Favorite Posts and Frustrating Comments

I'm going to use the fact that Umm Zaid, of the acclaimed Sunni Sisters blog, mentioned three of my previous postings in the Favorite Posts section of her Islami Blaghies 2007 posting to do some self-promotion. The three she mentioned are The Face Veil...Let's Be Honest, Remembering the Veterans of "The War to End All Wars", and Khaled Abou El Fadl - "I follow...the Mutazila". I very much appreciate her positive feedback on this, and I guess I should add these articles to my PLEASE READ section on the sidebar.

Yes, on the right sidebar, below my website links, there's a box entitled PLEASE READ which contains links to the postings, guidelines and other articles that I feel are most essential to understanding the outlook, purpose and policies of this blog. These include my oft-ignored Comment Guidelines, two articles [(1)(2)] that touch upon my reasons for selecting "Mere Islam" as the title of this weblog, a lengthy rant against morally depraved Muslims and My Favorite Sufi Aphorism, as well as a tirade against a typical example of Islamophobic bigotry.

Also, for those of you who may not have noticed, I maintain an ARCHIVE INDEX for each year—2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007—that this blog has been in operation. These list all Mere Islam blog postings in sequential order, thus making it much easier to browse through the titles of all of our various postings.

Speaking of my oft-ignored Comment Guidelines...well lately a lot of comments have been sent to the rubbish bin without ever actually appearing on this blog. One thing that I wish readers would take note of is the fact that all comments are moderated. That means they will not show up right away, but only after I, the benevolent dictator of Mere Islam, read and approve them. Due to that, there's no need to submit them multiple times in a misguided attempt to get them to immediately show up.

Other than getting lots of duplicates, the main reason that comments get rejected is that they are, as my Our Guidelines for Comments put it, "completely lacking in merit". For example, one Bilal Iddinn chastised me for "Calling a fellow believer a grave worshipper" and of "outright slander" because he completely misread my comments regarding an email that I received from a "Salafi" (i.e. he thought it was me—Abdurrahman R. Squires—that was saying the things that the "Salafi" actually said). I rejected these comments because I didn't want them to confuse the matter nor distract from the issue at hand. Please read the comment in question, since I'm disappointed that it hasn't generated more feedback. I guess, however, that I shouldn't be surprised, since what else can they really say? Ha!

On another tack, I get comments from people who are seemingly perturbed by comments I've made on DeenPort.com (and all of my DeenPort.com postings can be found here), but instead of refuting—or even trying to refute—them, they send me links to long articles coupled with a challenge for me to "Refute this!"...so hopefully the non sequitur nature of this fallacious thinking is rather obvious.

And then there was the long comment from Abu Musa, in response to my Yusuf Al-Qaradawi Exposed posting, in which he says that my "exposiotion" [sic] was "nothing more than an attempt to ridicule, character assasinate and mock" although I'm not the author...which is not to say that I don't standby my posting of it. However, keep in mind that I'm just the messenger here—a mere promoter, rather than the author, of the painful truth (at least in this case). Anyway, Abu Musa then goes on to say that "Shk Qaradawi has not been a member of the Ikwaan for many a decades, nor does he form part of their shura", as if one has to be an official member of the Brotherhood in order to adhere to their outlook and methodology! That's like saying that one isn't a Marxist unless one is a card-carrying member of an official Marxist party. Sigh. The rest of Abu Musa's comments were just inflamed...yawn...rhetoric that I had a lot of trouble...snore...remaining attentive to while wading through. Typical of the methodology of doing everything possible except address the issues that Shaykh Gibril's article put forward was his saying that "Shaikh Gibril is an unknown in the scholastic world"...which just shows how out-of-touch he is. So are we to believe that al-Qaradawi's views are correct just because he's more well-known than Shaykh Gibril? Finally, he confused liking the "al-Halal wal-Halal" joke because the humorous way that such an artful quip passes judgment on many Islamically questionable opinions with "mocking of a Old Man" [sic]...and then threw in a brief diagnosis of my nafs to boot. Now there's a topic of interest—which is about as close as Abu Musa managed to come to hitting upon one.

Well that's the current state of affairs on Mere Islam, other than the fact that we're having an interesting discussion on the Theory of Evolution in the comments section of the O'Reilly Shamefully Ignorant of the Bible post, so feel free to join in. Things are becoming contentious and even a little rude, but so far the dialogue has been quite thought-provoking and interesting. I'm no expert on this subject, although I'm becoming increasingly well-read on it. I certainly feel that there are tons of misconceptions about what this theory means, coupled with a lot of misinformation about it written by religious people who obviously see it as a challenge to their faith. My call on this subject is for honesty and integrity, since misrepresenting the views of others gets us nowhere. Rather, Muslims should spend our time developing solid and coherent answers, from the Islamic point-of-view, that address the challenges that Darwinism presents (in theory or in fact) to religious belief. So far, I don't think that the religious side, whether Jew, Christian or Muslim, has done a very good job, since most of the anti-Evolution books and papers out there are a mixture of pseudo-science and bad theology written for popular, rather than scholarly, consumption. Which is not to say that some of the pro-Evolutionist, like Richard Dawkins, aren't guilty of taking their conclusions too far. Actually, that's one of the main points that I try to make: both sides, the scientific and the religious, have often stepped outside the bounds of their expertise on this issue...but that's a long story better left for that forum.

On a side note, while doing some reading on various aspects of Darwinism, I came across Luke vs. Matthew on the Year of Christ's Birth, by Richard Carrier, which is a detailed discussion of what appears to be a clear historical error in the New Testament.

Deen on...