refuting misconceptions:1-women in Islam

[Caecilian]

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Mo3 and the Taliban are both muslims. If we want to evaluate islam, with regard to, say, its attitudes towards women, we need to consider both the liberal islam of people like mo3 and the brutal fundamentalist islam of the Taliban. Plus everything in between. And the picture that emerges is not good.

i agree with u but i just want to add that they are minority if u want to know if they are right or not compare what they are doing with the history of islam and also dont judge islam by what some muslims are doing and u r choosing a ppl who even lack education if some of their scholars says something they follow without thinking(search about what muslim scholars say about what bin laden did)

The nature of religion is such that it is impossible to falsify or verify any specific religious interpretation with religion itself. Religion provides no means to do so since there is no shared mechanism to conclusively verify or falsify the various claims. At the core of every religion are unfalsifiable claims. Anybody can start his own religion today, based on quran or any text you choose and start interpreting away. It does not help to suggest, as you do, to verify the different interpretations of the quran with the history of islam because the history of religious interpretation says nothing on intrinsic truth. Just as the history of catholicism is not a case for the truth of catholicism. In fact history shows that right from the start controversy on interpretations has been around.

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Exactly. I can't remember who described theology as 'intellectual tennis without a net' (might've been Dennett), but its a very accurate description. There simply is no way to assess the validity of one religious claim to truth (or veridicality, or scriptual validity, or whatever) over another. Its all just interpretation, without any possibility of verification from a source outside of religious discourse.

What this means is that it really doesn't matter what religious scholars say. They're always going to disagree with each other anyway. What matters is what religious people do in the name of their religion. And here the record of islam towards women is appalling.

For example: somewhere between 78% and 97% of egyptian women have been subjected to genital mutilation. Source: wiki article

For example: women in muslim countries are frequently denied an education (Afghanistan Male literacy Rate 43% Female 13%; Pakistan M 63% F 36%; Egypt M 83% F 60%; Senegal M 51% F 29% etc). Source: CIA World Factbook

For example: