women. If so then why were their own women embracing it!

    That they did so usually through marriage was also often forgotten…

    But there was one slight problem: the issue with not knowing anything is that you cannot know if you are being taught the truth. The feel good factor with Naik and the IRF crowd was immense…but the content was mostly for those who knew relatively little – little Islam and little science that is. But for those who dug deeper, serious problems were waiting. Often more serious than the questions they had had in the first place. Not only was no-one upfront in IRF a serious academic scientist, despite their ballooning support and wealth, they resolutely refused to hire any. A lot of questions (polygyny, jihad, was Islam spread by the sword etc) were answered, to varying degrees of satisfaction. But questions such as the age of Aisha (RA), sex with slaves, FGM and reliability of hadith that had been the mainstay of academic orientalists for years went by the wayside.

    In fact, ‘academic’ it was not.

    Which would have been fine. Except now, by debating and ‘doing dawah’ to non-Muslims, Muslims were exposed to these issues too. A slew of Evangelical Christians were also on hand to bring to light any strange narration or tafseer under the sun. Answers brought new, tougher questions. Debates against mediocre opponents incited the wrath of more serious and learned ones.

    Matched initially against atheist and polemicist opponents who had only bothered with a cursory study of Islam (if that), and never at an academic level (see Christian apologists, and Richard Dawkins himself reminded us that not only had he not read the Quran, he does not need to), the Muslims speakers came to realise that if their opponents don’t know anything about Islam, well, they don’t need to either…

    The Muslims had traded scholars with little or no cultural sense or secular knowledge for ‘dawah carriers’ with presentation skills, oratory but neither secular nor Islamic knowledge.

    It was a bad swap.

    But cousin, business was booming! Nearly all universities had ‘Islamic Awareness’ weeks by now, bookings for speakers such as Hamza Tzortzis and many others came thick and fast, international engagements, seminars, Islamic conferences and television engagements followed. They became not only ‘Dawah guys’ but ‘intellectual activists’, ‘linguists’ ‘political analysts’ (both Muslims and their non-Muslim brethren had to suspend disbelief as nearly all of these qualifications were achieved unsupervised in the speakers’ bedrooms). But of course the Islamic ‘scholarship’ was still there: the dawah guys were always referring questions to, checking with or even studying under ‘People of Knowledge’. In the case of the biggest and most prominent organisation, these ‘People of Knowledge’ were none other than the same ones who had so recently beat a hasty retreat from campus: namely Haitham Haddad. Behind the scenes, all sectarian affiliations were preserved – IERA, like Naik, would never talk about sectarian issues or shia/sunni – but they did that as a front only. Administratively, they were run by hardliners such as Haddad who would never be seen dead with an Ashari let alone a Shia.

    The new ‘defenders’, the ‘Dawah Carriers’ had not learnt Islam nor secular sciences – they had learnt politics and misdirection.

    But who cared about that when there was the next debate with the student ‘atheist society’ to organise or the next Islamic Awareness stall? We could only hope that Hamza and Co would be back from Malaysia or wherever they had gone to emancipate the minds of Muslims in time! In fact, being a dawah guy was like being a rock star, just without the sex, drugs and rock and roll…well, maybe not without the sex: the ‘Big Three’ speakers of IERA during this period (Hamza Tzortzis, Adnan Rashid and A R Green) were all (or had been) coincidentally polygamous, the sunnah they had entirely randomly chosen to revive, you know instead of others such as redistribution of wealth or adopting orphans. And only a cynic would say that they took any pleasure in this act (even, when, strangely, the second wife in some cases was thereafter divorced after a very short period – but of course, only a cynic would say again that what in the West is called a ‘fling’ of a few months by a husband is called by others a ‘second marriage’ or a ‘misyar’).

    So the dawah carriers were doing very well for themselves: fame, world travel, bringing back polygyny (hey, someone had to do it) and speaking at the Cambridge or Oxford Student Union (and when they got well known enough, a wage from IERA or at least a speakers fee).

    The model that these ‘dawah carriers’ used, whatever organisation they belonged to, was usually the ‘Naikian’ one of confronting and debating the non-Muslims – but whereas he was in India jousting with individuals of debatable credibility such as William Campbell, Hamza and Co. in the UK were debating Theoretical Physicists, Philosophers of note and even politicians. It was all very glamorous to start with and they had a good degree of success: most of the western intellectuals had not bothered to conduct a study into Islam specifically and would just deploy the same general arguments against religion that they had with Christian Europe in mind. This gave them a huge handicap. The applause and accolades from Muslims multiplied and emboldened speakers like Tzortzis even started to venture ‘research papers’, in his case in Embryology (not being a biologist himself, he neglected to get it checked by one, though reassuringly, Haitham Haddad was on hand to make sure it was ‘Islamic’). Muslims were now even producing research! It was an unbelievable step forward. One could almost forget that nearly all of the Dawah carriers, like Tzortzis, were directly under the tutelage of the same group of ‘expelled’ and even extremist and sectarian scholars and banned groups (at least on campus) such as Hizb Ut Tahrir. They just had a different packaging. And of course, they were ‘converts’ – which for Muslims gave them instant celebrity status.

