title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The TPDF advanced into Kampala on 10April. Few Ugandan or Libyan units resisted; the greatest problem for the Tanzanian troops was a lack of maps of the city. On the following day, while Tanzanian and UNLF troops were mopping up the remaining Ugandan forces in Kampala, Oyite-Ojok went to Radio Uganda to declare the city's capture. He stated in a broadcast that Amin's government was deposed and that Kampala was under the control of the UNLF, and appealed to residents to remain calm and for Ugandan soldiers to surrender. Civilians came out from their homes to celebrate and engaged in destructive looting. On 13 April Lule was flown into the city and installed as the new President of Uganda. The new UNLF government was quickly recognised by other states as the legitimate authority in Uganda. It was greatly hampered in establishing itself by the lack of an effective police force or civil service and the looting of equipment from offices. The government played no meaningful role in the succeeding military operations against Amin's forces.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Amin fled, first to Libya and later to Saudi Arabia. Despite the flight of Amin and the fall of the capital, scattered and disjointed remnants of the Ugandan military continued to resist. With Libyan support, these loyalists retreated into the north, pillaging as they did so. They were accompanied by PLO militants under the command of Mahmoud Da'as who eventually crossed into Sudan. After Kampala's capture, little further damage was caused by the fighting. On 22 April the TPDF seized the town of Jinja and the Owen Falls Dam intact, which provided all the electricity in the country. Most units of the Uganda Army mutinied or dispersed, allowing the Tanzanian-UNLF troops to occupy most of eastern and northern Ugandan without opposition. A few Ugandan units offered firm resistance along the western border, but these were also overcome. Attempts by Amin's loyalists to block the Tanzanian northward advance were defeated during the Battle of Bombo, the Battle of Lira, and the Battle of Karuma Falls. In Mbale, 250 Ugandan troops defected and chose to defend the town from retreating loyalists and await the arrival of the Tanzanians. A large number of civilians armed themselves and attacked Ugandan stragglers, and all those belonging to ethnic or religious groups who were associated with Amin's regime. Mobs destroyed entire communities. The worst massacres were carried out by Ugandan rebels belonging to FRONASA and Kikosi Maalum. In many cases, Tanzanian soldiers condoned and even aided lynchings of Ugandan soldiers at the hands of vengeful civilians. Regardless, most sources concur that the Tanzanians behaved relatively well, especially in comparison to Ugandan rebels and tribal militants.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The last battle of the war occurred on 27 May when a band of Ugandan troops fired on elements of the TPDF's Task Force near Bondo before fleeing. The Task Force shortly thereafter seized Arua without facing resistance. Upon entering the West Nile region, FRONASA launched a "systematic extermination" of the local population, assisted by vigilantes belonging to anti-Amin tribes. A significant portion of West Nile's civilian population consequently fled into exile along with the remnants of the Uganda Army. From Arua a Tanzanian brigade advanced to Uganda's western border with Sudan and Zaire. It secured the Sudanese frontier on 3 June 1979, thus ending the war. By that time a total of 30,000–45,000 TPDF personnel were deployed in Uganda.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The TPDF lost 373 soldiers over the course of the war, and of these only 96 were killed in the fighting. About 150 Ugandan rebels died, most of whom died when one of their boats accidentally capsized in Lake Victoria. About 1,000 Uganda Army soldiers were killed while 3,000 were taken prisoner. At least 600 Libyan soldiers were killed during the war, and about 1,800 were wounded. The Tanzanians took 59 Libyan prisoners, and released them several months after the end of the war. Several PLO fighters were killed during the conflict, though their number remains disputed. The PLO admitted to losing twelve fighters in Uganda, counting the dead and those missing in action. In contrast, Tanzanian officers claimed that 200 Palestinians had been killed during the conflict. One Pakistani national was also captured by the TPDF with the Libyan forces, and released after the war. About 1,500 Tanzanian civilians were killed by the Uganda Army in Kagera. According to Avirgan and Honey, about 500 Ugandan civilians were killed by all belligerents. Others have reported far higher civilian casualties in Uganda. According to Indian diplomat Madanjeet Singh, Uganda Army soldiers began killing Ugandan and expatriate civilians at random after the war started, and within the month of February 1979 over 500 people were murdered. A.B.K. Kasozi stated that thousands were murdered by retreating Amin loyalists in March and April 1979, while Ogenga Otunnu has argued that anti-Amin insurgents also killed thousands in the West Nile region during the conflict's last stages.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: During the early stages of the war in October 1978, Radio Tanzania broadcast no news on the conflict while Radio Uganda reported erroneously on an attempted Tanzanian invasion and intense border clashes. Once the invasion of Kagera was made public, Radio Tanzania launched an intensive propaganda campaign to gather public support of the war by retelling stories of the atrocities committed in Tanzanian territory and portraying the Ugandan attack as an egotistical venture by Amin to bolster his self-image. Radio Tanzania and Radio Uganda quickly became entangled in a "radio war", each making allegations against the other's country. In the first few months the Tanzanian public was offered little official information aside from a few speeches delivered by Nyerere. The Tanzanian government quickly established an "Information Committee" to manage news about the war. The body was chaired by the top secretary in the Ministry of Information, George Mhina, and consisted of the editors of Tanzania's two state newspapers, the head of Radio Tanzania, Presidential Press Secretary Sammy Mdee, and representatives of the TPDF and security forces. Mhina began repressing news about the war so that while many Tanzanian journalists and photographers had gone to the front lines, little of their reporting was ever published. Mdee and the newspaper editors boycotted the committee's meetings in protest. In general, the press in Tanzania was allowed to publish what it wished within the law, but it rarely reported anything different from the official media and often reprinted press releases from the government news agency, Shirika la Habari Tanzania (SHIHATA).


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: In response to the suppression of information, Tanzanian citizens began listening to foreign broadcasts from BBC Radio, Voice of America, Voice of Kenya, Radio South Africa, and Radio Uganda for reporting on the conflict. In Dar es Salaam, civilians went to the Kilimanjaro Hotel to view the news carried through on the establishment's Reuters telex machine. The Information Committee eventually had the unit deactivated. Radio Tanzania spent the duration of the war broadcasting dramatic news reports, songs, and poems about the conflict as well as praise for the TPDF. Announcers fluent in Ugandan languages were hired and their newscasts were directed into Uganda. Ugandan exile Sam Odaka hosted a 45-minute daily propaganda programme on Radio Tanzania that targeted Ugandan soldiers. The show successfully damaged the Uganda Army's morale and ran until Kampala fell. SHIHATA regularly labeled Amin a "fascist".


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: There was no press freedom in Uganda, and most local media outlets garnered their information from the state-run Uganda News Agency. Amin used official media to communicate with the civilian populace throughout the war and to rhetorically attack Tanzania. Ugandan propaganda—in addition to being biased—was lacking in factual accuracy. It attempted to bolster the image of Idi Amin and raise the Uganda Army's morale by spreading fantastical tales, such as claiming that a Tanzanian unit had been wiped out by crocodiles or that the President could easily defeat 20,000 Tanzanians with just twenty Ugandan soldiers. One of the most notable propagandistic stories spread by pro-Amin media featured the President's wife, Sarah Kyolaba, as she allegedly led a battalion of armed women against the TPDF. No firm proof for the existence of such a unit ever surfaced. Decker speculated that the tales about "Suicide Sarah" were supposed to "feminize the enemy"; instead of actually emphasising the bravery of Ugandan women soldiers, people were supposed to believe that the Tanzanians were so weak that even women could defeat them. The information released by the UNLF was often dubious or outdated. Following the end of the war an employee of Radio Tanzania was put at the disposal of the UNLF government to advise them on how to use public broadcasting to garner public support for rebuilding.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: At the beginning of the war, Tanzania brought four journalists to Kagera to prove that Uganda had attacked the area. Thereafter correspondents were not allowed to travel to the war front, making independent confirmation of each belligerents' claims impossible. Journalists often attempted to confirm Ugandan official media by cross-referencing it with Tanzanian news for consistencies. The two exceptions to this rule were Reuters reporters Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, who had the permission of Nyerere to accompany the TPDF as it invaded Uganda. Four European journalists that attempted to infiltrate Uganda from Kenya in the middle of the war were shot by Uganda soldiers. Most journalists instead covered the conflict from Kenya, particularly Nairobi. From there they telephoned foreign diplomats in Kampala and, as the war progressed, obtained accounts from local residents.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Sociologist Ronald Aminzade asserted that "the key" to Tanzania's victory was its ideological framing of the war as a threat to the nation, thus facilitating the mobilisation of a popular militia that performed well in combat. Aminzade stated that in contrast Uganda "embarked on a nonideological territorial war", deploying forces that suffered from low morale and internal dissension. Journalist Godwin Matatu reasoned that the Uganda Army's failures rested on its low morale and reliance on vehicles and roads which made them vulnerable to Tanzanian ground forces, who traveled on foot for much of the war. Journalist Anne Abaho concluded that Uganda lost the war due to four key factors: internal tensions and incompetence in the Uganda Army, the Tanzanian deployment of BM-21 Grad rocket launchers and the failure of Uganda to counter them, a lack of military intelligence, and poor coordination with Libya. Some Western military analysts attributed Tanzania's victory to the collapse of the Uganda Army, arguing that the TPDF would have been defeated by most other African armies. Others felt that the TPDF's success indicated substantial improvements in African military capabilities over the previous years. Military analyst William Thom praised the TPDF's ability to successfully deploy its forces over considerable distances. Intelligence analyst Kenneth M. Pollack attributed Libyan troops' failures to their low morale and lack of military intelligence. Academic Benoni Turyahikayo-Rugyema wrote in 1998 that "Had Amin not invaded the Kagera Salient in Tanzania he probably would still be ruling Uganda."


