Educating the Educators - afterthoughts

Asalaamu alaykum.

For those who attended, what are your afterthoughts of the event?

I thought it was a great premise with great speakers.

I was pleasently suprised by Harun Yahya's team, and his great refutation of evolution. I was never one for 'disproving' evolution since I always felt that it should be left alone to the scientists to discuss, but the talk highlighted the fallacies of the theory. I think it would have gone above many heads, if you didn't study biology up to college level you'd probably be lost in all the words, so perhaps they could dumb it down next time.

Yusuf Estes, was as always excellent, great speaker, really funny, excellent da'ee.

Zakir Naik chose to speak on the issue of Women in Islam - this was an excellent talk and very good topic since a local newspaper had printed the headline "Radical preacher is coming to Wales". David Davies MP had also called Zakir Naik a 'hate-monger' who is preaching 'repression against women'. The talk not only destroyed the myth of oppression of women in Islam, it quite confidently refuted all claims against him. Sadly, despite both FOSIS and the Muslim Council of Wales inviting the David Davies to the event - he decided not to come.

During the QA session of Zakir Naik, a Christian man came to the microphone and introduced himself in Welsh (Subhan'allah, if you could only have seen the look on Zakir Naik's face, absoulutely classic, you could just see the inner-dialogue "What's this dude saying? Is that English? It sounds like Arabic? Prynhawn da....that isn't Arabic. He's white, it can't be Bengali or Indian. Oh thank Allah he's speaking English again" ).

Anyway, the Christian objected to Islam's view that women shouldn't run countries as heads of state. Zakir Naik refuted this by explaining that the position of a mother in Islam is much higher than that of a PM or President, and explained some of the restraints the women would have as well as pointing out an error in the mans logic regarding "women not killing as much as men".

Things started getting a bit dodgy when the topic of capital punishment came up into the discussion. The Christian man held the view it was outdated and uneccesary as 'love heals all'. Zakir explained as standard, using the example of rape. This eventually led to Zakir asking what the man would do if someone raped his mother. The man replied he would forgive him. Zakir asked if that stopped the man from raping again. Zakir asked 'how', the Christian kept repeating that love would help and he would help the man. Zakir then, quite firmly asked, "but how would you help him?". There was no reply, and the audience, (made up of lots of teenagers) started laughing, which simply embaressed the man and wasn't good in terms of dawah.

It looked quite bad for Muslims since Zakir was perhaps too aggressive to the man. Personally, I think it seemed that way since the man was very timid by nature.

The event in general was excellent, but I feel people expected entertainment rather than a session to learn how to do dawah, but knowledge was gained masha'allah.