 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating religious freedom, conquest, slavery, and sexual ethics, and we are starting right now with Dr. Javad's opening statement. But first, I want to quick read his biography. So I'm going to first start by reading his biography and then kick it over to him for his opening. Dr. Javad T. Hashmi is a PhD candidate in the study of religion, in particular Islamic studies at Harvard University, former fellow of medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, a practicing emergency physician. In addition to his medical training, Dr. Hashmi has obtained bachelor's and master's degrees in Arabic and Islamic studies from UC Berkeley and Harvard University respectively. Dr. Hashmi is currently completing his doctoral dissertation on the topic of jihad in the Quran. His research interests include Quranic studies, Islamic intellectual history with a focus on Islamic modernism, and the intersection between religion and violence. He recently took up a position as research director at MPAC, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, although today he is not representing MPAC, but instead here representing himself as an independent scholar. Dr. Hashmi can be followed on Twitter at Dr. Javad T. Hashmi, which is linked in the description below by the way folks, as well as on YouTube with the handle impactful scholar, which is also linked in the description folks. With that we'll kick it over to Dr. Hashmi. Thanks for being with us. The floor is all yours for your 25 minute opening statement. Thank you very much James and thank you Daniel for joining me. Hopefully my slides are showing okay. So today, okay perfect so I'm going to start now. So today we're going to be debating two religious world views. The first of them can be called a very reactionary form of traditionalism that is represented by Daniel. And the second is Islamic modernism, which I will be defending. Islamic modernism is a rationalist movement that arose in the 20th century would seek to strike a middle road between fundamentalism and secularity. Islamic modernists believe in the need to rethink Islamic norms and reinterpret foundational texts in order to make them align with the spirit of the Quran and the needs of the modern day. It is sometimes also known as Islamic rationalism or liberal Islam, but should not be confused with philosophical liberalism or progressive Islam, which has gone in a post-modernist direction. My general outline will be as follows. I will raise five general arguments for Islamic modernism, four specific arguments that Daniel will need to refute, and three arguments against traditionalism. My five general arguments for Islamic modernism, why it's a better paradigm is because it's more historical, more Quranic, more rational, more moral, and more family oriented. The four specific arguments for Daniel to refute will be on sexuality that the Quran mandates that sexual intercourse can only take place within a marriage contract or a nikah. On religious freedom, the Quran allows the freedom to choose or leave religion, and apostasy laws are therefore anti-Quranic. On warfare, the Quran categorically forbids wars of aggression. On slavery, the Quran does not allow the enslaving of prisoners of war. Now, as far as my specific arguments against Sunni traditionalism, Sunni traditionalism is built on four kind of legs of the stool, and I will knock down three of them. So the first one is when it comes to the Quran, whereas Islamic rationalists view the Quran as clear and accessible, traditionalists view the Quran as quote, dim, ambiguous, and incomplete without the hadith and tradition, but this leads to an infinite regress, since you need someone to interpret the interpretation of the interpreter. The second leg, the hadith can be knocked down because no narrator criticism was done on the very first level, that is of the companions, so no hadith can actually be authenticated. The third leg can be knocked down, Ijmaa consensus, because it's not based on anything absolutely certain. There's no certain source to base it on, and therefore consensus is based on circular logic. We'll go into this in more detail later. Here are my general arguments on Islamic modernism. Islamic modernism is more historical because Islamic modernists are actually originalists who use the latest historical critical scholarship to figure out what the actual historical prophet Muhammad preached so that we can follow and honor that. We follow the original teachings of God and his messenger as found in the Quran, whereas traditionalists follow their sex later tradition, which took centuries to develop and rely on post-chronic sources, such as their own sex hadith canon, the fsir and fiqh, none of which can be traced back to the God and his messenger and actually diverges from the Quran. Traditionalists and agronistically back project these sectarian and culturally situated ideas onto the prophet, both Islamic modernists and Western historians alike agree that the Quran is the earliest source and goes back to the prophet Muhammad. Professor Patricia Krona even credits Islamic modernists for signaling this trend of going back to the Quran as a historical source. Islamic modernists love, respect and follow the Quran more than any other group. And you will see that today when I am will be the one pointing to painfully obvious readings of the Quran, whereas Daniel's position will often line up with the hadith medieval commentaries and historical tradition. The reason why we can't rely on the classical commentaries alone is because as Western historians have noted as well as Islamic modernists, the classical commentaries are full of imaginative and manifestly improbable readings in which the exegetes are imposing meanings of their own. And there are many scholars who have said the same thing. As Fazal Rahman noted a long time ago, they never allowed the Quran to speak for itself, but instead read the Quran through the later tradition, especially through the hadith. And that's why we will not be able to avoid the hadith debate today since all the problematic stuff actually goes back to the hadith and not the Quran. Now, from a historical perspective, the hadith are full of mass forgeries and historical anachronisms, and many hadiths seem to depart radically from Quranic teaching. Hadiths, therefore, in general reflect the views of later Muslims rather than the words of the Prophet. And there's now universal Western skepticism on the reliability of hadith reports. Now, this is not only a Western invention. In fact, this idea of doubting hadith goes back to the early periods of Islam with the Islamic rationalists, and it was the Islamic modernists of modern South Asia who were amongst the first to question hadith, which even Aina's Goldseer credits them for in his monumental Muslim studies. Now, there's also a religious problem with hadith, which I've already talked about, is that there was no narrator criticism that was done on the first level of the chain of transmission, so there is no way to know if these traditions were honest or these transmitters were honest or had accurate memories, other than, of course, blind and magical belief. This topples the entire edifice of hadiths since it rests on that first level. The second argument against, and that's the second argument of Sunni traditionalism, which I've already raised. Now, hadiths from a religious perspective, it's okay to use them, not Islamic modernists are not necessarily Quranists or Quran, only I'm certainly not. I think it's okay to use hadiths in a very limited way, but not to derive key theological and legal beliefs from them, those must be derived from the Quran, and we certainly cannot decide matters of life and death based on random hadiths. And instead, we should reject any hadith that conflicts with the Quran or human reasons, science or history. And this was an approach of early hadith criticism by the Islamic rationalists, such as the Montesla, as well as the early Hanafis. Imam Abu Hunifa actually took this approach, and this is one of the reasons he was declared an apostate, disbeliever, and heretic by the proto-Sunni traditionists. Abu Yusuf, his student, actually said that you should reject any hadith that contradicts the Quran. The second argument that I'm bringing forward is that Islamic modernism is more chronic. That is because we believe that the Quran is clear and accessible as scripture, and we place it above all else, and we seek to imbibe its true spirit. Whereas traditionalists devalue the Quran, thinking its meanings are ambiguous, dim, and partial without the hadith or tradition. Traditionalists abrogate or cancel out or change the Quran's meaning using their sex hadiths, which are full of mass fabrications and acronyms, and rulings of their legal schools, as well as an indefensibly circular concept of consensus. In practicality, all of these hadith, legal rulings, and consensus become more powerful than the Quran. In fact, they made hadith equal to the Quran, and said it was similar to the speech of God. In fact, they raised hadith over Quran as this saying, which is very famous in the Islamic tradition, goes. The sunnah stands in judgment over the Quran. In a recent interview, Dr. Jonathan Brown endorsed this dual-scripture model and recited these two sayings, which are very well known in the tradition. The book did not come to rule over the sunnah, but the sunnah came to rule over the book. The Quran needs the sunnah more than the sunnah needs the Quran. And hermonitically, or from an interpretive standpoint, the sunnah of the prophet is more powerful than the Quran. We find these statements to be damning. In fact, they said that the hadith could abrogate the Quran. And this was endorsed by, for example, Imam Ghazali, who said the hadith can abrogate the Quran. Even Imam Shafa'i, who said that it can't, still did it, but he just called it something else. He called it specification. This is because they imagined that the Quran, the Quranic speech was dim, ambiguous, and incomplete, which placed meaning largely in the hand of the interpreter. And this was also endorsed in the recent interview by Dr. Jonathan Brown, in which he said the interpreter has all the power. It doesn't matter what the constitution says. He says what matters is the interpretation of the Supreme Court, which really means it doesn't matter what the Quran says, it matters what the Ulama say. So my first argument against Sunni traditionalism is that the Quran is viewed by them as dim, ambiguous, and incomplete, and requires an interpreter, but this also entails an infinite regress, as I've already said. Now, they gave a lot of power to the interpreters who already had a general idea of what the law should look like, and then they massaged the meaning of a text to accommodate that prevailing legal culture, or the law that they were trying to result in. In fact, we see this from this fourth century text, this damning quote, where it said very openly, every Quranic verse that conflicts with the view of our legal school must be taken as abrogated or canceled out, or as rejected, or better yet should be reinterpreted so as to agree with our school's opinion. This is not just a Hanafi view, but Shafi did it too. And the problem with this is that Hadiths are mass fabricated as even traditional reports from the traditional canon will let us know. Pious fabrication was also a major problem, as this early Hadith scholar said, I have not seen the pious in any regard being more dishonest than they are in regard to the Hadith. This is why the Islamic rationalists of old had a low view of what they viewed as the gullible traditionalists, and this is what we agree too. As one classical rationalist said, he said, the stupider the muhadith, the more prominent and trusted he is among them. This is why Islamic modernism is simply more rational. Islamic modernists have a high view of human region, which is God-given, endorsed by the Quran, and is what differentiates us from the animals. And we consider it the only means of properly approaching scripture. As rationalists, modernists are open to outside knowledge and wish to advance collective human reason. Whereas traditionalists, especially Hunbelies like Daniel, devalue reason and our Fideists who would rather follow unreliable and absurd reports, which lead to absurd and even morally atrocious beliefs. As Fideists, such traditionalists reject any outside knowledge and are parochial in their thinking. Meanwhile, Islamic modernists look to the expansive and exhaustive Islamic tradition and in the sense, we're actually more traditionalist than them. We look for insights from the Islamic rationalists and the philosophers who they condemn as blasphemous idolaters. Meanwhile, modern day Salafis like Daniel reject 90% of our tradition. We actually claim to follow and get inspired from the first and original theological group, which was the Qadiriya or the people who have free will, not like the Sunni tradition, which became fatalist. This is one of the earliest identifier of theological movements in Islam, not Sunnism. This group was absorbed by the Mu'tazil or the Islamic rationalists who preceded orthodoxy by far. And Mu'tazilis were a major force in Islam for several centuries. The Mu'tazilis had a very high view of human reason. They followed the Quran, along with moral reasoning and human reason. So Islamic modernists are open-minded and are open to outside knowledge and wish to advance collective human wisdom, also like the classical Islamic philosophers. This is the attitude that the classical Islamic philosophers had, they were open to knowledge, no matter where it came from and they would view it very critically. If it aligned with truth, they would accept it. If they didn't, they would reject it and warn against it. But they believed that philosophy was obligatory and it was important to advance the collective wisdom of humankind, which is a trust given to us by posterity and by God. In fact, Ibn Rush said that there was an obligation to study philosophy. And that's why the Islamic rationalists and philosophers advanced philosophy and science in the Islamic world unlike the Hunbali Fideists. So the Islamic philosophers and the Islamic rationalists had a high view of human reason. Meanwhile, the semi-rationalists who would later form orthodoxy had only an instrumental use of reason, whereas the Hadith literalists who were always a minority, the Hunbalis, they had a very low or dim view of human reason. And Daniel, like I said, is a Hunbali or an Atheri. And they had the view that anything that was from a foreign source was by definition anti or un-Islamic because it came from a foreign source. In fact, Imam Ahmed Ibn Hunbal, the eponymous founder of the school, said that debate, argument, and rational theology are all forbidden. In fact, he would be opposed to Daniel being here today because he is engaging in reason debate. The Hunbali scholar Ibn Kudama said that rational theology and philosophy are all bad. Ibn Taymiyyah said logic is bad and for him, the foreignness of a doctrine is sufficient proof of evidence of its inherent un-Islamic nature. A Hunbali scholar in the 18th century said logic is pure haram. Reason is actually bad. You shouldn't use reason. Have faith, submit, and acquiesce. People are led away from the truth by reason. So don't use reason. If you strengthen your rational side, strengthening that will harm your religion. So this is the anti-intellectual approach of the Hunbalis. And this is just a fideistic approach to religion. And in fact, Daniel endorses this in his book where he defines what it means to be a Muslim skeptic. It's not being a skeptic at all. It's being a fideist. He says, don't use your mind, just follow the texts. And he's talking about dogmatically accepting hadith. And the problem with that is that it means that you have to accept even textual reports that are absurd. Imam Ahmad said, even if the ears are repelled by this textual report, if you're disgusted by it, you must still believe in it. And this, of course, is not how the Islamic rationalists viewed it. If they saw an absurd hadith, they would just say, this is not possible that the messenger of God could say something like that. Now, the Hunbalis, because of this, believed in an anthropomorphic God because they were accepting all these random hadith reports. Here's Imam Ahmad Ibn Hunbal, who affirmed that God has a face, eyes, curly hair, mouth, voice, five fingers, and even shockingly loins. They even accepted this report about God appearing in the shape of a young boy with beautiful curly hair. And this report was accepted by Imam Ahmad Ibn Hunbal and even Ibn Taymiyah. Here's the receipts for that. Now, they also believed that the earth was flat. And this is their view of the flat earth theory. And they believe that God sat above the throne and put his two feet on the footstool. This flat earth theory was pushed by Asiyuti, even in the 15th century. He wrote this book on Sunni traditionalist astronomy in which he pushed out this view of the flat earth. And he, of course, forbade logic and philosophy. This flat earth theory was supported by the Saudi Grand Mufti Ibn Baz, or at least it's reported that he did. He definitely doubted the moon landing. This is the anti-scientific approach that they have. Here's Daniel expressing doubt about the moon landing. So it's the same kind of approach. Also Daniel denies evolution, not just human evolution, but all forms of evolution entirely. So he's a creationist, much like a Christian fundamentalist. This goes against the rationalist strains and the better strains of our tradition, which always accepted that sometimes you have to use figurative interpretation. And here's Ibn Uris backing that up as well. Now, from a meta ethical standpoint, we also believe that you need to use moral reason, not only science informs your worldview, but moral reasoning should as well. And that's why Islamic rationalists or modernists are ethical objectivists and moral universalists. Using human reason, human beings can work out at least some shared moral truths. We embrace natural law and believe that the moral laws inscribed in our hearts discoverable by human reason and our innate moral intuitions, which are God-given gifts. So we believe that you're supposed to read the Quran ethically on the assumption that it is ethical and has something ethical to say. Meanwhile, Sunni traditionalists are ethical subjectivists. They believe good and evil are based on God's arbitrary will. Because it is arbitrary, morality is unknowable except through divine revelation. Ethical reasoning has virtually no role to play. God could have said, told you to smash infant skulls into rocks and that's in the Bible and that would make it right. This is a strict divine command theory. And of course, this is why they side with slavery and enslavement and sex slavery because they think that this is prescribed in their revelation. Now, the problem if you don't use any moral reasoning is that you need tons of texts to inform you on every little thing. And this is why you need to have mass generation of textual reports or hadiths and you're forced to accept even weak hadiths as Imam Ahmad would accept weak hadiths even over moral reasoning. Now, this is not the approach of the rationalists who believe that the Quran itself endorses scripture and wisdom, Hikmah. So the prophet was sent to teach scripture, Kitab and wisdom, Al-Hikmah. And as far as the beautiful example of the prophet that's mentioned in the Quran, this is not about following these random atomized textual reports that talk to you about how to grow your beard and how to sit on the toilet. Instead, it's about following the ethical example of the prophet and the virtues that he embodies. The very next verse speaks of the prophet's bravery and faith. That's what it's telling you to embody. And similarly, we know that we're supposed to follow the beautiful example of Abraham. It's not this textual, all these random atomized textual reports that we have that we follow Abraham. It's the example and spirit of Abraham that we're supposed to follow. This is actually the earliest usage of the word sunnah, which just meant good ethical practice. In other words, what would the prophet do in our current situation? That's what we really should ask. In other words, what would the most ethical person do in a situation? That's why Islamic modernists tend to be virtue ethicists and I surely am one. Religion is about instilling the right virtues in yourself, bravery, compassion, kindness, et cetera, so that you know how to act ethically in any given situation. In other words, you can't just offload your ethical deliberation to a Mufti for a quick yes or no answer. Islamic modernists are anti-clerical and oppose the excessive legalism and abuse of rules which plagues Islamic traditionalism. Modernists read the Quran as agreeing with Jesus' critique of the rabbinical approach to law, which unfortunately our Uluma took up. The Quran tells you to do good and join right and forbid wrong. These are generalities that seem to imply that people already knew what these things are and that they know it in their hearts. God commands justice and virtue. It seems to say that people already know what this would mean. That's because the soul is inspired to understand what is right and wrong. This is already inbuilt into our soul as the Quran says. The sense of good and evil, of right and wrong is breathed into every human soul from its very creation. And this lines up with the earliest usage of the word sunnah which did not yet refer exclusively to the prophetic practice tied to the individual atomized and decontextualized textual reports. Instead, it was a much more generalized thing and just meant good ethical practice. And we can see this from the sunnah of Umar, the second Caliph. He frequently departed from the specific rulings of the Quran and the prophet because he felt the circumstances had changed. In other words, he used his moral or ethical reasoning. He changed the rules when it came to alms distribution, the zakat distribution of war spoils. He suspended the Quranic penalty for theft during the year of the drought. He increased the penalty for public intoxication and he changed all sorts of other rules including put in some protections for slave women. So we believe in doing contextualist readings. We believe in trajectory hermeneutics where we have to understand the social historical context in which a Quranic rule was issued in order to grasp the Quran's ethical trajectory. And then that's what we apply. The ethical trajectory not always or not necessarily that specific ruling because the circumstances have radically changed today. We also believe that the Quran embraces legal minimalism. Unfortunately, our tradition went in the legally maximalist direction based on rabbinical Judaism. But the Quran actually leaves a wide space for robust moral reasoning. And so we believe that you follow the spirit of the text over a literalistic adherence of the letter of the law which is just a bunch of Hadith reports. The Quran calls for faith virtue doing good and social justice. These are the ethics that we call to. For Islamic Morris, that Quran is accessible and clear where to read the Quran ethically determine its ethical trajectory and apply that to our current circumstance. For Sunni traditionalists on the other hand, traditionalists on the other hand, Hadith trumps Quran since the Quran is dim, ambiguous, and incomplete. Established law derived from local practices trumps Hadith and also generates more Hadith. Claims of consensus meanwhile, Trump everything which is just the consensus of one's own sex jurists. So Quran is less than Hadith, is less than Fiqh, is less than Ijma. As far as Ijma, Ijma is very problematic. Now Imam Ghazali and others said that Ijtiyadh of the umma that is the and by the umma he just means the sex scholars is infallible. So once Ijma is actually superior than the Quran. And here's Sheikh Yasser saying that Ijma is the highest form of Islamic law and actually trumps a Quranic verse. And here's Daniel approving of the high place that consensus is in our religion or in the Sunni tradition. But the problem is that consensus, there are all sorts of problems with consensus. But the main thing is that there's no grounding for consensus. There's no sound basis for this doctrine of consensus. And so it falls apart. It's circular logic. In fact, the Quran opposes this idea and says where you do obey most of those on earth, they would lead you astray. So this is the third argument against Sunni traditionalism that Daniel should address. In fact, this idea of consensus has its corollary and rabbinical Judaism as well as Catholic understanding in which they also have this idea of the infallibility of their Ijma. But the Quran actually goes against this and says, quote, they take their rabbis and their monks as lords apart from God. And that's indeed what has happened. To summarize, traditionalist ignore Quran, which actually goes back to the Prophet and favor Hadiths which were mass fabricated in a much later period and consensus, all of which was rooted in local customs and practices. And that's why there's a discontinuity between Quran and early Islamic law, which many Western scholars have also noted. In fact, the raw material of this early Islamic law was formed to a great extent from non-Islamic sources that is from Christian Rome, Zoroastrian Persia and Jewish law. These outside laws include the laws against apostasy, rules of imperial warfare, laws regarding slavery and concubinage, laws of divorce veiling, et cetera. These are the influences that are at play. Islamic modernism, my fourth argument is that it is more moral. Islamic modernists have religious viewpoints that line up with their innate God-given moral sense and moral reasoning, whereas traditionalists force themselves to accept morally atrocious viewpoints in order to conform to medieval tradition. And that's why they approve conquest, slavery, sex slavery and all of these other things that come from imperial conquest. The early Islamic empires modeled themselves after neighboring Roman and Persian empires. And my fifth argument is that Islamic modernism is actually more family-oriented. Islamic modernists stress the importance of lifelong monogamous marriage, forbidding premarital and extramarital sex or easy divorce with obligations of the father as a lifelong partner, whereas the medieval Islamic tradition endures absolute sexual debauchery that leads to the disintegration of family life. What are the family values that Daniel speaks of? The medieval Islamic tradition allowed unlimited sex slavery, eunuchs to guard the sex harem, pederasty was normalized, polygamy along with easy, instant divorce for the husband, child marriage. This is not, these are not good values. The values we should look for are in the Quran and the key value that we should look at is insania or humanism. This is based on the idea of basic human equality, which is endorsed in the Quran in multiple places where we are told that we all come from the same soul. Unfortunately, the Islamic tradition not only said that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims, but they said that Arabs are superior to non-Arabs and they would oppose the proponents of equality who were considered to be blasphemous innovators. This is endorsed by the Sunni mainstream. Here's Ibn Taymiah saying it's Sunni orthodoxy to believe that the Arab race is superior to the non-Arab races and that's because of the quality of their minds. Here's Islam Q and A, a Salafi website saying that this is unanimously agreed that the Arabs are superior. And here's a Hanafi website saying the same thing. But we don't believe any of that. That goes against the Quran. We believe that all human beings have exceptional human dignity and exceptionality because God himself has honored them. And this is because we are God-breathed. Because we are God-breathed, anyone who kills a soul, it is as if he kills all of humankind. This makes our human lives inviolable and it also makes so you can't enslave anyone. Now, as far as slavery, it was a deeply ingrained institution and a social factoring the Prophet's lifetime. However, the Quran does not allow the enslaving of prisoners of war. Similarly, the Quran mandates that sexual intercourse can only take place with a marriage contract. Now, freedom of religion, liberty is because of free will. God gives us free will so no one can compel us if God didn't compel us. And so that's why there's no compulsion in religion. Would you compel men till they become believers? If God had willed, he would have made all of those on earth believe altogether. And this is actually echoed by John Locke all the way when he defended it to bring up modern liberalism. But anyways, this is an idea that goes to the Quran. Specifically, the Quran allows the freedom to choose or leave a religion and apostasy laws are therefore anti-Quranic. We also believe in sul ikul or the idea of peace with all universal peace. Specifically, we believe that the Quran categorically forbids wars of aggression. These are my specific arguments for Daniel to refute. Again, sexual intercourse requires anika. On religious freedom, apostasy laws are anti-Quranic because the Quran allows the freedom to choose or leave a religion. On warfare, the Quran categorically forbids wars of aggression. On slavery, the Quran does not allow the enslaving of prisoners of war. I argue that Islamic modernism is more historical, more Quranic, more rational, more moral and more family oriented. And these are my three arguments against Sunni traditionalism. Overall, my religion is the pious and ethical Islam of the Quran and the prophet, which is the firm voluntarily by the heart and conscious of the true believer spread by beautiful preaching and good example. Whereas Daniel's religion is the imperial religion of the Umayyad and Abbasid tyrannical regimes, which favored authoritarianism and utility over godliness and piety, thus favoring caliphate dictatorships, slaving empires, concubinage, sex harems, aggressive imperial warfare and state enforced belief. Now, when it is said unto them, the Quran says, when it is said unto them, follow what God has sent down the Quran. They say, nay, we follow that which we found our forefathers doing. When the Quran centric people like us say, follow what God has sent down, the Sunni traditionalists say, nay, we follow what we found our forefathers, the Salaf doing. They have taken the rabbis and priests as lords apart from God. And the messenger will say, oh my Lord, my people have abandoned this Quran. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening statement. We are gonna kick it over to Daniel, but wanna give you guys a quick heads up folks. In terms of the format tonight, we're going big. This one is a six hour, if you include the breaks, it's close to six hours long tonight. This is our second longest stream we will ever have done, but more interesting than that, I've gotta tell you folks, these two men have a history I'm not exaggerating for years. This has been piecing together, you could say, culminating, coming toward this one weekend. We're gonna have a two part debate series where tonight we're gonna have this monster debate that's close to six hours. Tomorrow night, we're also going to have another debate with these gentlemen. You don't wanna miss it, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss either one. We're gonna kick it over to Daniel for his opening, which is 25 minutes as well. Thank you very much, Daniel. The floor is all yours. Sure, so I wanted to just, oh before I get to the opening, can I just make that introduction? You bet. Yeah, so everyone's familiar with my debates, hopefully on modern day debates and on my channel, Muslim skeptic. So the topics that we're gonna be discussing in this debate, things like slavery, minor marriage, concubines, religious freedom, conquest, slavery, I've covered in many debates already and I've given moral justifications for them. I'm not really gonna focus on moral justification in this debate, rather I'm concerned with the actual debate topic, which is establishing what the Quran endorses and what the historical Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, what he actually, what his beliefs and norms actually were. So that's, so for justification, consult my other debates for moral justification. That's not what I'm gonna be doing in this debate. I'm just going, I'm trying to determine historically, what does Islam actually say and endorse? That's what the debate is about, as opposed to justifying it or giving a moral explanation to like a broader non-Muslim audience. Okay, so should I share my screen now? Okay, one second. While waiting, wanna remind you folks, if you haven't yet, hit that like button, we appreciate that support. All right, ready for you Daniel, the floor is all yours. All right, you can see? Yep. All right, Bismillah, alhamdulillah, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, adhar Rasulillah. Today's debate is about traditionalism versus modernism. When I refer to modernism, I mean liberal reformism, meaning the liberal reform of Islam. To understand liberal reformism, we have to understand something called the historical critical method or HCM. Liberal reformers like Javad like to use the historical critical method for their ideological agenda. So let's first get a better understanding of HCM, and then we can talk about how liberal reformers selectively use that method to promote liberal reform of Islam. Religious people believe that their scriptures and doctrines can be traced to the founders of their religion. Jews think the Torah and keeping Kosher go back to Moses. Christians think the Bible and the doctrine of the Trinity go back to Jesus. Buddhists think that the Tripitaka goes back to Buddha. The historical critical method, however, says no. You may think your religious doctrines go back to the founders, but probably they do not. This is the fundamental premise of HCM. HCM says all religious traditions assume that their doctrines go back to their founders who have access to divine revelation, but in most cases, this is false. If you look at the historical evidence, most scriptures and doctrines cannot be traced to the founders, and there's plenty of evidence showing how these things were developed over time far after the founder lived. And then these scriptures and doctrines were back projected onto those founders. The historical critical method was pioneered in the 19th century and was primarily used to undermine traditional Judaism and Christianity. Later it was also used against Islam, but initially Western academics assumed that Islam was very different from Judaism, Christianity, and all other religions. These academics said that when it comes to other religions, their doctrines can't be traced back to Moses or Jesus, but when it comes to Islam, the Islamic tradition should be considered largely historically accurate. For example, the 19th century French academic Ernest Renan said in his book, Muhammad and the Origins of Islam, quote, in place of the mystery under which the other religions have covered their origins, Islam was born in the full light of history. Its roots are on the surface. The life of its founder is as well known to us as that of any 16th century reformer. We can follow year by year the fluctuations of his thought, his contradictions, his weaknesses. Clearly, Renan was not a fan of Islam, but he acknowledges that Islam is not like other religions. Its history is not a mystery. Other academics like Theodore Noldeka and Julius Wellhausen make similar statements. These aren't friends of Islam, but they admit that as far as historical preservation is concerned, Islam is in a different category from other religions. Then in the 1970s, you get a new wave of Western academics who challenge all this. People like John Wansborough, Patricia Crona, Michael Cook, these academics say, no, we need to be more critical of Islam. This is because the earliest Islamic texts were written roughly 100 years after the Prophet's death, sallallahu alayhi sallam, around the year 750. So how can we know that those texts are accurate in describing the origins of Islam and the Islamic doctrines in the time of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam? People can forget a lot in 100 years. A lot of the doctrines could change in 100 years. So we have to be radically skeptical of these texts and not just assume that they actually go back to the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam. So historical critical academics were radically skeptical of the Islamic tradition. Three of their main points were, number one, Muhammad sallallahu alayhi sallam and Mecca didn't actually exist. The Quran, Hadith, and other scriptural texts are an amalgamation of Arabic literature compiled over time, well after the life of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam. The basic Islamic account of the Prophet's career and his life events are just mythology. Historical critical academic said, if we want to learn about the origins of Islam before 750, we have to look at historical sources from non-Muslims or dateable inscriptions from before 750 because this material predates Muslim sources. Now, since the 1970s, much has changed. Many of these claims against Islam had to be thrown in the trash. They claim that the Quran was just Arabic literature compiled over time, but paleographic and radiocarbon evidence has proven that the Quran dates to the time of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam and did not change over time. Second, it's also been proven that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam actually existed, not just because the Quran mentions him, but also because seven century Christians are mentioning him. Third, the claim that we don't know the early Islamic history has also proven mistaken. Historians have verified the basic details of the Prophet's career in Mecca and Medina, sallallahu alayhi sallam. So the three main claims of these hyper skeptical academics have all been debunked and the historical critical method as applied to Islam has been nothing but one failure after the other. That's the track record of HCM as applied to Islam, but the proponents of HCM are not ready to give up just yet. Sure, they've abandoned their main claims against the Islamic tradition, but now they've moved on to secondary claims. They say, fine, we accept that the Quran is authentic, but the hadith are fabricated. Fine, we accept that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam existed, but other Islamic doctrines related to patriarchy, conquest, slavery, et cetera, those were invented later and back projected onto the Prophet sallallahu alayhi sallam. This is what Javad claims, and it all revolves around the 100 year gap where allegedly there's no evidence showing that early Muslims supported these traditional Islamic doctrines. But is this true? Is there really no hard evidence that Muslims prior to the year 750 supported patriarchy, conquest, slavery, et cetera? This is what we're about to debunk, inshallah. Now, let's be clear. The historical critical method has been a failure when applied to Islam, but that doesn't mean Muslims have to reject HCM completely. After all, HCM has done a great job proving one very important Islamic claim, namely that Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible have radically evolved over time. So as Muslims, we don't reject HCM out of hand. There's nothing inherently wrong with looking for historical evidence for religious claims. That being said, despite some valid aspects, HCM also has some fundamental problems. One fundamental problem is language. Historical critical academics are not trained in the interdisciplinary studies of language and the biological and psychological foundations of language use. This is a glaring deficiency because HCM academics are very interested in interpreting the Quran. The problem is they have a very simplistic understanding of language. When you read the Quran, clearly there are multiple interpretations of some verses, but what's the correct interpretation? Are all interpretations equally valid? According to interdisciplinary scholarship on language, understanding the meaning of a text is about understanding the intentions of the author. And you cannot understand the intentions of the author without understanding his beliefs and norms. If you're clueless about the beliefs and norms of the author, you still might be able to get some meaning from the text, but your interpretation is liable to be inaccurate or you might even understand something as the opposite of what the author intended. Imagine a boat. The beliefs and norms of the speaker anchor the meaning of speech. If you detach the boat from beliefs and norms of the speaker, then the boat becomes unmoored and can easily be carried off and lost at sea or even capsized. Now let's apply this to the Quran. Take the verse, don't drink wine. How do we interpret this? Does it mean don't drink wine specifically? But beer is okay. What does it mean? Drinking wine is okay as long as you don't get drunk. What exactly does the Quran mean? Well, beliefs matter. If the speaker believes that there's something uniquely bad about wine, specifically in other types of alcohol are not bad, then the speaker might just be prohibiting wine but has no problem with beer. But if the speaker believes that what is bad about wine is that can intoxicate you, then when he prohibits wine, that prohibition also applies to other intoxicants, including beer as well as meth or cocaine. For example, if the speaker believes that wine specifically causes cancer, but beer doesn't, then the speaker's intent might be to ban wine as a means of preventing cancer, but he has no problem with beer. Also in the future, the speaker might allow wine if a new type of wine were invented, which does not cause cancer. So the beliefs of the speaker matter, the norms of the speaker also matter. For example, take the Quranic command, don't kill. Does this mean we should not kill animals? Well, to properly interpret this command, we have to understand the norms of the speaker. If a Buddhist or a Jain says, do not kill, that means don't kill animals because Buddhists and Jains are vegetarian. But if a non-vegetarian says, do not kill, then we would interpret that as don't kill humans, but animals are okay. When the Quran says, do not kill, we know from Hadith and Seerah that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam ate meat. If there were Hadith saying the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam refused to eat meat, then we would interpret the Quranic command, do not kill, very differently. In Islam, the relevant beliefs and norms are those endorsed by the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. In traditional Islamic scholarship, these beliefs and norms are determined largely on the basis of Hadith, Seerah and Tafseer. But if we eliminate all the Hadith and Seerah evidence using HCM, the interpretation of the Quran becomes very difficult. Interpreting the text gets radically subjective. Imagine if we tried to interpret Hitler's Mein Kampf without referencing the actual beliefs and norms of Hitler. Is it possible to read Mein Kampf as a love letter to the Jews? Yeah, if you're creative enough and you're willing to engage in enough textual mental gymnastics, obviously I'm not trying to compare the Quran to Mein Kampf, but what is analogous is detaching text from the speaker's beliefs and norms. That's exactly what liberal reformers want to do with the Quran. Liberal reformers make claims about the Quran, but they don't recognize that interpretation of the Quran becomes radically subjective if you don't take into account the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. This is a methodological point the liberal reformers fail to recognize. They don't want to recognize this point because they want to give their liberal interpretations unhindered by historical reality. They want to do goofy textual gymnastics in order to reinterpret the Quran in a liberal fashion with absolutely no concern for the beliefs and norms of the Prophet himself, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, because those beliefs and norms would block their liberal interpretation. So this is a fundamental problem. So now that we've covered language and the importance of knowing the beliefs and norms of author, how do we know the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? Other than the Quran, Muslims know the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam through Sira, Hadith and Tafsir. Obviously, I believe that these sources are valid and I include them in my analysis, but I'm going to steal man the liberal reformist position and bring other evidence. Liberal reformists like Javad rely on HCM to reject Sira, Hadith and Tafsir literature as later fabrications. Obviously, I don't agree, but the reformist argument is so weak that even if we put the Hadith aside, there's still plenty of evidence that shows how the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam are consistent with traditionalism. As it stands, historical critical academics use a few different sources to understand the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, but they use these sources inconsistently. One major source of information about the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is to compare Islam to other religions in late antiquity. This is a valid source for understanding the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, but historical critical academics are very selective in their comparisons. For example, the historian Fred Donner. Donner proposes a radical thesis that early Islam was ecumenical, meaning that Muslims saw Jews and Christians as fellow believers who could attain salvation. Donner supports this thesis by noting how Islam shared certain doctrines with seven century Judaism and Christianity. Jews and Christians wanted to conquer the city of Jerusalem and the early Muslims also wanted to do this. So according to Donner, maybe they united in this ecumenical fashion in pursuit of a shared goal. But Donner is cherry picking because when we look at seven century Judaism, they were extremely sectarian and would never have even conceived of uniting with each other for the purpose of conquering Jerusalem or anything else. So why was early Islam influenced by the Jerusalem doctrine but was not influenced by the rampant sectarianism? Donner cherry picks whatever supports his thesis and ignores everything else. This is inconsistent and not very intellectually compelling. Another source that Western academics used inconsistently are reports from seven century non-Muslims. This is a valid source, but it's also not used consistently. Again, to use Donner as an example, Donner wants to show that there is this believers movement with Jews, Christians and Muslims all working together. So whenever he finds a seven century report from a Christian saying that Muslims prayed in a church or collaborated with Christians, Donner says, aha, and he cites that. But when the source says that Muslims were destroying synagogues, they were breaking crosses, they were taking half the wealth of Christians as jizya, Donner ignores all of that or he dismisses it as an isolated exception. So this is just post hoc reasoning and the most egregious kind of cherry picking. A third source that historical critical academics use is archeological data, such as radiocarbon data manuscripts, paleography, inscriptions and other physical artifacts. Again, this is a valid source, but Western academics don't use them consistently. For example, proponents of HCM often claim that there are inscriptions that resemble the traditional shahada, but some of the inscriptions don't mention Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. They take this as evidence that the early Muslims didn't really emphasize belief in Muhammad as the messenger, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, but were mainly concerned with monotheism, which is why they built bridges with Jews and Christians and formed this ecumenical believers movement. Someone might be duped into thinking this is a solid theory until you realize that the same academic systematically ignore other authentic sources that do mention the importance of Muhammad as messenger, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. So these are three sources of evidence besides the Quran that are valid and we can use them to understand the beliefs and norms of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. The problem is that Western academics are not using these sources consistently, but there are actually deeper problems. A huge problem is that the HCM academics ignore evidence from biology, psychology, and quantitative social science. This is problematic because the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, was a human and as such, he shares a biological and psychological similarity with humans today. And humans as a matter of biological fact have specific beliefs and norms. Biology, psychology, and the quantitative social sciences provide a vast amount of information that can help us understand the beliefs and norms of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam and the earliest Muslims, beliefs and norms that are extremely relevant to this debate. People across space and time share similar beliefs and norms about patriarchy, gender roles, exclusivism versus pluralism, about punishing certain sexual behaviors, about war, about slavery. Not only are these beliefs and norms shared across humanity, but they're also shaped by different types of societies. But this evidence is ignored by Western Islamic studies. In the quantitative social scientists, researchers analyze a large amount of data collected from thousands of cultures around the world. They then infer patterns and trends that allow them to categorize these societies. Societies fall into four categories, hunter-gatherer, pastoral, agricultural, industrial. We have statistical data about the patterns of beliefs and norms across these four categories. What do all pastoral societies have in common? What do all agricultural societies have in common? This is data that can help us better understand the beliefs and norms of the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam and his companions, simply because they lived in a pastoral, patrilineal society. We can make many accurate inferences on the basis of this data, but this data is ignored by Western academics and Islamic studies. So this is a major methodological problem with HCM. So to recap, we have identified three major problems with