Mark Durie - Session 1: Understanding Islam

it's my privilege to introduce our speaker for today but before I give it it first of all welcome you this was part about the 20th anniversary celebration sets started in this church 20 years ago so it's appropriate that we should be having this meeting here today and we've had a series of events throughout the year to celebrate this anniversary last week for example we or as a staff waiting to move to Tucson in Alex and we didn't actually stay amongst the children I will be releasing a military book there's a lot of projects but this one is particularly relevant I think in the context of world affairs towards the end of last year we became more and more convinced that we shouldn't just have Islam as a small portion of one cause and so we decided to write a brand new course focusing specifically on his lung several of the items this year have focused on Islam for example it got a scholarship and doctoral scholarship this year for the first time for people studying Islam and of course having machia is the cherry on the top so this is a really important day for us yesterday we had a decision for our staff and last night it was an open meeting at the church and he attended it and we're looking forward to grades a day with Mark today strong influence on what is surely one of the most critically important topics about time so let me hand over to mark and as he done he's a world authority on this topic we extremely privileged near someone and he's capability in this field to address us and I'm sure by the end of the day you understand why I think welcome thank you well it's a great pleasure privilege to be here with you today thank you for that kind introduction we're going to look at five different topics throughout the day the first session is understanding Islam and they're not we speaking about living under Islam we'll be looking at the issue of Christians and Muslims worship the same God and why that's an interesting subject for particularly evangelism and sharing the faith I'll be looking at muhammad and jesus and then the last session will be on spiritual freedom rather than pro habits the cross premise freedom from the common dental structure of islam my background is that I was you know in a past life you might say there was an academic in linguistics I did a PhD driving a grammar of the people of our Chow in international language about chain in Tunisia the our Chinese were the group in North Sumatra who were most affected by the tsunami I think they lost about 200,000 of their people maybe about 10 percent of the action East people were killed by the tsunami and I had the joy of living the air mongst a very Muslim people group and I wrote a grammar of my for my PhD back in the early ages then I in the 90s I felt called by God to go into pastoral ministry so I resigned my job at Melbourne University and went into parish ministry and in 2001 when I saw 9/11 happening I was called by someone early in the morning to wake up and watch TV which I did and saw those events happening I knew what I knew what ideology could motivate people to do something like that and from my time in I chose and I decided that I needed to understand Islam better to teach and equip others about it so I've been busy in doing that for the last 15 years and in the last four or so years I've been active leading a congregation of made up of all some combats actually there's a congregation of Iranians in Melbourne but I have the privilege to Pastor and lead and they've all become Christians in the last three or four years so that's been a really exciting an interesting ministry to work with them be very fruitful and enjoyable I'm also the pastor of a few Anglican congregations that I look after with my team but I've been devoting more and more time to Islam in in recent years and earlier this year completed a second doctor on the theology of the Quran but I won't be focusing particularly on the Quran today a bit more a number of different important topics from standing and engaging engaging with Islam Islam is a really important issue for for us in the world today for everyone and it's important to understand how Islam works for lots of different reasons it's important to be quit I know when I went to Theological College I studied about the Reformation and the early church and history of the Western Church felt that we were given very few resources to engage with Islam and it's a pity really because within itself Islam includes an apologetic against Christianity so most Muslims who had any kind of training in Islam will have been taught certain things about Christianity and what to say to Christians but that's not the case of about Christians Christians approach those conversations like a blank slate you know and that's a very unequal way of Muslims and Christians to talk to each other what the Christians need to equip themselves so we're going to talk about understanding Islam and I'm gonna explain how Islam is organized as the faith and some of the distinctives of Islam Islam the word Arabic in the word every word Islam means submission to surrender it's the surrender of battle that's the image comes from where you become pacified as a word bye-bye and you save yourself by surrendering to your enemy and the word Muslim you'll see the SLM in both words that route they share the same rhythm us ylim is someone who has surrendered or submitted and become thereby the captive in in this case to Allah you know you surrendered or submitted to Allah when you become a Muslim and the the fundamental metaphor for the relationship between God and humanity in Islam is that of a master and a slave so the very common Islamic name Abdullah means a slave of Allah and that's really a a description of what was what was meant to be someone who's a slave of Allah is submitted or surrendered to Allah in order to understand how Islam works it's a good of the place to begin is is to ask what is the fundamental human problem because different ideologies different faith systems can have different views of what is the fundamental issue about being human and from a Christian perspective what would you say is the fundamental human problem what does what is that what is Christianity to say is the fundamental human problem sin exactly and the same answer would be heard in Korea or America or Australia or Europe or China it Christians have been taught and learned that sin is the fundamental in the problem and the solution to to sin is forgiveness it's a breach of relationship basically and the outcome of that forgiveness of God extends to us whose salvation we are saved we're found by God however in Islam the fundamental human problem is not sin it's love does have a concept of sin but it's not the main issue the main problem with human beings according to Islam is that they are by nature ignorant and easily led astray and the solution to that ignorance is guidance and the result of being rightly guided is success so instead of sin forgiveness salvation you have ignorance guidance