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Several academics have evaluated whether the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda and its effort to depose Amin could be classified as an instance of justified humanitarian intervention. While some writers agree that Tanzania's action was humanitarian in nature, others have disputed such a conclusion, arguing that even if Tanzania fought the war with some humanitarian considerations, it was largely invading Uganda for different reasons. For its own part, the Tanzanian government accused Amin of committing atrocities against his people and stressed that many Ugandans "celebrated" Tanzania's invasion, but it did not justify the war on humanitarian grounds. Instead, it argued that the country had acted in self-defence of its territory and that Amin's regime posed "a turbulent menace to the peace and security of East Africa". Christianity specialist Emmanuel K. Twesigye considered the war "a good example of the 'just war theory' at work". Political scientist Daniel G. Acheson-Brown concluded that, according to just war theory as espoused by Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars", Tanzania's invasion of Uganda was justified on humanitarian grounds to overthrow a brutal dictatorship. Acheson-Brown also noted that the Uganda Army committed "an overwhelming number of atrocities" during the conflict and that Tanzania made "some significant violations of the proper conduct of war", particularly when the TPDF destroyed Mutukula. Walzer also considered the war a case of justified intervention. Legal scholar Noreen Burrows wrote that while Tanzania's attack on Uganda violated strictly construed international law, it was justified by moral and political arguments. International law scholar Sean D. Murphy characterised Tanzania's invasion of Uganda as "one of mixed reasons of self-defense and protection of human rights". Belgium later cited the Uganda–Tanzania War as an example of justified intervention when explaining its decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's intervention in the Kosovo War.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The overthrow of a sovereign head of state by a foreign military had never occurred in post-colonial Africa and had been strongly discouraged by the OAU. At an OAU conference in July 1979, President Gaafar Nimeiry of Sudan said that the Uganda–Tanzania War had set a "serious precedent" and noted that the organisation's charter "prohibits interference in other people's internal affairs and invasion of their territory by armed force." Nigerian Head of State Olusegun Obasanjo shared similar concerns. Some observers dissented from this line of thought and argued that the situation demonstrated that the OAU charter needed reform. Nyerere accused the OAU of shielding black African leaders from criticism, noting that Amin's regime had killed more people than the white minority governments in southern Africa. He also circulated a "Blue Book" published by the Tanzanian government, which argued that Tanzania's role in the war was justified by Uganda's attack on the Kagera Salient and Libya's armed intervention, which would have prevented the Ugandan rebels from overthrowing Amin themselves. President Godfrey Binaisa, Lule's successor, praised the Tanzanian intervention. Most Western states cautiously avoided commenting on Tanzania's role in deposing Amin, though British Foreign Secretary David Owen declared that he was pleased with the end of Amin's rule. According to academics Roy May and Oliver Furley, the overthrow of the regime was "tacitly" accepted by the international community, as indicated by the speed with which they recognised the UNLF government that replaced it.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The war with Tanzania caused great economic damage to Uganda, as price gouging of commodities surged and inflation rapidly increased. The movement of armed forces throughout Uganda in 1979 disrupted the planting season, leading to inflated prices for staple crops such as bananas, sweetpotatoes, and cassava, and causing famine in some regions. Despite this disruption, rural areas were mostly physically undisturbed by the fighting, which was concentrated in other areas. An estimated minimum of 100,000 Ugandans were made homeless by the conflict. Severe social unrest also followed the war. With Amin ousted, different groups of political and ethnic rivals started to compete and fight for power. It also triggered a resurgence of crime as bandits—known as "kondos" and armed with guns that had belonged to the TPDF, Ugandan rebels, and Amin's security forces—took advantage of the disorder to rob and loot. Political assassinations became commonplace and Kampala remained plagued by violence until 1981, facilitated by the lack of effective courts and police which had languished under Amin's regime. Rural areas avoided the worst violence, as traditional norms provided some basis for order. In addition, the conflict resulted in a growth of illegal poaching across the country, leading to substantial environmental damage.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The TPDF remained in Uganda to maintain peace, and subsequently Tanzanian soldiers fathered a large number of Ugandan children. Many TPDF soldiers married Ugandan women and brought them back to Tanzania. Some residents in southern Uganda believed that Tanzanian soldiers brought HIV/AIDS into the region and spread it by having sex with civilians. Over time many Ugandans grew tired of the Tanzanian occupation. Meanwhile, remnants of Amin's Uganda Army reorganised in Zaire and Sudan, and invaded Uganda in autumn 1980, starting a civil war which became later known as the Ugandan Bush War. More TPDF personnel died during the occupation of Uganda than during the Uganda–Tanzania War. The last Tanzanian occupation troops left Uganda in October 1981. Tanzanian military advisers remained in the country as late as 1984.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Uganda was embroiled in a political crisis almost immediately after the UNLF took power. Lule disregarded the Moshi Conference agreements stipulating a weak presidential authority and attempted to assert his ability to operate under stronger powers provided by the constitution operative in Uganda before Amin's coup. He also distrusted the UNLA, which he considered to be made up of loyal Obote and Museveni partisans. Meanwhile, Museveni and Oyite-Ojok both attempted to stack the army with their own supporters. Lule's refusal to consult the NCC about ministerial appointments provoked outrage in the committee, and on 20 June 1979 it voted to remove him from office. Godfrey Binaisa, the former Attorney General of Uganda under Obote who had come to oppose both him and Amin and had no prior role in the committee, was then elected president. Lule's ouster instigated large protests in Kampala and clashes between demonstrators and Tanzanian troops attempting to maintain order. Nyerere announced that he would offer continued support to Uganda as long as it retained a unified and uncorrupted government. Over the following month large numbers of TPDF troops were withdrawn and political violence around Kampala increased. In November Binaisa began to fear that Muwanga—then serving as a minister in the government—was preparing to return Obote to power, and considered dismissing him from his post. At Obote's advice, Muwanga publicly declared that Obote had no interest in regaining the presidency and would back Binaisa in the next national election. As Obote and Muwanga intended, Binaisa felt assured by the guarantee and instead removed Obote's rival, Museveni, from his post as Minister of Defence. The situation in Uganda declined further as Tanzanian troops clashed with civilians, unofficial militias were raised, and Binaisa focused on using his office to enrich himself. In 1980 Binaisa attempted to strip Oyite-Ojok of his post as Chief of Staff of the UNLA. This infuriated many Ugandan soldiers, and Muwanga and Oyite-Ojok, with Museveni's approval, began moving to oust Binaisa. On 12 May the NCC's Military Affairs Commission announced that it was assuming the responsibilities of the presidency. Nyerere refused to intervene, fearing clashes between the TPDF and UNLA.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Obote soon returned to Uganda and began reorganising the UPC in preparation for general elections, which were to be held on 10 December. Assisted in part by irregularities in the process, the UPC won the parliamentary elections and formed a government with Obote as president. In February 1981 Museveni, denouncing the elections, organised a small band of rebels and began attacking UNLA forces, thus entering the civil war. Shortly thereafter they co-founded a new rebel coalition, the National Resistance Movement. Museveni overthrew the Ugandan government in 1986 and became president.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The outbreak of the war came at a time when Tanzania's economy was showing signs of recovery from a severe drought in 1974–1975. All planned government projects were suspended in every ministry except Defence, and the administration was instructed not to fill vacancies. Nyerere stated in January 1979 that the TPDF operation to expel the Ugandans had necessitated a "tremendous" diversion of the country's resources away from development work, and he estimated that the war took $1 million a day to finance. Scholars' estimates of the total direct costs of the war for the Tanzanians range from $500 million to $1 billion. In Kagera, $108 million worth in economic assets were destroyed. Tanzania received no financial assistance from other countries in the OAU during the war. As a result, the government in Dar es Salaam had to finance the invasion of Uganda and subsequent peacekeeping mission from its own funds, further driving the country into poverty. The financial burden severely disrupted food supplies and health care services. Tanzania would not fully recover from the cost of the war until Uganda paid its debt back to Tanzania in 2007.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: When the TPDF began returning en masse to Tanzania, only a small number of soldiers were demobilised, contrary to public expectations. Military commanders then began making accommodations to render the wartime expansions of the army permanent, creating new units and divisional headquarters. Some in the military hierarchy expressed disapproval in light of Tanzania's bleak financial situation, and the country's depressed economy eventually forced the TPDF to disband many of the extra units. Nevertheless, the TPDF retained a large amount of officers in the standing army, with the assumption that they could be used to command militiamen in the event they needed to be called back into service. The post-war size of the TPDF remained larger than the pre-war size throughout the next decade.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Despite the PLO's involvement in the Ugandan war effort, Nyerere did not harbour any ill will towards the organisation, instead citing its isolation on the international stage as the reason for its closeness to Amin. Tanzania's relations with Libya experienced a rapprochement in 1982. The Tanzanian government strengthened its presence in Kagera after the war, bolstering its police station in Kyaka and establishing several others in border towns. For security reasons, villagers were prohibited from occupying land within of the border, though there was little oversight of this restriction over time and it was sometimes ignored by locals. In the immediate aftermath of the war the government shut down cross-border markets, resulting in shortages of goods and spikes in commodity prices. Smuggling also became rampant. Normal trade with Uganda did not resume until the 1990s. As the original demarcation posts along the Uganda–Tanzania border were removed in the war, the border dispute between the two countries remained after the conflict, but at a low intensity. Negotiations between Uganda and Tanzania on reestablishing a complete, official demarcation of the border began in 1999 and concluded successfully in 2001.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: In addition, Tanzania experienced a spike in crime and communal violence, most importantly cattle raiding, as a result of the Uganda–Tanzania War. The mobilisation of tens of thousands of soldiers had a major impact on Tanzania's society, as many young men from poorer families had enjoyed the power, chance of plunder, and relatively good salaries of military life. When they were demobilised, these men usually became unemployed and plunged back into poverty due to Tanzania's struggling economic situation, resulting in rising dissatisfaction. In addition, Tanzanian soldiers had smuggled large quantities of abandoned Ugandan weaponry into their home country. Having grown accustomed to violence in the military, many veterans consequently used their guns to acquire wealth illegally. This did not just dramatically increase crime, but also led to communal tensions. Some groups were overrepresented in the TPDF; most notably, by 1978, over 50% of all Tanzanian soldiers belonged to the Kuria people, although they made up less than 1% of the country's population. There were also regional differences in the number of veterans, with some villages having many more armed ex-soldiers than others. All this contributed to power shifts, and growing inter-tribal, inter-clan, and even inter-village violence in Tanzania. There is a widespread belief among Tanzanians and among some health workers that the war contributed to the spread of AIDS across the country (though the first identified case of AIDS in Tanzania was in 1984).


