sankelegs said:
in effect, someone who doesn't pray is eligible for death because not praying makes you an apostate. so that point in the article was inaccurate.
the more i think about it - no, i'm sure it's not in the qur'an because the death sentence for apostasy is not in the qur'an - so they are both from the ahadith.
Well since nobody seemed to respond to this, I'll take the liberty if you guys don't mind.
Firstly, I seriously don't think that a person not praying makes them an apostate. If it does, then any Muslim that commits a sin can also be called an apostate because he's doing something against God's wishes. Obviously, this is not the case. Apostasy in my opinion is failing to perform any of the five pillars, and most importantly not believing in the Oneness of Allah and the message of the prophet Mohammed (pbuh). Failing to perform one or two of those makes a person a weak Muslim, but not an apostate.
Secondly, I think you all know my stance on apostasy. As snakelegs said, there's no mention for a punishment for those who leave Islam in the Qur'an, on the contrary, it actually mentions people who apostate and come back to Islam and apostate again, etc... and only a few ahadeeth mention death to apostates, which we discussed in another thread and noted that they have very strict conditions that have to be met before a person can be eligable to be executed.
As for the article, I don't know what u guys are complaining about. I see a lot of it as totally valid and am quite surpised to see fellow Muslims rejecting the points mentioned. As for who wrote the article, I didn't see any names, but the site it's on is not bad, or anti-Islamic. So I really don't see what the fuss is about.
As for the points:
Poverty-I think that Muslims actually do protest against poverty, but not strictly as Muslims, but as people of the world along with other groups of people. One other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of poverty in this world is actually in places where a lot of Muslims live.
Honor killings-I think the reason why a lot of people aren't protesting this is because there's very little awareness of it. It's quite rare that you hear about these cases, and I only knew about it by visiting one of those anti-Islamic sites where they threw a bunch of articles talking about this in my face. Nevertheless, I agree that people who know about this should definetely protest it because it's completely against Islam and what we believe, and is making Islam look bad to those who don't know much about it.
Child labor-I'm no expert on this so I'm just gonna ask a question here...is there such thing as legal child labor? I'm sure there must be...and I think that what the article is talking about is the illegal kind. I see nothing wrong with children living in poor families working to help support their families, but children being trafficked and all that or getting badly underpaid or not paid at all is definetely wrong. I think the article has to be more specific about that if they want support for it.
Suppression of cultures-I don't know if protesting against this will really do anything positive, unless what is meant here are things like banning hijab in schools, etc. This however is not suppression of cultures, but supression of religions, and those are two different things, and yes I do think that we should protest things that force us to not fulfill our religious rights which are also our constitutional rights given you live in a country like France, etc. But my opinion is that if you don't want your culture to be suppressed, instead of protesting, share your culture with others!
Death fatwas-And the controversy begins... Although I can see how some individuals from around the world can be considered enemies of Islam, we as Muslims don't have the jurisdiction to kill them if they are attacking from non-Muslim countries. Even if they were in Muslim countries, you'd have to sit and talk to them first, and only if they insist on continuing their attacks are we allowed to kill them.
Secondly, death is not only dealt in retaliation, but also for adultery and certain cases of apostasy, BUT only within Islamic countries. You can't for example kill a woman in the US that slept with a man that's not her husband. That's crazy.
So should we protest against these death fatwas? If you have A LOT of people, yes, because if you don't, you'll probably get one on your own head.
I think it would be more effective though to actually sit with the people issuing these fatwas and convince them with scripture that they are wrong. I mean they can't ignore scripture if they REALLY doing this in the name of Allah.
Terrorism-Now there's one that I'm really down for. Muslims should definetely stand up against this, as well as things like suicide bombings, etc., because they are things that are completely against Islam.
Unfortunately (I actually wanted to write an article about this), Muslims these days feel like they should be protesting the dispicable actions of non-Muslims against Muslims before protesting the dispicable actions of Muslims against both Muslims and non-Muslims. In a way, that's understandable, but on the other hand, if they do protest against the actions of some of their 'evil brethren', wouldn't that make Islam as an ummah look better to the international community while at the same time be a fulfillment of God's commands to us. Like that one hadith, if you see something evil being done try to change it with your hand, and if you can't do that then change it with your words, and if you can't do that either, then hate it in your heart. In my opinion, now that virutally everybody has Internet access, there's no excuse for anyone to not be able to perform the second one.
), Saddam Hussain killed 300,000 of his people in 1992-2003.
if u r hurt by my sweeping generalisations 
oh: ....let me explain .