success the call to prayer that rings out from the minaret says for the master says come to there's no god but Allah and what one of the things you see it says is come to success come to success so the act of Prayer is an act of being rightly guided looking forward to success in this life and the next scent the Islam divides the world of humanity into winners and losers the ones that are successful and the ones that are unsuccessful and will be fabulous so that's a different understanding of of the human nature I think all actually all societies that have adopted an ideology that rejects the idea of sin have have had trouble establishing righteousness in government and in public life it is if you don't believe sin is a fundamental human problem then it just runs relevant that's happened in in communist regimes trying to bring justice but without acknowledging the fundamental issue of human beings but you might say well I'm quite attracted to that idea I find myself to be easily misled and I need guidance how can I be rightly guided how can I follow the right thing God is slightly truly submitting to God that's so you might be asking that question even that is you're listening well you become a Muslim you become a submitter a surrendered one by saying and believing these women creatures called the Shahada which is that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Messenger that's the that's how you become a Muslim to say that I believe it and the meaning of that phrase contains within it the answer to the question of where can the guidance be found because according to Islam the guidance that is needed is found in the messenger Allah sends messengers to humanity according the crow to the Quran to bribe them the guidance they need to stay on the straight path and to please God so when you say Muhammad is Allah's messenger you're saying he will be my guide I will follow him follow what he says you might then say having heard as much you might several where can I find this guidance a moment if here's the god that's been sent to the messenger that's been sent by God to keep on a straight path how can I learn about the guidance that he's provided and the answer to this is to follow the guidance of Mohammed is found in the Quran which means the recitation it's a series of recitations if you like that are recorded in the Quran and they that provides one form of guidance and another form of guidance is actually what's called the sooner it's enough a word meaning pathway and it means actually the life of Muhammad what he did and said the Quran teaches that that the manner of life of the messenger is the guidance for people to follow and so if you want to know which how to stay on the right path you learn about the life of Muhammad and you basically do what he did and you say what he said and he becomes the principle to follow to be rightly guided so there's actually quite a few similarities between Christianity and Islam in this respect because a true Christian will want to do what Jesus did follow men Jesus it and to be a Muslim you need to follow the example in the teaching of Muhammad plus the Quran as well it's not just the Quran the life of Muhammad is really critical to and actually the Quran makes clear that you have to follow the example of mohammed surah that the chapters of the Quran so these these sirup obey Allah and obey the messenger if you obey the messenger you'll be on the right path so basically the Quran says in in a whole number of different ways but you have to follow the messenger it's interesting there are some Quran only Muslims who don't want to follow the example of teaching in moment but in fact the Quran itself says that you have to follow the messenger so you know the Quran demands obedience to the example of the messenger Allah is Stern he says he's angry with people that don't follow the messenger and he doesn't speak Mohammed doesn't his own desire so his pronouncements the things he said and did become mandatory for Muslims to listen to her to follow them to be aware of you know in the in the sunday-school situation the answer to every question is Jesus and sometimes it can cause children to get into difficulty if they follow that advice but the answer to almost every question you might want to know about Islam is its Mohammed I tested the the crowd last night on this enabled good answers and I'll test you as well here today you've probably observed that many Muslim women have large beards and why the wider Muslim men have large beards the answer is Mohammed that's excellent they have large base because Muhammad said you should tread the moustache and let the beard grow long and if you see a picture of a radical Muslim of the big beard have a look at his moustache and he'll observe that he has none at all or a very very small one because Martin said to trim the beard so he's exact and he would have done the same himself so his example becomes mandatory to follow now then you might say okay like you're telling me that to be rightly guarded I need to follow the example of mohammed you just mentioned about this beard thing how can I find that sin this information where is it found you know how is it reported and it's reported in in terms of hadith or the traditions these report the example and the teaching of Mohammed interestingly they're written down and recorded in the form we have today two to three hundred years after Mohammed so traditions about Mohammed were passed on orally until finally they were written down and then Muslims in the century or two after that they poured through all this material worked out principles for living the guidance of Mohammed was organized and actually so nice into what's called the Sharia and these are this guidance is preserved in collections recognized six canonical collections of muhammad's sayings and the two most prestigious and rival are say Albert hurry and start Muslim so he means reliable and that say Muslim is published in English in four volumes quite thick volumes in translation and you can get an Arabic English version of the same oval current and that's in nine bottles and one of the things I did in that this summer after 9/11 in Australia was to read all this and I spent a couple of months reading it from page to page which is very interesting I learnt a lot about Islam but basically it's lighted up what happened would happen is that Muhammad's friends and companions would listen to what he'd be saying and doing and then later they pass it on then write it down and it would get encoded into this books which then become the foundation of Islamic jurisprudence is I mean you know religious practice is based on this materials together with the crime actually in some ways the Quran is less important than this material only about 10% of the Quran gives direct guidance in terms of instructions or commands or less than 10% but this are full of information interesting information I'll give you a few examples these particular Hadees these particular collections are organized for legal purposes and what