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: The 435 Tanzanian soldiers who died during the war were buried at the Kaboya Military Cemetery in Muleba District, Kagera Region. A white monument was erected in the cemetery and adorned with the names of the dead. Nyerere, Tanzanian Vice President Aboud Jumbe, Prime Minister Sokoine, Chief of Defence Forces Abdallah Twalipo, and Chama Cha Mapinduzi Executive Secretary Pius Msekwa visited the monument on 26 July 1979 to pay their respects to the dead soldiers. Another monument was built in Arusha, displaying a statue of a soldier celebrating victory. Nyerere toured Tabora, Arusha, Mtwara, Bukoba, Mwanza, Tanga, Zanzibar, Iringa, Dodoma, Dar es Salaam, and Mara to thank the Tanzanian population for its contributions to the war effort. On 1 September 1979 a series of national ceremonies were held to honour public contribution to the war effort. On 25 July 2014 Tanzania observed the 36th anniversary of the war and recognised the soldiers and civilians that died in the conflict.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: After the war and until 1986, when Museveni took power, 11 April was celebrated as "Liberation Day" in Uganda. In 2002 Uganda renewed its official celebration of Amin's overthrow. In the 2000s the Ugandan Government established the Kagera Medal to be awarded to Ugandan rebels or foreigners who fought against Amin's regime between 1971 and 1979.


