I'd like to gain a basic understanding of Islam. I'm not thinking of signing up anytime soon, but it's worth understanding. I've been at it for a couple of years now and I've found it to be hard to pin down. I'm often told that I'm "misinterpreting" parts, or that I lack historical perspective or this or that...
So here are some ideas I found in the Quran, and my guess is that I'll be told I should ignore them, that they are not part of the "true Islam", even though we see many Muslims in the world pursuing these ideas:
- 1:7 - Allah is forever angry with Christians and Jews
- 2:106 - Some verses can be abrogated (replaced), by later verses.
- 2:178 - Slavery is ok.
- 2:193 - Fight non-believers until there are no non-believers.
- 2:216 - Participate in violent Jihad even if you don't want to.
- 2:223 - Have sex with your wife whenever YOU want to.
- 3:118 - 3:120 - Non-believers are not to be trusted - in many ways
- 3:157 - Dying as a martyr is a great idea.
- 4:89 - Kill apostates
- 5:45 - Eye for an eye, life for a life
- 5:57 - Don't criticize religion
- 6:60 - You can be guilty of thought crimes
- 7:166 - Think of Jews as monkeys
- 8:73 - Create a caliphate
- 9:1 - Break treaties with non-believers
- 9:29 - Fight and subdue non-believers, have them pay the jizyah
- 13:41 - Keep taking the lands of the non-believers
- 23: 6 - Wives and slaves are possessions
- 24:8 - Ways for wives to avoid stoning
- 24:60 - Old women shouldn't expect to get married
- 25:53 - Fresh water and salt water don't mix
- 29:28 - Sodomy is the worst sin
- 31:6 - Music and singing are discouraged
- 47:35 - Don't ask for peace if you have the upper hand
- 57:10 - Conquerers get the best reward
- 68:9 - Non-believers will hope for compromise - don't compromise with them
- 86:13 - Laws are in the Quran
Perhaps you see my dilemma here... What do Muslims value and believe?
note: sorry, got the first reference wrong, updated 1:1 to be 1:7
You don't seem to understand the first thing about Islam. So allow me to explain:
Islam is combination of both the Quran and the Sunna (behavior of Muhammed, which comes from both the Sira, the biography of Muhhamed, and the Hadith, collections of his sayings). In fact the Quran is only roughly about 16% of the text in which Islam is based, the majority of it is actually the Sunna. So you can see quoting the Quran is not really much to the point. So what should someone like you who wants to find out what Muslims believe and value do? Read the Sharia! The Sharia is the Quran and Sunna interpreted by Islam's finest scholars. The Reliance of the Traveller, for example, is a 14th century book on Shira certified by 5 of the greatest Islamic scholars today (there is no actual universal authority in Islam to say how one should understand, for example, a particular Quranic verse. Majority consensus of mainstream scholars is as close as one will get to authoritative Islam).
If you do this you find that Islam only approves of slavery for Kaffir, which is to say non-muslims. However this is a misleading translation because everything in Islam has a political component and Kaffar (plural of Kaffir) aren't simply non-believers they are bottom class citizens in the Islamic state. They can be enslaved, raped, and all other manner of awful stuff. Muslims however cannot, legally, do any of this stuff to each other. Oh yea Muslims are allowed to purposefully deceive Kaffar as to the real nature of Islam. This is called taqiyya, and such deception is considered a sacred act. The third comment on this board in fact is a good example, but the comment right above mine is an even better one.
Sharia ultimately is what every Muslim has been obliged to strive for whether they accept the use of political violence as a means for it or not. For every Muslim, non-muslim legal documents such as the U.S. Constitution are man made documents of ignorance, jahililyah, that must submit to Sharia law.
So you can see your post is actually quite nonsensical since you are only quoting the Quran ( which really only exists in Arabic, anyway) and not the Sharia, which since it is only human utterance can be translated. If you had done this then you would know that O9.0: Jihad means war against the Kaffar to establish Islam or O8.1: When a person who has reached puberty and is sane, voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.
Muslims would like you to read the Quran, where they can simply mislead you about the meaning of certain obscure passages (and the Quran has been compiled in such a way by the second caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, that really all the verses are obscure), they do not, however, want you to read Shira texts such as The Reliance of the Traveller.