they've done is they break up the thousands of sayings of Muhammad into topics a niche topic is given of what's called a book within the collection and search example a sigh of weariness 93 books some of the books of the book of Earth's devours with marriage you know the book of marriage will have all the sayings of things that Muhammad didn't said that could be relevant giving guidance for marriage and the book of manners you have the stuff of beards in there and the book of jihad is all about warfare so there's 93 of these books and they're organized in this way so that if a Muslim jurists or a lawyer or a judge wants to know you know an expert wants to know about the guidance for say marriage they can find all that all the sayings about Muhammad's marriage and what he didn't said about marriage in one place so you can look through it or tell that's it that's what's where the violence comes from and here's an example of a hard lead this is this hadith is from the book of manners and it's about sneezing in the audience okay in Australia in Australia you we our culture is that you train your children to cut their nails whether you want to it's good in Australia keeps the flies out we have a lot of those and you generally you might say bless you when someone sneezes but it's not a Christian apart it's not a religious doctrine okay but in Islam it's a when among transfer kids to cover them up morning she's teaching them Islam but this Mohammed said that you should cover your mouth when you're yawning and you have words to say to someone who sneezes and other like sneezing and it doesn't like yawning so you should try and suppressing your otherwise Satan might laugh at you so there's a religious dimension to something as simple as covering your mouth when you're yawning so that's a happy occasion and if you live in an Islamic culture you will find people around you doing lots and lots of things that have a religious basis but they become part of the culture they've come in they're into culture example Muhammad said you should put your right shoe on before your left shoe and when you vent your really an inter with your right foot with your left except if you're going into the toilet you enter with your left foot so there's a lots and lots of things to know instructions about which side of the body to sleep on and where you tell which direction you would you face when you sleep and and there's also you know bigger instructions to like having Miriam in what's divorce love like and how does custody children worth lots and lots of different material but loves of it's quite detailed it's a table system of life now the honey's contain a lot of really important information for the practice of Islam for example if you go into a mosque and ask them for us a little booklet about Islam they might give you a booklet that gives you a list of basic beliefs the basic things that Muslims are meant to believe now that's not from the Pearl it's from a hadith that Muhammad uttered naming a number of things that Muslims have to believe you have to believe in profits in angels about favors in books the day of judgment and so on so that that summary you know when you when you get a little tracked about Islam it says Muslims believe these six things that summary is actually taken from something that Muhammad said it wasn't that people sat down and worked out what Islam believed this is a repeated repetition of a set of beliefs of Muhammad said you have to believe and also the idea of these five pillars of Islam you may eleventh heard about that every Muslim has to say the shot either declare that i lo there's only one god but and that's other and muhammad is the messenger to pray five times a day to pay zakat this is a kind of religious tax to to do the kill damage too fast you know these are the five pillars of islam why they killed us because on a certain day the centrai mohammed said they were and that gets written down and becomes a core part of some practice so that list is nowhere to be found in the quran all these practices are mentioned in the quran but the list comes from Muhammad's direct teaching and you can actually look up I think these lives in our other days but if you do you could look up some khan yes you double in aah calm and it's got lists of hadiths you can look up look up female circumcision or I don't know infidels or whatever you like honey what does Mohamed say how can you believe it then you also have biographies of Muhammad and these are important because they lay out the story of Muhammad's life the story of Muhammad's prophetic career is the man against which Islam is is tracked and organized the Quran is arrayed against the life of Muhammad in terms of the life of Muhammad so that's quite important the earliest biography is the sealer muscle hola which is is originally written about 150 years after Muhammad and it was edited 218 so there's still a pretty late document compared to say the Gospels which were basically written within 50 years of Muhammad they actually reached it was like Jesus sorry they were written within a within generation the Gospels were written within the time frame that if you were writing about the life of Beatles now if you're writing about the Beatles now the distance between say 1960 and now is is the kind of timeframe within which the Gospels were written about Jesus life okay so it's it's within a generation however the life of Muhammad was written 150 to 200 years after and same with a hadith collections even a bit later so that's all that's quite a big time what was happening in South Africa 200 years ago and you know writing a biography of someone's life from 200 years ago it's very difficult from different from writing you say about the Beatles and so it's interesting to realize that it is lom's primary sources a lot of them are quite late time the Quran is early that's clearly a text it goes back at least to the lifetime of Muhammad now there is some aspects of Muhammad's life that are really puzzled he cared for often see this compassion for widows encouraged all sorts of good behavior and some things are in conflict with contemporary ethical standards and some things that Muhammad didn't say they're absolutely shocking they're just horrific really disturbing and when Muslims say and believe that he's the best person who ever lived it's not necessarily the case that they actually are crossed everything he didn't set because it's hard to justify that judgment by ethical standards today if Muhammad was alive today he would be convicted of serious crimes many times you spending all those life in prison in South Africa so that's just something to be aware of now if you meet your Muslim neighbor and you're chatting about Islam they might believe is the best person who ever lived and has the best personality but they won't necessarily have all that stuff they won't haven't read the basic materials Muslims are not expected to read this audience I remember saying to one man who converted to Islam I've read deciding Muslim I read this