title: Uganda–Tanzania War

text: Historians have paid little attention to the war and few books have been written about it. Tanzanian journalist Baldwin Mzirai published "Kuzama kwa Idi Amin" in 1980, which details the Tanzanian military operations of the conflict. American journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey published "War in Uganda: The Legacy of Idi Amin" in 1983. They followed Tanzanian forces into Uganda and witnessed the battles for Entebbe and Kampala. The 11-chapter work, in addition to covering the conflict, discusses some of its political implications in Uganda. Henry R. Muhanika published an Utenzi poetic account of the war in 1981, "Utenzi wa vita vya Kagera na anguko la Idi Amin Dada". In 1980 the state-owned Tanzania Film Company and the Audio Visual Institute released a colour documentary chronicling the conflict, entitled, "Vita vya Kagera". It emphasised the "bravery and determination" of the Tanzanian forces. The war is known in Tanzania as the Kagera War and in Uganda as the 1979 Liberation War.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Criticism of Islam is broadly defined as criticism of the Islamic religion in its beliefs, principles, and/or any other ideas attributed to Islam.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Early written disapprovals came from Christians and Jews as well as from some former Muslims such as Ibn al-Rawandi. Later the Muslim world itself received criticism. Western criticism of Islam grew after the September 11 attacks and other terrorist incidents, in regard to its scriptures and teachings, which were claimed to be a significant source of terrorism and terrorist ideology.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Objects of criticism include the morality of the life of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in both his public and personal lives. Issues relating to the authenticity and morality of the scriptures of Islam, both the Quran and the hadiths, are also discussed by critics. Islam has also been viewed as a form of Arab imperialism and has received criticism by figures from Africa and India for the destruction of indigenous cultures. Islam's recognition of slavery as an institution, which led to Muslim traders exporting as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, has also been criticized. The Shafi'i version of Islam has received criticism for advocating female genital mutilation and introducing this practice to Southeast Asia, where it was previously nonexistent. More recently, Islamic beliefs regarding human origins, predestination, God's existence and nature, have received criticism for their apparent philosophical and scientific inconsistencies.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Another criticism focuses on the question of human rights in the Islamic world, both historically and in modern Islamic nations, including the treatment of women, LGBT people, and religious and ethnic minorities, as shown in Islamic law and practice. As of 2014, about a quarter of the world's countries and territories (26%) had anti-blasphemy and (13%) had anti-apostasy laws or policies. In 2017, 13 nations, all of which were Muslim majority nations, had the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy. In the wake of the recent multiculturalism trend, Islam's influence on the ability or willingness of Muslim immigrants to assimilate in the host nations has been criticized. Assimilationist arguments have also been made in other countries where Muslims are a substantial minority, such as China, India and Russia.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The earliest surviving written criticisms of Islam are to be found in the writings of Christians who came under the early dominion of the Islamic Caliphate. One such Christian was John of Damascus (c. 676–748 AD), who was familiar with Islam and Arabic. The second chapter of his book, "The Fountain of Wisdom", titled "Concerning Heresies", presents a series of discussions between Christians and Muslims. John claimed an Arian monk (who he did not know was Bahira) influenced Muhammad and viewed the Islamic doctrines as nothing more than a hodgepodge culled from the Bible. Writing on Islam's claim of Abrahamic ancestry, John explained that the Arabs were called "Saracens" (Greek Σαρακενοί, Sarakenoi) because they were "empty" (κενός, kenos, in Greek) "of Sarah". They were called "Hagarenes" because they were "the descendants of the slave-girl Hagar". In the early formative stage, criticism on Islam was usually hidden, because openly questioning Muhammad or the Quran was punishable not only for the critic but also for the critic's entire community. Jews, for example, passed on criticism on Muhammad by oral-traditions. Although it is hard to verify oral traditions, certain tales and statements could be found of independent communities. According to one narrative, some Jews included hidden messages in the Quran, like the "Muqatta'at" (Mysterious Letters), which allegedly refers to certain parts of the Tanakh about a Hebrew term denoting a false Prophet.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In the early centuries of the Islamic Caliphate, Islamic law allowed citizens to freely express their views, including criticism of Islam and religious authorities, without fear of persecution. Accordingly, there have been several notable critics and skeptics of Islam that arose from within the Islamic world itself. One eminent critic, living in the tenth and eleventh-century Syria was the blind poet Al-Ma'arri. He became well known for a poetry that was affected by a "pervasive pessimism". He labeled religions in general as "noxious weeds" and said that Islam does not have a monopoly on truth. He had particular contempt for the "ulema", writing that:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In 1280, the Jewish philosopher, Ibn Kammuna, criticized Islam in his book "Examination of the Three Faiths". He reasoned that the Sharia was incompatible with the principles of justice, and that this undercut the notion of Muhammad being the perfect man: "there is no proof that Muhammad attained perfection and the ability to perfect others as claimed." The philosopher thus claimed that people converted to Islam from ulterior motives:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Bernard Lewis, just as it is natural for a Muslim to assume that the converts to his religion are attracted by its truth, it is equally natural for the convert's former coreligionists to look for baser motives and Ibn Kammuna's list seems to cover most of such nonreligious motives.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Maimonides, one of the foremost 12th-century rabbinical arbiters and philosophers, sees the relation of Islam to Judaism as primarily theoretical. Maimonides has no quarrel with the strict monotheism of Islam, but finds fault with the practical politics of Muslim regimes. He also considered Islamic ethics and politics to be inferior to their Jewish counterparts. Maimonides criticised what he perceived as the lack of virtue in the way Muslims rule their societies and relate to one another. In his Epistle to Yemenite Jewry, he refers to Mohammad, as ""hameshuga"" – "that madman".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Apologetic writings, attributed to Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa, not only defended Manichaeism against Islam, but also criticized the Islamic concept of God. Accordingly, the Quranic deity was disregarded as an unjust, tyrannic, irrational and malevolent "demonic entity", who "fights with humans and boasts about His victories" and "sitting on a throne, from which He descends". Such anthropomorphic descriptions of God were at odds with the Manichaean understanding of Divinity. Further, according to Manichaeism, it would be impossible that good and evil originate from the same source, therefore the Islamic deity could not be the true god.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Early criticism came from Christian authors, many of whom viewed Islam as a Christian heresy or a form of idolatry and often explained it in apocalyptic terms. Islamic salvation optimism and its carnality was criticized by Christian writers. Islam's sensual descriptions of paradise led many Christians to conclude that Islam was not a spiritual religion, but a material one. Although sensual pleasure was also present in early Christianity, as seen in the writings of Irenaeus, the doctrines of the former Manichaean Augustine of Hippo led to broad repudiation of bodily pleasure in both life and the afterlife. Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari defended the Quranic description of paradise by asserting that the Bible also implies such ideas, such as drinking wine in Gospel of Matthew. During the Fifth Crusade, Pope Innocent III declared that many men had been seduced by Muhammad for the pleasure of flesh.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Defamatory images of Muhammad, derived from early 7th century depictions of Byzantine Church, appear in the 14th-century epic poem Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Here, Muhammad appears in the eighth circle of hell, along with Ali. Dante does not blame Islam as a whole, but accuses Muhammad of schism, by establishing another religion after Christianity. Some medieval ecclesiastical writers portrayed Muhammad as possessed by Satan, a "precursor of the Antichrist" or the Antichrist himself. The "Tultusceptru de libro domni Metobii", an Andalusian manuscript with unknown dating, shows how Muhammad (called Ozim, from Hashim) was tricked by Satan into adulterating an originally pure divine revelation. The story argues God was concerned about the spiritual fate of the Arabs and wanted to correct their deviation from the faith. He then sends an angel to the monk Osius who orders him to preach to the Arabs. Osius however is in ill-health and orders a young monk, Ozim, to carry out the angel's orders instead. Ozim sets out to follow his orders, but gets stopped by an evil angel on the way. The ignorant Ozim believes him to be the same angel that spoke to Osius before. The evil angel modifies and corrupts the original message given to Ozim by Osius, and renames Ozim Muhammad. From this followed the erroneous teachings of Islam, according to the "Tultusceptru". According to the monk Bede Muhammad was foretold in Genesis 16:12, which describes Ishmael as "a wild man" whose "hand will be against every man". Bede says about Muhammad: "Now how great is his hand against all and all hands against him; as they impose his authority upon the whole length of Africa and hold both the greater part of Asia and some of Europe, hating and opposing all."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In 1391 a dialogue was believed to have occurred between Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and a Persian scholar in which the Emperor stated:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Otherwise the Greek Orthodox Bishop Paul of Antioch accepts Muhammed as a prophet, but not that his mission was universal. Since the law of Christ is superior to the law of Islam, Muhammad was only ordered to the Arabs, whom a prophet was not sent yet.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Denis the Carthusian wrote two treatises to refute Islam at the request of Nicholas of Cusa, "Contra perfidiam Mahometi, et contra multa dicta Sarracenorum libri quattuor" and "Dialogus disputationis inter Christianum et Sarracenum de lege Christi et contra perfidiam Mahometi".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: David Hume was critical of traditional religion and scholars generally agree that Hume was both a naturalist and a sceptic, though he considered monotheistic religions to be more "comfortable to sound reason" than polytheism and found Islam to be more "ruthless" than Christianity. In "Of the Standard of Taste", an essay by Hume, the Quran is described as an "absurd performance" of a "pretended prophet" who lacked "a just sentiment of morals". Attending to the narration, Hume says, "we shall soon find, that [Muhammad] bestows praise on such instances of treachery, inhumanity, cruelty, revenge, bigotry, as are utterly incompatible with civilized society. No steady rule of right seems there to be attended to; and every action is blamed or praised, so far as it is beneficial or hurtful to the true believers."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The commonly held view in Europe during the Enlightenment was that Islam, then synonymous with the Ottoman Empire, was a bloody, ruthless and intolerant religion. In the European view, Islam lacked divine authority and regarded the sword as the route to heaven. Hume appears to represent this view in his reference to the "bloody principles" of Islam, though he also makes similar critical comments about the "bloody designs" characterizing the conflict between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. Many contemporary works about Islam were available to influence Hume's opinions by authors such as Isaac Barrow, Humphrey Prideaux, John Jackson, Charles Wolseley, Hugo Grotius, Paul Rycaut, Thomas Hyde, Pierre Bayle, and Blaise Pascal. The writers of this period were also influenced by George Sale who, in 1743, had translated the Quran into English.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In the early 20th century, the prevailing view among Europeans was that Islam was the root cause of Arab and Berber "backwardness". They saw Islam as an obstacle to assimilation, a view that was expressed by a writer in colonial French Algeria named André Servier. In his book, titled "Islam and the Psychology of the Musulman", Servier wrote that, "The only thing Arabs ever invented was their religion. And this religion is, precisely, the main obstacle between them and us." Servier describes Islam as a "religious nationalism in which every Muslim brain is steeped". According to Servier, the only reason this nationalism has not "been able to pose a threat to humanity" was that the "rigid dogma" of Islam had rendered the Arabs "incapable of fighting against the material forces placed at the disposal of Western civilization by science and progress".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The Victorian orientalist scholar Sir William Muir criticised Islam for what he perceived to be an inflexible nature, which he held responsible for stifling progress and impeding social advancement in Muslim countries. The following sentences are taken from the Rede Lecture he delivered at Cambridge in 1881:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The church historian Philip Schaff described Islam as spread by violence and fanaticism, and producing a variety of social ills in the regions it conquered.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Schaff also described Islam as a derivative religion based on an amalgamation of "heathenism, Judaism and Christianity".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: J. M. Neale criticized Islam in terms similar to those of Schaff, arguing that it was made up of a mixture of beliefs that provided something for everyone.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: James Fitzjames Stephen, describing what he understood to be the Islamic conception of the ideal society, wrote the following:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: G. K. Chesterton criticized Islam as a derivative from Christianity. He described it as a heresy or parody of Christianity. In "The Everlasting Man" he says:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Winston Churchill criticized what he alleged to be the effects Islam had on its believers, which he described as fanatical frenzy combined with fatalistic apathy, enslavement of women, and militant proselytizing. In his 1899 book "The River War" he says:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to historian Warren Dockter, Churchill wrote this during a time of a fundamentalist revolt in Sudan and this statement does not reflect his full view of Islam, which were "often paradoxical and complex". He could be critical but at times "romanticized" the Islamic world; he exhibited great "respect, understanding and magnanimity". Churchill had a fascination of Islam and Islamic civilization. Winston Churchill's future sister-in-law expressed concerns about his fascination by stating, "[p]lease don't become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalism." According to historian Warren Dockter, however, he "never seriously considered converting". He primarily admired its martial aspects, the "Ottoman Empire's history of territorial expansion and military acumen", to the extent that in 1897 he wished to fight for the Ottoman Empire. According to Dockter, this was largely for his "lust for glory". Based on Churchill's letters, he seemed to regard Islam and Christianity as equals.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: During a lecture given at the University of Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI quoted an unfavorable remark about Islam made at the end of the 14th century by Manuel II Palaiologos, the Byzantine emperor: As the English translation of the Pope's lecture was disseminated across the world, many Muslim politicians and religious leaders protested against what they saw as an insulting mischaracterization of Islam. Mass street protests were mounted in many Islamic countries, the "Majlis-e-Shoora" (Pakistani parliament) unanimously called on the Pope to retract "this objectionable statement".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Dayanand Saraswati calls the concept of Islam to be highly offensive, and doubted that there is any connection of Islam with God:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Pandit Lekh Ram regarded that Islam was grown through the violence and desire for wealth. He further asserted that Muslims deny the entire Islamic prescribed violence and atrocities, and will continue doing so. He wrote:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Mahatma Gandhi, the moral leader of the 20th-century Indian independence movement, found the history of Muslims to be aggressive, while he claimed that Hindus have passed that stage of societal evolution:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, in his book "Discovery of India", describes Islam to have been a faith for military conquests. He wrote "Islam had become a more rigid faith suited more to military conquests rather than the conquests of the mind", and that Muslims brought nothing new to his country.