    What could go wrong?

    Well, a lot: for a start, academics have a habit of ‘learning things’ and ‘researching’, no matter how bigoted and uninformed they are. Rather than answering the doubts of the Muslims, by their debates and confrontational manner (not to say posturing and producing ‘research’ which…wasn’t) the ‘dawah carriers’ painted a target on the backs of the Muslim community once again. Secularists, atheists and even political groups turned their focus away from Christianity and started to focus on Islam. They saw it for the threat it was. And they rallied.

    These people didn’t do their research in their bedroom and then submit it to ‘authorities’ Haitham Haddad (whose most prestigious teacher Ibn Baz said that anyone saying that the Earth was not flat was a disbeliever. Happily, he changed his mind at the behest of the Saudi monarchy) or Akram Nadwi (a faux Sufi and closet Salafist) but at the Library of Congress, CERN or The Perimeter Institute and then submitted it to reputable peer reviewed journals.

    Street dawah is a very different thing – take the same model into MIT and you may have a problem:

    MY NEIGHBOUR BETTY: Hi, nice day isn’t it?

    ME: Lovely. I feel all warm inside.

    MY NEIGHBOUR BETTY: Yes.

    ME: …

    MY NEIGHBOUR BETTY: How come Islam sucks?

    ME: Who told you that Betty?

    MY NEIGHBOUR BETTY: I saw it on the news, you’re okay love, but Muslims are forever killing people and all that. Why don’t you find nice English boy and settle down?

    ME: It’s not true. You don’t believe everything you see on the news do you?

    MY NEIGHBOUR BETTY: Hmmm…good point…

    ME: You should read the Quran, don’t believe ‘The Man’ Betty, he’s out to get you. Fight The Power! Decide for yourself!

    MY NEIGHBOUR BETTY: You’re right! Allah-huakbar!

    Because most people trust people they know more than  they trust ‘the News’.

    DAWAHWARRIOR:Kufr/Capitalism/Secularism/Liberalism/Atheism/Deism/Polytheism and Science and everything else sucks.

    You suck also. I challenge you to a debate. Or dialogue. With respect of course.

    Also, the Quran is embryologically accurate.

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: Young man, do you not think you are being a bit rash? Have you conducted a thorough analysis of these things that you speak of?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: Of course I did. In my bedroom no less. I am a Intellectual Activist, Islamic Polemicist, Amateur Gynaecologist, Political Commentator, Blogger, Lover, Fighter, Linguist and part-time Thaumaturgist. I also practice Ikebana. I own the very hat that Che Guevara wore when he did that pose. And other cool stuff like that.

    Also, I read about these things.

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: Where?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: In books of course! What kind of question is that!

    We need to have a proper dialogue and get to the truth

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS:…Look, for starters, you cannot say that science is not ‘true’ and then use it to establish the truth of your religious text can you, I think that is perhaps an epistemic contradiction.

    DAWAH WARRIOR: No it isn’t.

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: Hmmm…why not

    DAWAH WARRIOR: Because of ‘ontology’

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: What do you mean?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: I just told you. We need to have a proper dialogue and get to the truth!

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: So are you saying that ‘Science’ is the criterion of truth?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: It depends on ‘ontology’

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: …

    Did you perchance consult with any embryologists or scientists before coming to your conclusions?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: I don’t need to – I researched it myself and besides, Professor Keith Moore said that Embryology proves the Quran. What more do you want? You need to check your ‘ontology’.

    PROFESSOR BOFFIN McBRAINS: Look, just having the opinion of one authority, even if it is big one, does not prove the case definitively, especially not in science. Einstein was great, but if no-one else thought his theories were worthwhile he would have struggled. So it is indeed intriguing that Keith Moore said that, but it was a long time ago; would it not be worthwhile to sit down with some more embryologists and sort things out, maybe reach a kind of ‘consensus’. Don’t you have the same concept in Islam? I believe you call it ‘ijma’ right?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: That would be a waste of time. Also, you don’t know anything about Islam, I don’t appreciate you talking about stuff you know nothing about.