article Korea and he looked at me in shock you said you're not meant to do that I said I found it very interesting and I think everyone should read that if they're interested for example in becoming Muslim if you know someone is interested in becoming Muslim maybe a daughter wants to marry a Muslim man or something like that tell I have you read this out without you know that the Muslim Allah so apparently read this you know well I do have you actually read the core sources the original sources about Muhammad do you know who it is that your guidance and he's gonna follow and your daughter might say well no if it's some other Moscow me in a little booklet of 1500 issues about Muhammad it's not enough you need to access this material for yourself it's selected so that's my point that's my point yes so they don't necessarily know all this stuff but I tell you a well-trained scholar someone who was trained in classical Arabic and it reaches a certain level of knowledge of the religion they will know this material but ordinary Muslims don't and these farms organized on a need-to-know basis so you might people might not be aware of it now this is very different from Jesus Jesus life is public truth you can read the Gospels in a day and everything that we know about Jesus is kind of therefore want to know if you many churches read the Gospels every Sunday so most Christians have heard everything there is to know about Jesus from the Bible at some point many times over that's not true about the line commandment and when the Iranians were welcoming I told Khomeini to come in and and institute the Iranian Islamic Revolution in Iran they didn't know what they were about to receive is they had read all the materials they didn't know the text ahead and read the fine print there's a lot of fine print in Islam anyway it's interesting that given there are these problems in Muhammad's life and I'll mention a few of them did later is the classical little texts in Islam to be able speaking critically about Muhammad this like there's this big taboo about engaging with this person's life and it's their novellas own very hard to talk about and if you bring certain things into the light the risk is that you could be seen to be denigrating this life on the other hand if you're silent about it you're covering it up so what you do which way to go it's it's a challenge this is really interesting issue the Quran is organizing two stories or chapters and it's basically from there laid out from the longest to the shortest apart from the very first chapter which is called al-fatiha the opening and that's part of daily prayers but the rest are more or less not quite exactly but more or less the longest or shortest this is not one of logical so if you read the Koran cover-to-cover you'll be reading chapters that jump around in Muhammad's life and it's actually very confusing to try and get a sense of timeline it's not laid out for that purpose actually Paul's letters are organized from the longest to the shortest is sort of similar way as well roundness of the lungs so it comes first but so it's it's not like the Gospels of the Bible in that sense many people find the Quran are difficult to read the individual sorezore chapters are themselves made up of many smaller passages that could be from quite different times in Muhammad's life so they've been collected together within a chapter I mean some really hang together but some of the longer chapters are made up of lots of bits and pieces and they might be drawn in very different episodes so if you're looking at the interpretation of verse 21 the interpretation that verse is really tied in to the context of what's happening in Muhammad's life when that verse was revealed and verse 19 or verse 22 might not be part of the context of verse 21 it might be that 21 which is stuck in there and you have to know what's happening in the life of Muhammad to interpret that verse so that makes the Quran of difficult tips to read okay the other thing to know about all these sources is they're written in classical Arabic a form of Arabic that was a spoken language 1400 1200 years ago but most modern Arabic speakers would not be able to read this material fluently before understanding it's difficult to comprehend some you know an arrogance people would understand a bit of it but it's there's a lot of terms and grammar that's obscure so people need to be trained in this in this kind of in these texts in order to read them maybe very thing people can well though now know the world has changed so in the last 50 years a lot of this materials translated the hadith are available in different languages and now Muslims are actually reading a lot of this material for themselves off the internet in a way that was never possible for 1400 years and people are able to make up their own minds base material which wasn't really possible in the past now the Quran was we came to be through according this is the official Islamic story okay whether it was true as a separate matter but the official Islamic story is that Muhammad in a 23 year prophetic career would receive bits and pieces of revelation from Allah and they would be remembered by he by others and eventually written down it wasn't the case that he wrote them down there's a tradition that says that he was illiterate actually but including read/write but whether that's true or not it's important to understand that it's a it's an oral document reflecting oral revelations recitations over a 23 year period that then get consolidated into a single texts that are organized into chapters Muhammad and the Quran I really need to close the closely connected you can't read one without the other I sometimes compare Muhammad to the backbone of Islam and that sorry that the Quran is like the backbone and Muhammad is like the body and you can't have a body without a backbone or a backbone without a body we'll need to go together so the life of Muhammad and the Parana really need to twine in ways that might not be obvious if you just read the Quran but in the way Islam works that's the case he Muhammad said that these revelations came to him through the angel Gabriel Jibreel it was mediating these words from Allah in the Quran the hadith explained the traditions explained the Quran and here's an example of a tradition which has embedded within it a verse of the Quran and this verse is saying that Allah doesn't forbid you to be kind to your relatives provided they haven't driven you out of your homes and treated you unjustly and you remind read that in the Quran no not just your relatives your Allah doesn't defeat you to be kind to people who haven't forced you out of your homes and dealt with you unjustly you might say well what's that about well there's a hadith that says that this this was revealed to Muhammad in the moment when he was having a conversation with a woman who was asking advice about whether she could to her mother who was not a believer she wanted to know you know Mohammed II hated Alice apostle am I allowed to be kind to my mother