ISMA’s Zaid R Rashid receives a further trashing from Farouk A Peru

The clash between Islamologist, Farouk A Peru and ISMA activist, Zaid R Rashid, shows no sign of abating. Read Farouk’s latest rebuttal…

The episode with Mr Zaid R Rashid continues with another response from this young man yesterday.

I was not surprised that he responded, but what saddened me was the quality of his response itself.

This is not a personal attack on the young man whom I applaud for his devotion to his sect. Rather it is an indictment on the Islamofascists’ system of education. There is no room at all in that system for logic and it shows in Zaid’s response.

He is simply unable to engage with my points without falling into logical fallacies. When I first read this response on his wall, I cordially invited him for point by point debate (he gets to ask me questions, I get the same) which should then be published by the confused racists Ismaweb.

He refused, immediately and none of Isma’s racist religious scholars would step up to take his place either. I suppose Isma cannot risk losing their cattle, as open debate may somehow show them, that their ulamak are nothing but fraudsters.

In any case, here is my response to Zaid. I have summarised Zaid’s points and provided my refutation.

1. Racist ideology is incompatible with Islam

Before we even begin, my questions from the previous article were not even mentioned in his response.  

I had asked him about the indigenous rights of Malays and whether they are in accordance with the Quran and Sunnah (which he wants Quranists to follow). I also asked him about the number of verses which are abrogated (mansukh, to use Sunni terminology).

I did not get a single answer to these questions.

I can only surmise that Zaid knows that his racist ideology does not fit at all with Islam (whatever kind of Islam) yet he stubbornly clings to it. This shows that religion is only a badge for the ISMA types. At the end of the day, they do not really trust Allah to bring them success. The Quran says:

And place your trust in Allah for enough is Allah as a representative (33/3).

The context of this verse above is the system of the Prophet (nidham an-nabi detailed in chapter 33) which was a bastion against oppression. Muslims are to place their trust in Allah’s system which eschews racism. So why does Zaid not do so? Why does he partner (Arabic: yushrik) Islam with Malay supremacism?

About abrogation – Islamofascists believe some verses of the Quran CANCEL OUT (yes, you read that right!) other verses. This is called ‘an-naskhwal-mansukh’ in their Quranic sciences.

I asked Zaid how many verses are cancelled out because since the Quran is claimed to be their primary source of law, it is vitally important to know which verses still apply.

Guess why Zaid won’t answer? They don’t know! That’s right. ‘Prophet Muhammad’ failed to tell them the number of abrogations so there are about two dozen opinions of the matter.

As a student of Syariah, the fake law of the Islamofascists, Zaid must know this which is why he refuses to discuss it.

2. Circular Logic

In this second response, Zaid begins by posing his circular logic.

I had asked him previously, why does the Quran not have the terms ‘hadith an-nabi’ (narrations of the prophet)  or ‘sunnahar-rasool’ (well-trodden path of the messenger).

He returned it with a question –  why does the Quran have the words ‘aqeedah’ (theology) or ‘tawheed’ (monotheism) either yet these terms are central to Islam, he says.

This is what is known as circular logic. In other words, he has to appeal to terms which his own priests used to understand the Quran.

Unfortunately, I do not subscribe to such terms either. The Quran do not have these terms for a particular reason. I surmise the reason is that it is not about systematic theology but rather a processual one. It is not doctrinal but rather experiential.

In any case, I will not presume to teach Allah His religion, as Zaid and his priests are doing.

Aqeedah and tawheed are absent from Quranic vocabulary, hence I will not use them and say this is islam. Rather if I were to use them, I would admit that they are my constructs projected unto the text.

As for the terms ‘hadith an-nabi’ (narrations of the prophet)  or ‘sunnahar-rasool’ (well trodden path of the messenger), how can the Quran not use these terms when they are claimed to be central to Islam! Would Prophet Muhammad who taught the Quran to his people use different terms to explain the institutions of Islam? Think about it.

If Muhammad was totally in the spirit of the Quran, would he need an extra-Quranic set of terms to identify his own understanding? The Quran never implies that he is to provide details (Quranic term: tafseel or elucidation) to it. Rather it calls itself ‘tafseel al-kitab’ in 10/37. It provides all the details we need, not Muhammad.

Muhammad’s own narrations and culture simply are not recognised as sources of the religion, Quranically speaking.

3. Mis-Interpretation

Zaid then gives a ‘proof that it is obligatory to accept hadith’ by quoting the middle phrase from a verse, ‘and what the messenger gives you, take it and whatever he forbids you, abstain from it’.

Note, this is not even half a verse. It is the middle phrase within a single verse.

Zaid speaks about interpreting the Quran correctly and yet his own method of reading is akin to a person with reading disabilities!

Why does the phrase start with ‘and’ (wa)? Because it follows through from a previous point.

If one reads the entire verse, (Chapter 59 Verse 7), it is about the gains of the system (fa’i). This is ratified by the immediate context (59/6-10).

How can Zaid accept this as evidence for hadith given total contextual disparity from that idea? Answer, he can because this is how the ulamak interpret the Quran!

4. Questionable accuracy

Zaid claims that the memorization and writing of hadith began since the time of the Prophet himself. Is this true? Let’s pose the following questions:

4a. Do these ancient collections exist?

No less that Mustafa Azami himself (the Wahabi’s favourite hadith scholar who wrote volumes on the hadith ‘sciences’) agrees that no such manuscripts exist but we must take it on (read: blind) faith that they do. This is from his book ‘Studies in Early Hadith’.

