Ayaan is a very brave woman, who lived through the horrors of Islam. In her famous book, Infidel, she details her life as a Muslim, including the horrifying details of her circumcision. Amidst death-threats from Al-Qaeda, she was forced out of the Netherlands by the government on the flimsy excuse of falsifying her immigration papers.

In Part 1 of this article, Islam and Its Reformation by Muhammad, discussing Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book, Heretic, I wrote about her illusion—that there are actually two different Islams, the Mecca Islam and the Medina:

What Ayaan Hirsi Ali does not realize is that Muhammad was not only the Founder of Islam, he was also its Reformer, and Muhammad's Reformation of Islam came in the form of his abrogation of the earlier Mecca verses of the Quran by the later Medina verses. This article traces Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Medina, and the attendant transformation of Islam”

In Part 2, I discuss the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reforming Islam.

 

heretic-ayaan-hirsi-aliIn Heretic, she categorically declares:

Islam is not a religion of peace... the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.”

As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts. It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been “hijacked” by extremists. The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria’s Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.”

These words most accurately encapsulate the truth and reality of Islam. But then she ambles into the optimism that Islam can actually be reformed. This may create dangerous illusion of a false sense of security among the kafirs. While we all would love to see that Islam achieves a inclined-toward-peace Reformation, we must also be on guard to the possibility that Islam can never achieve such a Reformation.

It is fundamental to Islam that the dictates and ideas of the Quran and Prophet Muhammad's tradition are of moral perfection. Muslims believe that EVERY word of the Quran was descended verbatim from the Almighty God, which can never be altered by mortal human beings.

The problem of Reformation of Islam, as desired by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is that it will require altering, nay condemning, many ideas and dictates of Allah as outlined in the Quran. For example, the Quran is filled with numerous immoral commands and teachings, for instance: child molestation (65:4), sex-slavery and rape (4:3, 4:24), torture (22.19-22), whipping adulterers (24.2), amputation and crucifixion (5:33), beheadings and mass murder (8:12, 47:4, 2:191, 9:5, 8.67, 7.4), genocide (8.17), killing and terrorizing kafirs (47.4, 8.60, 3.151), wife beating (4:34), inferiority of women (2.228, 4.11, 4.176), women as sex objects (2.223), and accession to an orgy-filled immoral paradise as reward for Muslim men who kill kafirs in Jihad (9.111), theft and robbery (Chapter 8 on Booty), forcible submission of other religions to Islam (2.103, 2.286, 3.19, 48.16). For example, Allah says verbatim in Quran 47.4:

So when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks until, when you have inflicted slaughter upon them, then secure their bonds, and either [confer] favor afterwards or ransom [them] until the war lays down its burdens. That [is the command]. And if Allah had willed, He could have taken vengeance upon them [Himself], but [He ordered armed struggle] to test some of you by means of others. And those who are killed in the cause of Allah – never will He waste their deeds.”

For a believing Muslims, the horrendous, blood-curdling commands entailed in verses of the Quran like this are the very words from Almighty Creator Allah's mouth, which no mortal humans can ever dispute and question. And for a meaningful Reformation of Islam to occur, entire verses like this will have to be roundedly condemned and obliterated from the Muslim holy book. And there are no end to such verses in the Quran containing objectionable ideas, teachings and commands.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali is recommending a Reformation of Islam, she is literally suggesting that verses such as these, which constitute the larger portion of the holy Quran, be obliterated for eternity. The question is:

  1. Under what authority does Ayaan Hirsi Ali recommends the obliteration of Almighty Allah's eternal teachings and commands from the holy Quran?

  2. And under what power can anyone carry out those obliterations to turn the Quran into a meaningless book of a mere few pages?

  3. And which Muslim is going to accept those gross changes to the holy Quran?

Can Ayaan Hirsi Ali or anybody, who are optimistic about a meaningful Reformation of Islam, give a plausible answer to these questions?

Sure, there was a somewhat non-menacing Mecca phase in Islam, and then there was the militant and violent Medina phase. And I have related already in Part 1 that Prophet Muhammad had already successfully Reformed Islam with due authority and cooperation from the Almighty Allah during his prophetic years in Medina, whereby he declared the Mecca verses null and void through the verses of Abrogation, and made the Medina verses and its violent and barbaric teachings central, timeless and eternal in Islam. If Ayaan Hirsi Ali is hoping for a Reformation of Islam in the likeness of Martin Luther's Reformation of Christianity, wherein Luther tried to bring the Catholic Church to the true teachings of Jesus, then the only Reformation possible in Islam is: Whenever Muslim societies deviate from the militant and barbaric teachings of the Medina verses of the Quran and Prophet Muhammad's actions and examples, they can only go back to the Medina Islam, not away from it.

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