and he said yes as long as she hasn't driven you out of your home or treated you unjustly so what that means this verse means therefore is that if someone becomes a Muslim they're allowed to be kind to their family members as long as their family members don't harass them or hassle and will give them a hard time because they become a Muslim so it's that in order to interpret the Quranic verse you need to know the tradition in the life of Muhammad link it to it and that gives the context for interpreting it yeah but it's not all happens to consider to be equally reliable they were their graded assignments the highest level of reliability and it's connected with the life of an interesting cat the concept in interpreting the Quran is the idea of abrogation some verses in the Quran is said to abrogate other verses and the basically the principle is the ones that are revealed later in the lifetime of Muhammad have authority over the earlier ones so if there's a conflict between two verses in the Quran then you take the lacework revelation over the earlier one bear in mind however that welcome please be seated here bear in mind however that the Quran is not laid out in chronological order so you need to know when you're reading the Quran which verse is earlier or later than another verse and that requires knowledge of the life of Muhammad and the traditions to relate to you need to be a scholar to do that and actually scholars disagree about some of those details so it's quite a can be interesting Lee Missy area there's the perhaps the most famous example of abrogation is that the the earlier verses in the Quran which were revealed in Mecca council Muslims to be tolerant towards unbelievers and to be patient with them but the later verses call from Muslims to first of all fight defensively against them and finally to find an unlimited war against unbelievers so you get these different phases from peaceful witness to defensive fighting to attacking within limits to under unconditional warfare so you need to know the timeline on the sequence oh that's a verse which is used to justify abrogation that at the hour is the Florel of of majesty this is God such of our revelations as we abrogate or cause to be forgotten we bring in place one better don't you know other is able to do all things so others able to replace one verse with another and this is a little bit of a different way of understanding the speech of God for what we're used to in the Bible and it's based I think honestly it reflects a slave master relationship like in if your master tells you to do the washing on Monday and then tells you to dig in the garden on Tuesday you just keep digging in the garden until it gives you other instructional so you don't go back to Monday you do the last thing you're told to do that's how obedience works okay so if other changes is word to people you factly follow the last word that you Gibbs so abrogation is important it is a bit tricky because there are these more peaceful verses in the Quran and there are more violent ones with the later ones the violent ones more later so they are tending to cancel out the more peaceful ones and you need to know that in order to kind of balance out that material this is a commentary on this is a commentary on the Quran a tough sierra or commentary draws upon traditions hadith and so on in order to interpret particular verses and the commentary the even cut here is a very widely used by Muslims it's translated into English and it's very widely used by english-speaking Muslims and in this particular verse he's given the commentary this particular passage is commentary commenting on a verse which says forgiven over love the unbelievers and he says other us that said to sorry said to forgive and overlook the unbelievers until he gave a different word which was to fight that so he says this verse was abrogated by the merciful sword which is to a 9-5 and and yea so he said The Messenger of Allah Muhammad and his companions used to forgive the disbelievers and the people of the book just as Allah command until Allah fighting them and then I'll have destroyed those who we decree to be killed that is the believers killed them so I will destroy them so this this is a commentary explaining in looking at a particular verse that counsels forgiveness explaining that this verse was cancered by a later verse so the commentaries will try and sort that out you can find it and cut these commentary on the internet it's very easy to find just google tafseer even cut here and you'll you can look up any verse in the quran and get a pretty reliable interpretation of it to understand the quran there are various english translations again I think that link is now out of date but it's even cut these commentaries on them on the internet the best contemporary translation of the Quran into English is by our third driver dr OGE and it's very clear its laid out for two scholars or people who want to study the front lots of good footnotes so I commend that to you so just to summarize the Quran is revealed a word to live to Muhammad and you have this is one of the life of Muhammad which is reported in the traditions and the sea rather be our biographies and these two things together provide the foundational texts of Islam upon which the guidance is constructed now it's very important to understand that non-muslims have a right to study these materials for themselves I sometimes meet people to say mark you shouldn't be saying this you know a Muslim should be telling us about these things and or they'll say well you also said you said what do you think we should have a Muslim and give their video but actually I think non-muslims have a right to know about the stuff in themselves to educate themselves to teach themselves to come to their own opinion especially because the Quran has a lot of material and the life of Muhammad has a lot of critical material about Christians and any book that says bad things or good things about me I have a right to read because it's about me and the Quran is book about you because it says a lot about Christians and serve is the life of Muhammad you have a right to know what upsets to yourself and to take initiative to understand this for yourself that's just what freedom is about it's not disrespectful to come to your own view about these texts in fact it's important to come to your own view about it in fact even this this verse from the Quran - chapter one which says God is on the straight path not the path of those who earn your anger or those who come straight this verse is part of the daily prayers of Muslims since it 17 times today and Muhammad said that those who are astray are Christians and those who are under the wrath of God are Jews so if Muslims are praying 17 times a day and basically saying Christians have gone struggling and their prayers I have a right to have an opinion about that that that affects me it's not just their religion it's something that makes claims about me personally now what is the Sharia how does this work the Sharia