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Nobel prize-winning novelist V. S. Naipaul stated that Islam requires its adherents to destroy everything which is not related to it. He described it as having a:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Nobel prize-winning playwright Wole Soyinka stated that Islam had a role in denigrating African spiritual traditions. He criticized attempts to whitewash what he sees as the destructive and coercive history of Islam on the continent:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Soyinka also regarded Islam as "superstition", and said that it does not belong to Africa. He stated that it is mainly spread with violence and force.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Tatar Tengrists criticize Islam as a semitic religion, which forced Turks to submission to an alien culture. Submission and humility, two significant components of Islamic spirituality, are disregarded as major failings of Islam, not as virtues. Further, since Islam mentions semitic history as if it were the history of all mankind, but disregards components of other cultures and spirituality, the international approach of Islam is seen as a threat. It additionally gives Imams an opportunity to march against their own people under the banner of international Islam.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, described Islam as the religion of the Arabs in his own work titled "Vatandaş için Medeni Bilgiler" by his own critical and nationalist views:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Sami Aldeeb, Palestinian-born Swiss lawyer and author of many books and articles on Arab and Islamic law, expressed various positions critical of Islam, for example, he positioned himself for a ban on the erection of minarets in Switzerland, since in his opinion the constitution allows prayer, but not shouting.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Originality of Quranic manuscripts. According to traditional Islamic scholarship, all of the Quran was written down by Muhammad's companions while he was alive (during 610–632 CE), but it was primarily an orally related document. The written compilation of the whole Quran in its definite form as we have it now was not completed until many years after the death of Muhammad. John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone and Yehuda D. Nevo argue that all the primary sources which exist are from 150 to 300 years after the events which they describe, and thus are chronologically far removed from those events.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Imperfections in the Quran. Critics reject the idea that the Quran is miraculously perfect and impossible to imitate as asserted in the Quran itself. The 1901–1906 "Jewish Encyclopedia", for example, writes: "The language of the Koran is held by the Mohammedans to be a peerless model of perfection. Critics, however, argue that peculiarities can be found in the text. For example, critics note that a sentence in which something is said concerning Allah is sometimes followed immediately by another in which Allah is the speaker (examples of this are , , , and ). Many peculiarities in the positions of words are due to the necessities of rhyme (, ), while the use of many rare words and new forms may be traced to the same cause (comp. especially , 11, 16)."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Judaism and the Quran. According to the "Jewish Encyclopedia", "The dependence of Mohammed upon his Jewish teachers or upon what he heard of the Jewish Haggadah and Jewish practices is now generally conceded." John Wansbrough believes that the Quran is a redaction in part of other sacred scriptures, in particular the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. Herbert Berg writes that "Despite John Wansbrough's very cautious and careful inclusion of qualifications such as "conjectural," and "tentative and emphatically provisional", his work is condemned by some. Some of this negative reaction is undoubtedly due to its radicalness... Wansbrough's work has been embraced wholeheartedly by few and has been employed in a piecemeal fashion by many. Many praise his insights and methods, if not all of his conclusions." Early jurists and theologians of Islam mentioned some Jewish influence but they also say where it is seen and recognized as such, it is perceived as a debasement or a dilution of the authentic message. Bernard Lewis describes this as "something like what in Christian history was called a Judaizing heresy." According to Moshe Sharon, the story of Muhammad having Jewish teachers is a legend developed in the 10th century CE. Philip Schaff described the Quran as having "many passages of poetic beauty, religious fervor, and wise counsel, but mixed with absurdities, bombast, unmeaning images, low sensuality."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Mohammed and God as speakers. According to Ibn Warraq, the Iranian rationalist Ali Dashti criticized the Quran on the basis that for some passages, "the speaker cannot have been God." Warraq gives Surah Al-Fatiha as an example of a passage which is "clearly addressed to God, in the form of a prayer." He says that by only adding the word "say" in front of the passage, this difficulty could have been removed. Furthermore, it is also known that one of the companions of Muhammad, Ibn Masud, rejected Surah Fatihah as being part of the Quran; these kind of disagreements are, in fact, common among the companions of Muhammad who could not decide which surahs were part of the Quran and which not.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Critics point to various pre-existing sources to argue against the traditional narrative of revelation from God. Some scholars have calculated that one third of the Quran has pre-Islamic Christian origins. Aside from the Bible, the Quran relies on several Apocryphal and legendary sources, like the Protoevangelium of James, Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and several infancy gospels. Several narratives rely on Jewish Midrash Tanhuma legends, like the narrative of Cain learning to bury the body of Abel in . Norman Geisler argues that the dependence of the Quran on preexisting sources is one evidence of a purely human origin. Richard Carrier regards this reliance on pre-Islamic Christian sources as evidence that Islam derived from a Torah-observant sect of Christianity.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Hadith are Muslim traditions relating to the "Sunnah" (words and deeds) of Muhammad. They are drawn from the writings of scholars writing between 844 and 874 CE, more than 200 years after the death of Mohammed in 632 CE. Within Islam, different schools and sects have different opinions on the proper selection and use of Hadith. The four schools of Sunni Islam all consider Hadith second only to the Quran, although they differ on how much freedom of interpretation should be allowed to legal scholars. Shi'i scholars disagree with Sunni scholars as to which Hadith should be considered reliable. The Shi'as accept the Sunnah of Ali and the Imams as authoritative in addition to the Sunnah of Muhammad, and as a consequence they maintain their own, different, collections of Hadith.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: It has been suggested that there exists around the Hadith three major sources of corruption: political conflicts, sectarian prejudice, and the desire to translate the underlying meaning, rather than the original words verbatim.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Muslim critics of the hadith, Quranists, reject the authority of hadith on theological grounds, pointing to verses in the Quran itself: ""Nothing have We omitted from the Book"", declaring that all necessary instruction can be found within the Quran, without reference to the Hadith. They claim that following the Hadith has led to people straying from the original purpose of God's revelation to Muhammad, adherence to the Quran alone. Ghulam Ahmed Pervez (1903–1985) was a noted critic of the Hadith and believed that the Quran alone was all that was necessary to discern God's will and our obligations. A fatwa, ruling, signed by more than a thousand orthodox clerics, denounced him as a 'kafir', a non-believer. His seminal work, "Maqam-e Hadith" argued that the Hadith were composed of "the garbled words of previous centuries", but suggests that he is not against the "idea" of collected sayings of the Prophet, only that he would consider any hadith that goes against the teachings of Quran to have been falsely attributed to the Prophet. The 1986 Malaysian book "Hadith: A Re-evaluation" by Kassim Ahmad was met with controversy and some scholars declared him an apostate from Islam for suggesting that "the hadith are sectarian, anti-science, anti-reason and anti-women."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: John Esposito notes that "Modern Western scholarship has seriously questioned the historicity and authenticity of the "hadith"", maintaining that "the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad were actually written much later." He mentions Joseph Schacht, considered the father of the revisionist movement, as one scholar who argues this, claiming that Schacht "found no evidence of legal traditions before 722," from which Schacht concluded that "the Sunna of the Prophet is not the words and deeds of the Prophet, but apocryphal material" dating from later. Other scholars, however, such as Wilferd Madelung, have argued that "wholesale rejection as late fiction is unjustified".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Orthodox Muslims do not deny the existence of false hadith, but believe that through the scholars' work, these false hadith have been largely eliminated.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The traditional view of Islam has also been criticised for the lack of supporting evidence consistent with that view, such as the lack of archaeological evidence, and discrepancies with non-Muslim literary sources. In the 1970s, what has been described as a "wave of sceptical scholars" challenged a great deal of the received wisdom in Islamic studies. They argued that the Islamic historical tradition had been greatly corrupted in transmission. They tried to correct or reconstruct the early history of Islam from other, presumably more reliable, sources such as coins, inscriptions, and non-Islamic sources. The oldest of this group was John Wansbrough (1928–2002). Wansbrough's works were widely noted, but perhaps not widely read.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In 1972 a cache of ancient Qurans in a mosque in Sana'a, Yemen was discovered – commonly known as the Sana'a manuscripts. The German scholar Gerd R. Puin has been investigating these Quran fragments for years. His research team made 35,000 microfilm photographs of the manuscripts, which he dated to early part of the 8th century. Puin has not published the entirety of his work, but noted unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography. He also suggested that some of the parchments were palimpsests which had been reused. Puin believed that this implied a text that changed over time as opposed to one that remained the same.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The Kaaba is the most sacred site in Islam. Criticism has centered on the origins of the Kaaba. In her book, "Islam: A Short History", Karen Armstrong asserts that the "Kaaba" was officially dedicated to Hubal, a Nabatean deity, and contained 360 idols that probably represented the days of the year. Imoti contends that there were numerous such "Kaaba" sanctuaries in Arabia at one time, but this was the only one built of stone. The others also allegedly had counterparts of the Black Stone. There was a "red stone", the deity of the south Arabian city of Ghaiman, and the "white stone" in the "Kaaba" of al-Abalat (near the city of Tabala, south of Mecca). Grunebaum in "Classical Islam" points out that the experience of divinity of that period was often associated with stone fetishes, mountains, special rock formations, or "trees of strange growth".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Sarwar, about 400 years before the birth of Muhammad, a man named "Amr bin Lahyo bin Harath bin Amr ul-Qais bin Thalaba bin Azd bin Khalan bin Babalyun bin Saba", who was descended from Qahtan and was the king of Hijaz had placed a Hubal idol onto the roof of the Kaaba. This idol was one of the chief deities of the ruling tribe Quraysh. The idol was made of red agate and shaped like a human, but with the right hand broken off and replaced with a golden hand. When the idol was moved inside the Kaaba, it had seven arrows in front of it, which were used for divination. According to the "Encyclopædia Britannica", "before the rise of Islam it was revered as a sacred sanctuary and was a site of pilgrimage." Many Muslim and academic historians stress the power and importance of the pre-Islamic Mecca. They depict it as a city grown rich on the proceeds of the spice trade. Patricia Crone believes that this is an exaggeration and that Mecca may only have been an outpost trading with nomads for leather, cloth, and camel butter. Crone argues that if Mecca had been a well-known center of trade, it would have been mentioned by later authors such as Procopius, Nonnosus, or the Syrian church chroniclers writing in Syriac. The town is absent, however, from any geographies or histories written in the three centuries before the rise of Islam.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Muhammad is considered one of the prophets in Islam and as a model for followers. Critics such as Sigismund Koelle and former Muslim Ibn Warraq see some of Muhammad's actions as immoral.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf wrote a poetic eulogy commemorating the slain Quraish notables; later, he had traveled to Mecca and provoked the Quraish to fight Muhammad. He also wrote erotic poetry about Muslim women, which offended the Muslims there. This poetry influenced so many that this too was considered directly against the Constitution of Medina which states, "loyalty gives protection against treachery" and "this document will not (be employed to) protect one who is unjust or commits a crime." Other sources also state that he was plotting to assassinate Muhammad.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Muhammad called upon his followers to kill Ka'b. Muhammad ibn Maslama offered his services, collecting four others. By pretending to have turned against Muhammad, Muhammad ibn Maslama and the others enticed Ka'b out of his fortress on a moonlit night, and killed him in spite of his vigorous resistance. The Jews were terrified at his assassination, and as the historian Ibn Ishaq put it "...there was not a Jew who did not fear for his life".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to scriptural Sunni's Hadith sources, Aisha was six or seven years old when she was married to Muhammad and nine when the marriage was consummated.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, born in Persia 200 years after Muhammmad's death, suggested that she was ten years old. Six hundred years after Muhammad, Ibn Khallikan recorded that she was nine years old at marriage, and twelve at consummation. Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi, born about 150 years after Muhammad's death, cited Hisham ibn Urwah as saying that she was nine years old at marriage, and twelve at consummation, but Hisham ibn Urwah's original source is otherwise unknown, and Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi's work does not have the high religious status of the Hadith.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In the twentieth century, Indian writer Muhammad Ali challenged the Hadith showing that Aisha was not as young as the traditional sources claim, arguing that instead, a new interpretation of the Hadith compiled by Mishkat al-Masabih, Wali-ud-Din Muhammad ibn Abdullah Al-Khatib, could indicate that Aisha would have been nineteen years old around the time of her marriage.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Colin Turner, a UK professor of Islamic studies, states that since such marriages between an older man and a young girl were customary among the Bedouins, Muhammad's marriage would not have been considered improper by his contemporaries. Karen Armstrong, the British author on comparative religion, has affirmed that "There was no impropriety in Muhammad's marriage to Aisha. Marriages conducted in absentia to seal an alliance were often contracted at this time between adults and minors who were even younger than Aisha."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to some critics, the morality of the Quran appears to be a moral regression when judged by the standards of the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity it says that it builds upon. The "Catholic Encyclopedia", for example, states that "the ethics of Islam are far inferior to those of Judaism and even more inferior to those of the New Testament" and "that in the ethics of Islam there is a great deal to admire and to approve, is beyond dispute; but of originality or superiority, there is none."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In "The End of Faith" Harris argues that Muslim extremism is simply a consequence of taking the Quran literally, and is skeptical that moderate Islam is possible. Various calls to arms were identified in the Quran by US citizen Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, all of which were cited as "most relevant to my actions on March 3, 2006" (, , , , , , , , , , , , , ).