HCM scholarship and we outlined the seven types of evidence needed to determine the beliefs and norms of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. We can visualize it like this. Now that we've covered HCM, let's talk about liberal religious reform and how reformists like Javad selectively use HCM for their political ends. Liberalism is a project that emerged in the 18th century in the Enlightenment, philosophical liberalism. Liberalism has always aimed for civilizational progress. Civilizational progress is about scientific advancement and human rights norms. As such, liberals have always had a problem with traditional religions because traditional religions doctrines conflict with science and liberal human rights norms. So liberals have always had it as their goal to destroy traditional religion, but liberals realized that it's difficult to convince society to completely reject religion. What we need to do is to get people to gradually change their religion. This is called liberal reform. You gradually remove traditional doctrines that conflict with science and liberal human rights. In Europe, liberals just first reformed Judaism and Christianity, then in the 19th century, colonialism spread liberal reform throughout the rest of the world. Liberal reform can be understood like a very simple computer program or a bot. Take any doctrine like polygyny, multiple wives. Step one is deauthentication. The liberal bot will try to deauthenticate polygyny by saying that polygyny is not actually found in the Quran, that all the hadith that support polygyny are fabricated that polygyny was developed a hundred years after the prophet, so-and-so, et cetera, et cetera. HCM is obviously useful for this deauthentication step, but sometimes deauthentication doesn't work. Polygyny is found in the Quran. So then the bot is programmed to go to step two, reinterpretation. The liberal bot tries to reinterpret the Quranic verse and do all kinds of goofy mental gymnastics to say that the verse is not actually about marrying multiple wives. It's about gender equality and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But sometimes the reinterpretation step doesn't work either. Maybe the verse is too unequivocal and too hard to deny. So the bot moves to step three, temporary concession. The bot is programmed to say, fine, polygyny is something authentic. And it was practiced in the time of the prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, but this was only a temporary thing for those times in that context. In our times, in our context, polygyny is unacceptable. And if we really focus on the message of the Quran, we'll see that it's all about gender equality and giving women their rights. That's the core message of the Quran. So clearly Islam wanted to eventually ban polygamy. So this is the three-step liberal program. This is the basic script that liberal bots have been using for 300 years to strip away all non-liberal religious doctrines. The thing is, once you start using this program, there's no stopping. The program can be used to destroy literally every single religious doctrine. Liberal reformers get their foot in the door with doctrines like slavery and minor marriage, basically the most politically sensitive topics. They pressure traditionalists to renounce these sensitive doctrines. And some traditionalists, unfortunately, cave. They'll say, well, maybe the hadith are not authentic or maybe Islam always meant to abolish slavery. Maybe minor marriage was only meant for ancient times, et cetera. But once the traditionalist concedes on one doctrine, he has no principled basis to reject further reform. So once the traditionalist throws out slavery, then the liberal reformer attacks the next most politically sensitive issue and says, well, you're willing to acknowledge that slavery was a relic of the past. Why not polygyny? Why not hijab? Why not the banning of alcohol and on and on? Maybe the doctrine of heaven and hell was just a temporary concept meant for people 1400 years ago who couldn't understand higher ethics. But in the 21st century, we obviously understand higher ethics and don't need to be scared like children by the concept of hellfire. So even the concept of heaven and hell should be reformed or maybe even the concept of worshiping God. People 1400 years ago needed this metaphorical idea of God and worship. But in our time, people are more rational and intelligent. We don't need a concept like God in order to be good people. As long as you believe in some higher power and are nice to others, that's all you really need. In this way, liberal reform completely destroys religion. And that doesn't mean the liberal reformers themselves are atheists. Some of these liberal reformers might even practice religion. The problem is they're using a methodological approach that when taken to its logical conclusion, obliterates religion. Two examples of religious reformers, Sayed Ahmed Khan and Muhammad Abdul who were big fans of colonialism and promoted the reformist project on behalf of their colonial masters. Interestingly, Javad identifies with these specific liberal reformers and he says he's following their legacy. And he really is. Javad, like all liberal reformers should be seen as a colonial agent. Liberal reform is all about Western domination because traditional religious people don't want to abandon their traditions. But the liberal hegemonic West forces them to do so via colonialism and neo-imperialism. This results in the civilizational genocide and it licenses white supremacist domination over the entire world, including the Muslim world. Now with Javad specifically, he's going to use this reform script. He's going to deny the authenticity of texts and reinterpret them. He may even resort to step three. We've already seen it in his opening. He's going to selectively use HCM to undermine traditionalist doctrine he doesn't like, such as slavery, patriarchy, conquest. Javad denies the hadith that support these doctrines. And then when it's pointed out that these doctrines are actually supported by the Quran, he'll engage in all these kinds of goofy gymnastics to reinterpret the Quran to match his liberal ideology. Here's how we can visualize this. You have traditional Islamic doctrines that this debate is all about. Gender roles, patriarchy, restrictions on sex, restrictions on non-Muslims, conquest, slavery, concubinage. These doctrines are supported by the Quran and Sunnah as they've been understood for centuries. Javad will use HCM to attack the hadith by saying they cannot be reliably traced back to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and he'll attack the Quran by doing his goofy gymnastics. But are these the only proofs that support the traditional doctrines? No, we also have biology and quantitative social sciences. We also have other HCM approved sources like archeology, late antique religions and contemporaneous non-Muslim writings. These are the kinds of evidence that Javad selectively ignores despite calling himself an academic. In reality, Javad brings nothing new. He just regurgitates the 300 year old script. He's like a trained seal, basically. This is Javad's scholarship, quote unquote. This is the type of scholarship Western Islamic studies produces, just ideological propaganda. Everyone knows this. These academics pretend like their religious studies degree is some kind of deep sophisticated science when it's just liberal propaganda. It's basically one step up from feminist dance theory. That's the best way to look at it. It has all the objectivity of interpretive dance. Ultimately, Javad is an ideological activist masquerading as an academic. But more than that, we must recognize Javad as an agent of colonialism. And his mission, whether he recognizes it or not, is to destroy Islam. Through this liberal reformism, he's engaged in the genocidal work of neo-colonialism. And this is one of the many reasons that I don't consider this an intrafaith debate, but an interfaith debate between me as a Muslim and Javad as a non-Muslim mortal. Thank you. You got it. Thank you very much for that opening. I want to give you guys a heads up in the chat on the format for tonight. As tonight is a very special debate in particular. We had just gone through the general statements, you might say, for each of our speakers. We are now going to have three separate parts covering, respectively, gender and sexuality, then religious freedom, and then conquest and slavery. So we're going to go into part one on gender and sexuality. This will be 10 minutes from Javad. Want to remind you folks, if you haven't yet hit that like button, we appreciate that support. Javad, thanks very much. The floor is all yours. We had it there and then the slides disappeared. Sorry, I was on mute. I'm sorry, just one second. No problem. We don't start the time yet. Okay, thank you. I'll start now. All right, so Islamic modernists, we affirm the ontological equality of women. And this is based on the Quran. The Quran endorses basic human equality since we all come in the Quran. It says that humankind comes from the same soul. And the most noble of you, before God are the most piously righteous of you. So we're all equal. In fact, God has made you spouses of your own kind. And because it's from your own kind, the relationship should be one of affection and mercy, not domination or sexual exploitation. Unfortunately, the pre-modern Islamic tradition didn't go in that direction and said that the woman was not created of the same kind, but was actually created from the rib of man. In fact, was created from the worst, most crooked of the ribs. And because of that, this idea was used in the medieval period to stress women's status as a lesser creation and subject to male control. Women were considered inferior in almost every sense. This was an explanation for why women have unsteady morals, were unruly. This is why they were a fitna, harmful. They were deficient in intelligence, deficient in religion. And this was all backed up by hadiths that were generated. Eve was created wise, but was then made foolish. She was actually locked into perpetual immaturity. That's the view of women. Women are ungrateful. They are actually gonna be the majority of the followers of the Antichrist. They're gonna be the majority of the followers, sorry, the majority of the dwellers of Hellfire. In other words, the pre-modern view was that women were ontologically inferior creatures. This is because they were created from the rib and that's why you need to confine your woman. So a lot of neo-traditionalists today would like to argue for complementarianism, which is the view that husband and wife will have equal but different rules. This is actually a very modernist view. The pre-modern view was actually one of complete inferiority of women. And that was expressed by Ashraf Ali Tanvi, who was a major traditionalist scholar in South Asia. This is what he said, ladies, how can you be equal to men? You have been kept at the rear in virtually everything. Men are superior to women in respect to their natural capabilities, in their intelligence, bravery, power, intellectual capabilities, strategic planning, et cetera. Man is the leader and woman is the subject. It is safest for a woman to be subjected and obedient to a man. So this is the view of the pre-modern tradition, which can only be called misogynistic and led to the complete objectification of women. Let's take a look at that now. Daniel in his book and he always is talking about secular liberal societies, how they objectify women and commodify sex and how you can only have safe sex in marriage and through a marriage contract. I actually agree with him on this, but this is actually a very modernist take. It's the modernists who say that any sexual intercourse requires a marriage contract and sex outside of marriage is not permissible. Meanwhile, the pre-modern medieval Islamic sexual ethics was that you can have sex with whoever you want outside of marriage, primarily an extramarital, that is with sex slaves. You can have as many sex slaves as you want. You can have entire harem of sex slaves, thousands of them. There was in fact sex markets where you could go purchase girls and women and even boys and eunuchs. We'll talk about that shortly. In fact, the entire institution of marriage was influenced by the institution of concubinage. The parallel between wife and slave was simply assumed. A man owns both his wife and his slave. In fact, the marriage contract was a sale. It was a sale of the wife's vagina or bud, or which is also vulva actually. And this sale basically allowed the husband basic control over a wife's sexuality and physical mobility in the same way that a master has control over a slave's mobility and sexuality. And this led to the complete objectification of women. Now Daniel talks about the commodification of sex. He's worried about Netflix and Tinder and all this kind of stuff, and I agree with him. But then how come he isn't bothered by this sexualization and objectification of women? Here's Ibn Umar, who is the prophet's companion, who would put his hand between the breasts and buttocks of a slave girl before he was purchasing them. And this is a chain that's authenticated by Sheikh Al-Albani and he would shake the breasts of this woman. And when he would explain himself, he would say, she has bought an item for sale. In fact, the idea of examining the goods before you buy them, this was widely accepted by Islamic jurists who said that this verse about covering up modestly, 3359, was actually only for free women. It wasn't for slave girls. And flat slave girls were not allowed to cover up. This was forbidden because for slave girls, the aura or the amount to cover was just between the navel and the knees and the breasts could be uncovered. In fact, as John F. Brown writes in his book, buyers at slave markets could press on the buttocks and breasts of potential slave girls, no problem. And the Islamic jurists justified this. They were okay with the sex slave trade. They're okay with sex slave markets. And you see here that I had to edit out these pictures. These women were just completely uncovered. This is the sexual ethics that he's trying to back up. He talks about family and having kids and all this kind of stuff. But here you have the medieval scholars. Here's Imam Ghazali saying, yeah, you can have coitus, interruptus with your slave girl that is ejaculate outside of her so that she doesn't dare get pregnant. So this of course had a corrosive effect on family life. In fact, it destroyed married and family life. In fact, sultans even cease to contract legal marriages. Why would they do that? When they could just have arams full of slave girls, hundreds, thousands of them who actually, they couldn't have sex with all of them. So this forced many of them to, they were like going into adultery and have homosexual affairs. Here's Mehdi Tijani, who's Daniel's buddy who says himself that he wouldn't have wives. If he could, he would just have concubines. And you know what, that's what the sultans did. They had 700 female slaves, they had 4,000 sex slaves and they even had 8,000 young boys. We'll talk about that shortly. But this all makes the playboys mansion quite mild in comparison. In fact, we're talking about Saudi Arabia. Even Saudi, the founder of modern day Saudi Arabia which propagates the ideology that Daniel follows which by the way was backed by the British. He owned 3,000 people and he distributed slave girls to his close collaborators. This is what Daniel follows. You can look at this disturbing documentary that shows a slave market in 1964 in Saudi Arabia. Here are some pictures again. Look how they're uncovered. This is the ethics he's talking about. One harm led to another. They actually had to, if you had a harem full of sex girls, then you needed eunuchs to guard them. Eunuchs were people who were forcibly castrated. Their balls were cut off or the penis was removed. And they would guard the cage, the harem full of slave girls. Now the jurists didn't allow the Muslims to actually do the castration, but they had no problem with importing them or having non-Muslims do that so that it was actually widespread in pre-modern Islamic societies. Another evil that was prevalent was pedorasty. Daniel tried to deny this in the debate with inspiring philosophy, but what Islamic scholars forbade was simply the actual act of anal intercourse. They didn't have a problem with pedorasty in general. In fact, they said that writing pedorastic love poetry was perfectly okay. Daniel has a problem with Western media when it has Miley Cyrus and the sexualization of young girls, et cetera. And I have a problem with that too. But then surely Daniel should have a problem with his medieval scholars like Ibn-Hajr al-Haythimi arguing that love, pedorastic love poetry is okay. In fact, this was completely normalized. Images of an adult male pining for a teenage boy and begging for a rendezvous or a kiss did not arouse disgust at this time. And this was widely accepted. In fact, this major Hunbali scholar said there was nothing reprehensible in living, loving a boy chastly. There was this idea of chast love of young boys. In fact, there was an entire genre of man-boy love, chast margar, which you would become a Shahid for this love if you died for that. Pedorasty was in fact widespread in pre-modern Islamic societies because of this normalization by our Islamic scholars. And it was only in the modern period. Actually, it's in the modern period that Western visitors came and were horrified by this widespread pedorasty in pre-modern Islamic societies. And it was actually the Islamic modernists who actually were embarrassed by this and said, you know what, these Europeans, they're actually right. This goes against our religion. And so it's the case that the Islamic modernists were the ones who worked to change the attitudes and changed this normalization of normalizing pedorasty. Should we oppose this? Just because the West is the one who brought up the critique, surely not. In some pre-modern medieval Islamic sexual ethics allowed concubitage, sex slavery and normalized eunuchs and pedorasty thereby destroying the concept of monogamous marriage or a stable family life. It's the Islamic modernists who argued for sex within the bounds of marriage and the requirement for a marriage contract even with your slave who then became your slave wife. Here's the evidence from the Quran. It's clear as day, no textual acrobatics as Daniel says, verse four, 25. And whosoever amongst you has not the means to marry a free believing woman, then marry the believing young women among those whom your right hands possess. So wed them, give unto them the proper bride's wealth as married, chast woman, not as fornicators or lovers. That's the end of Daniel's entire argument. And when they are married, then they become slave wives, of course. And the Quran condemns those who follow their lesson just have sex with concubines without that marriage contract. Here's another verse in Surah 24 that says, and marry those who are single among you and marry the righteous among your male slaves or your female slaves and let those who are unable to marry be chast. It doesn't say go and have sex with the concubine. It says be chast. And Daniel was making fun of chastity in his last debate. And as for those amongst the ones whom your right hand possess who seek a contract of marriage, contract with them if you know of any good in them and compel not your female slaves into fornication if they desire to be chast. And whosoever compels them, this is condemned. And Daniel says that it's okay to rape your slave. Muhammad Assad says, the above verse reiterates the prohibition of concubinage by explicitly describing it as hordom. Let's look at that verse, that word, birah. It doesn't just mean literal prostitution as unfortunately the medieval exigites took it. Here's a narration which clearly shows that it's talking about any extramarital sex, zinah. And we know that from the Quran itself because the word is used in reference to marry being not un-chast, 1920 and 1928. And here's an Arabic dictionary that shows it doesn't mean literal prostitution, it means fornication and adultery. It's using hordom in that general sense. The Quran says in verse four, three, marry either a free person or marry from those amongst whom your right hand's possessed. Again, it's always take them in honest wedlock, desiring to be chast and honest wedlock and not in fornication. This is repeated throughout the Quran. Give unto them their brides well. Again, the same verse, not as fornicators or lovers. This is clear as day, no textual acrobatics. Daniel says that you can just compel and he laughs at this and that you can, it's just like giving somebody a burger, forcing somebody to have sex is like forcing them to eat a burger. But the Quran says and compel not your female slaves into fornication if they desire to be chast. Here's Daniel having a big problem with, why can't we rape our sex slaves? It's a big problem for him. Anyways, these are some other issues that I want to talk about. The easy insta divorce for men, polygamy with wives on rotation and child marriage, but we don't have time right now for that. What I will say this, the medieval tradition was based on an ontologically inferior status for women who were likened to slaves, children and foolish people even locked in perpetual immaturity. The legalization of concubinage had a hugely deleterious effect on women and married life. While elite men could have wild sex with hundreds of slave girls and go to sex markets to purchase more women, free Muslim women were locked up in their homes because they were the fit now. Remember, not the sex crazed men. The medieval tradition was full of sex harems, concubinage, eunuchs, manboy love, normalization and other debauched ways which Islamic modernist got rid of and replaced with a monogamous lifelong marriage. Islamic modernism is more family oriented while the medieval Islamic tradition endorsed absolute sexual debauchery. On sexuality, Daniel will need to prove, disprove this, the Quran mandates that sexual intercourse can only take place with a marriage contract. And how will Daniel respond? Nay, I follow what we found our forefathers doing. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening statement as well. We're gonna kick it over to Daniel for his 10 minute opening statement as well. Do want to remind you folks, actually let you know for the first time, I put a poll in the live chat if you would like to vote on which speaker when it comes to gender and sexuality you identify with most. The options are Javad, Daniel or neither. That poll is in the live chat. So come on over to Modern Day Debate if you're watching it live over at Daniel's channel or any other channel as occasionally other channels stream our content. But we're gonna kick it over to Daniel. Thanks very much. The floor is all yours. Can you see my screen, Jeff? Do the Quran and Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam endorse patriarchal laws, meaning laws which give men authority over women and laws which restrict sexuality. Patriarchy and limitations on sexuality are obvious when reading the Quran and hadith. Verse 43 says that men have the right to marry up to four wives and they can also marry their slave girls. Nowhere are women given the same right to marry multiple husbands. Verse 411 says that sons are due twice the inheritance of daughters. Verse 2282 says that one male witness is equal to two female witnesses. In verse 434, we read men are authorities over women by right of what Allah has given one over the other and what men spend from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient guarding in their husband's absence what Allah would have them guard. But those wise from whom you fear arrogance advise them, forsake them and strike them. But if they obey you, seek no means against them. So this verse clearly distinguishes different gender roles. Men are described as authorities and men have a specific role of spending on their wives. The verse also gives the husband the legal right to spousal discipline. The verse does not give her the same right. Verse 2228 reads, quote, why is have rights similar to their obligations according to what is recognized to be fair and husbands have a degree over them at Daraja. So this is clearly not gender egalitarianism. This is patriarchy. We also find patriarchal dress clothes imposed on women in verse 3359. Women are instructed to make their outer garments hang low. In verse 2431, Allah instructs women to not display their beauty and to draw their headscarves over their chests. There is no equivalent set of instructions for men. So in numerous verses, the Quran affirms patriarchy. In Surah 6610, the Quran even describes the wives of the prophets Noah and Lot as being under them. The Quran also prescribes legal punishments for those who engage in illicit sex, refer to verse 415 and verse 416. And verse 242, which prescribes lashing and confinement for fornicators. Also refer to the 80 or so verses of the Quran concerning the condemnation of homosexuality. Now moving on to hadith, we see many indications of patriarchal gender roles and restrictions on sexual behavior. The prophet, peace be upon him, had multiple wives. There's no record of any women of his time having multiple husbands. Numerous hadith describe how women were involved with cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Meanwhile, men worked as merchants, farmers, and soldiers. There are authentic hadith that condemn women's leadership and other hadith that describe a man as the head of the household. Hadith also described the implementation of the hudud punishments for illicit sexual behavior, including homosexuality. Now liberal reformers like Javad want to deny the hadith in order to rip the Quran from its lived context so that they can do a bunch of goofy gymnastics to somehow prove that the Quran is actually against patriarchy and against legal restrictions on sex. This is not hard to do because when you detach the Quran from the beliefs and norms of the prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, you can stretch and distort the text to mean almost anything. So other than hadith, how do we objectively understand the beliefs and norms of the prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam? Biology and natural psychology are critical. Research on the biological foundations of human behavior is usually referred to as cognitive science. Such research draws on various forms of evidence, including observation of primate behavior, psychological experiments with children, cross-cultural surveys, and neuroscientific studies. Islamic studies academics usually ignore all this data, but it's critical for understanding the beliefs and norms of the earliest Muslims. What this research establishes is that humans are naturally inclined towards patriarchal behaviors. Biologically, women are attracted to powerful men. Men are attracted to women who are chased. Women desire to enter into dependent relationships with women who are higher status than themselves. Vailing for women, male guardianship, the practice of gender separation, and many other sexual restrictions are also biologically rooted in what are known as mate guarding instincts. Certain sexual practices also trigger natural disgust reactions in humans. These include incest, promiscuity, bestiality, and homosexuality. This biological response explains why all pre-modern societies put restrictions on various consensual sexual behaviors and even legally punish them. Purely on the basis of all this natural psychology, we should expect that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorsed patriarchal norms as well as laws restricting sexual behavior. Now let's consider data from the quantitative social sciences. A huge amount of research proves that agricultural and pastoral societies are highly patriarchal. This is because in these societies, there are bigger families with more children. More children means women are pregnant more often and have more children to take care of. This means women are highly dependent on powerful men. Pastoral societies are especially patriarchal because not only are women dependent on more powerful men, but men in pastoral societies go the furthest in using their power to restrict female sexuality. The reason for this is that pastoral men have to leave their wives for very long periods of time to graze animals or conduct caravan trading, to ensure the paternity of their children, the men in these societies enact especially strict sexual restrictions on women. Harvard professor Anki Becker makes this argument in a recent influential paper. Obviously the Prophet Society Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was a pastoral one, so we can expect that it upheld these patriarchal beliefs and norms as well as sexual restrictions. Now what about archeological data? When researchers examine rock inscriptions, they found that tribes in the Arabian Peninsula up to the seventh century and thereafter were patrilineal. Arabs would inscribe their genealogies in rock and those inscriptions have lasted until today. These genealogies only mention male family members on the family tree. This means they were patrilineal. You don't see female family members mentioned anywhere. Why not? If the pre-Islamic Arabs and the earliest Muslims were gender egalitarian, why not mention mothers and grandmothers? Also relevant is that the inscriptions only mention male leaders. None of the inscriptions before the year 750 or after mention a single female leader. If the earliest Muslims were truly gender egalitarian, why do we not find a single rock inscription with the name of a woman leader? Also these rock inscriptions were carved by men, not women. This indicates that men were more educated and more mobile than women of the time. A clear mark of patriarchy and gender roles. We can also look at contemporaneous non-Muslim writing. One interesting piece of evidence comes from a text from the year 676 written in Syriac by an East Syrian priest. The text warns Christian women not to marry Muslim men who are referred to as pagans. The text has no warning to Christian men not to marry Muslim women. This obviously indicates that Muslim men were marrying Christian women, but Muslim women were not marrying Christian men. This gender difference represents Islamic patriarchal norms. Finally, let's look at other religions in the time of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. When we look at Judaism, Christianity, and even Zoroastrianism in the late antique time period, these were highly patriarchal religions with severe restrictions on women's dress and sexual behavior. Jewish scriptures place strong restrictions on women's education and characterize women as deficient in intelligence. Both Judaism and Christianity give husbands the right to discipline their wives. The Zoroastrians required wives to be obedient to their husbands and also to veil. The ancient Semitic Mesopotamian religions of Assyria and Babylonia, which influenced pre-Islamic Arabia, enforced veiling for free women and instituted male guardianship. In Greco-Roman religion and culture, women were taught to ideally stay secluded in the home and were discouraged from going to the marketplace or engaging in trade because it was believed such transactions were too complex for women. The Byzantines and the Sasanians punished sexual infractions like adultery and homosexuality with flogging, bodily mutilation, or death. So we have all these religions from the same time period as the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and we see an endless amount of evidence for patriarchy and legal restrictions on sexuality. To be clear, my claim is not that all these religions are the same, sorry. To be clear, my claim is not that all these religions are exactly the same as Islam in every way. My claim is that these religions have beliefs and norms that are analogous to what the Quran and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorsed. And of course, the historical critical method agrees with me on this. Now, does this mean I agree with HCM academics that Islam borrowed these beliefs and norms from late antique religions? No, not at all. The best way to explain this is by way of analogy. Evolutionists point to humans and chimps and say, see, they have many similarities. That's evidence that humans and chimps have a common evolutionary ancestor. In response, creationists don't deny there are similarities between humans and chimps. They just say, this is evidence that humans and chimps have a common creator. 30 seconds. Analogously, when we see similarities between these religions, that's not necessarily proof of borrowing. It is evidence of a creator who has sent revelation to many people over time with similar rules, not to mention the shared human biology that these religious rules are meant to regulate. Ultimately, there is no HCM academic who claims that the earliest Muslim community was non-patriarchal. Historians may quibble about whether or not thousands of patriarchal rules, whether some of the specific rules really existed at the time of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam or were later developments. For example, all the historians agree that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorsed punishments for certain sexual behaviors, but they won't agree on the details. Can I just finish the last? You got already 30 seconds. We'll kick it over to Javad. Do want to remind you a couple of things in particular folks for tonight's format. We have got a long one. It's going to be in total, not including the breaks, five hours and 25 minutes. So, believe me, we are just getting started. Our guests are linked in the description. You can hear plenty more from Daniel as well as Javad by clicking on those links below. We're gonna kick it over to Javad for his five-minute rebuttal. Javad, the floor is all yours. Wait, we're doing the rebuttals first then break? We can do the break first if you want. Rebuttal, and then after these rebuttals from each of you guys, we do the 10-minute break and then open discussion. But if I... Okay, go ahead with the rebuttal. I thought it was just before you. And do you mind putting your mic on mute just because the background a little bit and I will do the same for you? Okay. I'll do that. It might have actually been noise for me, but let me just double check. Yeah, I don't think my mic is making noise. I got you. Let me just double check your on the format because I know that you had said that it was important for your prayer time, Daniel, and I wanted to make sure I got it right and I might have screwed this up. So let me just double check really quick. If you need to go for prayer, you could break right now. The prayer hasn't actually came in yet. That's okay. It's like in five minutes, so I wasn't sure. Because we started late, that's fine. What we could do is, I think you had said right before the Q&A, but you are right, we did start late. And I do wanna respect the fact that you have a consistent time that you wanna... I could go pray. Okay, we're gonna kick it over to Javad. The floor is all yours, Javad, for five minutes. Oh, I think he said he wanted to pray right now. Oh, right now. Yeah, we could. It has come in the time it just came in. Oh, okay. What we're gonna do is we're gonna give Daniel, we've got a scheduled break because we did start late. We're gonna kick that break into gear right now. And then we're gonna come back for those rebuttal sections. Those are shorter folks, so do wanna give you, Daniel, you're free to go as well as Javad. We're gonna have a five-minute intermission, folks, during which I will show you a magic trick. No joke, so stick around. I'm gonna see if I've got this magic trick here still. So stick around, folks, but I do wanna give, like I said, we're gonna give five minutes to the speakers and then we're gonna get back enrolling on those housekeeping, or I should say rebuttals. Wanna say first, thank you, folks, for being here tonight as a very special night. In fact, this weekend is a very special weekend. As these two gentlemen that are on tonight have a history, to say the least, my dear friends, that history has culminated up to this point as no joke for years. They have disagreed on Twitter and elsewhere, and this is the first time that they're having a debate like this. So I do wanna say, folks, before I show you this magic trick, I gotta, let me just double check if I actually get the gear, the little trick here. But I wanna say, before I do, first, thank you guys for all of your support. I've seen all of your likes. That really does mean more than you know. In addition to that, if you have a friend who might like debates, maybe you know of someone who is like, yeah, like they're into this stuff just like I am, this is a great opportunity to share that with them right now. In particular, this debate link with them because we're gonna be going five hours. So if you're thinking like, I don't know if my friend's gonna get it on time to enjoy this debate live with me, because it's always better live. Like when you go to a concert, watch baseball, whatever, it's always more fun live. Even, I think people generally, you guys think class is taking classes on online versus in person, that in person's a little bit more engaging, a little bit more fun, I don't know. I think so at least. So you don't have to worry about, oh man, well my friend, they might not see it. You know, they might not be able to watch it live with me. We might not be able to talk about it simultaneously. Like let's say you're sending each other text messages about the debate or whatever. Well don't worry, we've got another five hours or so. So I'm highly confident if you share this debate with them right now, they will see it. So go ahead and hit that share button. It's just below this video feed that you're seeing. Let me see if I do have this magic trick here. You know, I don't know if it's gonna work anymore. I mean, but bear with me. I do wanna say in addition to that, thank you guys for all of your support. I didn't do this at the start. I wanna quickly let you know just about what Modern Day Debate is about. If you're watching here live at Modern Day Debate, wanna say we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from in addition. We wanna give everybody a fair shot to make their case on a level playing field. That's why Modern Day Debate is a fully neutral platform. Cause you might be thinking like, oh, James, are you gonna do like an after show where you like laugh at or like make fun of the side that you thought was wrong? No, no, no, we don't do anything like that here. For real, it is nothing but debates. We are not going to have a side represented on Modern Day Debate unless we have an opposing side simultaneously giving them pushback. My dear friends, we're excited about the future. We have a lot coming up here on Modern Day Debate. In particular, as you can see on the bottom right of your screen, so I'm pointing it to it right here. You see there? Tomorrow night, Javad and Daniel collide one last time as if tonight's, I mean, you guys, we're really working hard and I wanna say whoever it was that sent in earlier, maybe about 10 minutes ago, someone sent in a very generous super chat. So we do wanna say thank you so much for your support. It strangely didn't have a name next to it. I've never seen that. I don't know if I've ever seen it or it just didn't have a name at all. So I wanna say thanks for your support. That really does mean a lot. And thank you for any super chat. We have, for example, Mohamed tonight has given a number of super chats. We appreciate that support. Thanks so much. But not only that, like I said, thank you guys for sharing, seriously. It's our goal to provide a neutral platform so that everybody has their chance to make their case on that neutral platform. We deserve, or we believe that YouTube deserves a better class of debate channel and we're gonna give it to them. Modern day debate is trying to provide Muslims, atheists, Christians, you name it, everybody a fair shot to make their case on a level playing field. That's important to us if you believe in that vision, if you're like, hey, I like that idea. It's neutral. We're not gonna put a video out afterward that is like a total one-sided, like this is why Christianity is wrong or this is why atheism is wrong or this is why Islam is wrong. We're not gonna do that. It's fully neutral here. We hope you feel welcome. And I'm not trying to bash on, I know that there are channels out there that do have the case for Islam or the case for atheism, the case for Christianity. I'm not trying to throw those under the bus, but when it comes to debate channels, I think we all know we want them to be fair, right? Because why would you wanna go and make your case? Let's say you're like, I'm a debater and I'm gonna go on this debate channel and then that debate channel afterwards has like a singular video. And by singular, I mean like only one side is represented and they're like, oh man, that person, you know, that debated tonight, they were so wrong because maybe it's like an actuality. Maybe it's not a neutral channel. Maybe it's a, what's it called? What's the scientism? Is that what it's called? Maybe it's a scientism channel? That can't be it. It's not scientism. Let me look this up. What's the name with the gentleman who was a fiction writer? And then Scientology. It's been a long day. Is that maybe it's like, oh wow, actually it's a Scientology channel. They host debates, but then after, you know, the debaters leave, you know, they say, oh man, did you hear that, that atheist debater? Did you hear that Muslim debater? He was so wrong. Like, it's not what we do here. Wanna say, we hope you feel welcome. Thanks for your support. And there it is again. Thanks, I can't, I don't know. Thanks for your super chat. I don't know what your name is yet. I still can't see it, but whatever it is, thank you for your support. Says yeah, no problem. Just please don't forget to read it out so that, let's see. I don't know what that word means. I was worried, it's like, is it a bad word? I don't know. They say much appreciated. Thanks for your support. Seriously, it really does mean a lot. And my dear friends, we do wanna say though, for real, we do hope you feel welcome. If you are Muslim, if you're a Christian, if you're an atheist, we do hope you feel welcome. And if you're a Scientologist, I wanna mention when I was saying like, oh, what if they're a Scientologist channel? Like they're like, oh man, that Muslim or that Atheism is terrible. I'm not trying to say Scientologists like are disproportionately like that. I'm not trying to throw them under the bus either. My only point is I'm just saying, it was a theoretical example. So if you're a Scientologist, we hope you feel welcome. But yeah, let me see if I can find this magic trick. You guys, and I'm spoiling you guys. I do wanna finish, I had two seconds. Gotta take this chance now. I do wanna finish this. I almost finished my sub sandwich before we started. And I just didn't get you. So I have this little bit. Can you guys forgive me for just, this is a six hour debate. Can you cut me a little slack if I'm eating for a second? But I wanna say Mirage007-004. Thanks for coming by. I see you there in the old live chat. And Surgeon General, thanks for coming by. So I think it is an apostrophe. I am unable to take it because it's less than a year to go along. Oh, I didn't know that. ABJL, thanks for coming by. As well as, oh, I'm gonna enjoy this last little bit of subway. So I'm a big subway guy. Do you know that? All right, two seconds. It's turkey and avocado. It's probably my favorite. But I worry a little bit. If there's any vegans out there, I'm not trying to make a statement by saying that. But do wanna say thank you guys. I'm really big on healthy fats, you know? Avocado, nuts, eggs. Just testing, testing, testing. You hear me? Mm-hmm. All right, just making sure. I'm clear. I did do... Oh, let me just turn on. Oh, you guys, how long have you guys been waiting for me? I didn't know you were here. Sorry about that. I had you... Take your time. It's all right. I had you blanked out in Zoom. All right, let me just take a swig. It was just a root beer. Diet root beer. But do wanna say, all right, we're gonna get started in a second, folks. I hope you have your refreshments at home. Cause this is gonna be, it's a very, this is very exciting. We're gonna kick it over to, as I had mentioned, for these five minute rebuttals, first Javad, and then Daniel, and then we're actually going to jump into the open dialogue. So with that, thank you very much, Javad. The floor is all yours for your five minute rebuttal. Thank you so much, James. So I'm going to ignore the ad hominem attacks and just deal with the intellectual arguments that were raised. So, and if Daniel, if you don't mind being on mute right now. So number one is, as far as Daniel, I just made some notes. So Daniel's recap of HCM, I mean, I can't take any of that seriously. That's not a serious summary of HCM. He portrays it as if initially scholars thought that everything is historical and authentic. And then all of a sudden in the 1970s, everything changed. Nobody would take any of this seriously. He missed out. He named like three scholars, missed out all of this names of major scholars. Basically, I mean, Goldseer, Schacht, I mean, Springer, Muir, I mean, the list can go on and on. It was not the case that they said that everything was solid and good. And then in the 1970s, it changed. No, and then he's trying to portray it as, oh, then they got refuted and that's how reliable HCM is because they got manuscript evidence. No, actually there were scholars who defended the authenticity of the Quran before the manuscript evidence came out. So it's actually the historical critical method that actually allowed us to say that no, the Quran is earlier. And one of the major reasons is simply historical and acronyms. The Quran is devoid of historical and acronyms and whereas the Hadith is full of historical and acronyms. So that's something that Daniel should address. Now, but I've made a purely religious argument that Daniel should address, which is the fact that the whole, even from a religious perspective, there's no narrative, narrator or criticism done on the first level on the chain of transmission, which is the level of the companion. And so the Hadith corpus would fall apart because of that. Now, the other thing is, I'm not even, I've, if you notice, today I've been taking a very Quran-centric approach. I've been citing the Quran. So Daniel, it needs to argue the Quran. I've cited verses from 425, 24, 32 to 33. So he needs to address those and we'll see that throughout the debate. I will be looking at the Quran. Now, I think he also came to the wrong debate because he seems to be portraying me as some post-modernist in multiple ways. And or one, he thinks that I'm going to say that interpretation is just open to interpretation. The interpreter is king. No, I'm actually going in the opposite direction. I believe the Quran is clear. As rationalists, we believe the Quran is clear and we should follow it. Whereas it's actually the traditionalists and this is a part of the, I had this in my slides, you see that the Sunni traditionalists said that the Quran is dim, ambiguous and unclear and therefore requires something else to interpret it, which was the Hadith and the tradition and then Ijma. So it's actually a reversal of the argument. Then he talks about textual acrobatics. It's in fact, I've actually shown it and I will continue to show it. It's actually the... Folks, I'm figuring out what went wrong. Thanks for your patience. That was definitely a technical error of some part on my side. I don't know what it was, but I'll figure that out and get back to you on what it was. So we're going to go to Javad's opening statement. I know that if you're listening live, you have already heard this, Javad's rebuttal. If you are listening live, you've already heard this rebuttal, but I do want to give it to Javad just because it, basically, I feel like it's a pain that... Go on, it's fine. I'm fine with it, James, sorry about that. No problem. No problem. I don't want to be petty about it. Just go ahead. No problem. We'll kick it over to... So we'll now kick it over to Javad for his rebuttal. Javad, the floor is yours for five minutes. And James, if you could give me a one minute warning, that would be great. Thank you very much. So in my rebuttal, I'm not going to address the ad hominem attacks, instead I'm just going to address the intellectual arguments. I would say that I wholly disagree with, and I don't know what to do with the summary that he gave of HCM or historical scholarship, which simply was not accurate. He portrayed it as if, so Western scholars started out with a fidelity towards the text and he'd used Ernst Renan's quote, which is honestly considered a joke in Western Academy. Not in a joke in the sense that he was a bad scholar, but in the sense that it's almost every academic paper starts with that quote and says, we don't really believe that. But in any case, there was a long list of scholars, I mean, Aynes Goldsier, Schacht, and these people were already problematizing the Hadith long, long ago. And debates was not the case that it went all of a sudden in the 1970s to just, yes, in the 1970s, there was a strand of historical scholarship that became extremely skeptical and revisionist. And that strand, many of its major arguments got refuted, although they did benefit the scholarship as well. But that was just one strand. And there was other strands that were arguing in the opposite direction. So there were people who were defending that the Quran actually goes back to the Prophet Muhammad, specifically because of things internal to the Quran itself. This is before the manuscript evidence came out. So this portrayal of, oh, historical scholarship just got refuted by Alhamdulillah the Quran manuscript. No, that's not the case. Instead, it was the fact that certain scholars made certain arguments and those ended up being correct. And that is, for example, that there are no historical anachronisms in the text. There's archaic language, et cetera. So, and in any case, what I'm arguing today is a very Quran-centric approach. I'm arguing from within the Quran to argue my specific points. And that's where I think Daniel may have come to the wrong debate because he seems to be implying that I'm some sort of post-modernist where I just take the text and say that the interpreter can make it mean whatever he wants to make it mean. In fact, I'm arguing that the medieval exigites are the one who did that. And I showed you the quote in which there was that text in which it says that if the Quranic verse opposes our view, then we simply consider it abrogated or we reinterpret it or we reject it. So it's actually the medieval tradition that did that and we'll see that. And that's what they use the Hadith for in order to cover up or change the Quran. So we need to argue about the Quran. And when you look at the Quran, the specific claim that I've made in this debate is verse four, 25 is the key one, but there are other ones that I pointed to as well that show that you need to marry a slave girl. And then it says that do not take them as fornicators or lovers. Take them as married or chast women, give them their bride's wealth. So this completely rules out acubinage, which is called, I mean, this is sexual indecency. And that's where I would say he also has come to the wrong debate where he's trying to portray it as I'm pushing out some sort of progressive sexual ethics. I'm the one saying that you need to have sex within marriage and have a marital contract. And it's in fact, my critique is that it's the pre-modern Islamic tradition which allowed this kind of sexual debauchery including unlimited sex with sex slaves, multiple wives where you can just have one on rotation due to insta divorce. You had pederasty that was completely normalized. And then you had unics that were guarding your slaves and even there was some homoerotic business with the unics as well. So this is a pre-modern tradition. It's not this idea of marriage, sex within marriage, which Daniel usually tries to propagate. That's actually a very modernist argument. So that's what I'm arguing today. Now he raised many different verses of the Quran. I can't go through all of them. All I'll say is as far as verse 434, which says to supposedly beat your wives, there's a really good article by Saqib Hussein, an academic article which shows that that's not the case. That's talking about lashes that the woman gets if she is convicted of adultery, but that's a very complex argument and you need to look at that article. It's not goofy textual acrobatics. It's actually looking at the Quran on its own terms, which is what I'm arguing for today. Lastly, I would just say that what I am pushing for, whether it's a patriarchy or not, that's not the issue. The question is, are you for ontological equality of women? And I am. I'm saying that the Quran is endorsing ontological equality because we all come from the same source. Women are not inferior in that sense. And that's what the pre-modern tradition believed and that's what Daniel needs to defend here today. So whether it's patriarchy or not, for me that you can have a benign patriarchy. And in any case, the Quran was revealed in a deeply patriarchal time. So certain things are definitely historically contextual, such as inheritance and testimony and all that kind of stuff. But what my point is is that the medieval tradition went in a very misogynistic direction, in the worst case scenario. And the reason they did that is because they believed in these kind of ideas that women are literally inferior and so they missed out on these things. And I would say, as Daniel has said in his own book, you can be for women's rights without being a feminist. So I don't have to be a post-modernist, a feminist, completely against patriarchy, 100% to argue for women's rights and argue that the medieval tradition fails to uphold the rights that are in the Quran. And the Quran is deeply concerned with vulnerable minorities, including women, divorced women, orphans, slaves, poor people, travelers, all the vulnerable categories the Quran is concerned with. And the basic relationship that the Quran is enforcing between men and women is that of being, I have five minutes on my timer. We agree that we give a 30 second grace period at the start though. Garments for one another. That's all I'm saying. The basic relationship is of garments for each other and guardians and caretakers for each other, not of dominance and sexual exploitation. Thank you. And we'll kick it over to Daniel for five minutes as well. And that has that flexible 30 seconds at the end. Thanks very much, Daniel. The floor is all yours for your rebuttal. Okay, so this is the definition of Gish Galloping. Like his entire presentation has been Gish Galloping bringing all these kinds of other issues and topics that have nothing to do with this debate. The debate topics, let me remind you, Javad, they're about patriarchy, restrictions on sexuality, restrictions on non-Muslim practice, conquest and slavery. That's it. Don't bring like theology into it. Don't bring all of this bizarre issues related to free will and rationalism. Like this is something that is way beyond the scope of the debate. So your entire opening is Gish Galloping and that's what we've seen in your first section too on patriarchy. Also, you're wrong about Islamic modernism. It actually emerged in the late 19th century under colonialism. There was no Islamic modernism before that. So you're factually wrong there. You keep endorsing this view of a Quranic only understanding. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of language. You can, if you say, oh, I want to just understand Mein Kampf on its own terms without looking at the beliefs and norms of the author of Mein Kampf, you can reinterpret it in any other way other than the intent of the author. What is so important about the life of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is that he is the one who is the messenger who brings the Quran and he exemplifies the Quran in his behavior. As Aisha radi Allahu Anha said, he is the walking Quran. So we need to understand the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and what were his beliefs and norms? How did he live life? How did he set up his community? That is critical for understanding the Quran. If you take that all out and you say, as you've done multiple times that we need to look at the Quran only, then you can't really understand the language of the Quran in the first place. You come up with all of these bizarre interpretations that frankly no one is following or understanding. Also your portrayal of Islam is just, Islam is a pure denigration of all Muslim societies prior to modernity. Your whole speech basically in these two openings has been pure hatred, pure racism, pure colonialism. And if you actually look at the atheists in the chat, they are cheering you. They love what you're saying. You're like worse than Apus. You're worse than these Islamophobes in the way that you're portraying the majority of Islamic society. You keep wanting to talk about rational speculation, but what does rational speculation have to do with this historical critical method? You claim to be an academic. You claim to be a historian. What have you said about history? All you're doing is engaging what you call rational speculation or rationalization of the Quran with no interest in history. You wanna look at the rationalists? You prove to me where Ibn Sina or Ibn Rushd and all these other rationalists that you cited, show me where they oppose slavery. Show me where they opposed, the different Haudhud punishments. Show me where they oppose patriarchy and conquest. Show me that if they're so rational. You're saying that Islamic modernism is not liberalism. That is completely false. Also, you're making this big deal about Ernest Renan. You're saying that he was considered, he started being considered or he was a joke, but when did he start becoming a joke? Prior to the 1970s, everyone is citing him because he's making its distinction between Islam and other religions. I'm not saying that Orientalists prior to the 1970s thought everything in Islamic tradition was accurate. That's not my claim. You just strawman that entire claim. I'm pointing out this distinction between the prior Orientalists prior to the 1970s and the ones afterwards. Yeah, so your whole presentation is like disgusting Islamophobia. It's literally being paid by the US government because of your employer. Yeah, you're just a pure mortade who clearly hates Islam and you have this extremely negative portrayal of Islam and Islamic history. Pederasty was normalized. What are you talking about? Where's the evidence for that? Don't cite poetry. That's like if I cited rap music and I said rap music about killing and murder and drug dealing and that represents the ideals of American culture. That's basically your argument. Show me the proof that Pederasty was normalized. Yeah, some scholars did say that young boys resemble females and therefore there could be attraction on the basis of them resembling young females. That's not normalizing Pederasty the action. That's not saying that this is something that you can act on and that was normalized by the tradition. This is nonsense, pure nonsense. Yeah, so your complex arguments as you call them about the Qur'an. Yeah, they're complex because no one can understand them. You keep citing four or three verse four or three of the Qur'an about marrying slaves. Where does it say that you have to marry your female slaves? And the fact that you're citing this verse it presupposes that you have female slaves. So I guess you can see the later part of this debate where we're going to argue about having female slaves. So you can see that female slaves are permissible to own, right? That's basically a concession on that point. And yeah, you say you cite Saqib Hussein. That article is trash. It engages in the same textual gymnastics that you're engaged in. Yeah, your caricature of Orthodox Islam is exactly that. It's just a ridiculous caricature. Ghish Galloping, Islamophobia, that's all your presentation has been thus far. And like I said, you're like a pure mortade who hates like the vast majority of Islamic tradition. Like what I'm representing is 99% of the Islamic tradition. And you're portraying that as like pedorasty. Time. We're going to kick it over to actually right now we're doing a quick change up in particular. We're jumping into the open discussion, which is generally most people's favorite part. So gentlemen, if you can do me a favor, if we can keep this on the rails, if it won't go too far in terms of interrupting, the floor is all yours. So Daniel, what I would say to that is that it's actually you and I have multiple screenshots of Islamophobes who actually love you and promote you. And you talk, you mentioned Apus. Apus actually is telling pearly things that he wants you to be on that channel because you do such a bad job of representing Islam. Because you're the one who justifies sex slavery. You justified having sex with a five-year-old, six-year-old. You're the one who gives the worst possible interpretation of Islam. Meanwhile, I'm actually saying that the Quran doesn't say any of this. I'm actually the one who's saying that true Islam understood through the Quran doesn't say any of this. Now, as far as the Islamic tradition is concerned, I'm actually saying, I'm saying no, not mental gymnastics. That's how you're doing it. You didn't even cite the right verse. I said verse five, four, 25. So how do you explain verse four, 25, which says, don't take them as fornicators or lovers? And says- No, no, that's your bizarre interpretation. This means prostitution. Zina does not mean sex with someone that you rightfully have a relationship with, whether that's through marriage contract or ownership. You don't even understand what Zina is. That's your problem. Like this is the exact, look, this kind of, we can go back and forth on the interpretation of specific words. How about history? Do you wanna talk about history? Why does the Quran say wed them? Do you care about history? Of course I care. So you're saying that no historical tradition can get something wrong. You said that Jesus, that Christians believe in the trinity. Do you think that Jesus actually preached the trinity? You yourself have said that history- No, I acknowledge that, the historical, yeah. So you acknowledge the fact that a tradition can get things wrong, correct? So therefore it is possible that Jesus could preach something that his immediate followers could get wrong. Similarly, it's possible, yeah. So it's possible that the prophet taught something that his followers got wrong. That's the question. You have to refer to actual history to determine that. But you don't wanna look at history. Let's look at history and see what the prophet, let's see what the prophet actually, that's my whole point. So first of all, you keep saying that you wanna avoid theology. You wanna avoid scripture. I'm telling you, let's take a look at this verse, 425, okay? You don't wanna deal with that. You wanna look at pop science and pop culture. You follow things like the kind of academic books that you cite, I mean, what can I say? But look at 425, okay? And tell me, why does it say, so wed them, marry the believing young women, so wed them by permission of their people and give unto them their proper bride's wealth as married, chast women, not as fornicators or lovers? So please tell me why it would say that if you can just have sex with them. It's not requiring it, that's the point. It doesn't require it. It says, don't take them as fornicators or lovers. Yeah, don't sell them, don't sell them. Don't sell them, don't prostitute them. That's what it means. Your whole argument, your whole argument. It doesn't say prostitution in this verse. That's according to you. That's according to your mental gymnastics. There's no mental gymnastics. So you don't even, It is, your mental gymnastics, you went through this whole song and it's, don't interrupt me. Let's you talk for five minutes. Look, your entire interpretation of this verse was on your reinterpretation of what all of the people who are translating this have said, where does, who has translated this other than you as Zina? Zina is a specific term and has a specific meaning in the Islamic tradition in Islamic law and in the Quran itself. The Quran says the punishment for Zina is lashing, right? This is not the word Zina is not used in this word. So what justifies your interpretation? The thing is that we, you can put any interpretation on the texts of the Quran because you don't actually look at history. You're the only historian that doesn't seem to care about the actual practice of Muslims at the time of the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. So this is, this is like a waste of time to go. It's a waste. No, I'm looking at 425 right now. 425 is not the one that talks about prostitution, Daniel. It's 2433 that does. Okay, so you're at the wrong verse. Okay, verse 425 doesn't mention prostitution at all. You're completely wrong. And so you should actually look at the verse and take theology and scripture seriously instead of just calling, you know, biology and pop culture. Okay, it says, marry the believing young woman amongst those whom your right hand's possessed. So wed them by the permission of their people and give unto them their proper bride's wealth as married, chast woman, not as fornicators or lovers. And when they are married, should they commit an indecency, et cetera? And then 427 condemns those who follow lusts. I'm sorry, you got to take scripture seriously. All textual gymnastics, all textual gymnastics. I just read the verse. What textual gymnastics is that? You're just reading the verse. That's textual gymnastics for you. This shows you. Which verse? You said 425, then you referred to 425. 425. Yeah, I was been referring to 425. Which verse? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's 425. How many times should I say 425? I said 425. This is talking about, look here, let's read the verse. The one with prostitution is a different verse. That's 2433, okay? You got it wrong. All right, the other thing is, are you preemptively saying that no interpretation of the medieval exegetes can be wrong? Is that what you're saying? No, there's difference of opinion. There's obviously ichtilaf. Yes, of course there is. And by the way, we're gonna see that ichtilaf. I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you. The difference between Islam and Christianity, like this is what you were trying to make an analogy with, is that with Christianity, after Jesus, you had continuous revelation, whether it's through Paul, whether it's through the Holy Spirit, according to the Catholic belief and other denominations. Like this is very different from Islam. In Islam, the Quran is the revelation of God, and it's meant to be completed with the prophet Muhammad, as the last prophet. So that's a big disanalogy between Christianity and Islam. What does this have to do with Christianity? What did I say about Christianity here? I said you're saying that you think that, well, Christianity could have these doctrines that are not attributable to Jesus. Similarly, Islam could have doctrines that are not really attributable to the prophet's life. So you're just presupposing the truth. So you're just presupposing, the whole debate is whether the traditional arguments are correct. You're simply presupposing. So your argument just goes, I brought all of this history. I brought all of this. I brought contemporary Islamism sources. I brought inscriptions. I brought actual historical sources. I made comparisons to late antiquity. You have none of that. You have no history. You're just engaged in this. Are you serious? Textual gymnastics, you know, exactly like the memes depict. Reading the Quranic verse. That's all you can do. Let's put it up on screen. I don't see anything in this verse that says you have to marry your slave girls. I don't see anything. Yeah, really? Look at this. And marry the believing young women. So wed them. Give unto them their proper bride's wealth. Hold on, hold on. It's currently in presentation mode. I think that if you switch it, there you go. Oh, no, it went away. Okay, here. Look at the verse. It's not, hold on. It's clearly not, this is the thing that's crazy. It's covered by all of us. There are some blues there. Okay. Yeah, there. I had to get rid of this. Yeah, bring this up so we can look at it very carefully. All right, let's see the textual gymnastics of me just reading the verse. Marry the believing young women among those whom your right hand possess. So wed them by the permission of their people. If you miss the first part, whoever does not have the means to marry free believing women. That's correct. So you know what that means? Yeah, so you don't have the resources. You don't have the money to marry a free. You can't give the mahar. So then you can opt for a slave girl. That doesn't mean everyone who has a slave girl has to marry the slave girl. That's actually an argument against you, Daniel, because that's saying that the Quran is saying that don't, it's actually preferable to only marry free women. And then if you can't do that, and it's, wait, hold on, hold on. Let me make the argument so you can understand. It's saying that it's preferable to marry free believing women. And only if you can't do that, then marry the believing young women and to wed them and not to take them as fornicators or lovers. So the Quran is actually discouraging any sexual intercourse with slave girls. But if you do have to have it, then marry them. If it's a conditional, whoever does not have the means to marry them. Yes, this is an argument against you. No, it's not. Okay, so then let me ask- There's nowhere in this verse, there's nowhere in this verse, that says, if you have a slave girl- It literally says, don't take them as fornicators or lovers. That's, yeah, exactly. While hinge is on your bizarre interpretation of- Bizarre. It's just taking them as fornicators. So you're just presupposing, this is- It's not fornication. It's a question begging on your part. It's a question begging on your part because you're assuming that you're assuming you cannot have permissible sexual intercourse with a slave girl. You're baking in your presumption. That's literally in the verse that says you're taking them as lovers. Do you not think that if you have a sex girl, that's your lover? Bring up the verse. Is it not your lover? Okay, let's bring up the verse. Yeah, yeah, show me, please. And then we'll take a look at the other verse, which actually says, specifically, be chast if you can't do that. It doesn't say go and have sex with a concubine. You're presupposing that your interpretation is correct simply because that was the historical interpretation. That's simply what you're doing. You're presupposing it, but the whole debate between you and me is about whether traditionalism is right or wrong. You can't just presuppose that. Modernists are saying that they got it wrong. So that's the very debate. There's no presupposition here. Like why are you taking the last part of the verse and you're applying it to that specific category of people? I don't know what you're saying. It's saying to wed them, give them their bride's wealth and as married chast women, not as fornicators or lovers. Yeah, so if you can't afford, if you cannot afford the means to marry, don't engage in fornication. Don't engage in fornication. That's what it means. It's saying don't take them as lovers. Does that not include your concubine? Is not your concubine a lover? Let's see the Arabic now. Let's actually look at this other verse here where it's saying to talk, take them as in marriage, in honest wedlock, not in fornication. It's literally calling concubinage fornication and telling you to marry. And it's telling you not, and it's actually, like you said, it's saying it's better to marry free women. So then your interpretation of all the verses, like the one from Surat al-Mu'minun that says that guard your chastity, the believers guard their chastity except from their wives and those who their right hands possess. Yes. So that means that relations with the ones that your right hands possess, milk yamin, your female slaves, that's something that's permissible according to Surat al-Mu'minun and the other verses that I cited. So there are two explanations to that. Number one is what we are saying is that you have free wives and you have slave wives. And the slave wives continued to be called those who are possessed by your right hand. So that verse- Okay, where is the proof for that? Because this verse, these verses that I just showed you- Where is the- Let me finish my argument and then you can respond, okay? And I'll give you a couple of minutes to respond. Okay, so the argument is twofold. Number one is the number one possible explanation is that because these verses require you to have a marital contract and then you're still called- By the way, in Arabic, you call even your wives what your right hand possesses. That's part of Arabic. And so it's not a surprise that it would refer to the slave wife as the one your right hand possesses. The second point is that those verses are- I've looked at every single one of those verses. They came chronologically before these verses. So just like I'm going to show you in the third debate that the verse about releasing and not allowing you to enslave prisoners came later. Similarly, these verses came later than the one that you just cited. Okay, chronologically. So I do agree that initially in the Prophet's lifetime- Where's the proof? You can look at chronological lists. You wanna look at lists? Okay, let's look at lists. Do you know- Okay, let me ask you this. Where do you go for the chronological lists of the Surahs? I just wanna have a debate about history. Show me the historical proof. I'm not here- According to historical critical method. Show me the proof where- Let me ask you this. How those verses abrogate the other one. Because I cited- I didn't say abrogation. Historical accounts. I cited- I didn't say abrogation. Historical accounts. Let me talk now. I cited historical accounts that are after the death of the Prophet Sallallam. And they're talking about how the Muslims have this practice of taking slaves. We will get to that in the third part of the debate. Taking female slaves and having sexual relations with them. This is something that is part of historical practice. You show me some kind of history. Some kind of record that actually justifies that your bizarre interpretation, these textual gymnastics, are actually based in someone's historical practice. Some kind of record that justifies that. Otherwise, this is just subjective, radical skepticism, based on your interpretation that no one else shares. No one else, even if we look at Shia, if we look at Ibadis, if we look at Ismailis even, the Kaffir Ismailis, none of them had this interpretation that you have throughout pre-modernity. So how did they all meet? So all of these groups that are extremely bitter enemies towards each other, all of these different sects, somehow they all fell on the same interpretation or the same understanding of slave girls and patriarchy and inheritance and all of these other issues that we brought up. I don't know why you're trying to only focus on slavery. All of them agree, even though they bitterly disagree on things like the Quran, like is the Quran just the most half that we have today? Or is it something that there is revelation that has gone missing according to some of the extreme Shia sects? Like they disagree on those levels of issues, but they have no disagreement on the issue of milk yamin are female slaves that the master can have sex with. Okay. And many verses of the Quran, you say you want only Quran, only. I cited the Quran for you. Okay, first of all, I wasn't, I didn't say Quran only. That's a strawman. I said Quran centric. Secondly, I told you, that's a big difference. Okay. Number two is you said no one in history ever had this view. I'm sorry, Daniel, but you're wrong about that. Okay. There was a Tesla scholar who agreed with this that now all of a sudden that doesn't count because it's a way to show what, right? Like you have, okay. Here, I'll show you the source here. Yeah, let's, let's put it up on screen. And then, and then you'll, then you'll say, well, that doesn't matter. Show me the Arabic, not your translation. It's not my translation and I'll get you the Arabic afterward. But it's, right now it's, let me just share this and you can see. Okay. So it was not only that this Tesla scholar said that it's not okay, but also there are reports going back to Ali that say that he was also not okay with it. Of course, there's contradictory information. That's how the historical record is. Okay. But the point is that you are just, we didn't see that. Now, as far as- Sure, again, we didn't see that. Sure, absolutely. Now let me ask you a question. Your doubting, your real thing was that you were doubting whether or not, how do I know chronologically the order? So let me ask you, Daniel, how do you figure out chronological order of Suras? What's the- That's irrelevant. That's irrelevant to the debate. No, how do you do it? It's irrelevant to the debate. If you don't know- If you don't know- You don't know, right? You don't know, right? No, you don't ask me. But I'm trying to prevent you from- You ask me. I'm trying to prevent you from gish-galloping, my friend. You are gish-galloping. Stick to the issues- How am I gish-galloping? You're gish-galloping because you're talking about like, that's way after the time of the Prophet SAW has nothing to do with the Qur'an. You literally just said- Let me remind you about the debate topic. Let me remind you, let me remind you of the debate topic. The debate topic, and now we can't see you. Like, we're looking at your spreadsheet. Yeah, so this spreadsheet, by the way- The spreadsheet answers your question. Did the Qur'an, and did the Prophet SAW and the Qur'an endorse patriarchy, mean authority of men over women? You said you actually agree with benign patriarchy. Is that true? Yes, because you yourself- Okay, so then we're on the same page? No, we're not on the same page. So men have authority over women? Men have authority over women. Men have authority over women. Do men have authority over women? No, do you think- Patriarchy, do you think- Stick to the topic of the debate. Gentlemen, stick to the topic of the debate. I am speaking to sex slavery. Sex slavery. I gotta do this. Javad, when I'm talking, when I try to jump into the store order, same thing with Daniel, it's like a major pet peeve where sometimes I fly off the handle when I'm trying to restore order and you guys keep going. So let me, I'm not trying to call you out in particular, Javad. Sometimes Daniel and I have- Can we- Remember your first time here, Daniel, and we- Anyway. James, can we do like two minutes each with the other person on mute? I'm okay with that, if you want to do it like that. Can I work with you, Daniel? No, no, let's have open conversation. He just needs to stop interrupting. That's why I'm like- But you're interrupting as well. I haven't been keeping track, so I don't know who's been doing it more. But I do think it's a fine idea to give this a shot. Are you open to this, Daniel, like a two minute back and forth, or even how about a one minute? Is that okay with you guys? Sure. I'm okay with trying. We can even continue the open discussion. We can go forward, but if it gets too crazy and we have to talk over each other, then I think, and I'm not saying it's all Daniel. It could be me as well, but that's how we go. So James, do you want to try the open? Okay. So my, your, can I go now, James? Is that okay? Do I understand what you're saying? We'll keep going with the open dialogue instead of the time? Yeah, open dialogue. Let's try the open dialogue and we'll see how it goes. But if it doesn't go well, then maybe we'll go to that. Does that make sense? That works. Okay. All right. So Daniel is accusing me of Gish Galloping when I'm actually binging up stuff that's extremely germane and responding to his exact points. He braised certain verses of the Quran and I told him that these were chronologically revealed earlier. Then he asked me, how do you know that? And then I asked him, well, how do you ever figure out chronology? The reality is, is that he, can you mute yourself? Cause you're snorting is unnecessary. He realized that- Your whole argument is unnecessary. You're Gish Galloping. Hold on. You want to insult me? I'm not going to just sit and be quiet. I'm like a mute yourself. You mute your whole life. Look, the idea is this Gish Galloping. James, James, I didn't even get to finish my point. You're going to lecture us. We're tired of this lecture. No one is following this nonsense. Wrap it up. James, I, yeah, I can, but James, can we do to timed responses because I don't think that he's going to let me continue on my point. So, and I'm okay with sticking to a time. Cause you want to lecture- Can we do two minutes- This is not your- No, no, we can do two minutes each. A graduate, two minutes each. A lecture. This is not like your graduate school lecture. I know that you don't have any real specialization, Daniel. Oh yeah, I don't. Okay, seriously. You do. Okay, seriously. Yeah, I do. Okay. We see that. Just, let's go with- He talked for one minute. Let me talk. I didn't wrap up my idea. So I need to wrap up my idea. Cause you're- It's getting so insensitive. Okay, seriously. Hurry up. Wrap it up. Two sentences. I'm going to give you 10 seconds to just wrap up the idea or the question. So you ask the chronology- And then we're going to go into one minute segments. So the way I figure out chronology is to look what the scholars said. There's a traditional Islamic chronology as well as multiple chronologies by Western scholars. Sinai's is the most accurate. And that is the one that shows that the verses came before. And you can look at the other chronologies as well. So the verse that I show you came after those verses. So even if you were going to take it that those were legalizing it, they came before. And so wouldn't be applicable here. Okay. This is all your speculation. We're going to give Daniel a full one minute. Then we're going to come back to you Javad for a full one minute as well. For as all yours Daniel. All right. So I don't know why you're talking about slavery. That's not the point of this part of the debate. We're talking about patriarchy. You say that you agree with benign patriarchy. I'd ask you to define it. You won't define it. Patriarchy means authority of men over women. This is what patriarchy means. So if you agree with that and you think that that represents the Quran and the beliefs and norms of the Prophet's Islam then we're agreed. Like debate conceded. No problem. We'll go to the next section. We also are supposed to talk about sexual restrictions. You say that you're a modernist. So you're not a progressivist. You actually do believe in sexual restriction. So do you believe in lashing the punishment for fornication as mentioned in the Quran? Acknowledge, like give us a better sense of what your modernism actually amounts to. Do you believe in lashing? That's in the Quran. Having women be secluded for engaging in lewd behavior. That's in the Quran. So acknowledge that those sexual restrictions acknowledge the difference when it comes to inheritance. Acknowledge the difference when it comes to witnessing all of those gender roles are in the Quran. So where is the acknowledgement of that? Javad. Javad? Thank you. So I did not say that I agree with patriarchy. What I said is that I'm okay with the possibility of benign patriarchy. And I'm not here to debate patriarchy. You tried to jam that in in the initial, when you were trying to use your clout and wait to like decide how the debate would go because you were scared to debate me. You were the one who was insistent. Yeah, you were. So this is how you insisted on that. Now what I'm arguing is I'm, and I showed you and I tweeted back and I said this is what I will be arguing. My argument is that the pre-modern Islamic tradition violates the Quranic ethic and goes against what the Prophet Muhammad taught. And it goes against women's rights from that perspective. So I'm not here to say whether about gender roles and all that kind of stuff. What I am here to say is that when it comes to sexuality the pre-modern Islamic tradition was all based on sex slavery. Okay, that was how marriage was also aligned with man and the woman. Now you asked me about fornication and what I say is I do not support marriage, sex outside of marriage. And I do think that there should be laws against that in a society. Now that doesn't mean lashing because we don't need to, just like when you go to war, you don't need to have a book. Time. Yeah, so look at you running. Like you won't even answer simple questions. Like tell us about the gender roles. Tell us about patriarchy. What does benign patriarchy actually amount to? You just wanna talk about sex slavery. That's a separate part of the debate. Why are you running Javad? Why can't you answer simple questions? Tell us what you mean by benign patriarchy. I defined patriarchy by referring to the Quran, by referring to Hadith, by referring to all of these historical sources, all of these late antique religions. You say that you're a historian, but you don't care what all these other religions in the Byzantine empire, the Sasanian empire, the Greco-Roman traditions, all of them are patriarchal. All of them had this permission of masters to have sex with slaves. All of them had punishments for sexual fornication and homosexuality. What do you say about homosexuality, Javad? What do you say about these sexual issues? Stop trying to change the topic of the debate. This is the problem with you. Stay on the topic, stop gish-galloping. That's all I'm asking. It's very, very simple. All right, my turn now. So I'm not gish-galloping. I'm staying right on point, which is about sexuality. And what I'm saying is that the pre-modern sexual ethic that you are trying to defend is not this family-oriented marriage, have kids kind of, that's exactly wrong. The reality is that it allowed sex harems, sex with concubines, eunuchs, all this kind of stuff, okay? And this is based on your interpretation of the Quran because you insist that the medieval exigites had to get it right. But I'm showing you the clear verse, which I'm gonna show again, which clearly shows that you have to marry them. And you cannot answer that because you know that concubines, if you're having sex with them, that's your lover, and that's exactly what the Quran is saying against, this is not textual acrobatics. You're the one who's dodging this verse because you don't want to actually interpret it, you wanna interpret it away. Now, and so that's actually you who's guilty of that. I'm not running away from anything. I'm telling you that your sexual ethic that you should be talking about is actually very, it's not something that is family-value oriented or not. So that's what I'm saying. Now as far as laws against adultery, I actually do think that that should be illegal. However, I don't think that you should lash people. I certainly don't believe in stoning. Just like when you go to war today, you don't use horses and arrows, right? Those were punishments at that time. Now we have different punishments and different laws. So if they had like a penalty, especially if you get divorced, these are things that you can talk about. But again, I'm being very clear, I'm not dodging anything. You're the one who's dodging, you can't deal with that verse. That verse you just can't get. Thank you for that, that is over a minute. Sorry about that. Yeah, it's way over a minute. So okay, again, dodging the issue, you didn't tell us what benign patriarchy means. Do you believe in criminalizing homosexuality? Do you believe that there are mandatory dress codes in Islam? These are the verses that I cited. You didn't address any of those verses. Any of the verses on gender roles, mandating gender roles, is that something that you believe in? Those are the specific debate topics. You're gish-galloping by talking about other issues. You wanna talk about that one verse. And it's again, it's based on your radical subjective interpretation. Mohsenat in that verse is, you're saying that this means slave women. No, there's different interpretations from the Tephaseer. No one had that interpretation that you have. So this is exactly the problem because you are not actually grounding the discussion or grounding the interpretation in the Quran in the historical practice of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. That's what I'm doing. You're avoiding that. So tell me, should the adult, so also you're saying that it doesn't even matter what the Quran says, because now we're in different times. So everyone who's listening, remember the three part strategy, the three steps for these liberal bots. So he couldn't answer the question with step one deauthentication because it's in the Quran. He couldn't reinterpret lashing. So that's step two. So then he goes to step three and he says that, oh, it's not applicable to our times. So this is exactly as I predicted, you're a liberal bot. Time, I give you the same extra 20 seconds as I gave Javad and the last one to make up for it. All right, Javad, now we're gonna go back to one minute again. Javad, Thor is all yours. So we're talking about bots. Remember bots is how the medieval exegetes interpret verses, and that's how Daniel interprets this verse. He looked at it, he was stunned. He was like, oh, it said believers, lovers, and he didn't, he paused, he didn't know how to respond to that. So actually they look at the Quranic verses and then they say, oh, we have to interpret this away. In fact, it's the medieval exegetes who would say that this verse is abrogated if it goes against my view. You haven't dealt with that at all. They would reinterpret it, they would reject it. But this verse is clear. Now you say you needed to ground it in historical practice, which you're actually grounding it is in the medieval tradition, the exegetical tradition, which I've already questioned. That's the entire debate that we're having. So you can't just presuppose that the exegetical tradition is correct. You have to prove that the exegetical tradition is correct. And I'm showing you that it's clearly not because of these obvious verses in the Quran. So this is the problem. You can't deal with the obvious verses of the Quran that repeatedly say that you have to marry them. And so this is a problem. You just presuppose that that's correct. Now as far as the prophet's practice, after the battle of Hunayn, he forbade enslaving anyone after that. And that's what I'm showing you that there was a progression in the ethic, okay? And you don't appreciate that because you just presuppose that what the medieval exegetes said was correct. And that's just a traditionalist argument to fall on 1400 years, quote unquote. And then I say, oh, actually this other scholar said something different. Oh, well ignore him, he's just a more tesli. What does he know? I'm just gonna follow my sect, my jurist, my exegetes, you know? I don't know, he didn't show anything. So you still don't have an answer. Should homosexuality be criminalized? Did the prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, have the belief that homosexuality should be criminalized? How about promiscuity, fornication? Should it be criminalized? Did the prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam have those beliefs? Did the prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam have the belief in gender roles? Did he have the belief in mandatory bailing for women? These are the things that you can't answer. So you just avoid it. You wanna talk about one verse and then get into this theory of abrogation. I don't have to defend everything in the exegetical tradition. I don't have to defend like that ridiculous gish-galloping opening where you're trying to straw man every single traditional position. I don't have to defend that. The whole point of my opening and the whole strategy that I presented in the first two sections is I'm looking at historical tradition as with historical critical method approved sources like late antique religions, like the contemporaneous non-Muslim sources, like the archeology. You're not addressing any of those historical sources. Time. So actually what you've done by talking about the late antique practice, which is what you point to, the Romans and the Sassanids, you actually proved my point for me. That was exactly the prevalent. Can you please mute? Cause I don't need to hear your story. All right. So this is the practice that was in the milieu at that time. And that's of course what the medieval exigites adopted. That's a point in my favor. You're presupposing that the Quran can't have a higher ethical belief. That's a very secular belief. I am a believer. I believe that the Quran has a higher ethic that it wouldn't tolerate sex with concubines like you imagine. So you are actually proving my point as far as late antique practice. As far as mandatory veiling, I'm sorry to say Daniel, but it was only free women that were veiled, not the slave girls who would walk around in the markets uncovered. Even the breasts could be exposed and you can touch their breasts and take a test of them to see how they feel. That is the tradition that you need to defend and argue about it. And then say, oh, well, they did it for 1,400 years so it must be okay. That is the traditionalist dogmatic mindset that I'm opposed to. Now you want me to talk about homosexuality because I know, okay fine. Time, that's great. Yeah, so again, I bring up mandatory veiling. You quickly switched to slavery. Why can't you address the actual issue? Do you agree with mandatory veiling for women? What does the Quran say on that? If you want to just look at the Quran, show us your textual gymnastics with the Quran. I'm grounding it in history. I'm looking at what the actual Prophet Salli Sallam practiced, what all of these other religions at that time period and the late antique time period practiced. This is all proof, okay, for the traditional understanding because it's something ubiquitous. What about the biological evidence? What about make guarding biologically? Why do we see the same kind of veiling practices, the punishments against homosexuality, against fornication? All of these are found throughout pre-modern societies, not just Muslim, not even just late antique. These are things that are universal. Your whole thesis is that these fundamentalist Muslims in the Umayyad period just invented these kinds of punishments but that thesis is completely debunked by the fact that you have all of these independent cultures and religions who have very analogous punishments for these kinds of sexual behaviors, the same kind of patriarchal gender roles, the same kind of patriarchal forms of dress, you're not addressing these. So your entire argument is that you're doing the glee of past peoples that the Quran is actually reforming because you presuppose that the Quran cannot have a higher ethical intent. So you're actually a very secular atheist in that approach that you have toward the Quran. You're saying the Byzantines do it, the Persians do it, all these ancient societies do it so it must be the way it was. Now again, you cannot deal with the Quranic evidence. You have to say that I'm dealing with the historical evidence, the biological evidence. I'm showing you the Quranic verse and then you have to go to the exegetical tradition so you can't really deal with that at all. Now as far as mandatory veiling, the reason why I brought it up is because you actually sell a false goods to people. You claim that this is what Quran does and so the society is much better. This is your whole career is made out of this but in reality it was just the free women who were jailed at home and meanwhile you can have these slave girls walking around. It's not irrelevant, it's totally irrelevant. So what I believe and that verse doesn't even say to completely veil by the way, that's your interpretation with exegetes who used to argue if you can have one eye or two eye showing. That's the exegetical tradition that you're talking about. Yes, I do believe that Muslim women on their own accord should dress modestly. That's a part of our religion. We should all dress modestly. I don't agree with half of the things that you act right bros do when you propagate and try to use sex to sell your YouTube videos. So like you just contradict yourself with every single response. If you care about higher ethical intent then why do you even care what the Quran says? Because if I establish that this is what the Quran means all you'll do is say that, oh well what about the higher ethical intent? So this is why are you even pretending to care about what the Quran says? Why do you even care what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said or did or believed? Because anything that contradicts your liberalism you'll say, oh well we have higher ethical principles. This is your get out of jail free card that you're gonna play every time to get out of these questions that you just can't answer. Again, I repeat, what about the criminalization of homosexuality and fornication? Did the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorse that? Did the Quran endorse that? You concede, say yes or no and then okay fine, higher ethical intent engage in your theological hermeneutics, whatever, no one cares about that. And also your whole approach has nothing to do with historical critical method. The historical critical method doesn't care about higher ethical principles, it cares about what did the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam actually believe? What did he do? You're not addressing that. Time. So Daniel has this imaginary thing of modern liberalism but in reality this is the approach of the Islamic rationalists of old who believe that you need to use your ethical reasoning when interpreting a text because you'll have interpretive choices before you. We saw that with the verse that we looked at. The verse, at least if Daniel was honest, he would say, you know what? You could take the verse in the wage of Allah saying it. He won't admit that but that's the reality. So you have an interpretive choice to make and when you have an interpretive choice to make you should use your ethical reasoning to make the right decision. You should stop and look and say, hey, why am I mullah saying that you can't masturbate and look at pornography which I don't agree with by the way but then you can go and have sex with a billion slaves. That doesn't compute. You should expect that the Quran as an ethical text has an ethical import and I'm saying that yes as an Islamic modernist, not as a historical critical scholar. I use my historical critical scholarship in conjunction with my views as a believer. So you do historical scholarship first and then you base your theology on the findings but there is still theological work that goes in afterward and I'm coming to you as a believer today. I believe that the Quran has an ethical intent and we need to discover that and follow that. So you're acknowledging that what you're saying has nothing to do with the historical critical method. None of these rationalists that you cite had anything to do with the historical critical method. That wasn't even their approach. They didn't even care what the Prophet SAW said or believed these rationalists and also you conveniently skip the point where are these rationalists or these even Martazi lights? Where are they actually saying you can't have sex with female slaves? Okay, you found some random citation that we haven't confirmed. Show me the official position of the Martazi school, the rationalist, show me what the Martazi last said about mandatory veiling for women. Show me what the Martazi last said about a spousal discipline or quote unquote wife beating. Show me anything, show me anything but it's ultimately irrelevant because all you're doing is avoiding the main topic of the debate. You're not showing us what the Prophet SAW you're bringing no historical evidence. You keep appealing to higher ethics as your get out of jail free cart and these textual gymnastics that are laughable. No one is able to follow them. So this is, you only use historical critical method when it suits you to get rid of hadith and then you go to your higher ethical principles. You're not an academic. You're not a historian. You're a propagandist. You're this kind of agent morta. Time. All right, when all else fails then you just call your opponent a morta and think that that's a reasonable way to debate. But I know that you're getting upset Daniel so that tells me where you are in this debate. This is the verse. There's no textual acrobatics. You can't deal with this verse. I'm not doing higher ethical reasoning here. I'm looking at the verse and saying this is what the verse says. Now