means apart the idea of a path is very important in Islam Turkish Islam offers guidance and the fundamental metaphor for the person's life before God is that of a path and you could be on the wrong path or the right path and the Shriya Sharia the pathway of observance is a system of principles and teachings and rules that's derived from the Quran and the life of Muhammad the swimmer and it's been systematized by Muslim scholars in the first rusev Islam and together it provides a huge body of knowledge information rules legal principles that together define what how a Muslim should live and there are different schools of Islam of Sharia there are four Sunni schools and their sheer schools and there are published books that that lay out all the teachings of a particular school like there are lines of travel you could look up what it says about divorce or whatever you like and it'll give a summary of what islam teaches it's a big book example thousand pages the love lottery so this work was done in the first generations and the process of interpretation using reasoning and logic to derive from the example of mohammed and from the Quran a set of rules or principles was a huge effort and some Muslim said that that that basically that interative work that was done in the first centuries is forever fixed the gates of interpretation of closed is a phrase that's used but actually modern times put a lot of pressure on this because Modern Life is requiring Islam to come up with answers about issues that were never imagined in the lifetime of Muhammad so Islam's going through a lot of review and change at the moment in order to adapt to modern conditions what does the Quran say about human cloning for example the owner or property law or whatever but that's that's what furious and how it was Sharia is the study of Sharia is the dominant discipline in Islamic studies so you know the equivalent of SATs are there as theological seminaries you might call it an Islamic institution of teaching about religion it's normally called a school of Sharia you know this is the queen of the sciences the religious sciences is the study of Sharia in far now what you should do it's more important to know what to do than what to believe Christianity is really concerned that believe Islam is concerned about obedience about doing stuff let me give you some examples of had some had this is a honey in which there is advice about new groups food and since the rider should first green with pedestrian and the pedestrian should greet the one who's seated and a small group should bring a logic of it so this is describing a situation on horseback but Imagineering are chained in Tunisia and you're riding along on your motorbike and you see someone sits seated on the ground based on this the person on the motorbike should greet the person sit by the road first and then they can respond and say hello and I found that if I was seated by the road and I saw a friend on a motorbike and I greeted them first they'd almost fall off their bike trying to treat me as quickly as they could but they should have greeted me first so this is a rule about how you greet people who you introduce to do if you like indicated it's another baby now this is more serious honey the most serious issue in Time magazine in 2002 reported that an Islamic court in Nigeria ordered a woman I mean lor the war a child more than nine months after divorce not to be executed by stoning until 2003 when her baby was weaned so it's just a little snippet of information in Time magazine and I mean Allah Wells case attracted a lot of international attention and discussion now you know enough now about Muhammad about Islam to know where to look to find the answer of why the judges came to that conclusion why do you think the judges make that particular ruling what is the reason for their rule the answer is Mohammed said saying did this though this is his rule so you'd you'd look up your hadith collection online you're typing stoning and you see the Hadees that come up you see you you look for the you could you could do that in 30 seconds so we did that now do you have access to these thing and in fact there is a hadith Muhammad's a woman came to Muhammad saying I'm pregnant please purify me I've committed adultery she said please purify me she's looking for atonement and he says go away Muhammad actually did not like people incriminating themselves Islam discourages that so he sends her away and then she comes back and she says I'm pregnant and he says go away until the baby's born and he comes back with the baby he says you know go away to his wind and then she comes back in the baby's wind and his holy piece of bread Allah Allah Allah the possible here is I've weaned him is eating food and then Muhammad entrusts the child to one of the Muslims present and they buried a woman in the unit in the ground up to her chest and they stand there to death so this is a ruling of Muhammad and it's on this basis that Islamic law has a principle that adulterers should be stoned so millibars fate as determined by a court in northern Nigeria is replicating this this activity this action of marlott why is the court had that power because it's a political concession to Muslims in northern Nigeria the state gave Sharia law to Muslims in the North they step it's our religious freedom we want to live by a religion they said ok why don't you have religious courts to deal with family matters and so on so you end up having a court making a ruling like this it's I found it really interesting to read what commentators sometimes say when they read something like the Time magazine report they've got it wrong this is a distortion of Islam this is medieval you know this is not right but actually it's just a smile it's just Mohammed this is what he said in tiered and if you say it is the best example then surely you should do what he didn't say otherwise you need to explain why doesn't fly anymore and that's a complicated complicated argument made that first summer when I read the Sun on Albert re in a side of Muslim and I read it from cover to cover I found it very very disturbing very very disturbing and lots and lots of stuff like this much worse things in this and very hard because I was thinking if this is what the perfect example looks like what kind of world will this create what kind of society will this produce what kind of worldview will instill in people about justice and righteousness and relationships with human beings I've discussed this already the Gospels are public truth information about Jesus is publicly known but for Muslims knowledge about Islam and the fundamentals of Islam is not so well known and often common understandings are sanitized so you might read something about Muhammad that emphasizes his long marriage to Khadija his first wife it was older than him and through be emphasized to show his quality and faithfulness and and so and what a good person he was but that that text it is trying to present a good view of Islam while explain that Muhammad married