4b. If these collections existed, why are they not in circulation? Why did we need Bukhari and his compatriots to come two hundred years later to start ‘authenticating’ things?

Let’s think about this – Muslims are incredibly rigorous in their preservation of the Quran. They memorise it and almost worship its text.

Is it conceivable that Muslims would allow verses of the Quran to be floating around till a ‘Bukhari of the Quran’ came two hundred and fifty years later, to hunt down these verses like Indiana Jones? Absolutely not!

Yet this is exactly what happened with hadith. Muslims never jealously guarded them and hence Bukhari had to hunt far and wide for 600,000 fragments of information and only accepting one percent of them.

Statistically speaking, the chances of him making a mistake is astronomical, given that he chose the right 1 percent!

4c. Were the legendary first four caliphs careless in their duties?

If I was Abu Bakr or Umar, people who had decades of experience with the Prophet and were in charge after his death, I would gather all the companions and produce a number of volumes of hadith and tafseer.

After all, they knew each other and could easily discuss and agree on this information. What was more important than preserving this ‘treasury of knowledge’?

Yet nothing of the sort was done. Abu Bakr actually BURNT his collection of hadith-notes because he was worried they were inaccurate.

Could a man come two hundred and fifty years later and claim accuracy? Only the intellectually crippled would agree.

5. No Compulsion in Religion

Zaid chides me for not understanding the hadith sciences because I claimed that the Quran contradicts authentic hadith.

He says, this cannot possibly happen and if it does, that hadith will be considered doubtful.

What a wonderful claim, if it only happens in practice! Zaid needs a lesson in simple Aristotelian logic here – X cannot be A and ‘not A’ at the same time.

The Quran is unequivocally clear – there is no compulsion in religion (2/256). It even rhetorically asks Muhammad if he would force people to become believers for they should rather use their own thinking (10/99-100). It told him to never be a compeller over people but to rather remind them (50/45).

Yet hadith from the most authentic collection of Bukhari says ‘whoever changes his religion, KILL HIM’. Was this not seen by Bukhari to be doubtful given its blatant contradiction?

Let’s say Bukhari made a mistake, then what of the jurists of Islamofascism who demand the killing of apostates, including our very own PAS and their ilk? Why do they not delete this hadith from Bukhari’s collection?

For a very simple reason – the ‘hadith sciences’ are a sham. They have principles only to comfort the masses. The ulamak do not really practise them.

6. Only God Punishes

To prove that Islam actually encourages the killing of apostates, Zaid actually quotes Quran 9/74 to say that for those who ‘turn from Islam’ should be given the treatment of war.

The verse also says that it is Allah who will punish people for turning away from peace and not Zaid and his Islamofascist/racist friends.

I am baffled by how he seems totally unaware of the difference between himself and Allah!

He then quotes 8/38-39 which he implies refers to warring against people who leaves Islam.

Once again, I am baffled that he does not notice that the context of Ch 8 (or even Ch 9 above) is in fact, about the conflict between systems. It does not show any kind of religious reneging at all.

In fact, the Quran is quite pluralistic when it comes to religions (2/62 and 5/69, for examples). I wonder if Zaid would abrogate these verses as well!

No, indeed what Zaid and his priesthood attempted to do is exactly like point 3 above. It is refusing to see the Quran as a holistic text in order to project alien and contradictory teachings. Verses get chopped up and contexts and thematic analyses ignored.

7. Burden of Proof

Zaid takes issue with me for attacking Bukhari whose opinions about authenticity he takes as divine (no shirk there, of course!).

He claims I need to understand Bukhari’s methodology, find flaws in them before rejecting them.

This shows he does not understand the concept of ‘burden of proof’.

I do not need to prove Bukhari’s errors, rather it is Bukhari and his followers who need to prove their methodology to me.

Why does Bukhari get automatic status of ‘authentic’? Who is he, exactly?

Even his own collection has no original documents and have been questioned and various hadith downgraded by Sunni scholars themselves. The Wahabis are actually criticized by the mainstream Sunnis for that very reason!

Zaid claims that the vast number of hadith are due to the different chains of narration rather than content themselves.

This is purely guesswork (even Zaid admits this by his phrase ‘bolehjadiberulang’). There is no physical evidence at all for these ‘different chains’.

And let’s say we take Zaid’s argument to be true. Does that mean Bukhari was less diligent? He spent less time on these chains? No, his work would require the same impossible criteria – determining the characters of people long dead through six or seven links of people.

Is it any wonder that the ulamak needed to make up this 600,000 hadith myth to make it seem that what they have is truly authentic?

In 2007, Zaid’s university – Egypt’s Al-Azhar – issued a fartwah saying that if a male and female colleagues who could legally marry, wanted to be alone together, the man had to suckle the woman five or ten times!

This is a university lecturer we’re talking about and he did not make this up. This is actually from the authentic hadith collections and one of the greatest imams of their legal schools! Was this a product of the ‘proper methodology’ Zaid was talking about?

In his response, Zaid said that he found my answers amusing (lawak). I do not find his amusing at all. Rather I find it sad and ominously scary.

It is indeed very sad that Malay Muslims have bought into this ludicrous form of Islam.

If one sees Zaid’s facebook page, he is called ‘great shiekh’ and enjoys tremendous support from very educated Malays. The arguments they give are rarely cogent, most are simply ‘tukangsorak’.

This is probably symptomatic of our abysmal religious education system in schools which has produced religious zombies for decades.

We should not be surprised when Malaysia becomes a Taliban state in the future!

Farouk A. Peru, 6 February, 2017

Islamologist and writer, PJ born Malaysian, Farouk A Peru