if you do have another interpretive possibility then you use your ethical reasoning but this verse is pretty clear. You said I don't care what the Prophet SAW. What the Prophet SAW brought was the Quran. I deeply care what the Prophet SAW brought and I think what the Prophet SAW brought was deeply ethical and that's what I wanna follow. Not what the Roman and the Sasanians and all these other cultures that you're bringing in pre-modernity, all of them believe that's not what I wanna follow. I wanna follow what the Quran says because that's what the Prophet brought. Yes, it's the historical critical method that lets me know that that's what goes back to the Prophet Muhammad and that's a good thing. But, and it also tells me that the Hadith comes from a later period but you can just base it on a Quran-centric approach and look at the Quran and it's crystal clear. Right here, you can't deal with it. Your entire pre-modern view is based on concubinage. Yeah, again, not telling us anything about sexual restrictions, not telling us anything about gender roles, not telling us anything that's relevant to the topic of the debate. It's just, you wanna make the entire debate about your goofy interpretation of one verse. It's not, we're not even in the slavery section. Like what are you even doing? What about all of these other patriarchal issues? Like why can't you address a single question that I'm putting towards you? So, you know, this is a very disappointing, Javad. I expected you to have some actual respect for history, some of these other historical sources. Like it's very sad, like that the debate is not even on the topic because I guess you didn't understand the topic. Like that's, it's a very simple question. Does Islam, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the Quran endorse restrictions on sexuality, criminalizing homosexuality, criminalizing fornication, mandatory dress for women, answer those questions. Why can't you answer them? Where, show me these rationalists. Okay, fine, rationalists. Where did they say anything contrary to what I'm saying? Did Ibn Sina say anything contrary with these specific issues? Okay, so Daniel is all over the place. He continues the claims that I'm not dealing with the topic, but the topic was sexuality. And what I'm saying is, your pre-modern sexuality was all based on this institution, so you can't deny it. You're the one who insisted on the format because you wanted to make it advantageous to you. But in any case, as far as your question about homosexuality, I don't know if you even know the literature at all. There's not an example in the time of the Prophet of him punishing homosexuals or people engaged in Liwat. It doesn't exist in the literature. This is even according to traditional scholars. It was at a later point in time and it was probably in Isdihad of the early companions. Now as far as punishments for Zina, yes, the societies had those. And we have to decide, as modern people, how we implement that's another step. But what I'm trying to tell you is that your interpretation, the thing that you sell is completely bogus because you're not, you're talking about be historical, you be historical. Your entire thing is about family values. How can you have family values when you believe in sex concubinage, sex harems, and sex trade and all this stuff, and you just wanna avoid that. That has to do with sexuality. That's the basis of your sexuality. So defend that. And yeah, I mean, family values, like do you think my understanding of family values is like leave it to Beaver and like 21st century family values? This is a straw man on your part. I think that having female concubines is part of family values because you have a commitment to the concubine. If she gets pregnant and she has a child, you have responsibilities towards that concubine. You have responsibilities towards that child. You have to keep and maintain those concubines. That is consistent with my understanding of family values, but your entire argument is so bizarre. It's like a straw manning. I don't have this Christian, conservative Christian understanding of family values. It's pure straw manning. And again, gish caliphine because this is not what the debate is about. Also the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, it's not about whether he actually had any had punishment against homosexuals. It's about what he endorsed. What did he endorse and what was his view? And this is represented in the Quran in the verses that I cited along with all of these other religions that are on that time that have the same exact perspective. That is not correct at all. The Quran, you didn't bring any verse that shows to punish homosexuals and the proof that you would have is actually reports. And the reports would say, they didn't even be clear about what the punishment was. They disagreed on it. You had that funny quote where you were the terrible quote where you're talking about bungee jumping. They either said that you should be thrown off a cliff or that you should have a building smashed on you and they disagreed. This was not the Prophet and doesn't go back to the Quran. So that's a bunch of nonsense. And then you mentioned the rights of slave women having a child. That's the Um Walad rule that was instituted by Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph. So you can see that there was a development in the ethic. So that's okay to do, to develop the ethic. That's what the modernist says, the rationalist says that you follow the Quranic ethical trajectory. So if you all want to defend Um Walad rule, then you have to defend the idea that you can have a progressive ethic when it comes to that and better things and fulfill the Quranic ethic in the correct direction. But we'll of course debate slavery itself in the final part of this. Daniel. If verse 4, 16, if two men commit a lewd act, punish them both. There it is in the Quran. So you don't understand the Quran. You don't even understand what the Quran says. But you want to have a Quran-centric view of the Quran. Okay, that's a fancy word for a bunch of BS. So yeah, I mean, I don't know what more to say. Like you don't care about the history. Like the actual historical critical method, actual historians, not propagandists like Javad, they will look at Christianity. They will look at the Byzantines, the Sasanians. They will look at the pre-Islamic Arabs. They will look at their practices as evidence for what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam likely believed and what the early Muslims actually believed. This is what your idol Fred Donner does all the time. He looks at these other religions, like Christianity and Judaism, and he sees what they believe in that particular historical context as evidence of what the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam believed. But you don't want to address that fact because it speaks against your position. If we do that kind of analysis, all of those religions were patriarchal in the way that I am. We're gonna jump into the Q&A. We have just run out of time for the open discussion. We're gonna read through these fast. I wanna let you know, folks, here's how this is gonna work. We have 10 minutes of Q&A at the end of each of these three parts of the debate. We are basically at the end of part one, except this last 10 minutes of Q&A regarding point or part one content. We're gonna do two parts after this, each with 10 minutes of Q&A. We may not have a chance to read all of your questions. I do wanna let you know, we're gonna move fast. Based on how this 10 minutes goes, I'll have a better idea of how many we can get in. First, Muhammad, thanks so much. As in the Quran, God said that the messenger will say, quote, my people took this Quran forsaken, unquote. What do you think this means? Daniel first, then Javad second. I need really short and pithy ones if you're broke. Yeah, it's referring to deviant mortads like Javad. Javad, what are your thoughts? It's actually talking about the community, if we look at that verse, and that's exactly what Daniel has done. He's abandoned the Quran, and unfortunately that's exactly what happened. Like he quoted that verse right now about, and claimed that, oh, that's definitely about homosexuality, even the exegetes didn't say that, but this is the shoddy Islamic scholarship of Daniel, who knows nothing about Islam. This one from Muhammad says, Daniel, just like how people worship money without calling it a deity, where do you draw the line between following the prophet or idolizing slash worship? Well, the prophet, S.A.W., is not a God. He's not omniscient, he's not all merciful. He doesn't have the attributes of God. He's not the creator. So we make a very clear distinction between the creator and the created. And we direct all of our worship and obedience to the creator, Allah. And Muhammad, S.A.W., is a prophet, just like many of the other prophets that were sent to humanity, such as Moses, Abraham, Jesus, peace be upon them all. These are all human beings that are meant to be living guides that we follow. And that's why it's so important to understand what did they actually believe, what did they actually do, as opposed to referring to your intellect and these higher ethical values and trajectory. This is all worship of the self, what Javad is engaged in. This one from Muhammad says, Daniel, Surah 36, Amecca, Surah, God said, the words have been fulfilled on them, so the majority, they say, will not believe. And then it says, Sunnis claim the majority of Mecca believed in the end. Did God not say the truth? No, I think it's referring to, I don't know the verse off the top of my head, but I think it's referring to the majority of humanity and also could be referring to Jinn kind as well. So Jinn is another category that they can choose to believe or not believe. So this is not necessarily referring to people in Mecca. This one comes from Muhammad. Do I get to answer any of these questions? Or not for you? We're not for you. That's okay. So not for you. I do have a challenge. We're trying to fit all these questions in just 30 minutes of Q&A. No problem. This one from Muhammad says eat meat because there's a hadith that says so. But God saying legal to you is the meat of animals in the Quran. And then says quote, goofy gymnastics. I don't think I like a counter example to my point. I think it was targeting you Daniel, but it's hard for me to tell. It's hard to understand. Yeah, we're not debating eating meat, but I did use the example of interpreting the language of the Quran. Like the Quran says do not kill. So assuming that there wasn't any other verse in the Quran about slaughtering meat and eating meat. Assume that there is no other verse. The verse just says do not kill. How would we interpret that verse? So without having a grounding in the actual beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the earliest Muslims, we wouldn't be able to understand does that do not kill mean do not kill humans and do not kill animals and do not kill pests like roaches and bugs that come in your house don't kill anything. Is that what it means? Or does it mean do not kill humans? You have to have those beliefs and norms of the speaker of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to understand the meaning of the verse. Otherwise you cannot properly understand it. You can get some meaning, but you have this radical subjectivism that can creep in. This one from Yahshua to King says, will Daniel debate Javad on the topic of child marriage alone? We can talk about other debates. Look at how this debate is going. The guy is all over the place. This one coming in from, they had no username, they say Javad. I don't know what all these words mean. So if this is an insult, forgive me. They say, I know you're a... Probably is. Munafik? M-U-N-A-F-I. It's one of... It means hypocrite. This is what Daniel preaches and teaches, and so you call people munafik and murthud, but yeah, that's what it is. Okay, so they say that and then they say, and Allah has exposed y'all in surah al taba. So clearly it's funny watching you move and setting off all the red flags of the munafikin. They say, I just wanna say no matter how much the Washington think tanks pay you, it won't help you in the end. Ad-ham and M-attacks as is standard of this type of people. I mean, we're in a debate of intellect, like even whatever we may have had before, this is the time to be decent. This is the time to talk to your interlocutor with a decent level of minimal decency. And I think we can continue to do that. We don't have to go down this. We don't have to go down this. This one coming in from Thunderstorm says... I didn't accuse you of supporting pedorasty. They say great dessert, dessert, let's see. Like the food? I'm just confused. They say, this one says, yeah, no problem. Just please don't forget to read it out. So another calling you a zindik. Is this bad? Yeah, this is all bad. These are his fans in cells who love to use these kind of words. Oh, respect in cell. That's an insult. This is a respectful debate, Javad. I agree tonight, but we're gonna say so the... You're right, Daniel. So that Javad can hear it. They say much appreciated. Okay, then XXWLZXX says, I see James wearing a good suit. So thanks for your kind words. Legos says, James, you're the goat of moderators. That's kind. I wanna say the debaters are the lifeblood of the channel. Check out Javad's and Daniel's links right now, folks. And if you're listening to the other Modern Native Ape podcast, because a lot of people listen to the podcast instead of the YouTube, you can find our guest links in the description box there. You can find their Twitter, for example, for Javad and his YouTube. And then Daniel, you can find his YouTube. Muhammad says, Daniel, you call Javad an apostate. Daniel, you associate things to God. You associate the accounts of Abu Hurayyar and others to revelation. And then they say shirk. Everything that I'm citing is from the Quran. I actually care about the beliefs and the norms of the Prophet SAW and the actual history of the early Muslims. I actually care about that. I wish I could say the same about my opponent, but I can't. So how is this shirk? I care about the Quran. Do you place the hadith over the Quran? Do you believe that the Sunnah abrogates the Quran? I just follow what the Quran says. And the Quran says, follow the Quran and follow the Prophet SAW. Obey the messenger. Obey the, Obey Allah and obey the messenger. That's what I'm holding on. And who are then obey those who are an authority over you then? There are so many verses. Obey God and obey the messenger and obey those in authority amongst you. Again, so does that Q&A? You're not interrogating me. This one, I do have to be sure that we get to this. Zaid Barakat says, Javad, can you read the Quran in Arabic? Of course I can. I've studied Arabic for the last decade. Josh says, Daniel, you were using Bruce Rind as a source for justifying child marriage who himself argued that pedorasty was normalized, total hypocrite. No, Bruce Rind, first of all, you can cite an academic source without saying that everything in that source is correct. You know, in this debate, I'm going to cite Fred Donner. I don't think everything that Fred Donner has said is correct. I think most of it is trashed. But Bruce Rind didn't cite any kind of data, any kind of statistics, any kind of actual evidence that pedorasty was normalized. When you say normalized, it means that it's being practiced everywhere and no one has a problem with it. In reality, you have the Islamic orthodox scholars constantly denouncing that kind of behavior and that kind of practice. The only historical evidence that people cite are these love poets poetry. That's not correct. And that love poetry, Donner, love poetry. Have you read? Have you read? Don't interrupt. We're not interested in your answer. Yes, I have. Yes, I have. Don't interrupt. That's not correct. Yes, it is true. Don't interrupt. Don't interrupt. Yeah, so it's like citing Tupac wrapping about murder and drug dealing and thinking that that represents American ideals. Like this is nonsense. Oh, I'm in murdering and selling drugs is normalized because look, Tupac and Biggie are rapping about it. Like that's basically the argument from Bruce Rind and others. This one coming in from Muhammad says Daniel. We got that one. This one from JN. Thanks for your kind words. This thanks, James, for giving Muslims a platform. Of course, you hope you feel welcome, folks. Whether you be Atheist, Muslim, Christian, you name it, we're glad you're here. Holy humanist, Narayakan, Daniel's old friend, says his name is Ridvan slash apostate prophet. At least have enough decorum to say it right. Your names aren't immune to mockery. Shame on both of you. Did both of you make fun of apostate prophet? I thought it was just Daniel it. Did you do them all for a apostate prophet? I don't think I did, but if I did, it was accidental. I didn't, I would never call them. I think they call them A-posts or something. I don't believe in doing that at all. So if that was the case, I apologize. I meant to call them AP. That's what I thought I called them. He's got thick skin. Because using nicknames like that is un-choronic. So I apologize if that was the case. This one from JN. What about Abu Lahab? What about Abu Lahab? The nickname for the uncle of the prophet. That's a nickname to mock him for going into the fire. How about that, Javad? Have you memorized that surah of the Quran? Or you're not done with this surah? Have you memorized that surah of the Quran? So you think that... Let's keep moving. Yeah, sure. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, this is coming in front. I want to give you, I'll give you a chance, really quick, because I mean, but I've got to tell you, we're gonna be here so late, you guys. Wait, is 30 minute Q&A for each section? It's a 10 minute. Yeah, so we're basically at the end of this one right now. I hate to do that. But so let me just be sure I've got all the ones in a row, at least. Okay, we got that one. Okay, so folks, I am going to read more questions. So we didn't get to all the questions for this particular topic. So I gotta give you a heads up, folks. From here on, caution, if you send in a question, we may not get to read it. And that includes super chats. I just want to let you know that we're gonna try to, but we do have limited Q&A, because we want to get the, we want to make sure the speakers get enough time for their dialogue and speeches. We're gonna jump into the next section of the debate. Oh, are we already... Sorry, I wasn't... Or now you're mute. Are you on mute? Oh, sorry about that. No problem. So what are we doing next? I apologize. Next up is part two. So the way this is planned as of right now, just to give you guys a heads up. So folks, you've seen the first third of the debate. How have we been here for three hours? Was it really just that tech meltdown? We started a little bit late too, but I know that I've stuck to the format. We maybe went like two minutes over for the Q&A, but I am gonna let you know, folks. We're gonna jump into the second part. Are you guys okay with doing the second part, running through the entire second part, and then taking a break before the final part? Which by that I mean a 10 minute break. Okay, you guys got a lot of endurance. This is going to be, oh, it's good. This is actually, so we don't have the 20 minute openings. That's right. This is just 10 minute openings. So 10 minute opening from Javad, then wanna let you know, folks, for part two, we're of course gonna have the same 10 minute opening from Daniel, then five minute rebuttals from each, then 45, maybe even 40 minutes of open dialogue, then 10 minutes of Q&A, then we'll take a short break and go to our final part three. So Javad, thanks very much. The floor is all yours for that 10 minute opening. And if I could get everyone on mute, please, thank you. Sure. All right, I'm just gonna share my screen. Please don't start my time until I begin. Thank you. All right, so the idea is very simple. In the, oh, sorry, just one second. This screen is showing, okay. All right, now please, thank you. All right, so the idea is very simple. The Quran endorses free will. God does not force humans to believe, so you should not force them to believe either. Unfortunately, the Sunni tradition went in the other direction and went into complete fatalism and denied free will. And it also denied secondary causality, which is honestly very silly. But we Islamic rationalists argue that it is our unique gift of intellect from which our free will stems that differentiates us from the animals. It is what makes us humans. Since this world is a place of trial and affliction for humankind, any forceful imposition or oppression for the sake of faith annulles the meaning of this divine test. Daniel believes in spreading Islam, the Islamic system through jihad. And he does not think that Islam respects freedom of religion. And he asks this really weird question. He says, if we demand as a matter of principle that worldly rulers tolerate every and all beliefs equally, then why wouldn't we demand that of God as well? In fact, he's arguing directly against the Quran, which says that God granted human beings respite until the day of judgment and that then he will judge them at that time, but until then they are free to disbelieve. The Quran says it is the truth from your Lord. So whosoever will let him believe and whosoever will let him disbelieve. Verily, we God, not Daniel, we God have prepared for the wrongdoers of fire. So God will deal with the disbelievers. Your duty is only to convey. If they turn away, then your duty is only to convey and ours is the reckoning. Yours is only to proclaim and ours is the reckoning. Bear them patiently and take leave of them in a beautiful manner. Leave to me the deniers, be gentle with them. Truly with us are the fetters and hellfire. There are approximately 200 verses that talk about this kind of religious freedom that your job is only to convey the message. And the Quran says, had I had your Lord willed, all those who are on earth would have believed altogether. Would you then compel men till they become believers? The Quran says that God himself could have made you all one religious community, but he willed otherwise. You are not their guardian. You are not a dictator over them. What whosoever wishes, let him pursue the way unto his Lord and whoever is astray cannot harm you. This is very important. It's whoever is astray, say verily, I am but a warner. Whosoever is astray is only astray to his own loss. He won't hurt anyone else. And this is repeated in the Quran. Daniel doesn't agree with this. Daniel, he says, because he's talking about those pre-modern cultures that the Quran is trying to reform, he's saying religion is a source of order and cohesion. And those who leave the religion, they pose a major threat to that social order and that social cohesion. Every society punishes defectors, often with death. This is actually arguing against the Quran. It's agreeing with the Quraishi idolater pagans who believe and accuse the prophet of upsetting social cohesion and daring to apostatize from the pagan faith. And so they actually did try to kill him and persecute his believers. So that's the kind of ethic that Daniel agrees with. In fact, the Quran goes against this and criticizes the Quraish pagans and justifies jihad in defense of religious freedom. Permission to fight is granted to those who were fought who were expelled from their homes without right only for saying our Lord is God. The next verse says, were it not for God's repelling people, some by means of others, then monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques wherein God's name is mentioned much would have been destroyed. The Quran is saying to defend religious freedom and worship. And then it says here that God only tells you to fight those who fight you on account of your religion and expel you from your homes. That's because religious persecution is greater than killing. And it says they will not cease to fight you until they make you renounce your religion. It's criticizing them for not allowing them to leave the religion of the idolaters. And the Quran says fight them until there is no religious persecution and your religion is for God. And it repeats this. In fact, the Quran says unto you, your religion and unto me, my religion. Daniel, if I said this and he didn't see this in the Quran, he said, oh, this is something very modern and liberal. In fact, the Quran says, let there be no compulsion in religion. The truth stands out clear from error. Here's a historical critical scholar, Professor Patricia Krona, who has a great article on this. She says, here it is explicitly ikrah or coercion by humans as distinct from God which is being rejected. This is the seemingly obvious reading of the verse. No textual acrobatics. No goofy stuff that Daniel is talking about. In fact, religious liberty, she argues, is not a modern liberal invention. In fact, church fathers such as Tertullian and Lactantius agreed with this idea that you can't force religion. It was only after Constantine converted and then Theodosius the first came and they had power. Then they started compelling people to believe. And interestingly enough, the medieval exigents, where did they borrow from? They borrowed the same ideas to justify force conversion. In fact, the jurists were well aware of Patricia Krona writes that the verse could be read as a universal grant of tolerance incompatible with the duty to execute apostates and wage jihad against non-Muslims. So what did they do? They do what they always do. Remember those bots that Daniel was talking about? They just said it was abrogated and canceled it out because this was their guiding principle. The principle is that every chronic verse that opposes the opinion of our scholars, then it is taken to be abrogated or reinterpreted. And we saw this with the verse that I quoted about, you have to marry your sex slave. It's not anything as a sex slave, but anyways. So in the Quran, religion is a set of beliefs about a single universal God freely chosen by the individual. Of course, now initially both Christianity and Islam began as freely chosen systems of belief. But once Christianity and Islam became the official state religion of empire, religion now performed the function of nationality. Under those circumstances, religious freedom became undesirable. Patricia Krona writes, in short, there cannot be religious freedom where the political empire is based on religion. This was why the medieval agitites had to interpret the no compulsion verse by recourse to far-fetched interpretations. This is the people who are doing acrobatics. And what did they do? They used their battering ram of abrogation. They said that the verse was abrogated and that the prophet was commanded to use another verse to abrogate it. In fact, those who said, they said either it's abrogated or we reinterpret it. We neutralize it, but that's the strategy that they used. And they of course superimpose this hadith, which is a hadith that says to go fight people until they become Muslim, which effectively inverts the Quran. It says that you actually fight people to coerce them, which is the opposite of what the Quran is saying. As far as apostasy is concerned, leaving believers going back to paganism to actually eight verses on this, and none of them say any temporal punishments are mentioned. In fact, it just says the same thing that God will punish them supernaturally, not human beings. Whosoever turns back on his heels will not harm God in the least. It's the same thing that you disbelieving does not harm anyone, but yourself. It will not harm God in the least. This is repeated repeatedly in all of these verses. Upon them shall be the wrath of God, but no legal punishment. There is no doubt that in the hereafter, they are the losers. And in fact, the verses say that they will die naturally. Whosoever among you renounces his religion and dies as a disbeliever. Their deeds will come to naught. So this verse points to an apostate's natural death as opposed to his or her execution or killing. And in fact, the Quran says that repentance is better. It's very mild. If they repent, it would be better for them. But if they turn away, God will punish them in the next life. The Quran leaves open, except those who repent after that, that apostasy and make amends for truly God is forgiving, merciful. This wouldn't make sense if you had to execute apostates. In fact, there are verses that talk about people who repeatedly apostatized, and the Quran mentions no legal punishment against them. Again, simply just repent and make amends. There are multiple instances of apostasy, even in the traditional sources, and it shows that the prophet did not punish them. In fact, here's a medieval Islamic scholar who says it is not mentioned in any of the well-known writings that the prophet ever killed an apostate. In fact, Imam Shafa, he said, some people believed then committed apostasy, then professed belief again, however, the messenger of God did not put them to death. So then, if the prophet did never punish people for apostasy, when did the apostasy law emerge? It was during the reign of Caliph Abu Bakr in which the wars of apostasy took place, and these weren't really technically apostates. They were convicted of what was called political treason, and that's when this first precedent was set. And Professor Christian Sauner agrees with it that this is the first precedent for this during the apostasy wars. Nonetheless, there still wasn't a fixed legal punishment. Professor Michael Penn, who he selectively quotes, actually shows that there was no fixed capital punishment at this time for apostasy in the first century of Islam. And it was actually the laws of apostasy and blasphemy were actually produced during the Abbasid period and later back projected onto the distant past. And in fact, blasphemy came with the so-called historically spurious pact of rumor. And I wonder if Daniel will agree with any of these conditions that non-Muslims are supposed to deal with. No new churches forbidden to publicly display their religion, wear distinctive clothing, like Jews wearing yellow turbans. I wonder if he's gonna defend all of this. As far as blasphemy, the Quran says that all messengers were mocked before you, so be patient. God will deal with the blasphemers. You don't need to deal with them. Instead, believers are told to take to pardoning, turn away from the ignorant, and should temptation from Satan provoke you to respond aggressively, seek refuge in God and respond to people with peace, forbear them and say peace, pardon them and forbear, forgive. So we, our job is just to invite to God's way with wisdom and beautiful preaching and to be patient. So Islamic modernists revere the Quran more because we follow it as clear scripture whereas traditionalists abrogate or change its meaning using their sects hadith, which talk about apostasy laws. And these were obviously coming from a later period. So my religion is the pious and ethical Islam of the Quran and the prophet, which is affirmed voluntarily by the heart and conscious of the true believer, spread by beautiful preaching and good example. Whereas Daniel's religion agrees with the Quraishi idolaters who forbade freedom of religion and persecuted the prophet. Daniel's view agrees with the imperial religion which favors authoritarianism and utility over godliness and piety, thus favoring caliphate dictatorships, slaving empires, concubinage, sex harems, aggressive imperial warfare and state enforced belief. My specific claim for Daniel to refute is on religious freedom, the Quran allows the freedom to choose or leave a religion and apostasy laws are therefore anti-choronic. And Daniel will reply, we follow that what you found our forefathers doing. Can you find anyone in the 1400s, blah, blah, blah. Tradition, tradition, tradition. The Quran says, follow what God has sent down. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening. We are going to kick it over to Daniel for his opening as well for this second- I can't hear anything. James, we can't hear you. I forgot to unmute myself on Zoom. Do want to say, folks, couple of things housekeeping wise, if you haven't already, consider checking out our podcast at Modern Day Debate. Look us up on your favorite podcast app right now. You can find Modern Day Debate whether it be on Spotify, Apple Podcast, you name it. With that, we're going to kick it over to Daniel for his opening. Thanks very much, Daniel. The floor is all yours. Do the Quran and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorse legal restrictions on the religious practice of non-Muslims? Do we actually think that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam instituted religious freedom when he came to power? This is obviously absurd. Religious freedom is defined in the US Constitution as, quote, government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Obviously the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam established Islam as the law of the land. No Western academic has ever denied this. Establishing Islam as the law of the land in and of itself is discriminatory against other religions. So case closed, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was clearly discriminatory and violated religious freedom simply by establishing Islam as the law of the land. Debate over. But let's steelman the liberal position and say, well, maybe truly violating religious freedom is not about establishment, but it's about prohibiting the free exercise thereof by putting discriminatory restrictions on non-Muslims or by punishing apostasy and blasphemy. Liberal reformists claim the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did not endorse these things. So let's check the evidence. Consider Muslim treatment of the Mushriqeen, i.e. the polytheist Arabs. The Quran denounces the Mushriqeen and commands the Muslims to fight and subjugate them. The starkest example of this subjugation is in verses 9, 17 and 18, which prohibit the idolaters from managing Mecca and Kaaba and the Kaaba. This is a major restriction on the religious freedom of the Mushriqeen because Mecca was their holy city and the Kaaba was their holiest shrine. The Quran and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam command the forceful seizure of these polytheistic shrines and destruction of their idols. We know this happened because the Quran mentions it and the hadith elaborate, but we also have no record of polytheistic religions being practiced in Mecca or the Arabian Peninsula more broadly after the Islamic conquest in the time of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Polytheism abruptly stopped right after Muslims took over. Why would this be the case if the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was a pluralist who respected religious freedom? Now let's add biology and quantitative social science. Cognitive science says that humans intuitively believe in in-groups and out-groups. From childhood, we all instinctively divide the world into groups defined by shared blood, culture or religion. This biologically rooted in-group loyalty explains why groups tend to subjugate out-groups whether through warfare, discriminatory laws, slavery, et cetera. Since hunter-gatherer times up to the present, humans have banded together along lines of race or religion or bloodlines or culture and this biologically rooted in-group loyalty explains why groups tend to subjugate out-groups through warfare, discriminatory laws, slavery, et cetera. Since hunter-gatherer times up to the present, humans have banded together along lines of race or religion in order to fight out-groups for power and resources. In hunter-gatherer societies, the conquerors just killed the defeated group but in pastoral and agricultural societies, they have much larger populations and thus fight larger scale wars. Rather than just kill the defeated, the conquerors extract economic benefits from the defeated usually through tribute payments but sometimes through slavery and concubinage. These policies are obviously discriminatory and are meant to prevent the defeated group from gaining power and eventually becoming strong enough to overthrow the conquerors. This is a universal pattern in human civilization which is why the discrimination against religious out-groups that we find in Islam is not the novel invention of intolerant Muslims a hundred years after the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. It's a biologically rooted instinct that the Quran and the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorse. In the Quran, verse 929, Fight against those who do not believe in Allah or the last day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the scripture. Fight until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled. Here, the Quran endorses the in-group fighting the out-group until the out-group is subjected to discriminatory laws that force them to pay the jizyah tribute and assume a subjugated demi-status. This is the biological basis for religious discrimination against non-Muslims what about punishing apostasy and blasphemy? These practices in traditional Islam also have a biological basis. Part of the in-group loyalty that we have already discussed is the intuition that we should protect our in-group from destruction. This means protecting our in-group from physical attacks but also protecting our shared way of life. This has been studied in psychological research on conformity. From childhood, humans intuitively believe that they and other group members should conform to the group's distinctive way of life. Humans naturally get angry and shun or attack those who violate the group's shared lifestyle and rebel. In-group conformity is an extremely powerful biological instinct that has been manifested throughout human societies in the form of blasphemy and apostasy laws. When people blaspheme or apostatize this poses a serious threat to the in-group. The biological instinct is to deter such threats by instituting legal punishments. Now let's look at these legal punishments in late antique religions. In the Bible, Leviticus 24-16 prescribes the death penalty for blasphemy. Daniel 3-29 also declares universal prohibition against blasphemy with severe consequences. Rabbinic Judaism imposes the death penalty for blasphemers but if the Jewish authorities cannot impose the death penalty then the blasphemer is expelled from the community. The Greco-Roman religion was polytheistic yet still had blasphemy laws. This is why the Greeks executed Socrates because he was discouraging people from worshiping their gods. The Romans subordinated the Jews and destroyed the second temple forcing them to pay the tribute tax. They also executed Christians for refusing to worship their gods. Christianity is also famous for punishing blasphemy and apostasy as well as discriminating against non-Christians. This is found in early Byzantine Christian law codes such as the Code of Theodoses and Justinian which barred heretics and pagans from having any places of worship and barred Jews from public worship proselytization and holding positions of high status. Though they were allowed to have their own places of worship. Even Zoroastrians persecuted non-Zoroastrians in order to maintain political dominance. This is reflected in the famous execution of Mani, the founder of Manichean religion. They also persecuted Jews and Christians. What about the pre-Islamic Arabs? They tortured and killed Muslims for renouncing their gods. The Quran mentions the persecution polytheists inflicted on Muslims such as verse 2, 2, 1, 7 and 2240. The religious persecution was so severe that the Muslims had to flee to Abyssinia and eventually to Medina. Now contemporaneous non-Muslim accounts. Christians writing in the mid-7th century described Muslims as invading, plundering, imposing jizya and even implementing the death penalty. In a 687 text, John Barr Pankiah says the Arabs quote inflicted the death penalty on anyone who acted brazenly against Islamic law. Thomas the Presbyter wrote in 640 about the Arabs ravaging entire regions in Syria where Jews and Christians resided. Zebios the bishop mentioned similar things in a text from 660. The Huzestan chronicles describe how the Muslims invading Persia killed bishops, priests and deacons in church. But not all the non-Muslim accounts mentioned bloodshed. Some of the accounts say that the Muslims supported the churches. In the letters of Bishop Isha'yad from the year 650, the author mentions how the Muslims did not force the Christians to abandon their faith. Now liberal reformists will point to this and say, see, that's religious pluralism. But if you read the rest of the text, it says that the Muslims gave the Christians a choice. They could remain Christian but pay the Muslims half their possessions as tribute or they could keep all their possessions but convert to Islam. Another text is attributed to Isaac of Ricodi written in 689 says that the Muslim governor of Egypt restored churches and even allowed one new church to be built. So this is evidence of religious pluralism, right? Well, the same text mentions that the governor also ordered the breaking of all the crosses in Egypt and putting notices on all the church doors, denying the Trinity and declaring that Muhammad soy sim is the great messenger. Another chronicle from as early as 650 from a Coptic Christian describes how the yoke laid on Egyptians by the Muslims was heavier than what the Pharaoh laid upon Israel. The chronicle mentions how Amr Ibn al-Ass the Sahabis actually preserved the churches but he also exacted taxes and many Christians either fled or apostatized and became Muslims. There are many early non-Muslim accounts and they all have similar message. Muslims are conquering lands, they're levying tribute taxes, they're breaking crosses, they're attacking houses of worship and treating non-Muslims as a second class out group. Now, the Christians may have greatly exaggerated details for polemical purposes, I grant that, but it would be bizarre to read all these accounts and think that they somehow represent religious pluralism. What they actually represent is the reality of one religious group in competition with other religious groups and engaging in warfare to seize power seize power and resources while keeping the conquered people subjugated. Finally, let's consider archaeology after the Islamic conquest of the Arabian Peninsula. We see no more rock inscriptions with polytheistic names or even Jewish or Christian names. If early Islam was this bastion of pluralism, why do we find only Muslims carving religiously inscriptions from that time period but no pagans, Jews or Christians? Also significant is the Dome of the Rock built in 692. The Muslims deliberately built it on the Temple Mount which was considered holy by Jews and Christians to add insult to injury. The Muslims added a Quranic inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock that denounced the Trinity. Not exactly a gesture of good interfaith goodwill. A final example of religious intolerance were the apostasy wars of the first Caliph Abu Bakh. These wars are verified authentic by historians including Fred Donner. The fact that apostates were attacked and killed in these wars is a major historical evidence against the religious freedom claim from reformists. So do I get my five minute rebuttal now, James? Yes, one minute I was just unmuting myself because I got myself unmuted on both OBS and then Zoom now. Want to say folks, we're gonna kick it over to five or four or five minutes for Javad's rebuttal as well as if you haven't yet, we appreciate it. Hit that like button. Thanks so much for your support, folks. Javad, the floor is all yours. And can you give me a one minute warning please? Sure. Okay, thank you so much. So Daniel tries to stack the cards in debate by trying to give me as extreme a position as possible whereas my, so he wanted me to defend, be feminist and say completely that patriarchy is always bad all the time. And now he wants me to say that I need to endorse full religious liberty, modern liberal as modern liberals would have. Obviously that would be a historical to do that. But what I am doing is I'm criticizing the medieval traditional Islamic view which Daniel holds and saying that that doesn't match up with the Quranic ethic that the Prophet Muhammad brought. And I'm being extremely specific on that. And that's about religious freedom when it comes to wanting to convert to another faith. What I'm saying is that there is no apostasy law in the Quran and in fact, it shows that you can even die as an apostate because it says that you should repent. So Daniel cannot prove that apostasy is punished in the Quran because it says the exact opposite and that's what he's trying to go away from. Instead what Daniel does is he relies on, this is what the Romans did, this is what the Sassanids did, oh, be historical as if the Quran can't elevate the ethic. That's a very secular, atheistic kind of idea. The Prophet want, even from a historian's perspective, the Prophet wanted religious freedom because he was denied religious freedom. Once Muslims came into power, just like Constantine came to power, all of a sudden the discourse shifted. So because Muslims had empire, they suddenly shifted when it came to that and that's unfortunate. Now, he's being a historical again by claiming that the Prophet established Islam as the law of the land. No historian, serious historian would say that. Instead, as Nikolai Sinai has said in his article very recently as many other in Juan Colas and many scholars have said this, the idea that the Prophet was some sort of Supreme King or Emperor is a later back projection. Instead, he was considered, he had like a Senator-like status. He was the leader of his Banu Hashim tribe and they had to listen to him. But the other tribes did not have to listen to him and we know that because when he wanted people to free slaves, he had to actually negotiate with them and tell them and bribe them to free the slaves and we'll talk about that in the next section. So the fact is that this is a historical. Now, the other thing is, so what I am arguing specifically is that the Quran does not punish apostasy and he needs to prove that. Now he used the verse 929 which is actually what Islamophobes always do and the reason why Islamophobes use this is because literally every single other verse when it comes to religious freedom and warfare always has mitigating verses right next to it. And in fact, Patricia Cona noticed this and said, quote, only the jizya verse 929 seems to endorse war of aggression at first sight. But if read as a continuation of the rest of this run, 9-1 through 23, however, it would be concerned with the same oath breaking polytheists as the sword verse. In other words, you have to read the Quran collectively. Now, if you read the Quran holistically, you will see and we'll talk about this in the third part of the debate. The Quran never allows wars of aggression. It always says self-defense only. Are we to presuppose that only one verse we pick out and we dump all the hundreds of other verses or do we reconcile the verse and say this is obviously talking about people that you were at war with and even the exegesis says it's about the Byzantines and it was talking about, and the Byzantines, we know attacked and we're intent on attacking the believers and that's what that verse is talking about. So you can't just take one verse and that's the textual acrobatics that we see that the medieval exeges do. They allow even half a little bit of a verse to abrogate dozens and dozens and dozens of verses. And so it's actually the other side that is doing the textual acrobatics because again, he cannot prove that apostasy law is in the Quran. One minute warning, one minute warning. Oh, okay. So wow, I ended up early on time. Now, he did mention, so the Arabian pagans, he says that they suddenly converted to Islam. That is not correct. Historians now say that's a later back projection and in fact, this is similar to in the Bible how it shows that all of the Canaanites were wiped out. It's a similar thing that's going on in the Islamic tradition, but suddenly we don't apply the same standard, right? But in any case, it was actually a very gradual shift from paganism to Islam and that's what the tradition was trying to paste plaster over, which is why it portrayed it that way. But if you look at the sources, it doesn't make any sense. Then he also cited all of these sources very inconsistently. He's looking at like Michael Penn's work and all this kind of stuff and he's just quoting it selectively. I'd rather take Michael Penn's own assessment of the sources, which actually shows a very much more balanced assessment of the sources and shows that actually there's a lot to show that the tradition actually got it wrong and there was ecumenical stuff going on, but that's not the debate we're having today. That was the debate I had with Shadi El-Masri. We'll kick it over to Daniel for his five minute rebuttal as well. Thanks very much, Daniel. The floor is all yours. Okay. So conveniently Javad ignores the verse that I cited about Allah saying that the idolaters cannot manage the Kaaba, they cannot manage the Mecca. So this is a major violation of religious freedom. He needs to answer like, did the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorse establishing Islam as the law of the land, as the official religion of the state? Javad, I'm asking you this question specifically. Let's see if you can answer a very clear question. Do you think that any state can establish Islam as the law of the land, as the official religion? If you do think that that's a violation of religious freedom, that's a violation of secularism. Do you believe in secularism, this absolute secularism? And are you really claiming that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam 1400 years ago advocated the secularism that we find in the constitution? Be a real historian, stop being a propagandist and answer these historical questions. Okay. And then do you also endorse, like do you think that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorse laws favoring Islam at the expense of others? Explain that, explain all of these historical sources that say that the Muslims were taking Jizya, that they were exacting taxes, that the Sahaba in the time of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and immediately after are taking Jizya, explain these. Now, yeah, I agree. It's not a contradiction to the traditional narrative that Muslims can cooperate with Christians and actually help them in certain cases and ally with them in certain