There is no moderate islam.
Sooner we know this, the better.
To be perfectly fair, the Old Testament holds exactly the same position as the Koran on this point.
The difference being that no fundamentalist Christians or Orthodox Jews are running around today defending this position.
Well, there was the nut group my brother-in-law got hooked up with for a while, but it had something like a total of 12 members.
All this guy needed was Internet access to figure out his slave question.
Well, you'll be even more shocked to learn that slavery continues today in Muslim countries. Need an example? Sudan.
Oliver is a convert from Germany who did his PhD in physics in Massachusetts and now lives with his wife in Cambridge
So Oliver, you convert to a barbaric religion and then learn after you convert that these people are barbaric? This is a lot like joining the Crips and then expressing shock and disgust that your new friends engage in criminal activity. Freakin' moron.
They said, Islam tolerated slavery only to avoid a social and economic collapse and therefore made slavery vanish not suddenly but slowly over time. When I heard this the first time, I assumed slavery disappeared in the course of a few generations. Several years after I became Muslim I was shocked when I learned that in fact, slavery lasted on for more than a thousand years, until the nineteenth century, when international agreements between Muslim and Western countries banned slavery, and it clearly seems the Western countries were the driving force behind this move.Not only has slavery been a regular part of all Islamic society since Mohammed (i.e., not just for a thousand years) but continues to this day, not only in Sudan, but slave auctions, and for that matter, bride auctions.
But there was something even more shocking: According to traditional schools of thought, not only was slavery permitted, but they also approved that every male master had the right to force any of his female slaves to have sex with him. This fact not only shatters any illusion one might have about the dignity a slave enjoyed according to traditional schools, it also smashes any hope to find a social or economical rationale for it. To me, this became a prime example for the necessity to reconsider the traditional rulings. I thought that any reasonable person would agree that the case of slavery and sex with slaves showed clearly that the traditional schools could not be relevant for us without major revision. Unfortunately, I had to learn that traditionalists do not agree.
I hope Oliver-the-convert takes this as a sign that he should reexmine some of the precepts of his adopted religion.