    We need to have a proper dialogue and come to the truth.

    PROFESSOR BOFFINS McBRIANS: I’ll admit I have not looked into Islam very deeply, but can you give me some good reasons that I should?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: Because kufr sucks and Islam is peace.

    PROFESSOR BOFFINS McBRAINS: But if Islam is so great, then  how come Muslim majority countries have such problems and are relatively lacking in many spheres? I find it problematic to abandon a tried and working system, however flawed for one which is unknown.

    DAWAH WARRIOR: It is because in those countries they do not follow Islam and thus also suck. Also, it is the West’s fault.

    You need to sort out your ‘ontology’.

    PROFESSOR BOFFINS McBRAINS: Why do you keep saying that?

    DAWAH WARRIOR: Because we need to have a proper dialogue and come to the truth.

    I remember as a second year student in Newcastle when I first came across Hamza Tzortzis. It was on a Satellite Television Islamic channel that time (though I saw and met him many times in person as well) and he was not that well known. I was from a Muslim family, living away from home with the struggles and challenges that any young girl of my age has. University was tough – I was what they call conventionally attractive and I was also smart enough to know that guys were to get into my knickers whether they had a ‘Ramones’ T-shirt and a piecing or a beard and a thoub. I had a lot of questions about my community and it’s behaviour as well as many more imposed on me by the media and Islam-baiters.

    Tzortzis was a breath of fresh air: he lobbied for rational arguments for the existence of God, he said that morality had no basis without God and backed it up convincingly. And he could talk about how the ‘Big Bang’ proved Islam until the proverbial cows came home. I went to my computer and set up a ‘Paypal’ account just so that I could donate to his website. I chased up all of his talks. Okay, it got a bit same-ey after a while, but there were debates and he was a great rhetorician. I was in love (intellectually of course).

    Imagine my disappointment when I learnt that he had taken his arguments largely from an Evangelical Christian called William Lane Craig and another less well known but more honest speaker called Adam Deen, as opposed to from Al Ghazzali or the Asharite theologians as I had assumed. I was shocked when I found he had absolutely no consistency – he would say whatever he had to to win. In short, the man I had mistaken for a Socrates was in fact a sophist. He borrowed arguments that were palatable for public relations purposes from sects of Islam, that he as a Salafist, deemed heretical (granted, these were on insignificant issues such as whether God exists or not, but still). He told people to read Ibn Taymiyyah, a man who had deemed the very ‘Kalam Cosmological Argument’ Tzortzis had borrowed from Ghazzali (via Evangelical Christianity) to be heresy (and cliterectomy for women to be a virtue, he was the ‘father’ of FGM amongst Muslims in one sense).

    It made no sense. The more I looked into it, the more I saw that he and his contemporaries would only give a Salafist answer, even if it was the most incredulous and unbelievable and unpalatable one. On issues where his teacher Haddad held shocking views, such as FGM and suicide bombing, Tzortzis would duck the issue entirely. He was more Nick Clegg than Caliph Umar. Tzortzis had no respect for non-salafist opinion unless they could get him an advantage in a debate with an atheist (they in turn were blissfully unaware that he was a Wahhabi anthropomorphist and as such could not even justifiably use most of his Kalaam Arguments). He was usually not well versed enough in them anyway to deploy them with any degree of success. His gaffes started to become famous. He stumbled on an easy question about apostasy because he tried to present the extremist Salafist opinion as the Islamic one (whereas for most Muslims, Salafism = heresy). His embryology paper had to be withdrawn, but his self-publicising nature became evident when he tried to cash in on this momentous gaffe of his which afflicted countless Muslims by then taking it upon himself to be the architect of a ‘New Approach to Quran and Science’, despite his colossal error, exposed by atheists, and the fact that he is neither a scientist nor a Quranic exegete (don’t worry, he got it checked by Haddad and Nadwi, the same guys who signed off on the embryology, so it should be fine. Oh, wait…).

    He was supposed to be making it easy for British Muslims but he and his organisation were all for forcibly segregated events, his organisation would allow him to speak to women only audiences (nice work if you can get it guys eh?) but would not even allow Yvonne Ridley to speak to a mixed audience. In short, it was Saudi Islam with faux science, massive investment by British Muslim money and arguments for morality and the existence of God borrowed from people they considered heretics or unbelievers. It was kind of…their own religion.