Khadija a younger woman when she was sorry Meredosia the young girl and she was five or six and consummated the marriage when she was not that that story will not tell you that he picked up a couple of wives Sofia and Rehana were Jewish women when he killed their men folk and he took them into his concubine they've to be his concubines this is what the Islamic state has been doing this is what Muhammad did and one of these Jewish women refused to ever marry him and become his wife because he killed her husband and her father and her brothers and so on or the second one I think it was one of these two with Jewish women he picked up when he attacked the Jews in Cairo and he he killed all the male relatives in fact her husband had tortured to death by lighting a fire on him in order to get information about wealth that he supposedly buried some way and on the first night when they were he married this woman one of his followers spent the night marching around the tent and in the morning Mohammad said why did you spend the night marching around my marriage tent and he said well you killed her father and her husband and my brothers and I was concerned for your safety so I was guarding you through the night and having said thank you that's very considerate of you you read these stories you think what what is happening here what kind of world this is producing this is the best example what do you do about this this is not a small problem this is a big problem information about Mohammed is traditionally it's not being democratized only you know well transporters would know all this stuff but now it's becoming more about what there's a Coptic and Egyptian priest called father Zechariah who's in America now and he broadcasts a TV program into the Middle Eastern Hill a typical thing to do is to open the hadith and read something about Mohammed in Arabic and he'll comment on it and they will talk about Jesus and then you have Muslims to go to the Imam and the mosque would say I know that father Zechariah tell me this about Muhammad is this true did he actually do this and it's just it's a sensation and people are not happy that he's doing it but the world is changing Islam is under kind of pressure there hasn't existed forever in the past you've also got the problem is things can be mistranslated and not translated well there's a verse in the Quran says the husband can beat his wife and some translations translated is beat lightly or chastise now in English chastises ambiguously can mean a verbal rebuke or it could mean a physical attack you know physical beating but the Arabic only means a physical beating but the translation kind of fudges that and make it length makes it less clear so that's a that's a challenge things get lost in translation there's also another factor that complicates that there's the spread of information the the democratization of infamy about Islam and that's the doctrine of takea or deception lawful deception there's a verse in the Quran that says that if Muslims are afraid for their safety and their dependent upon the protection of non-muslims then it's permissible to to be pretend to be friendly to them in order to keep yourself safe you you you should not bank friends when believers accept as a precaution to guard yourselves from them and one commentator said we smile in the faces of some people but our hearts curse them and other commentators as among so much clarity said the heart is confident by metric so you you're friendly to people who you need to be in good terms with your safety but your heart is confident by the hatred you have for them because really you should be shown you shouldn't be friends with them what do you do with this material to most Muslims live this way I don't think they all do but certainly some do depends how religious they are how much they'd read these materials what do you how do you live like this what sort of society does this create and sometimes people can be quite misleading they can be deception bizarrely who is a famous Muslim philosopher and theologian he was writing about this idea of deception and he said lying is permitted for certain principles and basically he said the end justifies the means you know line speaking as a means of obtaining objectives if the objective is mandatory and can only be achieved through line and the lying is compulsory if you don't have to lie then you shouldn't lie lying is a sin but if you can only achieve an end by perception then you have to lie so this is a very different ethic in fact in Islam there in Islamic law and the Sharia this lists of different situations when you are allowed or permitted or mandatory tolai you line warfare a husband can light his wife to keep the marriage happy you can lie to to reconcile people who are in conflict you are allowed to lie if you would otherwise reveal your sin that no one else knows about - you're not suppose to incriminate yourself and and this is an attempt to give the general rationalization of what's what's happening you should compare the bad consequences entail by lying to the - telling the truth and the consequences of telling the truth are worse then you're entitled to lie so this is from the reliance of the traveler a manual of Sharia law it's interesting that alcazar lee said it's better to give a misleading impression than to lie a misleading impression is you say something that's strictly true but you expect the other person will misinterpret it for example the reliance of the traveler gives an example where someone comes to your house and they want to meet early at least sleeping upstairs but you know how they doesn't want to see this person so you say to them ollie is not here and you mean it's not here between my hands and the person thinks are you saying he's not in the house now you have given him a misleading impression and that's better to do because other you might not be lying under the right circumstances and then God will judge you for lying so it'd be protect yourself from judgment you're given this leading impression and I've seen Muslim leaders in Australia sometimes do this they'll say something and the media is someone else interprets it and pick it up a certain way when you look at what the the person actually said it was different from why I was interpreted here you you mislead by misdirecting and that's why it's important in those circumstances - Russ asked very explicit questions and to demand that they get answered clearly this is a this is from the reliance of the traveler it's the discussion of my name's haniv end and I think it is important in Florida for us to understand the human compromises that Anna is the greatest of receivers there is that teaching as well however the teaching about deception between people is based on the storm and also some teaching in the crown and what we what I just showed you from our Cazale was a philosopher's attempt to generalize the principles based on the evidence of what Muhammad did instead Muhammad lightest wives for example and so that becomes the foundation of