Just got an anon from some muslim saying you have to be muslim to critique the quoran. And the reason why? An old post i dont even remember making. This common for you?
It’s simply an attempt to pre-emptively dismiss valid criticisms. Such a rule could be applied to anything: you have to be a Xtian to critique the bible. You have to be a Scientologist to critique Diantics or the execrable Battlefield Earth. You have to be a scientist to critique On The Origin of Species. You have to be an American to critique the US Constitution. You have to be an atheist to critique The God Delusion. You have to be a pedophile to critique NAMBLA. You have to live in the UK to critique Brexit.
You can then forbid them from critiquing anything you like, based on what you know they’re not affiliated with. They’re not a scientist, so they can’t dismiss evolution. They’re not a Xtian, so they can’t say the bible is wrong.
The entire notion is stupid. It’s empty and devoid of merit. Islam is just an idea, a claim, same as Xtianity, same as flat Earth, same as “I think pizza would be good for dinner.” We evaluate and we accept or reject ideas all day long. There’s no reason to treat any idea or claim any differently. Even if it’s “dearly held.” Or maybe even especially if it is, since being held dearly probably means reduced objectivity.
It’s a form of Special Pleading. The next question is for them to justify why, out of all the ideas in the world, Islam is the only one where you have to already be subscribed to it in order to analyse and evaluate it. That is, you have to have already bought the car before you can test drive it.
I’ve had this conversation several times before myself, and each answer was a non-answer that was simply about how dear and magical and true the belief is, that in turn required its own explanation, rather than being an actual explanation for the first notion. The same way a Xtian thinks “feel god in my heart” substantiates its existence, when it’s really just a whole new collection of questions and justifications.
It would be one thing if they actually did critique the Quran, as people who meet the self-declared criteria for doing so. But that doesn’t happen at all. “There are no scientific inaccuracy in Quran.” “There are no historical inaccuracy in Quran.” You will hear these recited verbatim, as if programmed in. Because they have been. The indoctrination into Islam is thorough and pervasive, and it’s designed, as befits a belief system established through the self-insertion fan fiction of a con-artist warlord, to discourage critical examination. Allah says Muhammad, with his single-digit year-old “wife”, is the perfect human, and Allah says Muhammad should have anything he wants, and Allah says not to question Muhammad. How do we know this? Muhammad says Allah told him so. And Muhammad wouldn’t lie because Muhammad says Allah says Muhammad wouldn’t lie. So, there. Rock solid. Joseph Smith pulled the same scam centuries later with his hat.
By all means, you shouldn’t be ragging on a French-language film when you don’t speak French - and there’s no subtitles - so you don’t know what it says. But there’s plenty of English-language translations of the Quran which are well-regarded direct translations by Muslims, or even open-source and open to correction. So you can see for yourself that the sun sets in a mud puddle, the Earth is flat, and the Moon was split in two.
You don’t have to believe something to understand that particular something; you don’t have to have cancer to study, understand and eradicate cancer, nor live on Mars to understand what a Mars colony would require or how to achieve it. We don’t understand things purely by first-hand experience; if we did, our judicial system would never get anywhere. Ex-Muslims will tell you in detail what they were taught “when I was a Muslm.” (I’m sure they weren’t “true” Muslims, though; somehow they never are.)
Ultimately, you won’t get anywhere. You’ll probably be called an “Islamophobe”, be accused of spreading “hate” and accused of following “the false religion of atheism” - which is sort of correct, but for different reasons. Don’t take it personally. It’s essentially plausible deniability on their part; they don’t have to consider the critique because they’ve just created a scenario which justifies ignoring you.
Things that are true don’t need to be protected from examination; the more a true thing is pulled apart, picked at and attacked - especially by a hostile party, not one simply mindlessly affirming it - the more we find out it’s true, because we discover why it’s true, by re-examining the reasons. This is the reason the scientific process works: testing, refining and, if necessary, discarding ideas and knowledge. Imagine what we’d think of our legal system, how much we’d trust it, if all the judgements were kept secret.
A thing you’re not allowed to criticize is probably not true, because it’s means declaring up-front that it can’t support itself on its own merits.
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