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Bernard Lewis writes: "In one of the sad paradoxes of human history, it was the humanitarian reforms brought by Islam that resulted in a vast development of the slave trade inside, and still more outside, the Islamic empire." He notes that the Islamic injunctions against the enslavement of Muslims led to massive importation of slaves from the outside. According to Patrick Manning, Islam by recognizing and codifying the slavery seems to have done more to protect and expand slavery than the reverse.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Brockopp, on the other hand, the idea of using alms for the manumission of slaves appears to be unique to the Quran, assuming the traditional interpretation of verses and . Similarly, the practice of freeing slaves in atonement for certain sins appears to be introduced by the Quran (but compare Exod 21:26-7). The forced prostitution of female slaves, a Near Eastern custom of great antiquity, is condemned in the Quran. Murray Gordon notes that this ban is "of no small significance". Brockopp writes: "Other cultures limit a master's right to harm a slave but few exhort masters to treat their slaves kindly, and the placement of slaves in the same category as other weak members of society who deserve protection is unknown outside the Qur'an. The unique contribution of the Qur'an, then, is to be found in its emphasis on the place of slaves in society and society's responsibility toward the slave, perhaps the most progressive legislation on slavery in its time."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Critics argue unlike Western societies which in their opposition to slavery spawned anti-slavery movements whose numbers and enthusiasm often grew out of church groups, no such grass-roots organizations ever developed in Muslim societies. In Muslim politics the state unquestioningly accepted the teachings of Islam and applied them as law. Islam, by sanctioning slavery, also extended legitimacy to the traffic in slaves.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Maurice Middleberg, however, "Sura 90 in the Quran states that the righteous path involves 'the freeing of slaves. Murray Gordon characterizes Muhammad's approach to slavery as reformist rather than revolutionary. He did not set out to abolish slavery, but rather to improve the conditions of slaves by urging his followers to treat their slaves humanely and free them as a way of expiating one's sins which some modern Muslim authors have interpreted as indication that Muhammad envisioned a gradual abolition of slavery.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Critics say it was only in the early 20th century (post World War I) that slavery gradually became outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France. Gordon describes the lack of homegrown Islamic abolition movements as owing much to the fact that it was deeply anchored in Islamic law. By legitimizing slavery and – by extension – traffic in slaves, Islam elevated those practices to an unassailable moral plane. As a result, in no part of the Muslim world was an ideological challenge ever mounted against slavery. The political and social system in Muslim society would have taken a dim view of such a challenge.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: However, In Islamic jurisprudence, slavery was theoretically an exceptional condition under the dictum "The basic principle is liberty" ("al-'asl huwa 'l-hurriya"), so that for a foundling or another person whose status was unknown freedom was presumed and enslavement forbidden.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The issue of slavery in the Islamic world in modern times is controversial. Critics argue there is hard evidence of its existence and destructive effects. Others maintain slavery in central Islamic lands has been virtually extinct since mid-twentieth century, and that reports from Sudan and Somalia showing practice of slavery is in border areas as a result of continuing war and not Islamic belief. In recent years, according to some scholars, there has been a "worrying trend" of "reopening" of the issue of slavery by some conservative Salafi Islamic scholars after its "closing" earlier in the 20th century when Muslim countries banned slavery and "most Muslim scholars" found the practice "inconsistent with Qur'anic morality".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri of Karbala expressed the view in 1993 that the enforcement of servitude can occur but is restricted to war captives and those born of slaves.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In a 2014 issue of their digital magazine "Dabiq", the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant explicitly claimed religious justification for enslaving Yazidi women.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Islamic law, apostasy is identified by a list of actions such as conversion to another religion, denying the existence of God, rejecting the prophets, mocking God or the prophets, idol worship, rejecting the sharia, or permitting behavior that is forbidden by the sharia, such as adultery or the eating of forbidden foods or drinking of alcoholic beverages. The majority of Muslim scholars hold to the traditional view that apostasy is punishable by death or imprisonment until repentance, at least for adult men of sound mind.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The kind of apostasy which the jurists generally deemed punishable was of the political kind, although there were considerable legal differences of opinion on this matter. Wael Hallaq states that "[in] a culture whose lynchpin is religion, religious principles and religious morality, apostasy is in some way equivalent to high treason in the modern nation-state".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Laws prohibiting religious conversion run contrary to Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that "[e]veryone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The English historian C. E. Bosworth suggests the traditional view of apostasy hampered the development of Islamic learning, arguing that while the organizational form of the Christian university allowed them to develop and flourish into the modern university, "the Muslim ones remained constricted by the doctrine of waqf alone, with their physical plant often deteriorating hopelessly and their curricula narrowed by the exclusion of the non-traditional religious sciences like philosophy and natural science," out of fear that these could evolve into potential toe-holds for kufr, those people who reject God."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: At a 2009 human rights conference at Mofid University in Qom, Araki stated that "if an individual doubts Islam, he does not become the subject of punishment, but if the doubt is openly "expressed", this is not permissible." As one observer (Sadakat Kadri) noted, this "freedom" has the advantage that "state officials could not punish an unmanifested belief even if they wanted to".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: However, according to legal historian Sadakat Kadri, while apostasy was traditionally punished by death, executions were rare because "it was widely believed" that any accused apostate "who repented by articulating the "shahada"" ("LA ILAHA ILLALLAH" "There is no God but God") "had to be forgiven" and their punishment delayed until after Judgement Day. This principle was upheld "even in extreme situations", such as when an offender adopts Islam "only for fear of death", based on the hadith that Muhammad had upbraided a follower for killing a raider who had uttered the shahada.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The four Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence, as well as Shi'a scholars, agree on the difference of punishment between male and female. A sane adult male apostate may be executed. A female apostate may be put to death, according to the majority view, or imprisoned until she repents, according to others.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The Quran threatens apostates with punishment in the next world only, the historian W. Heffening states, the traditions however contain the element of death penalty. Muslim scholar Shafi'i interprets verse as adducing the main evidence for the death penalty in Quran. The historian Wael Hallaq states the later addition of death penalty "reflects a later reality and does not stand in accord with the deeds of the Prophet." He further states that "nothing in the law governing apostate and apostasy derives from the letter of the holy text."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: William Montgomery Watt, in response to a question about Western views of the Islamic Law as being cruel, states that "In Islamic teaching, such penalties may have been suitable for the age in which Muhammad lived. However, as societies have since progressed and become more peaceful and ordered, they are not suitable any longer."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Some contemporary Islamic jurists from both the Sunni and Shia denominations together with Quran only Muslims have argued or issued fatwas that state that either the changing of religion is not punishable or is only punishable under restricted circumstances. For example, Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri argues that no Quranic verse prescribes an earthly penalty for apostasy and adds that it is not improbable that the punishment was prescribed by Muhammad at early Islam due to political conspiracies against Islam and Muslims and not only because of changing the belief or expressing it. Montazeri defines different types of apostasy. He does not hold that a reversion of belief because of investigation and research is punishable by death but prescribes capital punishment for a desertion of Islam out of malice and enmity towards the Muslim.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Yohanan Friedmann, an Israeli Islamic Studies scholar, a Muslim may stress tolerant elements of Islam (by for instance adopting the broadest interpretation of Quran 2:256 ("No compulsion is there in religion...") or the humanist approach attributed to Ibrahim al-Nakha'i), without necessarily denying the existence of other ideas in the Medieval Islamic tradition but rather discussing them in their historical context (by for example arguing that "civilizations comparable with the Islamic one, such as the Sassanids and the Byzantines, also punished apostasy with death. Similarly neither Judaism nor Christianity treated apostasy and apostates with any particular kindness"). Friedmann continues:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Some widely held interpretations of Islam are inconsistent with Human Rights conventions that recognize the right to change religion. In particular article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights


title: Criticism of Islam

text: To implement this, Article 18 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The right for Muslims to change their religion is not afforded by the Iranian Shari'ah law, which specifically forbids it. In 1981, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, articulated the position of his country regarding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by saying that the UDHR was "a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition", which could not be implemented by Muslims without trespassing the Islamic law. As a matter of law, on the basis of its obligations as a state party to the ICCPR, Iran is obliged to uphold the right of individuals to practice the religion of their choice and to change religions, including converting from Islam. The prosecution of converts from Islam on the basis of religious edicts that identify apostasy as an offense punishable by death is clearly at variance with this obligation. Muslim countries such as Sudan and Saudi Arabia, have the death penalty for apostasy from Islam. These countries have criticized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for its perceived failure to take into account the cultural and religious context of non-Western countries. In 1990, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation published a separate Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam compliant with Shari'ah. Although granting many of the rights in the UN declaration, it does not grant Muslims the right to convert to other religions, and restricts freedom of speech to those expressions of it that are not in contravention of the Islamic law.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Abul Ala Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, wrote a book called Human Rights in Islam, in which he argues that respect for human rights has always been enshrined in Sharia law (indeed that the roots of these rights are to be found in Islamic doctrine) and criticizes Western notions that there is an inherent contradiction between the two. Western scholars have, for the most part, rejected Maududi's analysis.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The September 11 attacks on the United States, and various other acts of Islamic terrorism over the 21st century, have resulted in many non-Muslims' indictment of Islam as a violent religion. In particular, the Quran's teachings on matters of war and peace have become topics of heated discussion in recent years. On the one hand, some critics claim that certain verses of the Quran sanction military action against unbelievers as a whole both during the lifetime of Muhammad and after. The Quran says, "Fight in the name of your religion with those who fight against you." On the other hand, most Muslim scholars, including Ahmadiyya, argue that such verses of the Quran are interpreted out of context, and argue that when the verses are read in context it clearly appears that the Quran prohibits aggression, and allows fighting only in self-defense.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Orientalist David Margoliouth described the Battle of Khaybar as the "stage at which Islam became a menace to the whole world." According to Margoliouth, earlier attacks on the Meccans and the Jewish tribes of Medina (e.g., the invasion of Banu Qurayza) could be at least plausibly be ascribed to wrongs done to Muhammad or the Islamic community. Margoliouth argues that the Jews of Khaybar had done nothing to harm Muhammad or his followers, and ascribes the attack to a desire for plunder.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Montgomery Watt mentions another reason for the battle. He believes Jews' intriguing and use of their wealth to incite tribes against Muhammad left him no choice but to attack. Vaglieri concurs that one reason for attack was that the Jews of Khaybar were responsible for the Confederates that attacked Muslims during the Battle of the Trench.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Shibli Numani also sees Khaybar's actions during the Battle of the Trench, and draws particular attention to Banu Nadir's leader Huyayy ibn Akhtab, who had gone to the Banu Qurayza during the battle to instigate them to attack Muhammad.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: "Jihad", an Islamic term, is a religious duty of Muslims. In Arabic, the word "jihād" translates as a noun meaning "struggle". "Jihad" appears 41 times in the Quran and frequently in the idiomatic expression "striving for the sake of God "(al-jihad fi sabil Allah)"". Jihad is an important religious duty for several sects in Islam. A minority among the Sunni scholars sometimes refer to this duty as the sixth pillar of Islam, though it occupies no such official status. In Twelver Shi'a Islam, however, Jihad is one of the 10 Practices of the Religion. The Quran calls repeatedly for jihad, or holy struggle, resistance, against unbelievers, including, at times, Jews and Christians. Middle East historian Bernard Lewis argues that "the overwhelming majority of classical theologians, jurists, and traditionalists (specialists in the hadith) understood the obligation of jihad in a military sense." Furthermore, Lewis maintains that for most of the recorded history of Islam, from the lifetime of Muhammad onward, the word jihad was used in a primarily military sense.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The Quran: (8:12): "...cast terror in their hearts and strike upon their necks." The phrase that they have been "commanded to terrorize the disbelievers" has been cited in motivation of Jihadi terror. One Jihadi cleric has said:


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Another aim and objective of jihad is to drive terror in the hearts of the [infidels]. To terrorize them. Did you know that we were commanded in the Qur'an with terrorism? ...Allah said, and prepare for them to the best of your ability with power, and with horses of war. To drive terror in the hearts of my enemies, Allah's enemies, and your enemies. And other enemies which you don't know, only Allah knows them... So we were commanded to drive terror into the hearts of the [infidels], to prepare for them with the best of our abilities with power. Then the Prophet said, nay, the power is your ability to shoot. The power which you are commanded with here, is your ability to shoot. Another aim and objective of jihad is to kill the [infidels], to lessen the population of the [infidels]... it is not right for a Prophet to have captives until he makes the Earth warm with blood... so, you should always seek to lessen the population of the [infidels].


title: Criticism of Islam

text: David Cook, author of "Understanding Jihad", said "In reading Muslim literature – both contemporary and classical – one can see that the evidence for the primacy of spiritual jihad is negligible. Today it is certain that no Muslim, writing in a non-Western language (such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu), would ever make claims that jihad is primarily nonviolent or has been superseded by the spiritual jihad. Such claims are made solely by Western scholars, primarily those who study Sufism and/or work in interfaith dialogue, and by Muslim apologists who are trying to present Islam in the most innocuous manner possible." Cook argued that "Presentations along these lines are ideological in tone and should be discounted for their bias and deliberate ignorance of the subject" and that "[i]t is no longer acceptable for Western scholars or Muslim apologists writing in non-Muslim languages to make flat, unsupported statements concerning the prevalence – either from a historical point of view or within contemporary Islam o f the spiritual jihad." Magdi Allam, an outspoken Egyptian-born Italian journalist, has described Islam as intrinsically violent and characterized by "hate and intolerance".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: According to Fawzy Abdelmalek, "many Muslim scholars speak of Islam as a religion of peace and not of violence. They say that the non-Muslims misunderstand the Quran verses about Jihad and the conduct of war in Islam."


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Dennis Prager, columnist and author, in responding to a movement that contends that Islam is "a religion of peace", wrote: "Now, Islam has never been a religion of peace. It began as a warlike religion and throughout its history, whenever possible, made war on non-Muslims – from the polytheists of North Africa to the Hindus of India, about 60 to 80 million of whom Muslims killed during their thousand-year rule there." John R. Neuman, a scholar on religion, describes Islam as "a perfect anti-religion" and "the antithesis of Buddhism".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Charles Mathewes characterizes the peace verses as saying that "if others want peace, you can accept them as peaceful even if they are not Muslim." As an example, Mathewes cites the second sura, which commands believers not to transgress limits in warfare: "fight in God's cause against those who fight you, but do not transgress limits [in aggression]; God does not love transgressors" (2:190).


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Lawrence Wright, author of a Pulitzer-prize-winning book, argued that role of Wahhabi literature in Saudi schools contributing suspicion and hate violence against non-Muslims as non-believers or infidels and anyone who "disagrees with Wahhabism is either an infidel or a deviant, who should repent or be killed." Andrew Bostom states that a number of jihads have targeted Christians, Hindus, and Jews.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Beheading was a standard method of execution in pre-modern Islamic law. Though a formerly widespread execution method, its use had been abandoned in most countries by the end of the 20th century. Currently, it is used only in Saudi Arabia. It also remains a legal method of execution in Iran, Qatar and Yemen, where it is no longer in use.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Muhammad's beheading of 600-900 Jewish men and boys has also been criticised (Abu Dawud 4390, , , Sahih al-Bukhari 5:59:447, Sahih al-Bukhari 5:58:148, Ibn Kathir V.3. P.170, Ibn Ishaq p. 464).)