moral behavior and gets interpreted and it gets replicated in the culture and in a society and embedded in an international identity as well this is a passage on female circumcision I have read a lots and lots of commentators to say that female circumcision is not a religious practice I've seen that so many times but what does the hadith say what does Mohamed say this is a text on female circumcision in Arabic and it's translated by Keller an American condom he says that it says the arabic says circumcision is obligatory by moving removing the foreskin and for women removing the foreskin of the clitoris not the purpose of self hon Barley's say that it's not obligatory but sunnah that is recommended or Huntley's considerate and mia courtesy to the husband said that's his translation in this text there lying side by side in in the book okay but what the arabic actually says is circumcision is obligatory for every male and female by cutting off the foreskin or but so the decisions of females by cutting out the clitoris so you know when i saw that you have the arabic that says one thing and the english translation says the opposite what is happening here you know how can he this translation is authorized by al-azhar university because as a as an accurate and reliable translation what's he doing there well he's he doesn't agree with that he's trying to conceal that he's presenting a different he's suppressing some important information actually female circumcision is very clearly supported in the happiness in the traditions of Muhammad and in shafa'ah Islam which is the Islam practiced in in Egypt it's compulsory and it's compulsory in Indonesia and Malaysia which are also under Shafi but other varieties other schools of Islam it's optional so the practice fear is so Shafi the jurisprudence areas in Islam habit and other Islamic areas generally don't have it as much so it depends on the on the form of Islam is practiced this is the book that says it's bit of you know a booklet on Islam that's presented for Western people that says that there's no variation in the Quran that every single letter of every Quran is exactly the same all over the world it's completely wrong there are a lot of variations in the Islamic text this is well known to Muslim scholars and there's a number of different currents published in the world today that have differences in the text so you know where where is the solid ground when you look at information about Islam what information can you trust or rely and Samuel green is an Australian has written about this and discussed that their relations was there a question in the Quran says that Jew solutions are corrupted texts yes so the Quran says the Jews of Christmas with crop the Bible so what they then say is that the Quran is perfect it could of course not but but the official view of those variants is that they're not provided that with that I'll reveal the parameters of variance so it's some if you actually show the only Muslims variations between the Quran they might have no knowledge of this topic that might provide to them but it fit well-trained they wouldn't know that they're inexperienced but yeah I will talk about that issue later his llamas ation use a process for changing a society and this was a lecture that was given in western Sydney by the carrier Matthews is actually a Muslim from South Africa I think he came to Australia and reserved important youth leader and one of the points he made intellectual was deception is necessary secrets should be hidden followers Muslims should be informed on a need-to-know basis about the religion in rolling out the program of his life he was later challenged about this publicly he gave a sermon emphasizing what a terrible sinner was to lie and that Muslims should never lie and he didn't explain how he reconciled this early statement to Muslim leaders with this his commentary on online in Islam I'm gonna keep moving because I want to move on to the next topic jihad is another area that once there's a lot of deception plea but the hadith collections have a book a book of jihad within them which has all the traditions about Muhammad about jihad and all about warfare it's not about self-improvement and sometimes Muslims will quote a hadith that says the greater jihad is though it was the war against the self but that hadith is not regarded as reliable and it's not actually respected as a foundation of Islamic jurisprudence because of that and there's lots lots of references to warfare in Islam and I'm gonna move on from this entry Salaam has a lot of good information about Islam that you can look up there what I want to say is religions are not all the same one of the problems that the Western people particularly have this they think that all religions are the same this is a very widespread view in Australian society and it's thought that the differences between religions are like differences between food you know it's one person's curry and someone else's moussaka someone else's biltong you know it's all food it's a matter of culture and preference that actually religions are not like that religions are about fundamental clients about the mean of the nature of humanity and the response to the mountains situation and they're very different different religions produce different societies and so they have a political implications you know the society is generated its values to generate it often by religious means Islam says when our and the messenger have decided the matter there's nothing more to be said and the fundamental question really is who you're gonna follow you're gonna follow Jesus take up your cross and follow him or you're going to follow Muhammad and that's a question for Britain it's a question for Australia for South Africa you know when they request for Sharia Courts or but what kind of law are gonna have in a nation this is a fundamental question that faces us even though a little makers are not aware of the significance of the question his example will be follow what are the challenges with Muhammad is if you follow Muhammad's example his lifestyle you end up replicating the life of a seventh century Arab and it's really interesting that in Christianity were not called to do all things the way Jesus did them you know we're not meant to eat food the same way a didn't wear a bee it's the way he wore and if we're men or go to the toilet the way he went to the toilet you know following Jesus is not about that sort of stuff but Islam is a lot about before that song stuff and that's the rivers you know Christian in Christian teaching following Jesus is about the ethics the heart of life the grace of God it's very differently in Islam

Channel: SATS Seminary

Views: 3,463

Rating: 3.8266666 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Durie, SATS, South Africa, Theological Seminary, Christianity, Bible, College, Theology, Johannesburg, Islam, Muslims, Jesus, Scholarship, Seminar, Lecture

Id: 411mD3mOrLY

Length: 62min 24sec (3744 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017