    I had indoctrinated my brother into the cult of the Dawah carriers and he became a helper to one of the most famous dawah organisations (which must needs remain anonymous). From him I heard about the lifestyle of some of the well known speakers, especially how they made the most of shall we say ‘access’ to women at segregated events. Not only that, but the organisations themselves had an unspoken incentive to single men and women to become helpers so that they could ‘find a halal partner’. It didn’t surprise me in the least: despite my access to the original Arabic texts and the fact that I had undertaken Islamic Studies at university, I had seen how keen many of the ‘Dawah carriers’ were to explain their ideas to me at their talks and events, as if I had not understood them (this was their equivalent of ‘So…do you come here often blah blah’). They were similarly keen to engage in e-mail correspondences and gave out their e-mail address to girls like me like Smarties. Less so to the guys at the events. ‘Organisers’ and ‘helpers’ were also forever coming up to me to ask if I was ‘looking’ (they meant for a husband). They paid particular attention to the marriage needs of converts or non-Asian or mixed race girls (like myself). Very liberal of them. Or maybe, like many other men, they were just after the exotic and the fashionable.

    ‘You do know what you are doing by helping out at these events don’t you?’ I told my brother, ‘You’re just like those guys who control the ‘backstage access’ at concerts or Hip-Hop shows. You’re just hoping for the left-overs from the famous guys aren’t you?!’. He didn’t contradict me. What was most ironic was that he was helping enforce segregation at Islamic talks for the express purpose of getting ‘access’ to the sisters! It was a most bizarre inversion: exude a public face of segregation and then use it to get a chance to pull.

    Of course, not all Dawah personalities were like this, there were notable exceptions such as Paul Williams and Shabir Ally. But these people were more public Muslim intellectuals than Dawah personalities. And neither availed himself of the need to reinvigorate the practice of polygyny like Tzortzis and Co. Sadly, Williams and others like him were the exception rather than the rule.

    Having studied Islam, I was shocked by the amateurish antics of IERA and other speakers. They showed hardly any improvement over the years I followed them and would answer according to their ideological biases and not Islamic orthodoxy and scholarship (see Appendix). They were joined by a whole slew of HT and ex-HT and secret HT speakers whose main concern was political posturing and indeed politicising Muslims (to their own ends of course) and nothing relating to genuine Islamic theology, law or practice. Worse, they conjured up answers to controversies and questions which were shockingly banal.

    But in the country of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Muslims, starved of answers and left to fend for themselves for so long, lapped it up. And they continue to do so. Until the inevitable exposure and backlash, which will leave them as unguided and adrift as they always have been.

    I remember once explaining the issue of the age of Aisha to a famous Dawah carrier. His knowledge was rudimentary at best and he could not understand that just because a narration was classed as ‘Sahih’ by muhadditheen, it didn’t mean that we took it into belief. I explained some basic hadith sciences to him from a Sunni and Ash’ari perspective and tried to tell him that accepting that she was nine at the time of sexual intercourse was not necessary. He shocked me by announcing that even if I was truthful in what I had said, in dawah it must be defended that she was nine since that was what was the belief of some Muslims. I will let the reader fathom the stupidity of defending every view of every Muslim. Of course, what he in fact meant was that rather than educate people of the fact that ahad narrations do not give certainty and that there is ikhtilaaf about not only the age of Aisha but even Khadijah and Muhammad (pbuh) himself, he would just take the easy way. Or rather, he would continue to attract bookings and funding from Wahhabi and Salafist organisations and events.

    So there you have it, most of the so called ‘Dawah movement’ is a feel good initiative aimed at under siege and under confident Muslims. There is no empiric evidence of ‘converts’ by these movements though there is lots of empiric evidence that most converts to Islam leave thereafter. They aggravate and offend powerful academic interests in the West and thus bring even more sanction, intellectual and otherwise, onto the Islamic community. Most of the ‘answers’ the provide are not logically correct nor Islamically licit. Further, they have left the issues which really need an answer, such as slavery, FGM etc, for which Islam indeed has good answers, as you can see on this very site, untouched.

    Further, females need to be warned that famous speakers such as Hamza Tzortzis seemingly lead a polyamorous lifestyle which is facilitated by their ‘celebrity speaker’ status.

    Because by now, thoughtful reader, you have understood what I am trying to say. Some of my girlfriends go to concerts hoping to get backstage. But most of them are very careful – they know what goes on at concerts.

    Have a look at the lifestyle of most dawah carriers and you will be equally careful about getting backstage at their events too…


    `But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
     `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad.  You're mad.'
     `How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
     `You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
  • Dawah Carriers Are Destroying Your Faith?And Having A Good Time In The Process
     Reply #1 - July 29, 2014, 02:46 PM

    Good read
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