cases. That's not against the traditional perspective. So if you wanna cite Michael Penn for example, yeah, I agree. There are those examples in the historical record as well, but that does not contradict, that's not a problem for the traditional perspective. What is a problem for your liberal perspective are these Muslims from the earliest period right in the time of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and thereafter who are taking over the Kaaba, taking over Mecca, who are imposing Jizya, that is a problem for your interpretation. So you're citing Hadith very selectively, as usual, you wanna cite Hadith about apostasy, your cherry picking. What about the Hadith that say to kill the person who changes his religion? That is a Sahih Hadith. Why do you, so again, this is the cherry picking that you have been engaged in. And then, I mean, how hilarious, like this is a real meme-able moment. You think the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was like a senator? Like you are really a morta. Like you are a shameless morta to even think about uttering such a blasphemous statement about the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Like you really, I mean, you're so far away from Islam, maybe you need to think about like what you really think, what you understand about the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Because if you think that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was a senator or who is akin to a senator, like people have to go and ask, he has to go and ask people's permission, like a senator would. Like this is such a blasphemous view and it's so insulting. Like this is, I haven't even seen some Islamophobes say make a comment like this. And maybe it has something to do with your advisor, Juan Cole, that you always like to praise and brown nose. Juan Cole says in his book that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was like Martin Luther King. That the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam was like this, you know, proponent of multicultural diversity and gender diversity and religious pluralism. This is like what your advisor says, also completely devoid of any historical knowledge. Look at what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did in Mecca. What is Fet Mecca all about? Like explain that or do you deny it? Do you deny the Quran? Because the Quran is explicitly referring to taking over the holy shrine and the holy precincts of the polytheists, of the Mushriki. So explain that. Like how is that conformant with religious freedom? How is that like being a senator or like being like Martin Luther King? Like this is a joke. This is all revisionism. You shouldn't call yourself an academic. You shouldn't call yourself a historian. You're a propagandist and you only use historical critical method for your very limited goal of denying these texts. Okay, fine, but in this debate, have I rested my entire argument on Hadith or on Tafsir or of these other texts? I haven't. So why do you keep bringing them up? Why do you keep making that the point of the debate? I'm looking at the history. I'm looking at the sources that you supposedly should be looking at as an academic historian. I'm basically debunking your entire career, Javad, because I'm actually debating you on your own turf. I'm debating you with the historical critical method. I'm debating you with the historical resources and you just want to avoid that and start talking about this ridiculous, gish galloping, mental gymnastics. You go on and on and on about like these verses with your interpretation that I can't follow and I doubt anyone else is following what you're saying about, you know, these chronic verses. Like such a bizarre argument. So I am not impressed, unfortunately, with your performance, Javad. James, do I get my one minutes now or how are we doing this? I'm muting myself. What was the question? One minute? Why do you get one minute? That was a rebuttal, so we get open discussion or do you want to break? Oh, I was saying that we go to open discussion, but I don't think that we can do that without doing how we did last time with a minute each. I see. Oh yeah. So that we don't talk over each other. I'm okay with doing it two minutes each, but it's up to you, Daniel. Do you want one minute or two minutes? One minute. Let's split it. Let's do a minute and a half. One minute, come on, it's open discussion. Why can't you discuss? Two minutes is a lecture hour. We don't need this. Just respond, respond to the points. It's fine. I'll let James decide. That's fine, I'll go with what James. Why don't we split the difference? We'll do, I think it was it. Javad wanted two minutes, Daniel. You want one minute. We'll do one and a half minutes. Go ahead. Is it making me work really hard tonight? All right, here we go. Okay, so are we going now or are we breaking? I didn't know. We're going right now and I've got the timer. I'm going to have one timer that's got the 45 minutes and then I'm using my phone for the one and a half minute limits. Okay, great, thank you so much. So it's unfortunate that Daniel continuously does ad hominem attacks and that's what you do when you run out of intellectual argument. He also tries to mis-portray me as if I'm trying to be disrespectful to the prophet. When I was saying that he was like a senator, I didn't mean that he was literally a senator. In fact, what I actually meant to say, he was like an episcopal figure. That was the word that just wasn't coming to my tongue. That's the word that Nicolai Sinai writes. So he was a religious holy figure who had control over his Banu Hashem tribe and he had to use, he was a prophet of persuasion and a prophet of love. That's how he convinced people to follow him. So he wasn't an emperor as it was later portrayed. They back projected him as a caliph, which he was not. Now Daniel is coming to the wrong debate because he's trying to make it out. Again, I told him I'm not a philosophical liberal. I'm actually a post liberal. So I don't need to show that secularism existed in the time of the prophet. All I have to show is that the pre-modern tradition got it wrong and that the pre-modern tradition didn't acknowledge that the Quran acknowledges freedom of religious belief and doesn't have an apostasy wall. That's the part that Daniel has to rebut and he can't do that so he has to go to all these other things and then claim Gish Gallup. As far as the public space, you're actually right. That, sorry, the part about the Kaaba, that is correct. The prophet did clear out, it did bar them from that because that was considered a public space and you're right, that does create attention for somebody who's trying to advocate for pure secularism. But what I am arguing is that the Quran endorses religious freedom to convert out of your faith and that is the argument. So he has to show that because I'm trying to criticize the pre-modern tradition. I'm not trying to defend secular liberalism. I'm a post liberal. The other thing is, I would point to the constitution of Medina. The constitution of Medina shows a bilateral relationship that the prophet enacted between people and so between people of different religions. All right, it is time. Go ahead, Daniel. So do you think that the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam when he's conquering Mecca and destroying all their idols and he's preventing the Mushri Keen from establishing like their rituals and their prayer in Mecca, like this is like a senator. Like is this like Martin Luther King marching as Juan Cole, your advisor puts it like, please answer this question. Are you even familiar with your advisor's work where he compares the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to MLK and he compares the conquest of Mecca to like an MLK march? Like please, tell me if you agree with that because I wanna see what kind of historian you really are, Javad. Also, the Kaaba is a public place. He cleared the idols because he's trying to make a public place. The Kaaba is not a public place, dude. Do you even know what the Kaaba is? You know what happens in Mashal Haram? You think that's a public place that anyone can go and do whatever? Like this is a joke. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what else to say. This is embarrassing. Could you get over to Javad? All right, so again, these are not arguments when you call a joke, question your, this kind of had hominem attacks. But in any case, first of all, what I would say is the historians actually questioned the picture that the traditional narrative portrays about the Arabian pagans being these crass idolaters. And they even questioned whether there were idols present in that time. So that's the first point. We need to understand that. The second point is that what Juan Cole said is he used the word peaceful cavalcade is what he used. And that is correct that there wasn't bloodshed and fighting and he didn't enslave the population of Mecca like Daniel would want. He didn't rape the girls as Daniel would want and said he granted a blanket amnesty to the people of Mecca, which showed the mercy of our prophet. And also, again, there's no proof in the Quran which I would repeat that you could force your belief onto anybody. And as far as he didn't actually, Juan Cole said it more resembling. He didn't actually say that it is exactly that, okay? And Professor Juan Cole is a well-established historian, tenured, respected, unlike you who has no specialty, but actually that's a personal attack I brought. I take that back. Okay, so in any case, I don't know what else I need to rebut. Okay, that's fine. I just would just say that where is your Quranic evidence for apostasy law? You can't find it, so you need to go to something else. We'll kick it over to Daniel. Once I just want to remind you folks in the chat, I don't think we're going to have time for any more questions. I'm sorry about that. So please just keep in mind that if you submitted a question, whether it be as a normal chat or a super chat, I don't think we're going to have enough time. We just have limited Q and A tonight. Go ahead, Daniel. Yeah, there is proof of imposing your religion on others. I cited it when Allah is saying that when Mecca and the Kaaba is restricted only to believers and not idolaters, that is imposing your religion on others. That is the proof of it in the Quran. Amongst many other things, you have completely avoided mentioning whether or answering the question that I posed to you. Can the Prophet, Salah alayhi salam, did he endorse imposing Islam as the law of the land, the official religion of the land in the Arabian Peninsula? Did he endorse that? You're not answering that question because you can't answer it. The answer is obvious. Of course he did. And that's a clear violation of religious freedom. That's the imposition of religious value. So that's, I'm answering exactly the point that you're making to me, but you're avoiding answering my question. And you wanted to say that, oh, I'm engaged in ad hominem attack. You're constantly attacking me and saying I support rape. Like how, what kind of worse ad hominem is there than that? So tell me, is there an endorsement by the Prophet, Salah alayhi salam on discriminatory laws, on the jizya, the concept of jizya and having a tribute tax, address all of these historical sources from Christians that say the jizya was imposed, address all the historical sources that say the Muslims took over religious sites. Explain the dome of the rock. Explain the dome of the rock. These aren't later developments a hundred years after the Prophet, Salah alayhi salam. These are within 50 years, within even two years. Explain the Haruba Redda. Explain the wars of apostasy. Like how is that not a clear proof? And your idol, Fred Donner, has the archeological evidence establishing that. And a half. Go ahead, Juat. Okay, thank you so much. So you just asked, what about the wars of apostasy? That's a great example. So just because the fact that Abu Bakr did that doesn't mean that that is what the Prophet would do. In fact, we know that's the case because other companions severely disagreed. So you can't use that as proof of that is what the Quran or the Prophet would want. In fact, their scholars have said that he went in a different direction, he had a different sunnah than the Prophet when it came to that. So you can't just use the example of the early Muslims like that to prove your point. What I am arguing is that what the Quran says, which is what the Prophet Muhammad brought does not punish apostasy. Again, you're trying to pin me to the claim, which is a ridiculous claim, that the, I'm not saying, I'm not this naive liberal who's trying to say that all modern liberalism is in the Prophet. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, is that the Prophet endorsed religious freedom, the right to change your religion. This is in recurring discourse in the Quran and that's why there's no law against apostasy. That is what you need to show. And as far as I was talking about the constitution of Medina, which shows that there was this relationship of bilateral mutual rights and not this imposing Islam like you say. And this kind of imposing Islam kind of mentality that you have is completely ahistorical. That is imposing this Islamist mentality onto the early period. The Prophet Muhammad didn't operate that way. It took some time for the Khaliful establishment to become in that imperial kind of sense. It's certainly not in the Prophet's time. And we know that from the Quran itself in Surah 5, it's around verse 40, around there, 45, 48, around there. It shows how the Prophet actually was an arbiter, religious arbiter between different sides. He couldn't just dictate his terms. Yeah, so this is nonsense. Like you're speaking at both sides of your mouth. You're saying the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam endorsed religious freedom. Okay, do you mean like this religious freedom that only exists in your mind? Because when people understand the term religious freedom, they understand secularism. They understand having the freedom to worship however you want without any kind of discrimination. All religions are of equal status. But this is clearly not the case. But you refuse to acknowledge it. You're running away. Did the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam impose Islam as the law of the land? Yes or no? That's what I've asked you multiple times. You run away from this question because it completely defeats your entire perspective. If you wanna have this kind of bizarre understanding of what religious freedom is where you can impose Islam as the law of the land, but as long as you don't kill apostates, that's religious freedom, then your understanding of religious freedom is the same as, you know, Ikhwan al-Muslimin, like the Muslim Brotherhood. They also don't believe in implementing the apostasy punishment. So your understanding of religious freedom is like Ikhwan al-Muslimin or Khomeini, or Khamenei, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Like you have that kind of understanding of religious freedom, or maybe not the Islamic Republic of Iran, but many of these Islamist arguments. So when Apus calls you a Islamist, he's right. If this is your definition of religious freedom, it's just nonsense. And time. Provide? All right, thank you so much. So I am not saying that the Prophet imposed Islam. This is completely ahistorical the Islam that you have in mind took time to develop as this reified institution. I debated Shadi al-Mustri on this, so you can go look at that and see what that debate showed. So I don't agree with the idea of imposing Islam, like there was this top-down imposition of a Sharia Islamic state, like Daniel Haqqa Choo thinks. Now, what I am saying is that, now, and he's right. For example, like when it comes to the Qaba, there was the verses nine, 17 to 18 that you have to look at. So no, was it exactly what modern liberal secularism says? No, of course not. But nonetheless, the key point that I keep getting to and Daniel runs away from this. He's the one who's running away. I'm just being honest. The key point is that the medieval tradition, Daniel has videos when he's this defending apostasy. He has arguments that he comes up with that, oh, I showed you the quote where he says that you need to have apostasy because you're flouting the social order, the social cohesion. That's what I'm saying does not exist in the Quran, does not go back to the Prophet Muhammad. This is a later development. It happened, the first precedent was during the Caliph Abu Bakr's time due to the wars of apostasy, which Omar and other companions disagreed with. So this is the reality. Daniel cannot defend this point. So he has to try to get this bigger argument, which I'm not even arguing in the first place. He tried to stack the deck in his favor before this debate, and people saw it, by the way, when you were trying to stack the deck and have this and you were like, you didn't even let me pick my own kind of points, but I told you that I'm gonna defend my own points, not go by your dictate. Time. Yeah, so you're saying that the companions disagreed with Abu Bakr, radiallahu anhu, like Omar. None of the companions said that Abu Bakr was violating the Quran or he had committed something, agreed just against the Sunnah of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. No one said that. Companions can disagree. That doesn't mean that there's a violation of the Sunnah of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Again, you want to say that, okay, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam established religious freedom. Answer the question, did he impose jizya? Did he agree with imposing jizya? Jizya is in the Quran. I cited you the verse. Why aren't you able to address those kinds of things? This is something that I'm, my whole argument was on the basis of these Quranic verses, but you have not addressed any of these Quranic verses. You're just making ridiculous statements about like the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam as like a senator or he's like Martin Luther King with the freedom march to the conquest of Mecca. Like this is really laughable. Yeah, so just answer. Like was there jizya imposed on non-Muslims, right? Was that the case? Name me one single pre-modern society that had this kind of religious freedom that you're describing that didn't kill apostates, that didn't kill blasphemers. Name me one single pre-modern society even name me like the Martezila school. Name me any of these kinds of rationalists throughout history that said, oh, we shouldn't kill the apostates. Sight me some sources, sight me some history. You're a historian, right? So let's see it. Time. All right, let's go point by point here. You mentioned jizya in 929. Yes, that was how you deal with people who wage war against you and then you impose jizya, which was an institution that pre-existed Islam that you deal with when you have a conqueror, people who fight you and then you conquer them and this was an institution that existed. However, contrast that with the people who didn't fight in the constitution of Medina, which didn't have jizya and they were on equal footing and it was a bilateral relationship. So Daniel needs to understand that point. Now, again, I'm not arguing for modern, secular, liberal religious freedom. That is a historical to do that. What I am saying is that we have many things in that early period that we can use for inspiration and know that the pre-modern Islamic tradition went in a different direction and that specific thing is the prophet not punishing apostates. You claimed I used a hadith in my opening here. I did not use a hadith. Instead, what I used was the words of Imam Shafi who said that some people believed, then committed apostasy, then professed belief again. However, the messenger of God did not put them to death. And meanwhile, I also posted to another scholar in the fifth century who said it is not mentioned in any of the well-known writings that the prophet killed an apostate. So if you think that that is what the case was, why can't you find, how can you reconcile the fact that these scholars are saying that apostates were not killed, okay? And that is why there was actually Iqtilaaf in the early period about whether that punishment is to be implemented as a had punishment or not. And that it could have, and there were scholars who said that it was a later Ijtihad of companions and they were actually right, it was. And that's why they disagreed with Abu Bakr. I don't know, this is all nonsense. Yeah, the prophet, so I said that he might himself not have implemented the had. He might himself not have killed an apostate. That doesn't mean that's the norm that he endorsed or the law that he endorsed. He explicitly says, if someone changes his religion, meaning apostatized, then kill him. That is the hadith that, and again, your bizarre interpretation is through word games, whatever. Like the point is the history, you are not able to address it. I think that's clear now to everyone. You wanna talk about, yeah, there are agreements with Christians or with other religious groups. That's called a surah, that's called a treaty. You think the traditional Islamic position is that we don't accept treaties? Like we don't, that's not part of like acceptable Islamic tradition. Of course you can have a treaty with any other religious group, even with polytheists. Like that's not upper debates. Like no one is disagreeing with that. That's not a counter example to traditionalism. The counteract, the counter example to your reformism and this bizarre claim of religious freedom are the verses that I cited, taking over Mecca, taking over the Kaaba, destroying the idols, imposing Islam as the law of the land. Tell me one society that did not impose a religion as the law of the land. Give me one example of that. You wanna reduce religious freedom to a debate about the death penalty. This is very selective of you. Okay, my turn? Yep. It is indeed selective of me because Daniel has videos and he defends the law of apostasy. That's what the main point is. That's what I said that I was going to debate today. So that's not being selective, that's being selective, but that's being strategically selective to show that the pre-model tradition could get things terribly wrong. So the point number one is I showed multiple verses that show that you can change your religion. Multiple verses that show that apostates can change their religion and God simply, the Quran simply says to make amends, repent and come back to the fold. Daniel has failed to show any single verse that says to punish apostates. Point number two, I've shown you how Imam Shafi, no less than Imam Shafi said no apostate was killed and the classical scholars agreed that they had to deal with this inconsistency and so they had to explain that away. Number three, I have shown that the companions, sorry, that the early scholars disagreed about whether this was an HDHOD of the companions or a ruling from the prophet and there was a debate about whether it was HUD or not. The point I'm trying to show is that it doesn't go back to the prophet Muhammad. It was as Patricia Corona has said that she's not some crazy Islamic liberal modernist trying to reconcile anything. In fact, she was very critical and even had some harsh words to say but she says that this was obviously a viewpoint and makes sense that was adopted once Muslims became an imperial power and modeled themselves after Rome and Persia. So all that evidence that Daniel brings that every other imperial society did it, yes, that is proof of why they decided that it has to be the case and then they read that back into the Quran but they can't find a single verse that says that you kill apostates. It says the opposite. Make a man's repent. Want to let you know, folks, just put a poll in the live chat on who you agree with more on religious freedom, Daniel or Javad. So if you're watching live at another channel, this is your chance, come on over to modern day debate, put your vote in the poll. We're gonna kick it over to Daniel for the next minute and a half. Yeah, so this is just, everyone go to the description of the video on my channel. What is the debate topic? Please check this everyone for me because am I like debating someone else? Like did I fall asleep and now I'm debating someone else? Because I thought the debate was about religious freedom in general. Like that's what I thought the debate is about. Javad, like why are you avoiding these questions that I'm giving you? Do you believe in imposition of the jizya? Do you agree with that? Why are you avoiding? Do you believe in the imposition of an official religion like Islam as the law of the land? Do you believe in that? Are you avoiding answering this because you're worried about your boss? Because M-PAC like is this liberal progressive group of deviants. And if you put statements like that on record, they'll boot you out. Like why don't you answer these questions? Why can't you stick on the topic? You have to narrow the scope to something that you imagine the debate to be instead of actually addressing the debate topic, religious freedom. If you didn't wanna debate that, why did you agree to the debate? Okay, you could have said, no, Daniel, you've limited the debate or you've talked about religious freedom. I just wanna debate apostasy. Why didn't you say that, Javad? So this is embarrassing. Like address the questions. Like can we impose a religion, official state religion as Muslims? Would the Prophet so I say, oh no, do not impose Islam as the state religion. I don't believe in that. You should just be a senator like me or Martin Luther King. Could you get over it, Javad? Sorry, okay. So I clearly said to you, tweet, ad hakekechu, despite my reservations about the way the points are articulated, I wish to move forward with this and will therefore accept your conditions as stated. This is when you were trying to strong arm and that's why who cares about what description you put in your box. You put such a, everybody laughed at how you advertised the thing and in a slanted way and what description you put. I said as long as you know that my own explicit positions are as stated here and that's where I defended exactly what I'm saying which when I said religious freedom, I'm talking about the law of apostasy in specific, okay? And the fact is that if the tradition got that wrong, then that's a major blow against traditionalism and we're debating modernism versus traditionalism and this is a key plank of modernism. You've said it yourself. This is a key plank. It's in your book. You actually have videos on this. The problem is that you're struggling right now to defend your view in the Quran and the Prophet's example. So you are struggling and you have to then claim that, oh, I'm Gishgalt. I'm literally on point as can possibly be and you can't defend it. You could just admit it and look, I don't have the proof. I don't have the evidence of that and just admit that. But this is completely on point. Again, the Quran endorses the freedom to change your religion. That's called religious freedom, okay? I'm not talking about in the modern liberal secular sense of, we're talking about court cases and all that. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the decision to leave your religion which you deny and you've had videos where you deny it. The Quran endorses it. The Quran even talks about apostates who leave the religion. Does modernism, your modernism, accept Jizya? Does it accept a state religion? Answer the question. Why can't you answer the question? Does modernism accept discriminatory laws against non-Muslims? Except, answer that question. It's very simple, Javad. So you said that you'll move forward with the debate as defined with those questions. Okay, so that means you consented to the debate topics that we agreed to. Like why are you trying to renege on that now in the middle of the debate when you're getting embarrassed like this? So when we were talking about, here's another question for you. So you say that you assume that the Muslims adopted the ideas and practices of Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians well after the Prophet Salli Sallam, right? So you say that after the Prophet Salli Sallam, after a hundred years, then the Muslims started adopting Jewish blasphemy, the idea of blasphemy punishment, killing apostates from Christians, from Jews, from the Byzantines, from the Sasanians, from whoever. Why didn't the Prophet Salli Sallam adopt those values or those norms? Why weren't that influence that you're describing, why wasn't that the influence of the time of the Prophet Salli Sallam and the time of the earliest Muslims? When we look at the Quran, it seems to be in line with those values. When we look at the Quran, it seems to be in, or the practice of the early Muslims, it's in line with punishing apostasy, punishing blasphemy, Jizya, discriminatory laws against non-Muslims. That's all consistent. My narrative is, the traditional narrative is consistent with the actual historical sources. Your narrative is opposed to that. So this is the point that I'm trying to make. But again, answer the question, does modernism accept Jizya state religion discriminatory laws? Time. Okay. So first of all, I would ask, as far as discriminatory laws, Daniel, do you support the pact of Omar's restrictions where Jews and Christians have to wear yellow turbans and do all these distinctions they can't ride on horses, they have to ride on donkeys? Let me ask you that question. We'll see how extremist you really are. As far as Jizya, modernists say that Jizya is a historical construct at the time. And you can clearly see that as you yourself say, was prevalent at that time and was considered just at that time. Now it is no longer in the culture. Just like, are you gonna defend slavery? No, you're gonna say that slavery we don't do anymore because there's bilateral agreements, correct? So therefore if they're bilateral, don't interrupt me. I don't agree. So if you say, okay, then we'll see how extreme you are if you wanna bring back slavery. But if you can say that slavery, we don't bring back anymore because of bilateral agreements that we no longer do Jizya either. As far as state religion, I already told you that the prophet didn't impose Islam in the way that you think it does. Now, as far as you say Jews and Christians, you also don't understand nuance at all. Nowhere did I say that a hundred years afterward that that happened. Rather it was a gradual transition as you see that initially the precedent was set by Abu Bakr, but it wasn't a fixed law at that time. It took some time for it to develop. And this idea of that following the Jews and the Christians that are actually hadith reports. Now I'm not taking those as historical to make this argument. I'm saying that there were hadith reports that you yourself have used that say that we will, this Oma will follow the Jews and the Christians and even fall into the lizard hole. That actually is an argument in favor of what I'm saying but there's no reason to presuppose that the Muslim Oma will remain on track like you wanted to. In fact, the Quran itself as we showed shows that my people will abandon the Quran and that's indeed what happened. As far as why I'm not insisting that the Quran. Daniel. Like what does even keeping on track with the Quran mean? Like if you have this idea of, well, there are higher ethics and we can just use our individual reason. Guess what? Individual reason can be very subjective if you're influenced by the culture. The fitra that you reference can be corrupted. So what does even keeping on track with the Quran and Sunna mean? That's what tradition is. Tradition is keeping track. So you're on the one hand criticizing tradition but then you're invoking the concept of tradition as people as staying on track from the other side of your mouth. So this is really speaking at both sides of your mouth. But as for the pact of Omar, like this is not the topic of the debate. That those kinds of restrictions in the pact of Omar, it's consistent with the Quran. It's consistent with the Quranic verse that says, make them sahirun, make them humble. His actions were consistent with that verse of the Quran. You haven't addressed that verse of the Quran. So I mean, the tradition is consistent. Your bizarre liberal interpretation of religious freedom is not consistent with the Quran. It's not consistent with the actual historical evidence. You still haven't addressed the non-Christian or the Christian sources that are describing the Muslims as taking jizya. You haven't addressed the state imposition of law. Is Pakistan, like is this the Prophet's lifetime would have a problem with Pakistan being an Islamic Republic? Answer that. All right, I don't know where to begin here because the argument is going off track. Daniel says that I can't bring in the pact of Omar because it's not the topic of the debate. But wait a second, Daniel, I thought the topic of the debate was religious freedom understood in the most expansive and grandiose way possible. Well, if that's the case, then that's directly relevant. Then you should be talking about Jews having to wear yellow turbans because that's what you would believe if you wanna hold onto the pre-modern tradition. Thankfully, the juristic discourse wasn't the only one that the pre-modern Muslims followed and there were other better discourses. In any case, as far as jizya, I've already answered your question. It was a historically contingent thing. So no, I don't think that it would be implemented today. As far as verse 929, I already told you that's for societies, it was talking about the Byzantines and it was a bilateral thing. But you have to look at all the other dozens and dozens and dozens of verses on warfare would say that you can't initiate attack, you can't aggress, and you certainly can't force your religion onto other people. So I don't know what else to say, really. Again, the Quran, I'm looking at the Quran. And as far as you asking, why isn't that the Quran took up the Roman and the Persian influences? That's a really secular, atheistic question. The Quran has a divine intent behind it, does it not? So it can rise above the ethic. This is a recurring theme that we've seen today. So and even Patricia Krona says that, now she takes a historical approach and says that it actually imbibed the early Christian view of religious freedom. And then once Islam became an empire, like post-Castanian Christianity, it then moved in the imperial direction and instituted a ban on apostasy. So there's an explanation either way, Daniel, but this is not mental gymnastics. This is clear Quranic verses. Go Daniel. Yeah, so this is the bot, the liberal bot saying, oh well just yeah, we don't apply it today because we have multilateral agreements. The debate topic is about the Quran and what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam endorsed. It's a historical question. You do this liberal bot move, step three of oh it was a temporary issue and now we're in a different time. This is the bot. So if we can remove this requirement of jizya and subjugation of these other religious groups, then why not remove the laws against fornication? Why not remove the laws against homosexuality? Like why can't we, we're in different times. Now we have paternity tests. So we can determine paternity through paternity tests. So fornicate with whoever you want. That was the, do not approach zinnah is only a restriction for that time when there is no paternity test. But now we have paternity tests. So go wild, do zinnah all you want. This is, isn't this the trajectory that you're talking about? Isn't this the higher ethics that you're talking about? We're rational, many rational people today think that should be no problem. Two consenting adults, love is love. That's the higher ethic and the rational view that so many rationalists today support. So why don't you have the same kind of argument for zinnah, for fornication, for adultery? Why not adultery for homosexuality? Let's remove all of these laws, Javad. Let's remove all of these restrictions because we're in a different time. All right, so let's talk about how the tradition implemented this apostasy law. Number one, they decided that the Quran, as I've argued in my first argument, is ambiguous and impartial and incomplete. So that was the first point I made against traditionalism Daniel has not addressed. Then the hadith canon comes along and supplements the Quran. But I've already said that the hadith canon is problematic because their first narrator, the first chain level in the chain, there's no narrator criticism done on that and so that collapses. So you can't use those hadiths that you quote about changing your religion for that fact because your hadith canon collapses because of that. Number three is then they said, oh, well, there's Ijma, there's consensus upon executing the apostates. But in fact, you can't ground Ijma on anything because it's circular logic. There's nothing and you haven't dealt with that argument either. As far as, you know, why would we accept taking away jizya now and not doing the other things? Well, that's obvious. You have to take a look at the text and decide what are universal principles that are timeless and what is historically contingent just like you do. I don't think that you advocate that jihad is waged by horses, right? When it says, prepare your seeds for war, you don't do that, right? So similarly, modernists have always said that you're not gonna lash people today. You're not gonna amputate their hands today because those were punishments that were of that time, just like you don't use seeds of war, like horses at that time. So as far as the bot is concerned, actually the classical exigites are the ones who use the bot. If you just look at the verse, let there be no compulsion in religion and read Patricia Cona's article on this, she shows the exegetical tools that they did. First they said, oh, this verse is abrogated, canceled out. That's the bot again. But if it's not abrogated, then they said it's only to people of the book or they restricted it or they reinterpreted it. That's the bot. Yeah. So again, like, well, Ramadan, why do we need Ramadan? You know, what if the economy can really benefit if people are eating and drinking during Ramadan so they'll be more productive? This is what the dictator Burkiba argued that his entire country, Muslim country should not fast Ramadan because we're in a different time. We're in a different time period and we have to raise the GDP. Everyone needs to eat and drink so they'll be good workers and improve the state of the economy. Why wasn't he this brilliant reformer and rationalist like you, Javad? Or do you actually agree with Burkiba? Should we think that, oh, well, no fasting in Ramadan, this is something, this was something from the past. Just like there are horses in the past mentioned and fighting with swords and spears and arrows, that's from the past, right? Now we're in a different time, we're in a different context, times change, so we don't actually need, we don't need fasting in Ramadan. That was just for those times when people wanted to focus on God. Now we can focus on God through meditation, through different kind of self care techniques. We don't need Ramadan. Like, why can't you, what blocks that kind of argument, Javad? Like, this is the problem. This is why you're a liberal bot. This is why your methodology results in the complete destruction of Islam. Because every single rule within Islam, Ramadan, fasting in Ramadan, prayer, hajj, even belief in Allah, belief in the Quran, belief in heaven and hell, they can all be portrayed as some relic of the past. Now we're in different times, we're in different contexts, we have to adapt. So Daniel is now showing his fideistic nature, which is not Muslim skeptic at all, which is fideism, which is just follow hadith, textual reports, and then you have to accept that God has a face, curly hair, was a young boy. You have to accept all this like Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyyah did. But the fact is that all people have to make interpretive choices. And even Daniel does this. I wanna, so you're asking me questions, I'd like to ask you, yes or no? Do you support Jews in your Islamic state having to wear yellow turbans? Yes or no? If the answer is no, then we show that even you take interpretive choices and decide what is universal, what is, for all time and what is historically contingent. All people need to make these interpretive choices. And the classical legends made tons of interpretive choices. They abrogated 200 plus verses to justify Imperial warfare. So everybody makes exegetical choices. What the modernist does as a rationalist, we believe we have ethical reasoning. So the reason why we don't abolish worship is because we don't touch worship. Worship is between us and God. So we keep that the same. But when it comes to change circumstances in our relations with human beings, that's something that we evaluate. But we maintain the Quranic spirit and the ethic of the Quran. So I'll give you an example. You guys in your podcast talk about how you can screw women by divorcing them and keeping all the wealth and not, and making sure to get the bare minimum that you can give to them in divorce. This is the Dawab Rose who do this. You've had no strings, nikah guy on your channel very supportively. And I would say that this goes against the Quranic ethic. The Quranic ethic is about taking care of divorced women. I'll give you another example. Al-Rahman brings up this example. I'll give it up in the next one, the example that I want to give. Yeah, so you're not following the Quran. Like, okay, fine. Any issue that has to do with mu'malat, like interaction with other people, this can be up to reform. So what is all this bluster, like hot air from you about, oh, we have a Quran-centric approach. As soon as the Quran, like the issue, the jizya, as soon as that contradicts your modernism, you want to eject it. You didn't answer the, or you didn't explain how that same logic doesn't apply to zinna. It doesn't apply, the Quran mentions zinna, it mentions, you know, not approaching zinna. Why should that not be considered a relic of the past? Explain it, like why is that so special that we preserve that, but we can dispense with the jizya? So yeah, this is all just galloping. You know, what about the ethical reasoning that people use about gender transition? Like, oh, we have these trans kids. You know, this is our modern time, so we have to support trans kids. Do you support trans kids? Javad, are you a rationalist? Like is the Quran is preaching mercy and rahmah? So is that a part of the evolved trajectory of the Quran that we have to accept trans kids? Give me a principled rejection of that, if that is not your position, and explain. And also, you're building up me with a strawman. You're saying my argument has to do with ijma and hadith. Did I cite ijma in my opening and anywhere in this debate? You just projected that onto me. You're debating something else. Like we're talking, we're debating religious freedom, not these other issues. All right, notice, Daniel said, I didn't quote hadith or ijma. Then what did you quote, Daniel? Did you quote any Quran? Oh, wait a second, no, you didn't. Why? Because the Quran goes completely against your view and has no rule of apostasy law. So great job on that, defending that viewpoint. Now, as far as your question, I wanted to finish with the example I was giving. So in the early period, the zakat that you gave was 2.5%. But Fazr Rahman says that's clearly not enough in our today's day and age to take care of all the groups that are meant to be taken care of for zakat. So that means that the zakat should be much higher today. That's how you apply the ethical trajectory of the Quran. That's what makes the difference between people who are rationalist believers and use their brain, and the Fideas who say debate, logic, theology, philosophy, all of these are haram, science, anti-science, let's believe in flat earth, let's deny the moon landing. Now, as far as how we deal with new situations, this is very easy. We use our, it's not easy, actually, nothing is easy. You have to do deep ethical reasoning. But this is the model that we use. So this is the fundamentalist paradigm. I hope you can see my image here. But the fundamentalist paradigm is, anytime you get an outside- It's not what you were doing earlier. Oh, okay. So anytime- Is there a way to make it any bigger, otherwise I can. So we don't have time for another presentation, Javad. Finish your point. You have like five seconds. I am finishing my point. You're not my boss. All right. We can't see your screen. We can't just automatically show your screen whenever you want. Like we have to technically go back and change the settings. Did you not get that? It's not a big deal. No, I didn't get that, Daniel. I didn't know that. It's a little bit blurry yet. Content creator. Okay. Is it better now or not? It is definitely better. Now it's a little bit too zoomed in. Okay. Here is, is that good? Maybe a little bit more zoomed in. Just slightly. Just like- Okay, right there. I just need one minute for this. That's it. You already had a minute and a half. Like, are we just extending your time? No, no, I need 20 seconds. At your decree? I need 20 seconds. Because I was setting this up. I need 20 seconds. Can we give them 20 seconds, Daniel, just because the setup- That's okay. I can do it on my next if you want. 20 seconds. Go ahead. Okay, so the outside critique is just reflexively rejected by the fundamentalist. But when the modernist gets a critique, they ask first, is it critically, is the critique scripturally valid? If yes, we change our position. If no, then we ask, is the critique philosophically valid? If yes, then we change our position. Sorry, if yes, we re-evaluate the scriptural data and then go in the circle again. If it's not philosophically valid, then we say no and we keep our original position. So there is a sensible paradigm that we follow. It's not just fideism like you follow. Yeah, so you're talking about like- This is our last one. I don't know how you talk about- We'll go to Daniel for this last one and a half minutes. Okay, so, I mean, I'm just, I'm a broken record at this point. Like you haven't talked about imposing a state religion, is Pakistan with the Prophet's Islam and approve of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or any of these governments that have Islam as the law of the land? Would he approve of those? You can't answer that question. You've avoided it. That's pretty obvious. You also have all of this stuff about a rationalist speculation and deep ethical reasoning. You've never defined this. You've never actually explained from first principles. Like what is this deep ethical reasoning, this rationalism that everyone supposedly knows? Like you've just presupposed that this is obvious. It's from my perspective, your rationalism is just liberalism. It is just this kind of script, this liberal bot that you rehash. Like you're one of these guys that you think that you're a real independent free thinker while just regurgitating all of the status quo, all of the same indoctrinated lines that liberals who have been brainwashed by liberal hegemony spout off on. Like that's all you are. Like what is this deep rationalism? A deep rationalism that just happens to coincide with everything that 21st century liberals approve of. Wow, that is so deep and ethical. Like this is just a joke. Like you're a trained seal. That's why I said in the opening you've been very well trained to... This is a great opportunity to go into the Q and A as well as wanna let you know folks, we don't mention it often. We do have channel memberships at Modern Databate. You can see at the bottom right of your screen we have both Patreon, which you can find linked in the description and channel membership. So you can click that join button. It's right under this video. Check out the perks. We just updated them and we're gonna jump into the Q and A. Wanna say thanks so much for your questions. This one first coming in from. I do appreciate it. And like I said, folks, we're a little bit behind in the sense that... Let me just pull this page up here. I think I'm trying to find it here. We do have limited time, nearly 10 minutes for each part. And so I'm gonna move as fast as I can. Wanna give you a heads up. If you put it in a super chat now, it's like a near zero chance we're gonna be able to read it just because we have so many. And so thanks for your patience. Coming in from, Mohammed, thanks very much says in 425, a slave wife has half the punishment of a free wife. That distinguishment is the difference between wife and what your right hands possess. Not sure who it was for though. I think that was for me. So yes, that's the exact point that you could have a... That's why they differentiated in the verses that Daniel talks about. Either that or it's because it's before those verses were revealed, but that shows that there is a distinction between a free wife and a slave wife. The later tradition, unfortunately, understood that if you married someone, you couldn't have... There still weren't your slave. And so that's why they disallowed marriage to your own slave. And that was a exegetical mistake, or an interpretive mistake. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Pardon my interrupting, either Javad I didn't mean to cut you off. Josh says, Daniel's idea of Islam is doom scrolling 4chan and watching Manusphere videos and throwing some Arabic words in the mix. They say he's the Islamic. Alex Menassian? I don't know who that is. But go ahead, Daniel. Is this true, Daniel? Are these things true? I mean, Ibn Taymiah, Rahmiullah, the great scholar has to be like a 4chan guy. Like this kind of rhetoric is so stupid. Like you can't address... These people can't address all of these citations. Like we're looking at the Quran. We're looking at Hadith. We're looking at all of these other religions. All of these pre-modern religions were 4chan basically, like incels and whatever. What about Christianity? What about the Byzantine Empire? What about the Sasanians? Were they doom scrolling 4chan? Like this is so stupid. Yeah, go ahead. This one from Yahya Asman says, was there a harem culture, Enoch's, et cetera, among the Sahaba? Or did it come later? Can Surah Muminan, verse five through seven also be addressed? I think, should I address Surah Muminan? That's the point I brought against Javad. And he said, oh, it's been abrogated. How convenient. Like everything that goes against his Oranic narrative, or his sexual gymnastics is abrogated. It came earlier. It came earlier and then there were later verses. Yeah, that's called abrogation, buddy. So this is... Buddy, buddy, let's stay courteous. We're talking on an intellectual level. There's no reason to do that. Excuse me, I've raped a few more times. I didn't accuse you of rape. Call me an in-cell, call me an in-cell a few more times. And then we'll be courteous. I never called you, that kind of joke. I never called you an in-cell. I hate to do this, but we do it more than X-Files. But now with me, there's no more time, more time, all this kind of words that you... Yeah, I'm just calling you that. Because you have no argument. You have no argument. We do have to move this one. Can we both respond to that, by the way, please? I do, like I hate to do this, but I do just because I have so many questions That's okay, that's okay, James. For each part, I should say. This one from Muhammad says, Quran 46-12 says, God said, quote, and before the Book of Moses, unquote, God called the Torah, God's word, the Book of Moses. Is the Quran the Book of Muhammad? I don't understand. Like, it's not a relevant question. Yeah, it's not relevant, like... Okay, this one from Dr. Omar. Hey, we have something, Daniel. This is Dr. Omar Muslim Theist. Says, Daniel still can't read 425, or answer about chronology. Daniel keeps Gish galloping about Ibn Sina, Greco-Romans, et cetera. Dr. Javad is on topic. No, like, it's Dr. Javad that's bringing up the rationalist throughout history, and he's saying that that's how he defined his modernism. So I just question him on that. Point me to some other rationalist within history who has the same views as you do regarding religious freedom, regarding patriarchy. You haven't been able to meet that challenge. So that's a declaring difficult, that's a declaring gap in your position. You don't need to, you can use the tools of rationalism to come to different opinions on the specific topics. That's ridiculous. You can use the same methodology to arrive at different conclusions. The rationalist's tools. The tool of Ibn Sina was just great philosophy. Like, that's not true. We've got one for you, Javad. We haven't studied Ibn Sina. Yeah, yeah, you haven't. He says, Javad, everything you're arguing for, the good parts, quote unquote, of Islam, why not Judaism or Christianity or atheism? Why can you deny Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, to say you're a Muslim without any roots? I don't really understand the question, but I have never condemned Judaism or Christianity. I believe they are virtuous religions. And so I don't understand the question, to be honest. This one coming in from Anan Yamus says, Javad, the prophet, peace be upon him, had a concubine named Miriam al-Qubtiah, and she bore him a son. He eventually freed her. Your whole argument crumbles. Okay, so that argument, and I wish Daniel had actually brought this up because this was the obvious argument to bring up. But in any case, it doesn't crumble anything. In fact, she's listed by Tabari and others in the list of his wives. And there was this debate about whether she's a wife or if she's a concubine. The confusion is, and there's even places that say that she was married. The reason for the confusion is that the classical scholars had forbidden you to marry your own slave. And so they didn't have that category. You were either a free person and married or you were a concubine. But she was likely a slave wife. And then like you said, she was freed. So all, so number one point, you had to have a marital contract. Number two, all of his slaves were freed. So what's the argument here? And then after the Battle of Hunayn, no one was enslaved after that. My arguments all check out. This one coming in from Suda Nim says, Daniel, do we, did I read this? They say, is your version of traditionalist some same as radical where the Quran is below Hadith even? Which takes priority? Why not modernist? I don't know, they say. I don't know what that means. Like I said, the Quran and Hadith, the Quran and the example, the Sunnah of the Messenger, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, they go together. So much of Islam is what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam practiced, you know, his lived example. You have to have that lived example to understand the Quran. So you can't say, oh, we just have a Quran centric and we get rid of Hadith. We get rid of Sira, we get rid of all this because then how can you understand the example of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? How can you understand the Quran without that Sunnah, without that example? The whole argument that I'm making, there's a reason why I'm not getting into the depth of Hadith because this is not a debate on Hadith. That's what Javad wants. That's why he's gish-galloping. His argument is so weak that I don't even have to, I don't even have to use Hadith. I can just use sources that he accepts. So show that we're in the traditional view. The debate is religious freedom. The debate is religious freedom. The opposite law is against religious freedom. Yeah, so what about the rest of religious freedom? Can you address that? I'm asking, I have already told you that I'm not expecting that modern liberal idea. I'm telling you that the tradition got this wrong. You can't defend that. So can you? I'm not debating that. I'm not debating with you on that topic. That's literally what I tweeted. But you want to debate, you want to debate like the very granular details of all this, the entire Islamic tradition. You want to debate all those details. We don't have time. We don't have time. This is a five-hour debate. This is a five-hour debate. This is a five-hour debate. And we can't even talk about it. 200 verses. You make up such a limited Q&A, we do have to go. Al Eirante says, question to Daniel. What school of feak, F-I-Q-H, do you follow? Why in your website there is no Islamic reference in reading list? Yeah, so I follow the Hanbali School of Thought. I'm also studying the Hanafi School of Thought. I studied Hanbali School of the Fiqh for many years and I'm studying the Hanafi School. As for the reading list, it's meant for challenging liberalism and challenging these liberal adults like we have here. So that's what the book list is based on that. This one coming in from Raj Wudud said, believing slave woman versus non-believing slave Dan. Do you know what that means? This one coming in from Al Eirante says, question for Daniel. What school of thought do you follow? Do you use al-Fuqh? Is that how it's pronounced? Yeah, so that's a part of Islamic traditionalism. They say, why don't you have any Islamic sources on your site reading list again? I explained that, so the site is not about teaching Fiqh. It's not about teaching these traditional sciences. That's not what muslimskeptic.com is about. Al Eirante says, no, this is the real question. They say, question for Daniel. What school of thought do you follow? Wait, okay, that's the same question. They said, Daniel Allah is compassionate. They emphasize, our prophet saw, in parentheses, was compasiment. Don't you dare mock and turn into sarcasm. Every surah in Quran starts with, in the name of Allah, al-Rahman, al-Rahim, except one. Compassionate Imam, quote unquote, term rejected as bid ah. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing. I know I've got to be mispronouncing some of these. You did a good job. Yeah, worry about spelling. This guy seems to have a problem spelling, compassionate. So worry about spelling, and then figure out what sarcasm means, and then maybe you can understand what compassionate in my usage of compassionate Imam actually means. This one from Dr. Omar Muslimtheist. We might actually, for the last section of Q&A folks, we might actually be able to take some questions, because we're actually catching up here. Dr. Omar Muslimtheist says, Daniel was not able to discuss 425 in last section. Here, he cannot establish apostasy from Quran. The word of God is too difficult for him. Yeah, yeah, that's sure the case. How about Javad is not able to discuss religious freedom? He's not able to address all of the verses that I cited about jizya, about, I was already honest, I said to you. Okay, now you're interpreting my answer. You're not getting questions because no one cares what you think. Let me actually explain what I'm saying. Well, this person is actually critical of you, who's giving the question. Yeah, so let me address it. And popularly, by the way, huge, he's interrupting me during Q&A. Should I interrupt him? Let's give Daniel a chance to respond. I'm giving that a reason. So 425 about slavery. The first section is about patriarchy and gender roles and restrictions on sexual liberty. That's the first topic that we debated. Javad wanted to jump the gun and talk about female slavery because he can't address the actual topics. Like, are you noticing the pattern here? Hold on, I didn't wanna, I just, I can't help but sympathize with Javad for wanting to jump in when you sometimes jab him while answering with the audience. Well, the question is jabbing me. The question is jabbing me. I know, but I get why Javad wants to jump in, because occasionally you'll slip in a jab while you're answering. And so I do, to be fair, Zudanim says, if Hashmi says freedom is apostasy, why are you Muslim? That is an extremely strange question, but I guess they're asking me, am I reducing freedom of religion to simply the law of apostasy as Daniel is trying to portray it? What I'm saying is that there, the entire chronic discourse on this issue revolves around the idea of being freely able to decide to leave the religion. This is what Jihad was mandated in the Quran for. So it's not just a minor throwaway issue. It's not just one verse here, one verse there. It's almost 200 verses or so, and that's why the classical exeggits, they had to use their bots, and as their bots, they said all of these verses are abrogated. Now the ones who didn't say that, they were bots as well. What did they go? They went to the next step and they said, actually gonna reinterpret them, but they somehow magically came to the same interpretation as those who claimed that all 200 verses were abrogated. So the scripture didn't change the law. The law dictated the scripture and they used hermeneutical tools to back project that on. And Benam Sadiqi has an excellent book on that for the logic of lawmaking in Islam where he shows that this is all just interpretive strategies. It's the law that drives the interpretation of the text, not the text, the law. Eloronte says the first Hadith taught in Hadith studies is quote, the merciful will be shown mercy by the most merciful. Be merciful to those on the earth. When I emphasize the word, it means they put it in caps. And the one in the heavens will have mercy upon you. Then it says Sinan al-Tirmidhi, 1924, Sahih. Is that a question or? That was all they put. I'm not sure who that was for. I don't know, do you have an idea? Well, I mean, do you accept that Hadith, Javad? Or is it probably something that someone made up? I wasn't listening. What Hadith was it? About have mercy. I believe that you can use Hadiths religiously as long as they don't contradict the Quran. Do I have historical certainty that the Prophet Muhammad said it? No. This one coming in, actually, but that's it for our Q and A for this. So we're gonna jump into the break. So we've got a 10 minute intermission, folks. This is a great time to grab a snack, go to the restroom, whatever it might be. We are going to be back in 10 minutes to the final section, which will be on Conquest in Slavery, which will be followed by a 10 minute Q and A as well. So if you have a question, we might be able to get it in there. Certainly the ones that are already in the list right now, we can, but I do have to warn you that I was like, with that. Gentlemen, thank you very much. I'll give you a chance to unwind, do whatever you need to, and then folks will be back in 10 minutes. Thank you, James, and thank you, Daniel. I will be here entertaining you all in the next 10 minutes. I will, let me see if I can find that magic trick. For real, it's not real magic. Two seconds. All right, hope this will work. I haven't done it a long time, okay? But I do have to say, Zade Barakat, thanks for that. I appreciate it in the live chats. I was enjoying the rest of that turkey avocado, James. I appreciate that. Is, I already finished it. It was great. Now, I have to remember how to do this trick. Daniel really wants to see this trick. He's excited. It's not real magic, Daniel. Okay, so, but let me see if I can. I'll do some entertainment. I'm trying to remember. You know who I learned this from? No joke. I learned this trick from the evangelist Ray Comfort. So if anybody, I know that the atheist for sure know in the chat who Ray Comfort is, and I, maybe even Muslim folks in the chat do, I don't know if they do. Because I know that in the atheist community, it's hard to top Ray Comfort in terms of public, and I mean number one. A lot of people, they're not a big fan. A lot of atheists, I should say. I think Christians are generally positive about Ray, but let me see if I can remember how to do this. I think it's, okay, so yes. So, it's so nervous. I haven't practiced in like, maybe like 12 years. So, folks, I've got this cloth. Can you see, like purple? Kind of like, ah, like simple. And now, the trick is to make it disappear. So, I am sticking it in here in my, hopefully you had seen it. It's a little bit tough, the camera's not great. Sticking it in there in my fist, like, packing it in real tight, and then, voila! It's, oh, and it's, it's the most simple trick. Don't ruin it in the chat if you know how it's done. Don't ruin it in the chat, but, you know. That was really good. Thank you. For someone who hasn't practiced, that's really good. I appreciate that, but yeah, I wanna say folks, wanna remind you, hey, you love debates, and we highly encourage you to hit like, whether you're here or at Daniel's channel. Hit like, because we think debates are a good thing at modern day debate. The more you hit like, I'm very serious with this, I think it really does make a difference. And Daniel, I'll get your opinion, like, as a YouTuber, I think that, you know, I mean, it's probably, it's not too surprising that if people hit like more, YouTube probably recommends a video more to new people. Yeah, yeah. Definitely like, share, leave a comment, engage in the chat, you know, all of this engagement will help the video reach a broader audience. And give me a second, James, you did a trick, I need to do a trick too now, you've got me. Oh my goodness. Just one second, let me. What a treat. This is, I've, but yeah, folks, I highly encourage you to hit like, because I really do think it makes a difference. I started doing shorts, YouTube shorts, and it wasn't until then that I really started thinking that likes make a difference. And the reason is, you know, for a while I had not noticed on normal videos, I never really, it wasn't as easy for me to compare, but one thing I noticed is that if a short got, because we release shorts on our channel, if a short gets a lot of likes right away, because I can usually tell on the first day, I'm like, oh, okay, that's more than most of the other ones get, you know, even after, let's say, the second or third day, it's a really good predictor that that video will get a lot more views in the subsequent days. So pretty crazy is that, I think it makes a difference. So are you ready? Was that the trick that you like turned your camera off? What was, was, is this, oh, you've got the trick? Yeah, yeah. I have to take off my earphones, so I won't be able to hear you if you say something like stop it, but it should be entertaining. Hold on. What is the trick drumroll juggling? Wow, very nice. Oh, okay, you can do a trick too. Is there a name for that when you like throw that one up extra high? Sorry, what was that? Is there a name for it? Like when you, it was like out of the normal cadence, you threw one like especially high, is that? Yeah, but I dropped so. Yeah, there's all kinds of tricks you can do like a rainbow. Do you, is this? No implication there. Wow, is this something you regularly practice? Yeah, I learned in high school. You can just pick it up like juggling three balls is very easy. The challenge is getting to four or five balls. That's cool. Your hand speed has to be really fast. So I did a lot of juggling in college. Oh, wow. There's a juggling club, yeah. You can juggle pins, you know, with a partner you can throw pins and yeah, it's like, it's good exercise. It really gets your hand-eye coordination really solid and it's a lot of fun. That's really cool. Pins especially is like, whoa, okay. That's pretty cool. But yeah, it's, in terms of folks who want to say, we really do want to provide a neutral channel here at Modern Day Debate. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from. You know, I've got to, I've got to tell you, I, that's actually one thing too. So a couple of things. One, if you happen to be a Muslim debater or maybe a Muslim who's like, I'm really interested in debate. I read this stuff all the time and I'd really like to, you know, actually make the case. And it might be something like tonight where it's two Muslim guests. It might be a Muslim versus an atheist. It might be a Muslim Christian. As I do want to say, if you email me, I want to put the invite out there at moderndaydebateatgmail.com. We are happy to have new Muslim guests. And not only that, I want to say this is that if you're, let's say, a Muslim and you're like, man, I went on a channel and I didn't feel like they treated me that well because let's say, in theory, I'm not saying that all channels do this, but I just, I'm always turned off if a person goes on a channel and this is one of the reasons I started modern day debate is that I would see, let's say Christians go on and I'm not trying to paint a, you know, I'm not trying to say this is true of all atheists, it's not. A lot of atheists will give you a very fair shot. But in this particular case, I saw an atheist channel where the Christian would go on a debate and then the atheists would come out with an after show right after and be like, oh my gosh, that was so bad. And I was always like, ah, man, it's like, how's the Christians like going on this channel in a way that is like promoting a channel that's regularly putting out atheist content. And so that some Christians were kind of uncomfortable or kind of turned off by that and they're like, why would I want to go basically promote an atheist channel by going and helping them create content. And that's why at modern day debate we've wanted to keep it as neutral as possible. We don't have any videos that are saying like, hey, we're going to make the case for atheism. We're going to make the case for Christianity or Islam in a vacuum. We only have debates. So if there's anybody making a case for Christianity or Islam or atheism, it's always going to be someone else giving arguments against it. And so that's why I do want to say like, if you are a Muslim debater, we hope you feel welcome here because I just think you deserve better and that's true for everybody. So let's say theoretically, if you were an atheist and you went on to a Christian channel and then if the Christian channel, let's say came out and they're like, oh man, that was so bad by that atheist. I'd be like, okay. It was like, you know, they came on your channel. Like can you do them a little better than that? And so I do want to say, you know, folks, we do hope you feel like it's fair anyway. Thanks for listening to that spiel, Daniel. Yeah, people are asking me to do the pen trick. So I got to, please the fans, you know, are you not entertained in debate? Can juggle, can flip a pen? We have tricks here from the moderator. This is the most exciting debate ever in history. This is, yes, we are lifting it up. It's taking it to the next level. And so yeah, I definitely. Oh, by the way, James, on your stream, I think, my name is under Javad, Javad's video. So people are gonna think that I'm this. All right, he's not here to defend himself. Yeah, I'm not gonna say anything, but you'll think that I'm him. I've updated it. And I also want to apologize. One thing that people in the chat said, James, Daniel's slides aren't showing. And I wrongly assumed, so you know we're not supposed to assume, but I did it. I assumed that you just didn't, that you didn't have slides that you're reading off a word document. And then I found out what they said. No, no, no, James, like he does have slides. And it's not that he purposely didn't show anything because he doesn't have them. He has them. He just maybe forgot to share. And so I'm sorry that I dropped the ball on that. And so I'll try to remember. There was only like, it was one section. I can't remember what it was. So it wasn't the whole debate or anything, but there was one where I slipped up there. I'm sorry about that. Was it just, was it two? Cause we've done three sections so far. We have the fourth one. But so it showed for the intro, but not like the two other sections. No, I think it showed for the intro and then the first 10 minute opening for part one. And then I think it was the opening for part two that I, like I said, I'm sorry about that. That's my job. Like I should be giving a friendly reminder. And so folks in the chat, thanks for letting me know that I should do that. I always feel like, yeah, anyway, but yeah, it's technical glitches happen. It happens to me all the time. So no problem, James. Oh yeah. And then there's that too. The whole technical meltdown. You know, it's crazy. I'm really grateful. Here's why I'm grateful. Not that it happened, but that on the modern day debate side, and I'm sorry for everybody on like, who has to watch it elsewhere is that on the modern day debate side, we didn't lose the stream, which is crazy. Cause my computer literally shut down and maybe YouTube is just getting better, but my computer literally turned off and the stream somehow we reconnected to the original. So I'm grateful for that. That's great. So this is gonna show black for that whole period that you're off. I will edit that out. I'll cut it out. But yeah, there is gonna be like probably three or four minutes where I was gone. And I would say, yeah, at least four minutes. But all right, Javad, my guess is you're ready to roll. I guess so. I was like, well, what even part are we doing now? It's just, but okay, I think we're at the last part. All right, let me just make sure I got the right PowerPoint. Okay, I think I am ready. Are we live or what? Oh yeah, we're still alive. We're in that intermission and we're gonna start it up. So folks, we are entering into part three. And like I said, folks, this is a, I had told Javad in an email, I said this is a really interesting story because these gentlemen have a history. They've been tweeting, going back and forth in the past, disagreeing. And so this is an interesting debate, both in terms of its subject matter, but also in terms of the fact that these guys have a genuine story. This one is part three, conquest and slavery. We're gonna have an opening by Javad and then of course by Daniel as well. Those will each be 10 minutes followed by five minute rebuttals. And 45 minutes of open dialogue followed by 10 minutes of Q and A and then our concluding statements for the night. So Javad, thank you very much. The floor is all yours for your 10 minute opening stage. Thanks James, if I could also get that one minute warning, thank you so much. And I'm just gonna share my stuff, okay? All right, oh wait, is that, I gotta close this box, just give me one second. Uh-oh, all right. You can see my screen, good? Yep. Okay, I'm gonna start now. All right, thank you very much. Okay, so the Quran is a book of peace. God is described as peace in the Quran. Heaven is the abode of peace. Mecca is the heavenly peace on earth. Islam is peace. And believers are told to spread peace. It's only sinful human beings who break the peace and shed human blood. Human life or human souls are sacred because they are God-breathed. Whoever kills a soul, it is though he kills all of humankind together. Therefore the default position in the Quran is one of sanctity of life for a human soul, a human being. Do not kill a soul which God has made sacred and this is repeated in the Quran, it's called Hurmat An-Nafs. Unfortunately, the tradition went in a different direction and they use this hadith to do it. They claim that you don't have the sanctity of life if you're a human being. It's only something that you opt into instead of being the default condition. It's an opt into if you convert to Islam, if they do it, if they convert, then their blood and property are sacrosanct. So this is unfortunate. In fact, if you were a non-Muslim living in a non-Muslim land, you were a kaffir harbi and your blood was listed to be shed. You had no sanctity of life. And unfortunately, this was the default position. Whereas the Quran considers all human souls to be universally and permanently sacrosanct. In the medieval Islamic tradition, it was the legal contract of dhimma that protected the life of the non-Muslim on a provisional basis. The kaffir dhimmi was protected, but in a subservient state. And they of course superimposed this hadith which inverted the Quran as we saw because the Quran says there's no compulsion in religion. The Quran also says that God divinely willed religious diversity. Had he willed, he would have made you all one religious community. So why are fundamentalists arguing that they want to make the entire world Muslim and Islamic and dominate the entire globe? This is a wrong understanding, unfortunately. The Quran actually says that we made you peoples and tribes so that you may come to know one another, to love one another, not to conquer one another and hate each other. The Quran actually as a professor, Patricia Krona says that when it comes to warfare, the Quran actually endorses the golden rule. The basic principle is that one should treat other communities as they treat one's own. Fighting in the Quran, she says, is declared legitimate and self-defense. The Quran insists on tit for tat, gasas, no more proportionate retaliation. Meanwhile, it's the medieval exegetes who have to postulate endless abrogation to make things fit into their imperial agenda that is offensive jihad, not jihad, jihad. The default state in the Quran is a state of peace and therefore one should peacefully preach the message. Patience in the face of insult and injury is a higher level of piety. However, according to the Quran, sometimes war is indicated to protect people from oppression and religious persecution. Even then, however, peace should always be sought and the door to reconciliation left open. It is, of course, permissible to defend yourself and this is repeated in the Quran repeatedly that you can defend yourself. However, it defends themselves. There's nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong is to retaliate more than equal retaliation or to initiate aggression. Whosoever's retaliated proportionate to what injury he received. So equal retaliation actually precludes initiating aggression. In fact, the Quran endorses a very clear non-aggression principle. This is not textual acrobatics. This is clear as day. Fight in God's cause against those who fight you but do not aggress for God does not love aggressors. In fact, here's an even clearer verse. Surah 4, 90, if they let you be, do not make war on you and offer you peace. God does not allow you to harm them. Oh, let's do some textual acrobatics and understand this verse. No, it's clear. Quran endorses a peace principle. If the, even if you fight a war of self-defense, if the enemy inclines towards peace, then you incline towards it because the Quran endorses peace. If they cease fighting you, what is past will be forgiven them. So the Quran has this peaceful and forgiving attitude and this is repeated in the Quran. So these are the Quranic principles of war, sanctity of life, non-aggression principle, proportionality principle, the peace principle and the truths of God. These are four months in which fighting is forbidden in order to cool things off and of course, these were abrogated by the medieval exegetes. Now, if you wanna look at the prophet's life story, we can do no better than looking at Ibn al-Kayyim statement which says, quote, to anyone who carefully considers the life of the prophet, it will be clear that he did not ever force anyone to adopt his religion and that he the prophet only fought those who fought him. This is an eighth century scholar, Hidri. Every chronic verse, this is what the exegetes did. What did they do with all these clear cut verses? Well, they followed the principle rule. Every chronic verse that conflicts with the view of our legal school must be taken as abrogated or better yet reinterpreted so as to agree with our position which is of course, waging offensive warfare. This is an 11th century scholar who said that Jihad goes into four stages and you can see how textual acrobatic they are. Here, they actually put in the fourth stage of Jihad, they put verse 2190 which they claim abrogates 2191 which was defensive war. What makes this even more ridiculous is that they didn't look at the rest of the verse which actually says against those who fight you but do not aggress. This is just a shoddy cut and paste job, the exact textual acrobatics that Daniel accuses me of. Now, if the wars of conquest weren't advocated by the Qur'an or by the prophet, how did they come about? They're actually not initiated by the prophet but we're actually an extension of the so-called wars of apostasy under Caliph Abu Bakr and this is supported by several historians. Whereas the Qur'an restricts the penalty for unbelief to the next life, the medieval Islamic tradition said that the penalty for unbelief was that we wage war and kill you, subject you to demi status, execute you or enslave you and that leads us to slavery. So when it comes to slavery, the theological basis against slavery is in the Qur'an. It is not for any human being to say, be my slaves instead of God. In fact, it's Pharaoh's sunnah to enslave people. He's the one who enslaved the children of Israel and his sunnah was, we shall kill your sons and spare their women. This is what unfortunately the medieval Islamic tradition accepted. So my overall claim is that the Qur'an envisions an emancipatory ethic which was unfortunately not followed by later Muslims who instead followed Pharaoh's sunnah and supported a massive slave trade. The Qur'an actually calls the emancipation of slaves to be the steep path and what will explain to you the steep path? It is the freeing of the slave. What is true piety? It's not just formal acts of ritual worship. Instead, it's to give wealth despite loving it for the emancipation of slaves. Islamic modernists since the 19th century have argued that it is simply nonsensical to argue that the Qur'an calls for the emancipation of slaves while simultaneously calling for enslavement. This would make the Qur'an contradictory. The conservative traditionalists, on the other hand, made the absurd argument that abolishing slavery would take away from Muslims the ability to accrue good deeds by being able to free slaves. So you need to have slaves in order to sometimes free them. Just imagine if someday we had a major technological advancement that allowed us to with a snap of a finger get rid of poverty altogether. Should we do it? The Islamic modernists would say, of course, that will be a fulfillment of the Qur'anic ethic. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, would say, no, let's keep people in poverty so that Muslims could still get the reward of giving charity to the poor. The Qur'an repeatedly says to emancipate slaves. This is all over the Qur'an, yet there's nowhere that it says to enslave anyone. In fact, what's interesting is that the medieval tradition understood that all of these various forms of enslavement, including debt bondage punishment for a crime, kidnapping, et cetera, all of these were banned. But for some reason, they allowed enslaving prisoners of war, which was the one door that actually the Qur'an specifically mentions is closed in verse 47. No textual acrobatics. Then, free them, the prisoners of war, graciously or ransom them till the war lays down the burden. Thus shall it be. There's no verse that says to enslave prisoners of war. This is actually in the Bible, but why are there no such verses in the Qur'an? We really need to ask that question. In fact, it was the sunnah of the neighboring Byzantine empire to execute prisoners of war, ransom them or to enslave them. Similarly with the neighboring Persian, Sassanid empire to execute, massacre, enslave captives. I wonder where the early Muslims got this from. Meanwhile, the Qur'an actually says to treat captives with mercy, give them sustenance, treat them well and then at the end of the war to free them, either graciously or ransom them. The obvious interpretation, this is not a textual acrobatics medieval text says, the obvious interpretation of Qur'anic verse 47.4 is that the Imam is only entitled to pardon captives or release them on ransom. In fact, this was the earliest opinion according to some sources. Al-Hassan al-Basri backed this up. The prisoner of war should not be killed, but he may only be ransomed or set free by grace. We even have sources that say there was an Ijma or consensus of the companions. I'm not rooting my claim in Ijma by the way. These are early figures who endorse this obvious reading. Imam Shafi, now coming to the Prophet's life story, we say that Imam Shafi shows, he said, we know not of any evidence suggesting that the Prophet captured and enslaved any single person after the Battle of Hunayn. In the Battle of Hunayn, 6,000 prisoners of war were taken and they were all released without ransom. Even their Hadith reports on not taking them as historical, but they show that there was no enslavement after that. Now, unfortunately, the pre-modern exeges just took this as limiting it to Arabs and said that Arabs are a noble race because this was a Sunni Orthodox view that the Arab race is superior to the non-Arab race. I wonder if Daniel Haqqiki agrees with this. So they limited this ethic to the Arabs. But anyways, there were some scholars early on who held that the Prophet's emancipation at the Battle of Hunayn was a momentous day and that there was a command to set free all other Arabs previously enslaved and forbade future enslavement and perpetuity. As far as the Prophet himself, he freed all 12 of his slaves that are reported to him, although there's a difference but he freed all of them, that's for sure. These are the different options that the Qur'an only offers two of them which is to free or ransom them. And here's our professor saying, although the verse is clear, it's the later Islamic tradition that went in the opposite direction. In fact, this is the same guiding principle, the Ba'at. Remember, this is the exegetal medieval exegetical Ba'at which said, every verse that conflicts with the view of our legal school, we take it as abrogated or reinterpreted. They actually nullified God's word as even this professor says, jurists found reasons to nullify God's seemingly clear instructions to free prisoners of war. Such exegetical exercises had the paradoxical outcome of seeming to mock the Qur'an. The instructions given to the conqueror of sin, Muhammad al-Qasim, read like a cruel parody of 47-4. Bind their bonds and grant freedom to no one of the enemy and spare none of them. These are historians who are saying this. The medieval exegety expanded it to four options but then actually reduced it down to just enslavement or mass execution going exactly against 47-4. Imam Malik said you could not release prisoners of war and so did Imam Abu Hanifa. And some said that this was completely not allowed to ransom or free people. The justification for enslavement at this time is not the kind of utilitarian ones that Daniel gives. Instead, it's considered a penalty for unbelief because you're considered dead if you're an unbeliever and then you can enslave or kill them. But this is philosophically incoherent and we can debate this in the open discussion. It's an unbelief that justifies it. Imam Shafi even said that the prohibition of killing women and children in war as a directive is based on financial consideration. Women and children as Shafi explains are property and property should not be damaged. This is the weird utilitarian direction that they went in. As far as the precedent for this, taking prisoners of war as slaves, it was actually Abu Bakr who during the wars of apostasy took women and children as prisoners and other companions opposed this. This was Abu Bakr Sunnah, which won against the Prophet Sunnah and we can disagree with this just as public companions did and he based this on public welfare and reciprocity because he was basing it on what the Romans did with prisoners of war, they executed them. In fact, Caliph Umrah who came after him returned the prisoners of the people of the Rida and demanded that no Arabs could be enslaved. There's sources that say that Ali actually extended this to non Arabs as well. My overall argument, whereas slavery was a de facto reality in the time of the Prophet and mentioned as such in the Qur'an, nowhere does the Qur'an endorse slavery. Not a single verse says to enslave prisoners of war. In fact, the Qur'an says to free them after the war. The Qur'an is anti-slavery and pro-emancipatory in its message, repeatedly stressing to free slaves and even marry them. The Prophet freed all of his slaves. The Prophet freed all the prisoners of war. I'm sorry that I didn't do that one minute warning. I just, that's my... So just 30 seconds. These are my specific claims for Daniel that the Qur'an forbids wars of aggression and does not allow for enslavement prisoners of war. These are what he needs to rebut and of course he'll respond this way. Thank you. And we'll kick it over to Daniel Parton that. Sorry about that. I'm just trying to keep an eye on the live chat just for questions as well as we're gonna kick it into the 10 minute opening from Daniel as well. The floor is all yours Daniel. Can we just make sure that I'm sharing the screen this time? Yes. Okay. Just one second. Let's see. Is it showing? Yes. Okay. Just let me know when to start. Ready for you. Do the Qur'an and Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam endorse imperial warfare and slavery, including slavery which permits masters to have sex with female slaves. First, let's look at the Qur'an. Traditional Islamic scholarships as rules of warfare shifted over time. There were three phases. First, while in Mecca, Muslims were small in number and weak. As such, they avoided the violent conflict but rather patiently withstood attacks. In the second phase, after migrating to Medina, the Muslim community was permitted to fight back against aggressors in defensive jihad. In the third phase, once the Muslims had grown strong in Medina, they were permitted to engage in offensive wars of conquest against even those who had not attacked them. The traditional scholarship argues that these last verses permitting offensive jihad abrogated the earlier verses. The verses that endorsed conquest are 929, 95, and 2193. We saw verse 929 in the last section. Verse 2193 reads, fight them until there is no more fitna and until worship is acknowledged to be for Allah. But if they cease, then there is to be no aggression except against the oppressors. Verse 95 reads, when the four forbidden months are over, wherever you encounter, the idolaters kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post. But if they turn to Allah, maintain the prayer and pay the prescribed alms, let them go on their way for Allah's most forgiving and merciful. On slavery, verse 3350 says, O prophet indeed, we have made lawful to you, your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and those your right hands possess from what Allah has returned to you of captives. Verse 867 reads, it is not right for a prophet to take captives before he has conquered the battlefield. Verse 474 reads, when you meet the disbelievers in battle, strike them in the neck and once they're defeated, bind any captives firmly. Later you can release them by grace or by ransom until the toils of war have ended. Verse 432 through 33 gives several rules about the rights of slaves and prohibits prostituting slaves. Obviously the verse presupposes the permissibility of owning slaves, including female slaves, regarding masters being allowed to have sex with slaves. The Quran uses the term milk yamin or right hand possessions, which is the term for female slaves. Verse 424 explicitly makes sex with female slaves licit, as well as verse 3350 mentioned earlier, in Surat al-Mu'minun, the believers are described as guarding their chastity, except from their spouses and their female slaves, same in verse 7029. Those are just a few of the many verses endorsing conquest, slavery and concubinage. The traditional position says these verses license offensive warfare, slavery and concubinage. Liberal reformists do jit-goofy gymnastics to get out of the clear meaning of these verses. So who is right? As usual, let's look at the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the actual history of the earliest Muslims. As for biology, we've already discussed the in-group versus out-group instinct that all human beings naturally have, not only humans, but even animal species have these instincts. For example, chimpanzees instinctually get into groups and engage in conflict and other groups over resources and power. Each group seeks territory, food and mates. Each group also seeks power over other groups to prevent them from attacking and to limit access to resources. This also involves females because female chimpanzees stay in areas with abundant food and water. When a group of chimpanzees takes the territory of another, it also takes control of females in that territory. Groups struggle for resources and power because attaining these things is required for survival and reproduction. Groups that don't engage in this behavior die out very quickly. These behaviors are found in other species as well as in humans. This is why conquest, slavery, concubinage are found in every pre-modern civilization without exception. These behaviors are required for survival and even modern superpowers engage in this competition for power and resources. Within the Quantitative Social Sciences researchers note that hunter-gatherer societies, pastoral agricultural societies, industrial societies, they differ in how they engage in war and domination, but regardless of the kind of society, they all engage in aggressive expansionism. It's built into human DNA as well as the universal cultural consciousness of humanity. This is very important when we study late antique religions. The Hebrew Bible endorses conquest of others and even genocide of certain groups like the Canaanites and the Amalekites. The Bible praises Jewish kings like David for their conquests. These kings are allowed to conquer other people for power and resources. The Bible also endorses slavery and holds that female war captives may be used sexually, either as sex slaves or as forced brides. Later, rabbinic law also endorses slavery and assumes that a master can use slaves, female slaves, sexually. Jews in the late antique period permitted sex with slaves. In the Greco-Roman religion, it's no secret the pagan Greeks and Romans engage in constant wars of conquest and enslaved entire populations. When the Romans adopted Christianity in the third century, they retained the same policies but with alterations. The New Testament doesn't establish a clear position on war, but from early Christian times, many Christians argued that defensive and offensive warfare are permissible. The New Testament clearly endorses slavery and there are no verses that ban sex with female slaves. Later, Christian Romans like the Byzantines endorsed taking slaves in war but did not allow males to have sex with female slaves, although it's unclear whether they permitted forced marriage of slaves. Zoroastrians also endorsed imperial warfare as well as slavery. They also permitted male masters to have sex with female slaves. The polytheistic Arabs, constantly warred with each other, took slaves including sex slaves, sometimes weak tribes voluntarily submitted to slavery in return for protection. These subordinated groups were known by names like Jar, Maula and Halif. This is the context of the world at the beginning of Islam from a historical critical perspective. It's expected that the early Muslims would endorse norms on warfare, slavery, concubines, analogous to the norms found within literally every other religion and culture. Further evidence comes from contemporaneous non-Muslim accounts. An account of the Battle of Gebetha is a very early fragment from 637, only five years after the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, that describes the Muslim conquest of Syria. Another document written by a Christian apologist called the Doctrina Yekobi, dating around 640, mentions Muslims. What's interesting is that the Christian apologists argues that the Muslim prophet is a false prophet because he came armed with a sword and was involved, quote, only in shedding of men's blood. We already mentioned the account from Thomas the Presbyter in 640, describing how the Muslims invaded Byzantine territory as well as Persia. In the Sebeos document from the 660s, the bishop describes how a band of followers obedient to Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, quote, began to go up to the land of Palestine, plundering, enslaving and pillaging. So this Armenian Christian account not only describes the Muslims as engaging in conquest and taking slaves, but he also attributes all of this to the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. The Khuzestan Chronicles written in the 660s says about the Muslims attacking Persia, quote, neither walls nor gates, armor or shield and they gain control over the entire land of the Persians, end quote. The Apocalypse of Sudo Ephraim from the 7th century is a Syriac Christian text describing how Muslims attacked Christians and took the conquered people as slaves and concubines. Many, many other texts all describe the same thing. Now let's look at archeology. The archeological record proves that Muslim armies took over and replaced the religious sites of other groups. The biggest example is Masjid al-Haram, which was the primary shrine for the pagan Arabs, we already mentioned the Dome of the Rock from 690, also the Umayyad Mosque was a cathedral that was converted to a mosque in 710. The Ibrahim Mosque in Palestine was formally the tomb of the patriarchs, a site sacred to Jews and Christians. In Persia, numerous Zoroastrian fire temples were converted into major mosques. This is all hard evidence. Another piece of hard evidence is coinage. Minting coins is the mark of an empire ruling over large territories. The Sasanian empires had coins, but starting in the 650s, the Muslims conquered Persia, took the Sasanian coins out of circulation and replaced them with newly minted coins with Islamic symbols. In the 690s, Muslims did the same to the Byzantine empire. It was as if the Muslims were saying, we're replacing these empires and we're going to be an empire like they were. There's also the building of forts and garrison cities. The aim of establishing garrison cities is to maintain long-term permanent control over vast, conquered lands. Examples of these cities include Kufa and Basra, built in 638 to control Iraq. Fustat, built in 641 to control Egypt. And Bayrawan, built in 680 to control Tunisia. Finally, archaeological data proves the earliest Muslims practiced slavery. Inscriptions from the first century of Islam mentioned slave-related terms like mola. Also, the fact that there are no rock inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula after the Islamic conquest dedicated to polytheism, Judaism or Christianity further proves hard evidence. That's what we're talking about. Hard evidence that the Muslims in the time of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and immediately thereafter were engaged in conquest. So let's see if Javad, who is supposedly a historian, will get off of the goofy gymnastics and the ad hominem and the gish galloping and the strawman arguments against the Islamic tradition and actually address the hard evidence. What about these late antique religions? What about these contemporaneous Muslim accounts? What about the coinage? What about the inscriptions? What about the dome of the rock? What about Masjid al-Haram? What about the Umayyad Mosque, which used to be a cathedral and it was made into a mosque? These all predate 750. So within a hundred years of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, these things are there as hard evidence. We'll jump into the five minute rebuttals. Javad, thank you very much. The floor is all yours. Before you do that, I need to share the screen, please. You bet. It's not allowing me to do it right now because I think he has to stop sharing. Let's see, I think Daniel, there you go. Okay, so if you just give me one second as I pull this up. Okay, so thank you very much. So Daniel, again, we're gonna see who's the real bot when it comes to interpretation and interpreting things away. He cited three verses that say that this abrogated, canceled out, nullified all those peaceful verses about not aggressing in war. He cited 9.5 and 9.29, that is Surah 9. Surah 9, this is Islamophobes who quote 9.5 and say that this killed the idolars wherever you find them. But let's actually see. 9.5 is talking about, the Surah starts out, it's talking about those whom you made a treaty with and then they violated. In fact, it says, don't wage war except those idolars with whom you made a treaty and who thereafter commit no breach against you, no support anyone against you. Those you don't attack, fulfill the treaty with them. Use lethal force against the idolars wherever you find them. But if they repent, then you stop fighting. It doesn't even say to convert to Islam there, by the way. And if any of the idolars seek safety with you, grant them safety. So long as they remain true to you, you be true to them. The Quran is only talking about those people who broke the treaty. It's right there. How could there be a treaty with God and his messenger for such people who break their treaty? How when, if they were to get the upper hand over you, they would not respect any tie with you of kinship or treaty. They are the ones committing aggression. The Quran makes sure to mention that it's not a war of aggression. Why would the Quran go out of its way to say that? And they break their oaths after the treaty with you and attack your religion. And then it's talking about fight them so that they may desist. Will you not fight a folk who broke their solemn pledges and proposed to drive out the messenger and did attack you first? So this is Sam Harris, by the way, who also used another verse. So it's not talking about offensive jihad and wars of aggression. It's against that. Then Surah 2,193 is what he cited. This is 2,193. It appears in this passage. Do not aggress. Fairly God does not love the aggressors. Deleted by Sam Harris and also by Daniel Hikikachu. Religious persecution is worse than killing, but do not fight near the sacred mosque unless they fight you there. But if they cease fighting that God is most forgiving and merciful, fight them until there is no religious persecution, fitna, and your religion is for God. Fight against them until idolatry. This is how Sam Harris interprets it, but this is not the word. It's not shirk or idolatry. It's persecution. It's fitna. So that does not support Daniel at all. And then the verse even says that religious persecution, fitna, is graver than killing. This is 2,217, which explains what fitna is. And they will not cease to fight you until they make you renounce your religion. It's giving a definition of fitna in the Quran itself. Then Daniel actually quotes 432 and 33 to justify having sex with slaves. Dude, that's 425. I already showed you that. The very next verse. Marry the believing young women. So wed them. Give them their proper bride wealth. Let's marry. Chast women, not as fornicators and lovers. Taking a concubine is taking a lover, okay? And then he cites amazingly. He cited 47.4, which I already told you 47.4 about taking prisoners of war. Dude, that's the entire verse that I quoted to you that says to free slaves. And finally he cites 867. 