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Critics such as lesbian activist Irshad Manji, former Muslims Ehsan Jami and the former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have criticized Islam's attitudes towards homosexuals. Most international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, condemn Islamic laws that make homosexual relations between consenting adults a crime. Since 1994 the United Nations Human Rights Committee has also ruled that such laws violated the right to privacy guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In May 2008, the sexual rights lobby group Lambda Istanbul (based in Istanbul, Turkey) was banned by court order for violating a constitutional provision on the protection of the family and an article banning bodies with objectives that violate law and morality. This decision was then taken to the Court of Cassation and the ban lifted.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In 10 Muslim-majority countries homosexual acts may be punishable by death, though in some the punishment has never been carried out.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq states that the Quran's condemnation of homosexuality has frequently been ignored in practice, and that Islamic countries were much more tolerant of homosexuality than Christian ones until fairly recently.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: ( literally "pleasure marriage") is a fixed-term or short-term contractual marriage in Shia Islam. The duration of this type of marriage is fixed at its inception and is then automatically dissolved upon completion of its term. For this reason, nikah mut'ah has been widely criticised as the religious cover and legalization of prostitution. The Christian missionary Thomas Patrick Hughes criticized Mut'ah as allowing the continuation of "one of the abominable practices of ancient Arabia." Shi'a and Sunnis agree that Mut'ah was legal in early times, but Sunnis consider that it was abrogated. Ibn Kathir writes that "[t]here's no doubt that in the outset of Islam, Mut'ah was allowed under the Shari'ah". Currently, however, mut'ah is one of the distinctive features of Ja'fari jurisprudence. No other school of Islamic jurisprudence allows it. According to Imam Jafar as Sadiq, "One of the matters about which I shall never keep precautionary silence (taqiyya) is the matter of mu'tah." Allameh Tabatabaei defends the Shia view in Tafsir al-Mizan, arguing that there are "mutawatir" or nearly "mutawatir" traditions narrated from the Shia Imams that Mut'ah is permitted. For example, it has been narrated from Muhammad al-Baqir and Ja'far al-Sadiq that they said "regarding the [above] verse, and there is no blame on you about what you mutually agree after what is appointed." It means that he increases her dowry or she increases his (fixed) period.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Sunnis believe that Muhammad later abolished this type of marriage at several different large events, the most accepted being at Khaybar in 7 AH (629 CE) Bukhari 059.527 and at the Victory of Mecca in 8 AH (630 CE). Most Sunnis believe that Umar later was merely enforcing a prohibition that was established during Muhammad's time. Shia contest the criticism that nikah mut'ah is a cover for prostitution, and argue that the unique legal nature of temporary marriage distinguishes Mut'ah ideologically from prostitution.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Children born of temporary marriages are considered legitimate, and have equal status in law with their siblings born of permanent marriages, and do inherit from both parents. Women must observe a period of celibacy (idda) to allow for the identification of a child's legitimate father, and a woman can only be married to one person at a time, be it temporary or permanent. Some Shia scholars also view Mut'ah as a means of eradicating prostitution from society.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Nikah Misyar () is a type of Nikah (marriage) in Sunni Islam only carried out through the normal contractual procedure, with the provision that the husband and wife give up several rights by their own free will, such as living together, equal division of nights between wives in cases of polygamy, the wife's rights to housing, and maintenance money (""nafaqa""), and the husband's right of homekeeping and access. Essentially the couple continue to live separately from each other, as before their contract, and see each other to fulfil their needs in a legally permissible (halal) manner when they please.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Misyar has been suggested by some western authors to be a comparable marriage with Nikah mut'ah and that they find it for the sole purpose of "sexual gratification in a licit manner" According to Florian Pohl, assistant professor of religion at Oxford College, Misyar marriage is a controversial issue in the Muslim world, as many see it as practice that encourages marriages for purely sexual purposes, or that it is used as a cover for a form of prostitutuion.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Professor Yusuf Al-Qaradawi observes that he does not promote this type of marriage, although he has to recognise that it is legal, since it fulfils all the requirements of the usual marriage contract. He states his preference that the clause of renunciation be not included within the marriage contract, but be the subject of a simple verbal agreement between the parties. Islamic scholars like Ibn Uthaimeen or Al-Albani claim, for their part, that misyar marriage may be legal, but not moral. They agree that the wife can at any time, reclaim the rights which she gave up at the time of contract. But, they are opposed to this type of marriage on the grounds that it contradicts the spirit of the Islamic law of marriage and that it has perverse effects on the woman, the family and the community in general.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: For Al-Albani, misyar marriage may even be considered illicit, because it runs counter to the objectives and the spirit of marriage in Islam, as described in the Quran: "And among His signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that ye may dwell in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts)…" Al-Albani also underlines the social problems which result from the "misyar" marriage, particularly in the event that children are born from this union. The children raised by their mother in a home from which the father is always absent, without reason, may suffer difficulties. The situation becomes even worse if the wife is abandoned or repudiated by her husband "misyar", with no means of subsistence, as usually happens.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Ibn Uthaymeen recognized the legality of "misyar" marriage under Shariah, but came to oppose it due to what he considered to be its harmful effects.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Many scholars claim Shari'a law encourages domestic violence against women, when a husband suspects "nushuz" (disobedience, disloyalty, rebellion, ill conduct) in his wife.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: One of the verses of the Quran relating to permissibility of domestic violence is Surah 4:34. In deference to Surah 4:34, many nations with Shari'a law have refused to consider or prosecute cases of domestic abuse. Shari'a has been criticized for ignoring women's rights in domestic abuse cases. Musawah, CEDAW, KAFA and other organizations have proposed ways to modify Shari'a-inspired laws to improve women's rights in Islamic nations, including women's rights in domestic abuse cases.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: On the other hand, scholars and commentators have stated that Muhammad directed men not to hit their wives' faces, he said in Farewell Sermon not to beat their wives in such a way as would leave marks on their body.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Shari'a is the basis for personal status laws in most Islamic majority nations. These personal status laws determine rights of women in matters of marriage, divorce and child custody. A 2011 UNICEF report concludes that Shari'a law provisions are discriminatory against women from a human rights perspective. In legal proceedings under Shari'a law, a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's before a court.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Except for Iran, Lebanon and Bahrain, which allow child marriages, the civil code in Islamic majority countries do not allow child marriage of girls. However, with Shari'a personal status laws, Shari'a courts in all these nations have the power to override the civil code. The religious courts permit girls less than 18 years old to marry. As of 2011, child marriages are common in a few Middle Eastern countries, accounting for 1 in 6 of all marriages in Egypt and 1 in 3 marriages in Yemen. However, the average age at marriage in most Middle Eastern countries is steadily rising and is generally in the low to mid 20s for women. Rape is considered a crime in all countries, but laws in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia in some cases allow a rapist to escape punishment by marrying his victim, while in other cases the victim who complains is often prosecuted with the crime of "Zina" (adultery).


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Sharia grants women the right to inherit property from other family members, and these rights are written in detail. According to the Quran,


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The status of women in classical Islamic law compared favorably to their status under laws of other contemporaneous cultures such those of pre-modern Europe, both in terms of financial independence and access to divorce, but the situation is different if it is evaluated against modern conceptions. Furthermore, slave women were not granted the same legal rights. Sharia recognizes the basic inequality between master and women slave, between free women and slave women, between believers and non-believers, as well as their unequal rights. Sharia authorized the institution of slavery, using the words "abd" (slave) and the phrase "ma malakat aymanukum" ("that which your right hand owns") to refer to women slaves, seized as captives of war. Under classical Islamic law, Muslim men could have sexual relations with female captives and slaves without their consent.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Slave women under sharia did not have a right to own property, right to free movement or right to consent. Sharia, in Islam's history, provided religious foundation for enslaving non-Muslim women (and men), as well as encouraged slave's manumission. However, manumission required that the non-Muslim slave first convert to Islam. Non-Muslim slave women who bore children to their Muslim masters became legally free upon their master's death, and their children were presumed to be Muslims as their father, in Africa, and elsewhere.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Starting with the 20th century, Western legal systems evolved to expand women's rights, but women's rights under Islamic law have remained tied to Quran, hadiths and their faithful interpretation as sharia by Islamic jurists.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: On 14 January 2009, the Catholic Portuguese cardinal José Policarpo directed a warning to young women to "think twice" before marrying Muslim men: Christians should learn more about Islam and respect Muslims, but marrying a Muslim man is getting into a lot of trouble, that not even Allah knows where it would end, if the couple moved to an Islamic country. He also said that dialogue "with our Muslim brothers" is difficult, because it is possible to dialogue only with those who want to have dialogue. Human rights group Amnesty International criticized Policarpo for inciting "discrimination" and "intolerance", and a representative of the Muslim community in Portugal said they were hurt and surprised by his words, but remarked that his words could be interpreted as a call to respect differences and get to know the other religion. A spokesman for the Portuguese Episcopal Conference said the cardinal had offered "realistic advice" rather than "discrimination" or "contempt for another culture or religion".


title: Criticism of Islam

text: The immigration of Muslims to Europe has increased in recent decades. Friction has developed between their new neighbours. Conservative Muslim social attitudes on modern issues have caused controversy in Europe and elsewhere. Scholars argue about how much these attitudes are a result of Islamic beliefs. Some critics consider Islam to be incompatible with secular Western society, and that, unlike other religions, Islam positively commands its adherents to impose its religious law on all peoples, believers and unbelievers alike, whenever possible and by any means necessary. Their criticism has been partly influenced by a stance against multiculturalism advocated by recent philosophers, closely linked to the heritage of New Philosophers. Statements by proponents like Pascal Bruckner describe multiculturalism as an invention of an "enlightened" elite who deny the benefits of democratic rights to non-Westerners by chaining them to their roots. They believe this allows Islam free rein to propagate what they state are abuses, such as the mistreatment of women and homosexuals, and in some countries slavery. They also state that multiculturalism allows a degree of religious freedom that exceeds what is needed for personal religious freedom and is conducive to the creation of organizations aimed at undermining European secular or Christian values.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Emigrants from nearly every predominantly Muslim country have immigrated to Canada. According to a 2013 poll, 54% of Canadians had an unfavourable view of Islam, which was higher than for any other religion (Hinduism, Sikhism etc.).


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In the United States, after the Boston Marathon bombing, the immigration processes in the country are assumed to be harder. Far-right commentator Bryan Fischer asked that no more visas be granted to Muslims, and no more mosques built; his opinion received support, most notably by the former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: Following the San Bernardino attack in 2015, Donald Trump, then a candidate for President, proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, until we can figure out what the hell is going on". Throughout the campaign, Trump repeatedly described Islam and Muslim immigrants and refugees as a threat to the West, and condemned current President Barack Obama for not referring to Islamic State militants as "Islamic terrorists" or "radical Muslims", accusing Obama of cowardice in the face of radical Islam and claiming that Obama had "founded ISIS" through his foreign policy. Trump's rhetoric was condemned by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as numerous Muslim advocacy groups and activists, and became a focal issue in the 2016 United States presidential election.


title: Criticism of Islam

text: In 2004, speaking to the Acton Institute on the problems of "secular democracy", Cardinal George Pell drew a parallel between Islam and communism: "Islam may provide in the 21st century, the attraction that communism provided in the 20th, both for those that are alienated and embittered on the one hand and for those who seek order or justice on the other." Pell also agrees in another speech that its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited. An Australian Islamist spokesman, Keysar Trad, responded to the criticism: "Communism is a godless system, a system that in fact persecutes faith". Geert Wilders, a Dutch member of parliament and leader of the Party for Freedom, has also compared Islam to fascism and communism.