I am personally, currently going through the motions of upgrading to Islam. And yes, I have indeed bought the DVD already!
First, I hear a lot that Islam is a "supremacist" ideology. This means that because Islam is God's will, and because it is superior to all other religion or ideology, it is then justified to subject non-Muslims to Islamic rule.
All of this depends on your own outlook on life. I am quite a supremacist person myself. Therefore, it is normal that I would rather join a religion deemed superior, rather than joining the ranks of a second-rank creed. Seriously, what would be the point in congregating with a bunch of losers in such second-rank religion? The fact that Islam is considered even by non-Muslims to be the top number one creed, i.e. the superior way of seeing things, is obviously fantastically attractive to me.
I even heard of a sort of tax that non-Muslims must pay to Muslims.
Since it would be unthinkable that I would pay tax to someone else, the only way to implement a functioning taxation system, if one is needed, would obviously consists in letting others pay tax to me. So, I pretty much agree with this view, because it nicely correlates with my own personal take on things.
Second, I have heard that the Quran and the Prophet endorse slavery, and specifically, sex slavery.
Well, there are always serious difficulties in giving women back their freedom. If you tell her, "You are free to go now. I am giving you back your freedom." you will find that lots of women may disagree. Freeing a woman, is not that simple. If you run away, she may even run after you. Islam therefore suggests that you could keep such women around, but then the men may start complaining that all of this amounts to slavery. It is a non-trivial problem. There are too many situations in which people actually desire to be what other people could understand as being
enslaved. I have tried to argue not even that long ago with my own wife that there would be so many benefits for her if only I manumitted her and gave her back her freedom, but unfortunately, she did not agree. So, she is still enslaving herself at the moment.
Third, there seems to be a significant amount of gender inequality
I also noticed that there is quite a bit of unfairness in the distribution of height and weight between men and women. I think that you must also have noticed that men are usually unfairly taller, and usually even weigh more. We have been working on this problem for a long time now, with unfortunately no ready-made solution in sight.
subjugation of women in Islam, particularly in countries such as Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi men are indeed known for their preference to lie on top. This obviously prevents the woman from getting away, if she so desires. In that sense, she may indeed feel subjugated. The Saudis are apparently, already working on this problem.
Fourth, critics often talk about a child bride married to Muhammad, and thus collude that adult men marrying female children is okay in Islam.
A 1576 law making it a felony to "unlawfully and carnally know and abuse any woman child under the age of 10 years" was generally interpreted as creating more severe punishments when girls were under 10 years old while retaining the lesser punishment for acts with 10- and 11-year-old girls. Jurist Sir Matthew Hale argued that the age of consent applied to 10- and 11-year-old girls, but most of England's North American colonies adopted the younger age. The French Napoleonic code provided the legal context in 1791 when it established an age of consent of 11 years.
Let's say that the historical age of marriage was around 10 years in Europe before the end of the 19th century. Of course, in and of itself, it is no problem that people changed their opinion about marriageable age in the West. In the end, families decide about that kind of things for their own children. In other cultures, people did not change their minds about the age of marriage or the age of consent. This is obviously also their God-given right.
The problem only occurs when particular utterly detestable western people suddenly decide that they want to stick their noses in the age of marriage of children in
other people's families, and force their own views onto other people, not about their own children, but about these
other people's children.
But then again, in this field, the only opinions that matter are the ones for which you are willing to risk your life and die. Furthermore, I tend to believe that the subject will soon be moot, because now that it has become pretty much inevitable that the war in Syria will end up getting exported elsewhere too, approximately nobody will spend time or energy on that kind of subjects when the severed arms and legs are flying around in the air. Who will still care about a thing like that?
Finally, critics accuse the Quran and Muslims of promoting a significant amount of hatred toward non-Muslims, as if non-Muslims are "less than"
If I could have the actual words of real Muslims dispelling these claims, that would be awesome
Since I am pretty much no longer such "non-Muslim", "less than" views and opinions absolutely suit me fine. Sometimes I understand the concerns of the pagans, when they get suicide-bombed or find themselves on the receiving end of a shoot-out, like recently in Orlando, but then again, since the shooters were obviously not targeting me -- I am not even gay, let alone a gay in Orlando -- I tend to move on to other items on the agenda quite fast. The pagans and their problems are never high up on my agenda, actually. In Allah we trust and in nothing else. Therefore, I enjoy quite good metaphysical protection against that kind of things. The pagans, however, apparently do not. I even saw it on television. They regularly seem to get butchered like sheep. They are really not doing well. They seem to have nonexistent metaphysical protection. But then again, that is also their own choice. I am quite confident that Allah would not mind too much to take them in too, but ok, if the pagans refuse, who cares? In that case, let them go it alone. You see, sometimes you can see already suicidal people getting angry at the pagans and turning the whole thing into a blood bath before dying themselves. Nobody besides Allah can do anything about that. No amount of whining can change that. Whining is just a waste of time. I do not even listen. Seriously, I don't care. The metaphysical characteristics of the situation are simply beyond me. That is why I am not sticking my nose into any of that. All I can do is to engage in signalling ("praying") to our Master, to make sure that I will make it alive out of it. I am obviously not going to waste my time praying for the pagans, if these pagans are clearly to lazy to pray for themselves. That is why you should never waste your time praying for the pagans. They are not going to make it anyway.