867 came long before the verse 47.4 and doesn't even actually say to take prisoners of war. So that's not a good argument. That's pretty much all I have because I addressed all of the Quranic verses that he brought forward. And you see that he's the one who's the bot who doesn't interpret. And I mean that he follows the exegetical strategy that if a Quranic verse goes against you, then you abrogate it. And they abrogated almost 200 verses. Or you reinterpret it. This is the strategy of the medieval exegetes. I'm showing the Quran. I'm basing my argument on the Quran. I believe in the Quran. I believe in the Prophet Muhammad. I don't have to believe in the later medieval tradition which accepted as Daniel himself says, the Roman and the Persian example. These examples, the Quran has a higher ethic. And you should believe that the Quran can have a higher ethic if you're truly a believer. And it's not just me who's saying it. Historians have also said it. Read Patricia Crona on this. She says the Islamic modernists are 100% right. She actually said initially I read the modernist as Shaltut and I said, oh, I think he's being apologetic. But then I read it a second time and I realized, you know what, he's being apologetic, but literally everything he said is right. And that's Patricia Crona who's no pro-Islamic person. So really I have the Quran on my side, Daniel does not. He still can't even defend the idea that you can have sex with a slave without a marital contract. Because 425 clearly says that you must. There's not a single verse that Daniel has shorting that has proven his point that you can take sex slaves, that you can have sex with slaves, you can conquer people, ways, wars of aggression. None of this, he can't prove any of it. We'll kick it over to Daniel for his rebuttal as well. I can't hear you James. We'll kick it over to Daniel for his rebuttal as well. The floor is all yours. It's 10 minutes. Let's see, I think this is your own rebuttals already. Or five minutes, five minutes. Five minutes. Oh, he went way over five minutes. Did I go over five minutes? Because I was supposed to stop. I thought it was 10 minutes. It's going way over time. I thought it was 10 minutes because he went for 10 minutes. Well, it's not me, it's I should be called out. So that's not, that's fine. Wait, just quiet both of you for a second please. I'm just trying to like get my bearing straight. It's like, were we just on the, that wasn't the rebuttals? That is the rebuttals. That was the rebuttals. I don't think you went, did you go? I don't think you went over. Maybe I'm mistaken. I thought, yeah, maybe I'm, it doesn't matter. It's fine. I was on my, like I had it set where it says set a timer for four minutes. You can talk all he wants. It's okay. Well, I'll set, I'll talk for five minutes. Okay. That's my mistake. I'm going to check and if you, if I'm, if you guys are wrong this time, I'm going to rub it and roll with your faces. Yeah, I could be wrong. Let's go to Daniel for five minutes. Okay, let me start. Okay, so my question for Javad now, do you think Islam was the first society to abolish slavery? Like as a historian, please tell me because this would be breaking news. You know, Islam is the first society. The Quran is the first emancipation document of history. Please, you know, make this claim as a historian. So all of your historian friends can laugh you, laugh you out of, off of Twitter or out of Harvard. Like people need to realize that this guy is a Harvard academic. Like this is an embarrassment. I'm also a Harvard graduate. This is like the best you can come up with. You know, when you have this kind of interpretation of the Quran and you're saying, oh, well these verses came later, I've noticed something with your goofy gymnastics Javad. Whenever there is a verse of aggression in the Quran, just what you presented right now, you sit like kill them wherever you find them, for example, or even jizya, you say, oh, it's for a specific event or it's just for this specific battle or oh, it's just for that specific time. What is your evidence for this? Who knows, it wasn't presented. But whenever there's a verse about peace, whenever there's a verse about mercy, oh, then that's universal, that's for all time and place. You know, this is just post-hoc reasoning. You have established no principles of interpretation. You haven't established any principles of reason or higher ethics. These are just pretty words that you refer to and you think that you're convincing people. No, it's a joke. No one can follow your argumentation because it seems all post-hoc and selective cherry picking. So, you know, this is the trend for this entire debate exactly as I predicted. Goofy gymnastics, you haven't even acknowledged this claim that I made at the very beginning, like we're still on this issue of do you accept, do you concede that language, understanding a text requires understanding the intentions of the author? Do you accept that? Like why can't we even agree on this basic point? Like this is an established scientific academic fact. You refuse to address it because as soon as you accept that scientific academic fact, then it becomes very pertinent. What is actually the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and what does the history actually say about the historical Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? You don't want to get into that debate as you've admitted multiple times now. You don't want to have that debate. You want to talk about very granular, specific, narrow issues because you can't address that larger argument. Me on the other hand, I'm coming to this debate with the exact topics that we agreed to in advance, religious freedom, patriarchy, gender norms, restrictions on sexuality, conquest, slavery, sex with female slaves. These are very broad topics. And if we want to address broad topics, we have to appeal to large amounts of historical sources, contextual sources. We have to look, we can't just say, oh, this verse, I think it means this. I read someone in the ninth century who had this interpretation of that verse and therefore this is what it actually means. Like this is embarrassing. Like I can't believe that you are taken as a serious historical scholar. I think this debate has really exposed you as a charlatan. This is not academic at all. You can't publish any of this kind of stuff. And this is why I agree to have this debate with you because I want to expose like, what is the reality of Harvard academics? Like they Harvard academics are not people to be intimidated by these Islamic studies scholars. They're people like Juan Cole saying that the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam is like Martin Luther King or he's like a senator and he has this peace march into Mecca. Like this is the kind of nonsense that your institution, your departments produce and every traditional Muslim, even like a first year student of Islamic studies can completely destroy all of your arguments. They just need certain pointers. For example, this debate, I'm bringing all of these historical sources from your own academics, from your own books that are seen as authoritative by your side. And you can't even address any of those. Like this is a complete debunking of your entire claim to be this historical critical scholar. No, it's a joke. You're a propagandist, you're a trained seal. And this is why it's so easy. Are you going to address the inscriptions that are explicitly using slave terms? Are you going to address the coinage? Are you going to address Kufa, Basra, Fustat? Are you going, these are not like 100 years after the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. These are directly after the life of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. And you have all of these contemporaneous Christian sources that are describing what the prophet is all about. Why do you think the Christians are saying the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam is, you know, a prophet of the sword? Like where did they get that idea? Like within two years of his lifetime, like a real historical critical scholar would take that as a lot of evidence for what the actual beliefs and norms of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam what were, but you're a propagandist. So you dismiss all of that and you ignore it. We're going to jump into the next section. Want to remind you folks, thanks so much for all of your encouragement, your likes and your shares. It means a lot. So thank you guys out there. We're going to go into the, I'm barely hanging in there guys. I can't believe it. Are you guys ready? These coas. Open discussion. Let's go. Let's go. Open dialogue. Excited James. Open dialogue it is. 45 minutes. Yeah, but we'll do it one and a half minutes each. That's right. I've got the timer set. Here we go. Ready for it. Okay, thank you so much. I'm afraid that Daniel does not listen carefully to arguments. He's asking, talking about inscriptions that used slave terms. I've already said that Abu Bakr started the precedent about enslaving prisoners of war and that other companions opposed that. So I'm not making a claim about the post prophetic period. I'm actually saying that the tradition went in a different direction. I'm making claims about the prophet and the Quran, using the Quran. Now he asked me about how I interpret my, the problem of interpretation. Actually he's going in the post modernist, post Gadamarian way, if I understand him correctly. That in fact that it's an interpretive circle then. Because then if you have to use the Hadith to interpret the Quran, then somebody has to interpret the Hadith and it's an endless cycle. This was actually one of my arguments against traditionalism. We believe that the Quran is clear and accessible because God is the one who inspired the prophet and therefore it had to be understandable. This is what the rationalist said. As far as post hoc explanations, it's actually the medieval tradition that relies on this. In fact, we see in this how you haphazardly apply Quranic verses. You ask me where did I get the context for kill them wherever you find them, verse nine, five. I got it from the Quran itself. Look at the passage. I showed you the verses where you're not paying attention. Verse nine, five is embedded in Surah nine early, which said it's only against those who violated the treaty and initiated aggression. As far as Islam abolishing slavery, I have not claimed that Islam abolished slavery. What I have claimed is that, and the reason why there's a difference between saying that you want to abolish. So if you look at this, Professor Richard Epstein talks about the Roman law in the sixth century. He said slavery is in fact a positive legal institution. And what you discover very quickly is that it was such a pot. Okay, so I'll have to finish that point on the second one. I want to answer the question of why didn't he just abolish slavery? Go ahead. How does that make any sense? Like you're saying that Islam did not abolish slavery? I thought that was your whole argument. I thought the whole ethic of Quran, don't interrupt. The whole ethic of the Quran is abolishing slavery. This is like the most apologetic type of nonsense. Like, oh, there's so many verses in the Quran that say to free the slaves. Well, there are many verses in the Quran to give Sadaqah, to give charity. Does that mean the Quran is against private property? Like you need to give up all of your wealth because the Quran is constantly saying to give charity. Like this is the kind of argument that apologists 50 years ago would make. And now you're regurgitating it and you're crawling yourself in academic. That is a joke. Circular, you said that I'm being circular because I'm trying to interpret the Quran with hadith. Where am I referring to hadith? I'm referring to historical sources. I'm grounding all of my points in historical sources. You're just straw manning me. You have a script for this debate and you're not adapting to the actual arguments that I'm making. Where is all of the hadith that I'm citing? Where is the circularity, Javad? And you're lying. Patricia Krona did not appeal to higher ethics in interpreting Quranic verses. She appealed to history. She actually was a historian unlike you. So you're lying about Patricia Krona. I'm not a fan of her, but you're misrepresenting her. So please explain how Islam is not the first to abolish slavery, did not abolish slavery, but the Quran also somehow is abolishing slavery according to the clear verses. So this is a contradiction. You need to explain it. Yes, thank you very much. So I never claimed that the Quran abolished slavery. What I did say is that the prophet is the Quran forbade enslaving anyone. That's a difference. So there was de facto slavery or there are already slaves that already existed and the Quran said to emancipate slaves. You can look at what Professor Richard Epstein says about Roman law in the sixth century. He writes, no jurists could simply overthrow it. And it was probably something of an act of courage to even speak against it. And that's what the prophet Muhammad did. By the way, Dr. Douglas Bradburn asks, why didn't George Washington just abolish slavery because he was opposed to slavery? Well, he couldn't because they were property. According to the laws of the land, they were human property and they were owned. So the only way to free the slaves was to emancipate them. You had to actually compensate the people. And that's what the prophet Muhammad did. So in the battle of Hunain, he couldn't force the other people, only Banu Hashem listened to him. And the rest, he had to ask them by persuasion. And then he had to say that I'll give you six camels or something, that's what it was. For each slave that you free, I'll give you six camels. So you had to use persuasion and encouragement. That shows that he couldn't force them to free slaves. This was the case with George Washington. This was the case with Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln couldn't even free slaves himself. He could only free slaves in the states that were rebelling, not in the states that were part of the union. The British empire took a hundred plus years with its navy and army to force, to end the slave trade and to abolish slavery. The prophet Muhammad didn't have any of that. The only people who would listen to him directly were Banu Hashem. I'll wait for James to tell me that the time is here. Okay, so. Time. Time? Okay, thank you. Yeah, so I'm waiting for this amazing new research, Javad, that you're hopefully gonna publish in some reputable journal that Islam was the first society to forbid the taking of new slaves. This is gonna be a great groundbreaking paper. You're going to win all kinds of prizes for this amazing insight that you have. Islam was the first society to forbid taking new slaves. Wow, I'm just so amazed by your insight, Javad. That Quranic analysis that you did was so brilliant. I'm waiting for it to see on the pages of the top journals, maybe Arabic or Islamic law and society. Maybe International Journal of Middle East Studies. Can you publish this there, Javad? I'm really looking forward to it. So this is complete nonsense. And yeah, the Prophet SAW also encouraged giving charity. He encouraged giving your wealth for the sake of Allah. The companions were giving their wealth for the sake of the cause of Islam, peace be with Allah. That wasn't an abolishment of private property. So yeah, you're encouraging, you're encouraging the freeing of slaves, but that doesn't, where is the prohibition of taking slaves? Especially when we see the historical record, we see the rock inscriptions, we see all of the non-Christian accounts. We see all of that history. Once again, you cannot address a single one as a so-called historian. This is sad. Go ahead. So I'm not gonna get into ad hominem. All I'll say is that I'm doing my dissertation right now and it's in a good state and I'm at Harvard so I don't really think you can question my credentials from that standpoint. But I can question your sloppy and dishonest citations. So I'm surprised that you haven't made this sloppy claim but you've made it in the past. You cite Lawrence Kealy's war before civilization to claim that all pre-modern societies took sex slaves. You said, this is why Kealy argues all pre-modern civilizations took sex slaves. That's not what Kealy argues, I looked it up. You're so bad at looking things up. This book is not even about pre-modern civilizations. It's about prehistoric civilization, primitive civilizations before written history. That's what his book is about. And even in the page right before it, he actually says that there are people who did not take sex slaves. So this argument that you have is, and you just told me, oh, Islam would be the first ever banned enslaving women. Kealy in the page right before the one that you cite says there were societies and civilizations that did not enslave women, did not take slaves. So this is the exact opposite of what you are saying. So you cite stuff very sloppily and this is not even war before civilization. You cite stuff like guns, germs, and steel. You're talking about being academic. So, I mean, this is a sloppy citation just like you do the sloppy citation with the Reind study that they've been talking to you about that you just, you know, you should actually look at what you write. He's talking about primitive war, warfare conducted by prehistoric and primitive societies. And in some, this is what he writes in page 113. In some primitive societies, women were spared injury or capture by enemy warriors. And they could enjoy immunity from harm. And you know what you said? You said, either take concubines or people get wiped off the face of the earth. There's no third option. And you're claiming that Keeley is saying that. You said, quote, this is why Keeley argues all pre-modern civilizations took sex slaves. He did not say that. Then you use the quote very misleadingly. Keeley is not saying what you're saying. I'm sorry, you're ignorant, Javad. What Keeley says, yeah, the societies that didn't take the slaves, they didn't take women as sex slaves. You know what they did with them, Javad? In the pre, you know, in these hunter gatherer societies, they killed them. They killed the women. They massacred everyone. So the societies that didn't take slaves were killing them. That's what Keeley says. You're appealing to your credentials at Harvard. I'd recommend not citing that because basically you're bringing down Harvard's name. And that's good. You know, people really need to understand that this is what Islamic studies, academics are all about. Like this is the level. Like it's a joke. Like you having a degree or a PhD from Harvard, now people will realize that it means nothing. It means like the Prophet Salli Sallam was like MLK or a senator. Like that's what they're gonna associate with Harvard, your Harvard PhD now. So societies that Keeley references, their hunter gatherers, 99.5% of societies in history were hunter gatherers. And like I said, they all, if they didn't take slaves, most of them didn't take slaves. They would just massacre. They would kill. So by killing off all the men, even if they didn't actually kill the women, the women would die without the men being there. Like that's the consequence of not having men to protect you or men to provide for you against the forces of nature. So this is like not really a point in your favor if you wanna go back to Keeley. Time to clarify. All right. Yeah, let's, hold on. Let me share my screen again. All right. Let's see Daniel's shoddy citations. He says a good book I recommend is Lawrence Keeley's Warfare for Civilizations. And he explains that pre-modern war was, it's not about pre-modern war. It's about prehistoric war. And he's actually trying to make the argument that they were not noble, quote unquote, savages. And rather that they were quite brutal. So he's not trying to justify these, trying to show that they were actually more ruthless. But he's contrasting that with pre-modern civilizations which Daniel is trying to actually lump in. And then he says, this is Daniel on the last paragraph right there. This is why Keeley argues all pre-modern civilizations took slaves. Again, this was a necessary aspect of war. If you did not take concubines, you were at a major disadvantage in militarily because you either take concubines or people get wiped off the face of the earth. There is no third option. So given that stark reality, yes, taking slaves was not only morally justified, it was morally necessary. And that's what his argument is. But really what Keeley says, Keeley says the opposite. Keeley, Daniel just repeated it again. He said, you know what they did? They executed women. No, in the page before, quote, it's in red here. In some primitive societies, women were spared injury or capture by enemy warriors and could enjoy remarkable immunity from harm. Just admit that you got this wrong. Be honest, seed the argument. This will be better for you. Instead of attacking and being ad hominem, this is not ad hominem. This is showing how you don't cite things correctly. So that's what I would say with the Keeley arguments. As far as why the, okay. Yeah, this is a side show. Like you had that, is that slide like from the, for the debate or you just had that in your pocket to show that I'm bad with citations. Okay, no, I said exactly what Keeley says. I cited it properly. The alternative for not taking the females. Once all the men are dead within Hunter gatherer societies, that means the women and children are soon going to follow as well. So this is, it's essentially a death sentence. So whether they take them as slaves, whether they kill them, whether they leave them to the forces of nature, this is irrelevant to the overall arching, overarching point that I was making in that debate. If people want to understand my views on the moral necessity of slavery throughout history and the justifications for that, go to any of these other debates. Harris Sultan was the one that we specifically debated on this issue and I, where I think the Florence Keeley citation was from. So, and then Keeley is not the only source, by the way, on pre-modern warfare. So that's another thing. Like I'm not mischaracterizing the historical record on this, but you want to make this debate about like scrutinizing every single word I've said in every single debate. Okay, that's interesting use of your time. I'm trying to talk about history. I'm trying to talk about the actual debate topics. But if you want to, you know, bring up some more citations from debates from two or three years ago, go ahead. You're kind of like Sophia, that feminist that I also debated who is obsessed, still is obsessed with me or Mike Jones. Like he's citing like my debates from five years ago as like some kind of winner against me. It's a bizarre debate tactic. Like I try to focus on the things that you say in the actual debate, the things that you cite in the actual debate. Maybe it'd be smart to address that. A lot of back peddling there. Basically, Daniel is back peddling and trying to get out of it and just not being honest and admitting that he made a mistake. That would be more honest of him. But I'm not just bringing it up just to say that you're sloppy. Your moral argument rests on it. This is what you said. You said it's morally, not only morally justified, but morally necessary. And then you double down on it right now. You said that in pre-modern societies, if you didn't do that, then all the women would be killed. But the problem is, is that the evidence that you're using that is for prehistoric societies, hunter-gatherers as you said, it's not the case for pre-modern civilized quote unquote societies, because in that case, and this is, we see that in the Islamic medieval tradition, the problem is that it wasn't only the women on the battlefield that you would take, but it was actually in conquered territories. That was as, Clarence Smith actually talks about this. He said, this is one further step that the Islamic tradition took. Not only the people on the battlefield, but it was people in those conquered societies in their countries. So you were taking them out of their homes where they lived. You were gonna conquer that territory. And it says, the medieval Islamic tradition said, you could just take all the women and slaves. They weren't gonna be killed or executed. They were living in their families and in their homes. So the entire moral justification that you raise for saying that slavery is morally justified and necessary goes out the door. So just admit that you're not actually using moral arguments for anything because you're a fideist. You just believe that the text says that, so you must follow it and then you use reason instrumentally. But the reality is that even Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal said that you can't even do that. Don't do reason debate. Maybe that would be better for you. But the reality is, is that the Quran itself says that you need to free slaves at the end of the war. You can take captives, you free them at the end of the war. Oh, Javad, Javad, Javad. You think that people in conquered societies, so all the men have been killed in agricultural or pastoral societies. All the men have been killed and then the women are in their homes and they can just live without men. There's no need to enslave them because they can order uber eats and they can get all their needs met by who, not the men, they're all dead. So what are you talking about? You have no conception of history. You have no conception of pastoral or agricultural societies. Like these quantitative and social science, quantity of social science that I mentioned before that academics ignore, like you're a great poster boy for that. Like you don't even understand like pre-modern society and these kinds of civilizations. Once all the men are dead, the women will die soon after, even in agricultural and pastoral, even in industrial societies. If all the men today died, who's going to maintain the infrastructure of society? Like this is a very obvious point. Women would not be able to survive if all the men disappeared. So the humane option is actually to take them as slaves, to take them as concubines. That is the humane way to do things and that's what Islam prescribes and that's what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did in his life. If it's so wrong and it's so inhumane, well he did it. He owned slaves, so explain that. Explain how that can be possible. And then the other point that I want to make is, yeah, so which pre-modern society didn't have slavery? Which pre-modern society, these civilizations didn't have concubines? You still haven't answered that. Okay, so this is very interesting. This is now where Daniel actually becomes the apologist of the apologetic person and he's arguing that there are humanitarian reasons for taking slave women, which is funny because the medieval tradition didn't do that. The medieval, some that raised this argument, the real argument was that when you're a non-Muslim, your penalty for unbelief was death and slavery is like death and so that's the reason the justification they gave. If it was really about being humanitarian and merciful, then why did the medieval exegetes exclude Muslims from this? So Muslims went to war with each other all the time and yet the Muslim jurist says you cannot enslave Muslim women. You cannot enslave other Muslim women. So if this was a humanitarian reason, what happened? Did they just execute all the Muslim women and children? No, they saved them. So your moral philosophical argument collapses on its head. You have to then say if it's a mercy, then we should be merciful to the Muslims too and we should have the same rules for the Muslims. This shows actually that the medieval exegetes understood, the medieval scholars understood that this is a harmful thing and we don't want it on our people. The only thing that prevented them from applying it to others was unfortunately the religious chauvinism where they were like, our people are more human and we saw that. They said that the blood of only a Muslim is sacrosanct, not of a non-Muslim. And this unfortunately goes against the Quran which sanctifies all human beings because we are, like I said, God breathed, whoever kills a single human being kills all human beings according to the Quran. So this is the reason why they set it up. You're being an apologist by raising this argument. Just be honest, the penalty is unbelief. It's a penalty, it's like death for them. That is the real, if you wanna be the real hardcore, non-apologetic answer like you love to do and smear the name of Islam everywhere, that's how much it's- Time, man, time. Yeah, no, your status, it's like you are as a slave, the status is like you're a non-person. Like that is known, like the jurist site that, this is not like a gotcha moment. Like I'm not trying to make a humanitarian defensive slavery. I'm just pointing out basic historical facts, basic sociological facts that you ignore in your analysis. The thing about the point that I am making is that it's about survival. It is about, it's a necessity to take slaves. It is a necessity to take sex slaves. That's why every single pre-modern society did it. Explain to me, if it's not a necessity, if it's just some kind of barbaric thing that was introduced later in Muslim society, tell me why there's no single pre-modern society that did not enslave. Explain that. Is there no society that didn't have expansionist conquest? Why when we look at Judaism, Christianity, the Sasanians, Zoroastrianism, all of these civilizations and religions, they all have a conquest doctrine and that's represented in their texts. It's represented in their actual history. It's represented in the archeology. All of them have that. You, if you wanna make the claim that Islam was the first religion, the first culture that banned conquest and oh no, we can only have peace. If that's really your claim, publish it. You'll become a famous, world famous, the greatest historian ever who has discovered the first and only civilization that banned enslaving people and banned conquest. What an amazing genius who has proven this from Harvard. Show that, show the evidence. Wow, okay, such ad hominem, but okay. So I think you did raise one great question, which is why, this is actually what's called a slavery conundrum that Dr. Jonathan Brown raises in his book on slavery, which is a more serious take on this issue. But there are scholars who have written on this topic. I recommended two articles. One is my Michael Rota, called a moral psychology and social change, the case for abolition, and the other is by Nigel Pleasance, the moral argument is not enough. Both of them are answering the question, why did it take until modernity for people to realize that slavery is bad in total, totally bad and we should ban it and abolish it? So the answer to that is simple. You need certain factors to arrive for moral realizations to take place. Prior to that, what most people thought was they thought slavery was like poverty. Poverty is bad, it's not a good thing, but we practically don't have any reason, way to get rid of poverty. So that's what they dealt with slavery. It's not a great institution, but we can't get rid of it, so what can we do? In fact, like I told you, it took the British Army 100 plus years to get rid of it. But so that's how they dealt with it. And then Rhoda and Pleasance talk about why when you have slavery in your society and they talk about moral psychology, you like moral psychology a lot. So they talk about group think and how group think leads to motivated reasoning and that you would have powerful reasons to use motivated reasoning to justify your society taking slaves. And that's exactly what happens. And that's the exact same way that, and they give examples, like when there are, so in order for there to be the moral realization and that moral blind spot to be removed, you need to have the economic conditions and the technological advance to make an alternative possible. And that's only happened in the bottom of labor. Did chimpanzees, do chimpanzees have motivated reasoning, Javad? Are all these animal species that are taking territory, warring with each other? Like are they using motivated reasoning? Like this is something biological, dude. Like this is something that is so basic for you to deny is just blowing my mind. I can't understand how you consider yourself a historian or a serious academic. Slavery was necessary. Slavery, what you had, this is why all of these societies had it and practiced it. It was part of their doctrines. It was part of their religions. It's part of their scriptures. It's in the Hebrew Bible. It is being preached by these major Zoroastrian priests. It's found in the Greco-Roman religion. It's found in the Assyrian and Babylonian religions. All of these religions have these exact doctrines. Now, they're not exactly the same as the Islamic doctrines, but they're analogous, as I mentioned. And I cited Professor Sean Anthony, who makes this point, like there are analogs, and that's how a real historian, not like you, a real historian thinks, is about the analogs between these different traditions and how there can be interrelations and connections. So this is something that I want you to address again. What about the Dome of the Rock? What about all of these garrison cities? What about this hard archeological data? Why can't you address that, Javad? You're the historical critical academic. Address it. Okay, so what I'm gonna address right now is the claim that why are all these societies enslaving and have slavery? Well, these are actually arguments in favor of the argument I'm trying to make. That this explains why they couldn't just get rid of slavery at that time and interpreted the Qur'an a different way. I'm not claiming that Islam abolished slavery or even stopped the enslavement. I said the prophet and the Qur'an said to stop not enslave and free people. That's the argument that I'm making. And you're showing that there were severe historical and economic reasons and pressures that were acting on the early Muslim community, which prevented them from seeing that and implementing that. And that's exactly what I was showing you in the two academic philosophical articles that I cited to you, which explain moral blindness. And so there was motivated reasoning and it was only until it became economically feasible and technologically possible to free slaves that all of a sudden that moral reasoning kicked in. And it only kicked in in those places where slavery was not present. And it's also untrue that slavery existed in all societies at all times. There are certain societies in which it died down and it went away. There was serfdom that replaced it. There were other forms of, which can be called non-free labor, but there were other forms that happened. So that's not the case. And it's all based on technological and economic factors. Now what the strange thing is that throughout this debate you are, I mean you made the amazing claim that we should look at Christian sources to understand the prophet and the Qur'an. This is actually the 1970s, Krona and Cook that you're, Hagerism that you're arguing for. You are the one who's arguing that. You're saying that we should look at the Christian sources to understand that the prophet Muhammad was a warlord and he must have had wars of aggression. Meanwhile, I'm pointing to the Qur'an and saying this is what the Qur'an is saying. This is verse after verse after verse. So we've ironically switched the roles at least as you imagine it of Orientalists. And I'm the one saying, look at the Qur'an. Look at what the Qur'an is saying. Whereas you are saying no, the Christian early sources say that Muhammad was a warlord, therefore he was a warlord. Whereas I'm pointing to the Qur'an and that's saying that's the earliest source that we have, the most accurate source that we have. And that's saying that you can't wage wars of aggression. You couldn't even cite a single verse. You cited three verses, 9.5, 9.29, and 2.193. Neither of them acknowledged wars of aggression. Patricia, Krona and other serious historians agree with me. I acknowledge that. Thank you for conceding that. That needs to be the highlight of this debate. All the historians agree with me and my points. Yes, thank you. That's exactly the point. You are a propagandist. You're an activist, right? You're an activist. And unfortunately, academia seems like they don't have the highest standards anymore. If you were a historian, you would also agree with me. But since you want to just get into this goofy gymnastics, this radical subjectivity of your personal interpretation of the Qur'an that no one in history had, none of these sects of Islam who bitterly fought over every single major point of creed, yet they all somehow agreed that, yeah, of course, Islam didn't abolish slavery. Yeah, of course, Islam didn't abolish conquest. Yeah, of course, that's something that's permissible in Islam. Yeah, of course, that's what the Qur'an endorses. Yeah, of course, that's what the Prophet SAW endorsed. All of these people, the rationalists as well, disagree with you. You're the only one who has this bizarre interpretation and you're suffering from a kind of denialism. You don't want to accept that you're a propagandist and you're a liberal bot, but this is an intervention for you, Javad. That's what you are. You're nothing more than that. Stop claiming that you're a historian. You still refuse. Address the dome of the rock. Address the inscriptions. Address the historical evidence. Look at these contemporaneous sources, these Christian accounts. Why don't you have an answer for this? How are you an academic and you don't have any response? Like, that's shocking to me. I thought you were going to put some kind of debate and some pressure on me on these points, but you're not. All right, so first of all, it's not my solitary opinion. This is the viewpoint that Islamic modernists have raised since the 20th century, 19th and 20th century, and this has been backed up by historians, Professor Juan Cole, who is a serious tenured academic, and not only just him, there's several Muslim academics. They're not YouTube content creators like you, I apologize, but they're actual academics. Now you make the argument that chipanzis take slaves or something or dominate people, okay? That's strange. So chipanzis commit zinna and they commit rape and so maybe that should be morally acceptable and the Qur'an should accept that. Then you claim that, oh, these other societies, they all did that, but the Qur'an is bringing a higher ethic. Surely you believe that the prophet was divinely inspired and had certain ethical ideas in mind. This is what the rationalist believes. Now, as far as the secular historians, you're right, secular historians will not use that kind of assumption and that's why it's more impressive that Patricia Chirona actually agrees with me. When you say Patricia Chirona agreed with you, no, she didn't. She reversed that. That was in hagrism. She moved away from hagrism after that. Everybody knows that, God's sake. I'm quoting what she quoted near the end of her life when she started reading Islamic modernists and said, you know what, they're actually right. Even though I thought they were apologetic, they're actually right. She said that on jihad. She said that on freedom of speech, sorry, freedom of religion. She said that on all these things. As far as the dome of the rock and these inscriptions, I have talked about them. I'm telling you that you should look at what those scholars whose books you actually looked at, hopefully, look at what they themselves say. Michael Penn is the one who wrote this book. You should see his assessment. I agree with his assessment. His assessment shows that they actually shared mosque and church spaces. Yeah, I'm saying that people like Michael Penn, like Juan Cole, yeah, they're academics, so what? They're not making the strongest arguments. There are other academics who are actually looking at the historical sources and they're making stronger, more compelling arguments. Like someone like Sean Anthony is in another league than Juan Cole. Like Juan Cole is the guy literally saying that the prophet's life time is like MLK doing a freedom march. This is like, this is a joke. So why are you citing that? Oh, Juan Cole agrees with you, big deal. Like so what? That's actually a point against you. And then this kind of stupid argument that, oh, well, chimps also do Zina. So are you saying that we should follow chimps and everything? No, don't be an imbecile. The argument, if you can follow it, is that these kinds of instincts for conquest, for dominating the outgroup, for defending the ingroup, these are biological instincts and that's why we see them universally. That's the argument. So it's not this kind of later accretion that these Muslim intolerant fundamentalists just invented it and back projected it onto the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. That's what the biological point rebuts. Obviously whatever animals do, that doesn't mean we follow it. It's just a proof of the biological basis and the Quran and the sunnah and the example of the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam endorse certain biological instincts and not others. We always refer ultimately to the Quran and the actual historical lived example of the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Go ahead, Javad. So thank you so much. So you keep insisting on it that I talk about the dome of the rock. The reason why I was ignoring it, I had to be selective about which arguments I rebut and I didn't really understand what your point was. It's well known and you should know this that it's Caliph Abdul Malik at, this is when it was the shift happened that the exclusivist shift happened. This is well known, that it was a Morrowind imperial project. This is actually cited as proof by the historians and scholars to show that there was this shift towards a religiously exclusivist direction. So this is not a point in your favor. They had mosques that were sharing spaces. Like I told you, that was Michael Penn, the one that you relied upon and now suddenly Michael Penn is a joker too. He's a Stanford historian. He's a joker. Juan Cole is a joke. Are you serious? Sean Anthony would not agree with that. Sean Anthony deeply respects Juan Cole. Juan Cole is a tenured professor. He got accepted, had a professorship at Yale, okay? So you don't know what you're talking about. You're not someone to speak. You don't know the literature and you don't know the scholarship. And anyways, I don't know what the Dome of the Rock matters. I've already told you that it's the Quran that says that you can't keep them enslaved, that you have to free them and that this wasn't followed post-prophetically. So what would the Dome of the Rock inscriptions help you with? I don't know. You're just saying that the early Muslims did it, but I already accepted that fact. So you haven't rebutted my argument. You haven't dealt with my argument. And the reason is that you can't deal with the Quranic evidence. The Quranic evidence that shows you that you have to marry a slave. You haven't dealt with that, 425. You haven't dealt with 474. That you have to free the slaves. And you say that this is a modernist interpretation. This was the obvious interpretation as the thick test I told you, said in the medieval times, this was the obvious interpretation, which is why they had to take it as abrogated. So you're all over the place. You cannot prove your argument. And so, I don't know what to say. Yeah, so this is why you're not, you can't be considered a historian because you don't even take the actions of the companions of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam within a year of his life. You don't take that as evidence of what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam actually believed. No historian accepts this. No, certainly not a historical critical historian says that, oh yeah, we can't use the actions of the Sahaba one year after the life of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to understand what Muhammad's policies were, what his beliefs and norms were Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Like that's ridiculous, which historian has said this? This is a rebuttal, a repudiation of the historical critical method from you. So thank you for doing that in this debate. Also, there's many people who criticize the conclusions of some of these people like Sean Penn, or Michael Penn, sorry, and Juan Cole Reid, Joseph Spurl's article. He talks about Tillman Nagel. He talks about the German Orientalist Tillman Nagel and his recent work showing that this Pan-Abrahamic thesis is complete garbage. It's complete nonsense. Fred Donner is a joke, like your idol is a complete joke. So you can cite Yale. Oh, he's a professor at Yale or UChicago, big deal. Like this is actually worse for the reputation that such people make historically baseless claims that we're laughing at, plenty of people, over a thousand people are laughing at that in this stream right now. You know what people are laughing at is the fact that you cited Joseph Spurl, who's a Christian Islamophobe, pro-Zionist, and doesn't know Arabic and is not taken seriously by anyone in Quranic studies in early Islamic history. Whereas all the people that you cite are at Stanford and well-respected. As far as your claim that, oh, historians would look at prophets' companions, no serious historian on earth would say, oh, we look at what the prophets' companions say and then we use that as historical evidence for what the prophet said. That goes against historical critical scholarship. That's like in Jesus' studies, you would never do that just because someone else said, you don't take that for granted. In fact, this argument is so weak because we know that the prophet companions themselves argued with Abu Bakr on this very point according to the same sources that you rely upon on the two issues that you're trying to cite. This is an example, number one, the apostasy issue, and number two, on taking them as slaves. On both of these issues, Omar and the other companions disagreed with him. So how can you, they said that this is not the prophet Sunnah. So this is a weak argument from a historical perspective and this is a weak argument from a religious perspective. So you really have no serious like to stand on and you cited Michael Penn yourself. It was on your slide. And then all of a sudden I said, Michael Penn said this and then you said, oh, he's not serious. Let me take Joseph Spurl who can't speak Arabic, who can't read Arabic. He's a Christian Islamophobe. He's terrible. I can't believe that you would cite Spurl. You actually don't know the academics. That's what I think is the truth. Spurl cites Tillman Nagel. Is he a joke too? He's like the leading German Orientalist. He's one of the leading academics in Germany in Islamic States. Is he a joke too? He's just, in that article, he's just conveying what Tillman Nagel says and Tillman Nagel is basing his argument on an actual analysis of the verses of the Quran and the historical record. And he shows that Donner is a complete joke, much like you. Your claim, basically, what your claim amounts to is that as soon as the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam passed away, the entire Muslim community rejected his message of peace and don't enslave, don't conquest. They just immediately, all collectively decided, we're going to ignore what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said and do the exact opposite. And they went in the exact opposite and this is what the Christians cited in their works, what these garrison cities, the coinage. This is absurd, like this is a conspiracy theory. There's no historical evidence for that. You want to cite certain hadith, contrary to your rejection of hadith, but those hadith don't prove that the Sahaba were saying that, oh, if we do conquest, we're violating the Quran. Who says that? No one says that. This is all a fantasy. This is completely absurd, like I'm flabbergasted that these are the kinds of arguments you're bringing to counter my points. And furthermore, do the beliefs and practices of Jesus's direct apostles actually tell us about Jesus's message? Can you answer that, Javad? Like, if we want to know about Jesus, if we had some kind of manuscript that showed what Jesus's direct apostles believed, would that tell us more information about Jesus or not? Well, once again, Daniel C shows how he deals with, I'm answering you, Daniel. You raised a lot of points and I have bullets here. So first of all, you say Fred Donner is a joke. Fred Donner is the dawn in Islamic studies. You said that Sean Anthony is the real serious guy. I like Sean Anthony a lot. He's a great scholar. Let's ask Sean Anthony. We'll tag him on Twitter afterward and we'll see what he thinks about Fred Donner. And as far as Nigel is concerned, he's known for being an Islamophobe, or naigle, sorry. He's known for being an Islamophobe, not an Islamophobe, but hostile to Islam. So that's not a surprise. And Islamic studies scholars, they disagree with each other all the time. That doesn't prove anything, but it doesn't mean that he says Fred Donner is a joke. That's your interpretation. No serious academic would say University of Chicago tenured professor emeritus is a joke. I'm sorry, that's just you who would say that. Meanwhile, you're claiming Joseph Spurl, who's at a Christian university, a Christian Islamophobe, doesn't read Arabic, is not considered in Islamic studies or chronic studies. You think that he is the standard. I'm sorry. Let's ask Sean Anthony about that. Now, that doesn't mean that Sean Anthony will necessarily agree with my arguments. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that academics disagree all the time. And you can't just dismiss Juan Cole as a joke. Fred Donner as a joke. Anybody who disagrees with you is a joke. That's not how academics work, unfortunately, for you. And no, I'm sorry. Nobody would take the prophet's companions as automatically expressing the view of the prophet. And I've already explained it to you. You haven't dealt with this counterargument that the companions themselves disagreed and said that Abu Bakr was not doing the right thing when he was treating them as apostates and taking them as slaves. And that's why Umar reversed the decision and freed those slaves. Exactly the opposite of what you are claiming. Yeah, this is like some genius insight from you. The Sahaba disagreed. There was Iqtilaq. They had Iqtilaq during the time of the prophet, S.A.W. So what? Like this is not, you have to show that they actually claimed your claim. Your claim is that they were violating the Qur'an. OK? So are they, the question is, are they evidence? You're saying that it's not automatic. OK, fine. It's not automatic. I can see that. But that's a straw man. I'm not saying that we take what the companions did and it's automatically, that's what the Prophet S.A.W. believed. I'm saying it's evidence. And that's the point. Just like we want to know what Jesus believes and you avoided this conveniently. We want to know what Jesus believes. Then there's evidence of what he believed from his direct apostles. If we want to know what the Prophet S.A.W. believed, there's evidence based on what the early Muslim community actually did within one year, two year, three year, four year, five years of his life. That's the evidential argument. That's a real historical argument. If you were a real historian, you would be able to handle that kind of argument and provide counter historical evidence. But whenever I push you on that, you just want to refer to hadith. But you don't accept hadith. So this is just cherry picking on your part. Refer to actual historical evidence. That's what's missing in this entire debate. You have no historical evidence. You just want to debate traditionalism, the straw man of traditionalism that you've created for yourself, as opposed to defend the historical facts that no one disagrees with that I've brought before you. You don't want to address those things because they prove the traditional perspective. They prove the traditional narrative. We'll kick it over to Javad one last time and then Daniel one last time. If I remember right, we started with you, Javad, with your first minute and a half. And so Javad one last time and then Daniel one last time before we go into the Q&A. Thank you very much. So this is not cherry picking. This is the standard approach that's considered dominant now in Quranic studies in early Islamic history, which is to take the Quran as our primary historical document that goes back to the Prophet Muhammad. This is for a variety of reasons that we've already talked about that Daniel does not dispute. So that's why I look at the Quran to see what the Quran says on slavery, on sex slavery, on conquest. This is the standard strategy. You are right that we look at other historical pieces of evidence and we use them cumulatively, but the Quran stands as first and foremost number one. You keep saying that I cited hadith. I don't know what you're talking about from that perspective, the fact that I quote unquote reject hadith. I neither reject hadith from a historical perspective nor from a religious perspective. I considered a historical source that tells us about what early Muslims believe, but it doesn't go back to the Prophet Muhammad necessarily and most likely a lot of them are forged. In any case, the point is that this is all historical information that we use. The fact of the matter is, is that when we do that, we see that the Quran clearly says that you cannot take slaves, you cannot take slaves from the captives and that you need to release them. This was the obvious interpretation. It was stated in medieval fiqh book that this is the obvious interpretation. The exeggits as well, who say that that's why it's abrogated, okay? So this is not textual acrobatics. The fact that the companions deferred away from this, sunnah, this is well known. The companions themselves would say you're going, this is a Bubakar's sunnah. It's going in another direction. So they had ikhtilaf and they went in a different direction. So this is not a proof text for you. The last thing that I would say is that your whole premise is based on Sunni traditionalism where you take the companions as being completely upright and that this is a creedal matter and you never even dealt with that issue. You have to switch over to Daniel. Yeah, I mean, this is really stupid at this point, but if it's the obvious interpretation of the Quran, then it should have been even more egregious violation when you have all the companions. You keep citing Omar. Omar also was at the head of all these conquests. You realize that, right? He was at the head of, he was directing a lot of these conquests. He was at the head of taking slaves as well. So what is this point with Omar? Omar also did all of these things that you say that, oh, they clearly disagreed with Abu Bakr on. Like, what are you even talking about? The other point that I wanted to make is, what was the point? Yeah, you were saying that, give me one second. Hi, I'm mistaken. Yeah, I lost my train of thought. But yeah, if it's the obvious interpretation of the Quran, like it's not obvious. If it were obvious, who else is citing it? Who else is saying it? You have like one random citation and I don't trust your translation because you've shown like your goofy interpretation of language, you have no consistent usul, like principles of interpreting language. So any kind of citation from Arabic from you actually should be disqualified on that basis alone. You haven't presented an actual theory of language. I have presented one. I say, look at what the people actually did in order to understand the author's beliefs and norms and their further intentions. And that's a consistent usul. We'll jump into the Q&A. We're gonna move fast. There was many questions and yours is possible. Can we take a break? I gotta go to the bathroom and I should pray as well. We'll do a short intermission. Can we do 10 minutes? Cause I gotta pray as well. It went longer than we can do that. You're on the West coast. No, no, no. Like you need to pray. It takes five minutes. Go ahead. But 10 minutes, like let's do it. Daniel, you were late. You were also got, okay. But it's fine. Two minutes late. I was three minutes late. Like why didn't you set that up with the, why didn't you set up the prayer time before we had? I don't wanna limit people's prayer. Have your 10 minute prayer. That's fine. Just interesting that you didn't anticipate that. It's the bathroom as well. Okay, go to the bathroom. We are going to be starting the Q and A in a bit folks. So we do happen to have a good amount of questions to where I don't, I wouldn't recommend submitting any more questions just because I don't know for sure that we'll read them because we have such a limited time. Limited time. It's 1209 AM where I am. And this is, it's already gone to six hours. So folks, I hope you have enjoyed this. We are, we still have more. So don't leave yet folks. It's going to be tremendous. This last part, I'm going to have a little bit of melatonin because in about a half an hour we'll be done. And I have to warn you in advance folks, I'm not going to do an after show. I've got to get to bed earlier. I have got to wake up at a decent time tomorrow. So. It's like 2 AM for you. Is it 2 AM or you're not on the East Coast? Oh, I'm behind you. I'm an hour behind. So I'm, it's 12 AM here. Wow, yeah, it's one for me. Yeah, this is, is this like your, like post-dinner time? You're just kind of. No, I haven't had dinner. I haven't had anything so. Well, yeah, I, let's see. I mean, I had a small little bit of subway sandwich. Which kind of sandwich? It was the California Turkey, I think or something like the Turkey Cali. And it was good. And I mean, I'm, you know, I don't actually go to subway that often, believe it or not. I actually only go maybe once a week. If I'm traveling, it'll be more, but not your everyday. Ashley, thanks for your super chat. I can read this one because it was addressed to me and I didn't read it early. I appreciate your kind words, Ashley. Thanks for being so patient with me. I sometimes wonder if I, so, you know, so I think, yeah, Ashley, I think I told you one time that there was a gentleman that I like, you know, like we clashed a particular debater. Well, you're looking at him. He's on screen. Look at that smile. And cause one time I went off on Ashley and I felt bad. I worry a little bit. I'm not, I've never, maybe as a kid, I was, you know, a little bit temperamental. I had a little bit, you know, but I don't think I'm too bad. You know, I'm generally a happy person. Once in a while I just fly off the handle. I don't know what it is. I honestly think I'm a little burnt out. I really do. I think that once I'm done with this program, I'm gonna be happier and less burnt out. And I do think it is the burnout that once in a while I'll go from like peaceful, happy to like quiet, you know, shut up. Like, and I don't, I don't take any pride in it. I really do feel a little embarrassed and sad, but I also went on. Yeah, there was somebody in the live chat that I got in a spat with tonight. And yeah, I've got a- You're like typing in the live chat? Yes. Wow, you can really multitask. I, well- That's amazing. Normally it's always like a greeting of like, hey, so and so, how are you? I hope you, you know, we're glad that you're here. So that is me typing in the live chat folks. If you ever see that, that's me. There's nobody else that has control of the account. And I just like it to like greet people and kind of say like, hey, like we are happy to have you. And then, but this was a regular, I can't remember what he said, but yeah, it's spiraled into, you know, me saying I'm triggered. And, you know, telling them like that you're cringe. So is that what the young people say today, Daniel? They say you're cringe? Not you personally. I'm saying what they say to people, you know, hey, you're cringe. Yeah, there's all kinds of expressions that I'm learning. That's when you realize that you're old. So I never knew what no cap meant. Have you heard of no cap? No cap? Yeah, no cap. No. You say something, no cap means like no lie. I'm not lying, I'm telling the truth. Wow, I haven't even heard that. Ashley, have you heard that? She's in chat, she's a regular, so she's been on for debates. We appreciate you, Ashley, and they've been lively debates. And certain general, Shane, have you heard that? He's in live chat right now. Folks, if you're watching over at Daniel's channel, tell me, I'll pop into the chat over there, and you can tell me if you've heard of these phrase. These phrases. Cringes, like cringe is common, cringe-based. This is, what else? Let me pop over there, because I've, yeah, I'm trying to think of the most recent that I've heard, because those have been around for a while. What are some of the really new ones? Bustin, bustin. Bustin, really? Something's bustin. That's funny. Bustin, I guess is, in my generation, we had the word cool, like, oh, that's so cool, right? So bustin means cool, I guess. That's, okay, bustin. Wow, man, things are changing fast. It seems like this- We're dinosaurs, we're old, we're like the grandpas, grumpy old men. It's crazy, I don't feel old. I still feel like, and I know I don't look like a guy in his early 20s, but I feel like that. I always feel like my mentality is behind my body. You never, like, your brain doesn't change as much. I still feel like, or I'm just like, kind of like a, so much to learn kind of guy that, you know, is pretty inexperienced. Oh, my laptop ran out of juice. So I, you know, I, oh, I know why, it's because of the cord, it wasn't even plugged in, okay. But it seems like things change faster nowadays. Yeah, maybe this is the nature of social media, and there's just so much content now that everyone has access to, so you can't follow the subcultures, like you could in the past. You just have such a diversity of media, so it just multiplies all the subcultures, as opposed to in the past, where there was limited forms of media. The internet just changed everything, you know? I've tended to think that the internet, one huge thing the internet did was like, on a broader principle, it helped people find each other. So for example, like a buyer's and a seller on eBay, or flat earthers, because, you know, you would have been afraid to tell your neighbor next door that you're a flat earther, but you could go to an anonymous chat room and share that you're a flat earther and you can find other ones, I don't know. But all right, let's get to it. Oh no, hold on. All right, we're gonna start the Q&A right now, right? Yeah. Okay, Justin. They're all gonna be for Daniel. His fame. I gotta grant that to you. Do you agree with Minor, Mary? Do you think the eyes show was nine years old? Yeah. 10 questions. Or half of them, half the questions don't make sense. That's, I wonder what people are doing when they're typing in the questions. Yeah, no spell check. Yeah, exactly. Two seconds. Well, it is late, so I guess that's one of the reasons. It's true. My laptop, it died and now I've got, but I got a spare right here that, because I can't even get it to start up. This is, you guys have, it's true. You know, like Javad said, he told me, he's like, there's gonna be a really long debate. You know, it's gonna be really long James. And I was like, oh, I don't worry about it. I'm young and spry. And now here I am, I'm, but you know, let me just, okay, I'm almost there. But yeah, Javad, you're on the East Coast, right? So it is like 2 a.m. I'm on the West Coast now. Oh, okay. Well, then good. We try to pray before like midnight is the issue. I'm almost there. For the final prayer, for the final prayer. But yeah, folks, I appreciate your questions. We all appreciate them. Also thanks for hitting like. Seriously, we really think it makes a difference. So, and it really does. Like when I, don't worry, this is loading. When I look at the likes and I say, hey folks, can you hit like? It means more than you know. And then I see them go up and I'm like, oh, thanks. Like someone really, you know, people really do that because it's like a personal favorite of me where I'm like, thanks for really doing that. So we're almost to 400 last I checked. So we appreciate that folks. Is your laptop really gonna die? Your power cord is not working. I've got it now. Thanks for your patience. I remember we were gonna start with the super chat. So someone, El Arante says this, Muhammad, they put in quotes, already asked like seven questions. Okay, Minecraft player says, anyone wanna play Minecraft scavenger? Thank you for that. Daniel, these, another one says, Daniel, is it true under Islamic? Law, Dimmies can't build or rebuild places of worship, can't ride horses and have to be humiliated while playing while paying jizya. From the traditional scholarship, the exact rules can vary. So certain things were found in Sham, you know, in the Syria in Iraq that weren't applied in Persia, the Kongi's conquered territories weren't necessarily applied in Egypt. So there's a difference of opinion amongst many of the traditional scholars throughout history on what exact rules to apply for the Dimmies. Like is it wearing different kinds of clothes? So Christians, for example, did they have to wear a belt to distinguish themselves from the Muslims? Where could they actually build their homes? Not even just their churches, but were they limited to certain parts of a city? These kinds of rules, there's a wide variety that span across the Islamic empire, which span from Andalusia all the way to East India. So these kinds of differences are there, but the overall principle is based on the Quran, and that's the verse that I cited multiple times, which specifically talks about exacting tribute, jizya, from the Dimmies, and also keeping them in a subjective status, subjugated status. So everything is consistent with that. Legatus says, Javad, do you think that religious tolerance extends to Satanism and apostapharianism? So I believe, like the Quran says, that religion, as far as belief is concerned, is a matter of the heart and the conscience. So according to the Quran, there could not be anything possibly worse than what the Arabian pagans believed. It was a shirk of the highest hype, and yet, and they were even persecuting the prophet. And the Quran allowed them and said in more than 200 verses that you have your religion unto me, my religion and unto you, your religion. And so yes, I believe that you have freedom of conscience according to the Quran. That's when it comes to belief. As far as actions are concerned, no, the pagans could not persecute the believers. That's when jihad in self-defense and against religious discrimination or persecution justified a just response back. You got it. This one from a picture of Iraq. No username says, oh boy, the CIA is definitely gonna take you out the payroll. You're supposed to be an insurgent to convince Muslims, but no Muslim believes your clear kafir. They say only the atheists are clapping for you. I don't know who that's for. That's for Javad. That's actually for Daniel. Daniel, they believe that you're an agent and are trying to, that's why they encourage that you go on to different podcasts to describe Islam in this version of fashion. I'm not the, okay, if it's for me, then I'll respond. Like I'm not the one who's on the payroll of an organization that is getting funding directly from the Department of Homeland Security. That's our argument for tomorrow. That's our argument for tomorrow. No, I'm responding to the claim. I hate you. I'm responding to the claim. I'm responding to the claim. People are accusing, I need to do this. Are you gonna show your face tomorrow? Are you gonna show your face tomorrow? Are you gonna move? Okay. I didn't show you. Tomorrow after this. You both work for the CIA. Okay, this, Zulu Zolo says, Actually, it's spy versus spy actually. We just don't realize it. We're both undercover. Zulu Zolo says, ask Javad, one could say about his argument, one could meditate instead of pray, salah, and fulfill the general principles of salah instead. So I believe, as Daniel said, so he was asked right now about, should you implement demi-laws? For example, a turban for Jewish people, a belt for Christians. So you have to make interpretive choices and interpretive decisions. That's the case no matter if you're a Fideist or if you're a rationalist. But what the rationalist believes is that use your ethical reasoning to arrive at a conclusion. And we are just open with the fact that you have to make these interpretive choices. And when you do, you do so ethically. Now, modernists have always said that when it comes to worship, acts of worship, we don't change those. Those are fixed. In fact, that goes back to the rationalists who said that revelation is meant to augment what our moral reasoning cannot attain to. So our moral reasoning can tell us that we need to thank the benefactor that is God, but it doesn't tell us how to thank the benefactor. And so it's revelation that tells us how to do that in what way to worship him. And so that's what we follow. So that is fixed and does not change. You got it. Thank you very much for your question coming in from PHX576 says question for, they say Javad script. They say, why do you act? Or no, they're saying question for Javad. And then they're saying, this is your script. They say, why do you act tough on Twitter with slander and personal attacks, but play victim here? And why do you defend garbage, such as apostate, prophet, sorry, Ridvan, who attack Islam? Why do I defend people like apostate, prophet? I've never defended apostate, prophet. However, I don't believe in using nicknames. No, I'm not perfect. Sometimes I will fall prey to that. Even in this one conversation, I can fall prey to the weaker parts of our soul, but I do try and debate to be decent and cordial. I did see, I've watched Daniel before in debates and I thought that he usually conveys, conducts himself in a good fashion. And I planned on doing that here. As far as my behavior on Twitter, I think I'm in general courteous, but I'm not perfect and I work to improve myself. And that's all I can say to that. But I do think that we should treat each other with decency and cordiality. For two years, you've been harassing me, calling me scared, calling me, I'm an arrogant buffoon. All of these high terms. I never called you an arrogant buffoon. That's a lie, I never called you that. No, I never used those terms. You called me worse, you called me much worse. You called me ISIS. You said I'm going to strap a bomb to myself and blow myself up. I'm one step away from that. I didn't call you ISIS. I called you ISIS light and we'll talk about that tomorrow. Yeah, because you defend views of ISIS. What can be worse than that? What can be worse than that? Well, that's your views. You defend having sex with six-year-olds. What could be worse than that? What could be worse? It's super late. Yeah, what could be worse than a different rate? You don't use any ad hominem, Javad. Gentlemen, I hate to do it, but we have all my tomorrow. Zulu Zolo says, another question for Javad. Is it not problematic that you reject Hadeeth claim chains, that you say, but could the same not be said about the Koran's chain and compilers? This is a standard traditionalist argument. The argument is very simple. It's that, oh, if you doubt the Hadeeth, then you're also doubting the Koran, because it's carried by the same people. Professor Sean Anthony, who Daniel praised immensely, just responded to this actually very recently, or at least I saw the tweet very recently, where he explained it very simply. And you can watch Dr. Joshua Little on this as well. The people who carried the Koran were not the same people who has carried the Hadeeth. There was some minor overlap, but in general, there was two different groups of people. The method of preservation of the Koran and the Hadeeth was completely different. The Koran was, at a very early stage, it was part of a Khalifa project to compile the Koran. Whereas actually, the evidence shows us that there was likely a ban on writing down Hadeeth in the early period. In fact, probably throughout the four early caliphs, there was a ban on writing down Hadeeth. So it's the exact opposite of the case, because what historians want, you want a written text as soon as you possibly can, because that stops oral tradition from shifting and doing drastic shifts, which is exactly what we see when it comes to Hadeeth. So it's the exact opposite situation. And the proof is in the pudding. You can just look at the historical anachronisms or lack thereof. The Koran doesn't have these historical anachronisms, whereas the Hadeeth literature, including the Sahih canon, is full of them as even Jonathan Brown had to admit in an article which he was writing for an academic press. This one from Elorante says, my Central Asian brother, Usinov, is correct. Thank you for that. Dr. Omar Muslim Theist says, Daniel, do you believe that Hadeeth abrogate the Koran, yes or no? No Gishgalaphing as you have done all night long, yes or no period. So the Koran and the Hadeeth should be taken together. They're both a part of revelation. How many times do I have to answer this question? They're both a part of revelation because the Koran says to follow the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So there are things in the Koran that are explained by the actions of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, his statements and the things that he approved of. Like you people have a very simplistic understanding of traditional Islam. And this debate wasn't about explaining all the nuances and details of Usul al-Faq and all of these Islamic principles. But even from your questions, it's clear that you have this very simplistic understanding of what the Islamic tradition is all about. So do you think, yes, that it can abrogate the Koran? Sorry, Javad. Don't answer, you dodged the question. You dodged a great question. I didn't dodge. I answered it very clearly. Eric the Great says, how would both Hashmi and Hakikachu deal with the issue of apparent contradictory Hadeeths and Koranic verses on relations with Jews and Christians? Some seem to promote both religious pluralism and Islam only perspectives. So I think this question is for both of us. You can go first, Daniel, go ahead. Yeah, so there are verses of the Koran that will praise Christians and Jews or people of the book for certain practices that they have, but there are many more verses that will criticize them for, for example, changing their religion or engaging in kinds of shirk. So Islam has no problem. And even the earliest Muslims had no problem with collaborating or having treaties with non-Muslims, whether Jews or Christians. So that's not really a contradiction for Islam. It's not a contradiction for the traditional perspective to have those kinds of verses found in the Koran. So from my answer, I, it was for me too, that question just real quick. It's very simple. You can just look at verse 3, 113 of the Koran. It says they are not all alike. Of the people of the scripture, there's a staunch community who recite the revelations of Allah in the night season, and then it condemns other. So that's the, it's very simple. The verses are, some of them are praising a group and another group is blameworthy. So that's very simple how to reconcile that. As far as Hadiths, Hadiths are also contradict, are actually directly contradictory. And those are what we're actually used to go into completely religiously exclusive as direction from a historian standpoint, you would not take these as saying what the prophet Muhammad preached. Elorante says, Daniel, know that I pray for you every day. I criticize you out of love as a Muslim brother. Please get legitimate mentors. You are a talented and charismatic person. Don't waste your talent. Wassalam. I appreciate that's very kind of you to say. I take all Naseerah seriously. So I have mentors and I could always use more mentors. So shizakalakher, make dua for me, pray for me. I appreciate that greatly. Leith says, great debate. Heard a nice quote I'd like to share. Quote is, quote, inspiration is a luxury. Motivation, a privilege. Neither are necessary. Let's get to work. Thanks for sharing that, Leith. And bite me, XD. You know, it's gonna be good when that's their name. Thanks, so James, this is for coffee. Thanks for your support. I want to remind you folks, our guests are linked in the description. What are you waiting for? If you want to hear more, you certainly can hear for more from Javad and from Daniel. Click those links in the description box, including at the podcast. El Arante says, we Muslims are grateful for hosting this debate. A generosity is a trait of a Muslim. Someone is triggered in comments, LOL. Don't worry, be happy. Thank you for that. A lot of triggering in the comments. El Arante says, compassion does not reduce testosterone. No MGTOW, which if anybody's new to that, this is one of those young people phrases. Daniel taught me this. This means men going their own way. No MGTOW, I'm just kidding. Door red pill innovations into Islam, please. We are masculine instead of talking about it. No thoughts? Any real questions? Daniel or Dr. Omar says, Dr. Omar says Daniel throughout tonight, Dr. Javad showed numerous chronic verses. You couldn't answer any of the chronic verses. You wasted the time of viewers. Okay, I answered every single chronic verse. I showed many chronic verses that show defending all the positions that we were supposed to debate. What Javad did is engage in goofy gymnastics. That was the entire, I anticipated that that's what he was going to do. And that's what he actually did. No one could follow these convoluted acrobatics that he was performing throughout his presentation of the chronic verses that somehow are endorsing all of these liberal values. Like that was a complete joke. I responded to all of his verses and I showed contrary verses that show, that explain how his interpretation is absolutely incorrect, not to mention all the historical, biological resources, the archeological record, the contemporaneous Christian sources, all of that shows that his interpretation is detached from reality. It's just interpretation in his head and reformists like Dr. Omar, whoever this guy is. This one coming in from Eric the Great says to both speakers, what are your thoughts on the recent alignment between Muslims and Christian conservative parents in the West against LGBT ideology in schools? You wanna go first or should I go first? Not go ahead. I think your views are well known on this. So this is an extremely sensitive topic and I am representing MPAC outside of this debate. And so I can't really say too much without as a nonprofit, you represent them. From my own personal perspective, what I would say is this, I do think that Christians and Muslims have a lot in common and religious liberty is very important and that Muslims, Christians, all believers should have freedom of religion and not be forced in certain ways. And I do think that that is going on right now. At the flip side, I do think that we have to coexist with people and we can't kill them. And Daniel seems to have an issue with even that. He was criticizing navigating differences on that front and we can look at what he said just a few years ago to see what he was saying on that. And that I think is just a little bit of a question. I've never advocated killing anyone. I've never advocated anything illegal. I didn't say that. Try not to be a fed for a minute. Hey, don't interrupt my answer. The question is for both of us. So you said you're a dumb piece, let me respond. I never advocated for killing anyone, stopping a fed for a minute and implying that that's what I have said. I think it's great that Christians, well, let me answer. I think it's great that Christians and Muslims are collaborating to fight back against this. I think it's very telling that Javad avoided giving a direct answer, but he did imply that religious liberties are being violated. So are you aligning with the right wing, the far right Javad? You think that parents should protest at these school boards for against this trans curriculum or whatever. Wow, you're a far right extremist Javad. This is a big revelation to M-PAC and all of your followers. There's one comment. I don't consider myself left or right. I believe that we should be principled in our advocacy no matter what. And I don't believe that we should be aligned with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. This one going in from El Orante says, we don't learn Islam from chimpanzees. I think that's with regards to your chimpanzees, Daniel. Yeah, you look at animal species to understand what are biologically intrinsic instincts that humans have, biologically rooted behaviors, instincts, beliefs, emotions. This is standard within the study of psychology. So anyone who knows anything about psychology knows that you look at childhood development. You do all kinds of experiments on psychology, look at brain imaging, hormonal imaging or hormonal studies. All of this gives us information about what is actually natural to human beings. And we can understand different religions. We can understand world history by understanding human biology. This is something critical and we can understand more about Islam. We can understand about other religions on the basis of these biological insights. That's not to say that everything that a chimpanzee does or behaves in, it means that that's what Islam endorses. This is a strawman. This one from Pseudo-Nim says, Daniel, you're supposed to be against evolution. Why use biology, DNA, chimps in your Islam debate? I explained it in the second presentation where I made the analogy with evolutionists who say, oh, chimps and human beings have similarities. That's evidence of evolution and a common ancestor. And the creationists, I'm a creationist, they don't deny the similarity between chimpanzees and humans, but they say, no, this is not evidence of evolution. This is evidence of a common creator. And the same thing when it comes to biological insights to help us understand certain aspects of Islam, the same God, the creator who revealed Islam is also the one who created human beings with a certain biology, with a certain psychology, with a certain set of instinctual beliefs and norms. Like that's the logic of it. There is a correlation and actually a confluence in that way. So this is a very coherent and compelling worldview or paradigm to operate in understanding Islam. Last two questions. Ariba Ashraf says, Daniel chimpanzees are actually a matriarchal culture and they eat their own poop. They're matriarchal. So that I don't think is correct. Maybe you're referring to Bonobos, but it doesn't really matter. Like that's not the point of the argument. If you read actual psychologists and these biologists, they'll point to all kinds of animal behaviors. It doesn't mean that everything that we find in the animal kingdom is applicable to humans. Like this, again, is not the argument. You have to, I guess, have a certain level of education or intelligence to understand this argument. Maybe there are people who haven't gone to college so they can't understand or follow a basic argument, but people are repeating the same points over and over in every debate. And last, chocolate walla says 425 only limits the sexual intercourse of the one that cannot afford under a contract. That concubine still has an owner. Did we forget that? Also, Sura Nisa came after Newman Noon. That one is for me. And what the verse says, as I already have shown, is that if you cannot afford to marry a free wife, the free woman, then and only then you'll marry a slave girl. And that means that the options are only those two not to take her as a concubine. So the person who's asking this question is simply presupposing that you can't have a concubine. That's the entire debate. And the verse wouldn't make any sense. It would say, don't take them as fornicators or lovers. So that argument simply doesn't hold water and I'll show that again in my concluding statement. As far as the order that I used, the order that I used, like I said, I told you by source already. You can look at Sinai's chronology and see that. So that's my answer to that. Can a slave give meaningful consent? I think you already, so the verse says that you cannot force people. You cannot coerce. It says, do not coerce. And I already showed you that verse and I'm gonna show it again once again, so don't worry about that. Even if the slave says yes, even if she says yes, is that a real consent? Because she's a slave. How can she give meaningful consent? You're 100% right, which is why the slavery should be abolished. That's why you should follow the Quranic ethical trajectory. The Quran says that you shouldn't enslave further and you should emancipate. I already answered that question by telling you that the Prophet didn't have the capacity to abolish slavery because you had to compensate the people who had slaves, which is exactly what the Quran said to do. We gotta save some juicy content for tomorrow. So I do want to, we do want to go into the conclusions, which are 10 minutes first by Javad and then by Daniel. So let me set the timer here. Do want to say thanks for all of your support folks. If you have a friend who enjoys topics like these, hey, consider sharing this debate with them and we're gonna kick it over to Javad. The floor is all yours. Sorry if you can wait just a seconds. Figuring how to do this again. Okay. And then please do give me the one minute warning, please. All right. Oh, wait, sorry, one more time. These pop-ups just are so annoying. Okay. All right, I am ready. Okay, thank you. Yep, I'm gonna start now. Thank you so much. So I just want to show, this is the exchange that we had on Twitter. Where I said very clearly, and I listed out my explicit positions are stated here. And they are here. And this is exactly what I have argued today. So Daniel, who tried to stack the deck against me, unfortunately, you didn't look at what I read or you were not careful, but I have stayed on track completely. In any case, I raised five general arguments for Islamic modernism, which was part of our debate by the way, if you notice right here. And the metathesis I would defend will be the following. Islamic modernism is more faithful to the Qur'an and the prophet than conservative traditionalism and a better way forward for Muslims. So we were to argue which one is better, modernism or traditionalism. And that's what I did in my opening statement. I raised four specific arguments that Daniel will need to refute. Let's see how he did on that front. And three arguments against Sunni traditionalism. Let's take a look. Let's grade Daniel. Let's see how he did. Well, these are more of my own, this is less for him to refute, but these are my arguments for why Islamic modernism is better because it's historical, it's originalist. It's more chronic. We've clearly seen that. I'm the one who's been continuously quoting the Qur'an and going back to the Qur'an. It's more rational. That's not even debatable. It's definitely more moral. It doesn't have you embrace raping people and that kind of thing. And it's definitely more family oriented as we saw the pre-modern Islamic tradition allowed you to have concubines, eunuchs normalized that and also pedorasty. And read Before Homosexuality by Khaled al-Rayhib where he specifically says in the introduction that I am not only using poetry, but he's actually using multiple streams of evidence, including the juristic literature to make his arguments as well as travel log literature. All right, the four arguments that I specifically raised for Daniel to refute, he was unable to refute any of them. Number one, on sexuality, the Qur'an mandates that sexual intercourse can only take place within a marriage contract. Nikaah, this was shown in multiple verses. I'll show the strongest verse, but there were multiple verses. He was unable to deal with this. His entire argument was, this is how Muslims did it, therefore it must be true. This is how the tradition interpreted. And only you are coming up with this random interpretation. First of all, it's not just only me. It's the 20th century. Islamic modernists have argued this. And the fact is that our entire debate was about whether or not the tradition is correct or not. You can't just presuppose that the tradition is correct because it's the tradition. That's question begging and your entire argument has been question begging. Why did you even come to debate then? The whole question is, is the tradition right or wrong? On religious freedom, the Qur'an allows the freedom to choose or leave a religion and apostasy laws are therefore anti-choronic. He could not show any proof from the Qur'an that apostasy laws are shown to be something that there's a legal punishment for it. I showed eight specific verses and a multitude of verses that show that you're free to choose your religion. On warfare, the Qur'an categorically forbids wars of aggression. I showed that. And on slavery, the Qur'an does not allow the enslaving of prisoners of war. He actually cited 47.4 in his favor, which is against him. So I also raised four arguments against Sunni traditionalism. I knocked down the Sunni view, the traditionalist view of the Qur'an, which is their theory of language, by the way. He said I didn't address that point. They actually viewed the Qur'an as dim, ambiguous and incomplete. That God's speech was incomplete and impartial and dim and therefore had to be through the hadith and the tradition that you understand it. But this leads to an infinite regress. Since you need someone to interpret the interpretation of the interpreter, he did not deal with this argument. The second argument was that hadith criticism is flawed from the very beginning, but it's no narrator criticism was done on the very first level that is of the companions. So no hadith can actually be shown to be authenticated. Instead, they simply just wave the wand and said all of the companions are Udul. But that is that they're upright, but that doesn't sell anything about their memory. So this is completely flawed and circular logic, especially because they didn't even narrate, they would refuse to narrate reports that spoke ill of the companions. So that's circular logic, even though of course many reports survive that show the companions did lie, did fight, did do all these things. Finally, I attack Ijma or consensus. The consensus supposedly gives certain knowledge according to the tradition, but in order for it to grant certain knowledge, you have to have ground Ijma itself in certain knowledge. That is not the case because there's no Qur'anic verse that's not open to more than one interpretation that you could ground that in. That's not me saying it, this is actually the traditional scholars who said that. And you can read Halak's article on this which tries to take a positive spin on it, but it itself says, and you can also read Hurrani's article on this, which shows that they were unable to ground Ijma in a Qur'anic verse and not even able to water Hadith. Therefore, consensus is based on nothing other than we have Ijma on Ijma, which is circular logic. So this is the language theory that the Sunni traditionalists took that the Qur'an is dim, ambiguous, and incomplete, which placed all of the interpretation in the hand of the interpreter. So they are the one that do textual acrobatics. Here Jonathan Brown saying that the interpreter has the power. It's not the Qur'an itself, which is the opposite of what Islamic rationalists said, who said the Qur'an is clear and accessible by its very nature because God made it that way. Here is the guiding principle. This is the bot that Daniel keeps talking about. This is the medieval exegetes and what Daniel himself does. So every Qur'anic verse that conflicts with the view of our legal school must be taken as abrogated or better yet should be reinterpreted. Now let's go to the individual arguments. This is the verse that Daniel simply could not deal with. It says, marry the believing young women. So wed them and take them as, give them proper brides well, as married chaste women, not as fornicators or lovers. Let's hope that somebody clips out that part when I asked him, are concubines lovers? And he paused completely. Obviously they are. And then the next verse says, don't do indecency with them. Those who follow their lusts are misguided. This is obviously talking about having sex outside of marriage. Also, let there be no compulsion in religion. There were so many verses. I mean, how can I cite all of them? But here I would just cite that these verses are saying that anyone who goes astray only leads themselves astray and is not a loss to anyone else, which goes against Daniel's entire argument, which is how harmful it is to social cohesion. So this may be the argument when you're running an empire, but not the Quranic ethic, which is something deeper. And we believe divinely inspired from God himself. It's no loss to anyone. And this is repeated in the Quran. As far as prisoners of war, it says to release them. It's clear as day, then free them. The prisoners of war graciously or ransom them till the war lays down its burden. This is the obvious interpretation as this medieval thick text says. This was the earliest, this is not a random opinion that Daniel keeps trying to show. This was an opinion that we can find in the early tradition itself. This is the earliest opinion. And in fact, there was said to be a consensus about this, but then the tradition went in a different direction. So we have to ask the question of why that is. These are early figures who adopted this obvious reading. And of course, then the tradition went in the opposite direction. And we know that Imam Shafi, he said that I quoted a hadith. I didn't quote a hadith. I quoted Imam Shafi who said that no single person was enslaved after the Battle of Hunain. And we know that the prisoners after Hunain were freed. So these are my basic arguments that are citing Quranic verses. Daniel was allergic to Quranic verses. And instead he cited what the Roman Empire did with the Sassanid Empire did, what monkeys do and apes do and biology. These are the arguments that he brought up because, and then he kept saying that I'm not here to do theology or something, well, you were in the wrong field then. I mean, this is about Islamic studies and you should bring up serious arguments from Islamic studies to do that. He has no idea about the historical record or the historians. He started citing people and saying that I'm a joke, but then by the end of the debate, he said all of Fred Donner is a joke. Juan Cole is a joke. Sean Michael Penn is a joke. Even Patricia Corona should be a joke because she cited all of, and the person he did cite was the actual joke who was Joseph Spurl who doesn't read Arabic and is a Christian Islamophobe. In any case, the fact is that we didn't have serious engagement. The only thing that he could possibly say is, oh, why didn't the prophet abolish slavery? Or Islam, and he's trying to claim that I said that Islam abolish slavery, that's not what I said. There was de facto slavery and you couldn't just simply wave your wand and wish away slavery. In fact, it took the British Army 100 plus years to do that with their army. So how could we expect the prophet to do that when he wasn't a caliph as the tradition tries to imagine? In fact, it was the case that you had to compensate slave owners and that's exactly what the prophet did in the Battle of Hunain. He tried to get them to do it on their own accord but they didn't do that which shows that he couldn't just command them to do that. He had to bribe them by giving them six camels each and that's how the other tribes agreed to free their slaves. So that argument just goes down the drain that he didn't have the power to do that. But he could encourage them and that's what the Quran did. Now why didn't the Islamic tradition go in that direction or the other directions that I pointed to? Well, it's obvious Daniel himself has rose, given the arguments for all of those things, there were deep economic, imperial reasons that were at play. That is exactly what motivated the early Muslims. Those were extreme pressures on them to generate different interpretations and interpret the texts away. Which is why, by the way, all early Islamic historians of early Islamic history and Quranic study specialists agree that there is a divergence between the Quran and early Islamic law. That's, for example, why stoning is not in the Quran but Islamic law does stoning. And so what did they say? They said they used that principle of let's just make up abrogation. So some of them said it's abrogated. Some of them said, oh, actually there was a missing verse of the Quran that said to stone them and then it got abrogated and then we don't read it at all. This is the bot that Daniel is talking about, all the ridiculous types of interpretive moves that they had to do. As far as the Hadith is concerned, the Hadith from a historical standpoint comes from a later period. I rose, raised arguments against the Hadith from a religious perspective but Daniel was totally unable to address them because he's not actually informed enough to do it. That's the reality. The studies that he relies on unfortunately are honestly in the realms of gun, germs and steel. That's not real academic scholarship in my opinion. He looks up like pop science and that kind of stuff and he denies the moon landing. He has conspiratorial takes, all this kind of stuff. I think when he says that academics are jokes, I think we really should think about that seriously. So that's all I would say. Lastly, what I wanna say is that I am approaching all of this from a deep love of the Prophet and of the Quran and of Islam, of my religious community. I have dedicated my life to fighting Islamophobia and clearing up misconceptions whereas Daniel is the one who Islamophobes continuously ask for him to come and be represented. Apostate Prophet wants Daniel to come and represent on these podcasts and that's why he asked them. Meanwhile, he tries to dismiss me and say, don't listen to him. So this shows you who the real quote unquote agent is but we'll talk about that tomorrow. I wish it didn't get ad hominem like it did but unfortunately it went in that direction. I believe that I've raised all of the arguments using the Quran as my guide and I hope that I've spread some truth and love today. And lastly, I would say that we don't need to be beholden to the Islamic tradition. We can love and respect what was good of it. There was a lot of good in it, including from the Islamic philosophers and rationalists which Daniel considers to all be kafirs and blasphemists. So when he says that you're insulting the Islamic tradition, what about all of that? Well, we can love what's good in it and correct what's wrong with it and use the Quran as our guide. Thank you very much. Okay, get over to Daniel for 10 minutes as well. The final statement of the night. Where are you guys turning your cameras off? What are you doing over there? I guess so. Go ahead, Daniel. I need to share my screen though. Can we not start at the time until? You got it. Let me see. The zoom is the thing that.