lly, but that's it for our Q and A for this. So we're gonna jump into the break. So we've got a 10 minute intermission, folks. This is a great time to grab a snack, go to the restroom, whatever it might be. We are going to be back in 10 minutes to the final section, which will be on Conquest in Slavery, which will be followed by a 10 minute Q and A as well. So if you have a question, we might be able to get it in there. Certainly the ones that are already in the list right now, we can, but I do have to warn you that I was like, with that. Gentlemen, thank you very much. I'll give you a chance to unwind, do whatever you need to, and then folks will be back in 10 minutes. Thank you, James, and thank you, Daniel. I will be here entertaining you all in the next 10 minutes. I will, let me see if I can find that magic trick. For real, it's not real magic. Two seconds. All right, hope this will work. I haven't done it a long time, okay? But I do have to say, Zade Barakat, thanks for that. I appreciate it in the live chats. I was enjoying the rest of that turkey avocado, James. I appreciate that. Is, I already finished it. It was great. Now, I have to remember how to do this trick. Daniel really wants to see this trick. He's excited. It's not real magic, Daniel. Okay, so, but let me see if I can. I'll do some entertainment. I'm trying to remember. You know who I learned this from? No joke. I learned this trick from the evangelist Ray Comfort. So if anybody, I know that the atheist for sure know in the chat who Ray Comfort is, and I, maybe even Muslim folks in the chat do, I don't know if they do. Because I know that in the atheist community, it's hard to top Ray Comfort in terms of public, and I mean number one. A lot of people, they're not a big fan. A lot of atheists, I should say. I think Christians are generally positive about Ray, but let me see if I can remember how to do this. I think it's, okay, so yes. So, it's so nervous. I haven't practiced in like, maybe like 12 years. So, folks, I've got this cloth. Can you see, like purple? Kind of like, ah, like simple. And now, the trick is to make it disappear. So, I am sticking it in here in my, hopefully you had seen it. It's a little bit tough, the camera's not great. Sticking it in there in my fist, like, packing it in real tight, and then, voila! It's, oh, and it's, it's the most simple trick. Don't ruin it in the chat if you know how it's done. Don't ruin it in the chat, but, you know. That was really good. Thank you. For someone who hasn't practiced, that's really good. I appreciate that, but yeah, I wanna say folks, wanna remind you, hey, you love debates, and we highly encourage you to hit like, whether you're here or at Daniel's channel. Hit like, because we think debates are a good thing at modern day debate. The more you hit like, I'm very serious with this, I think it really does make a difference. And Daniel, I'll get your opinion, like, as a YouTuber, I think that, you know, I mean, it's probably, it's not too surprising that if people hit like more, YouTube probably recommends a video more to new people. Yeah, yeah. Definitely like, share, leave a comment, engage in the chat, you know, all of this engagement will help the video reach a broader audience. And give me a second, James, you did a trick, I need to do a trick too now, you've got me. Oh my goodness. Just one second, let me. What a treat. This is, I've, but yeah, folks, I highly encourage you to hit like, because I really do think it makes a difference. I started doing shorts, YouTube shorts, and it wasn't until then that I really started thinking that likes make a difference. And the reason is, you know, for a while I had not noticed on normal videos, I never really, it wasn't as easy for me to compare, but one thing I noticed is that if a short got, because we release shorts on our channel, if a short gets a lot of likes right away, because I can usually tell on the first day, I'm like, oh, okay, that's more than most of the other ones get, you know, even after, let's say, the second or third day, it's a really good predictor that that video will get a lot more views in the subsequent days. So pretty crazy is that, I think it makes a difference. So are you ready?  What was, was, is this, oh, you've got the trick? Yeah, yeah. I have to take off my earphones, so I won't be able to hear you if you say something like stop it, but it should be entertaining. Hold on. What is the trick drumroll juggling? Wow, very nice. Oh, okay, you can do a trick too. Is there a name for that when you like throw that one up extra high? Sorry, what was that? Is there a name for it? Like when you, it was like out of the normal cadence, you threw one like especially high, is that? Yeah, but I dropped so. Yeah, there's all kinds of tricks you can do like a rainbow. Do you, is this? No implication there. Wow, is this something you regularly practice? Yeah, I learned in high school. You can just pick it up like juggling three balls is very easy. The challenge is getting to four or five balls. That's cool. Your hand speed has to be really fast. So I did a lot of juggling in college. Oh, wow. There's a juggling club, yeah. You can juggle pins, you know, with a partner you can throw pins and yeah, it's like, it's good exercise. It really gets your hand-eye coordination really solid and it's a lot of fun. That's really cool. Pins especially is like, whoa, okay. That's pretty cool. But yeah, it's, in terms of folks who want to say, we really do want to provide a neutral channel here at Modern Day Debate. We hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you are from.  So a couple of things. One, if you happen to be a Muslim debater or maybe a Muslim who's like, I'm really interested in debate. I read this stuff all the time and I'd really like to, you know, actually make the case. And it might be something like tonight where it's two Muslim guests. It might be a Muslim versus an atheist. It might be a Muslim Christian. As I do want to say, if you email me, I want to put the invite out there at moderndaydebateatgmail.com. We are happy to have new Muslim guests. And not only that, I want to say this is that if you're, let's say, a Muslim and you're like, man, I went on a channel and I didn't feel like they treated me that well because let's say, in theory, I'm not saying that all channels do this, but I just, I'm always turned off if a person goes on a channel and this is one of the reasons I started modern day debate is that I would see, let's say Christians go on and I'm not trying to paint a, you know, I'm not trying to say this is true of all atheists, it's not. A lot of atheists will give you a very fair shot. But in this particular case, I saw an atheist channel where the Christian would go on a debate and then the atheists would come out with an after show right after and be like, oh my gosh, that was so bad. And I was always like, ah, man, it's like, how's the Christians like going on this channel in a way that is like promoting a channel that's regularly putting out atheist content. And so that some Christians were kind of uncomfortable or kind of turned off by that and they're like, why would I want to go basically promote an atheist channel by going and helping them create content. And that's why at modern day debate we've wanted to keep it as neutral as possible. We don't have any videos that are saying like, hey, we're going to make the case for atheism. We're going to make the case for Christianity or Islam in a vacuum. We only have debates. So if there's anybody making a case for Christianity or Islam or atheism, it's always going to be someone else giving arguments against it. And so that's why I do want to say like, if you are a Muslim debater, we hope you feel welcome here because I just think you deserve better and that's true for everybody. So let's say theoretically, if you were an atheist and you went on to a Christian channel and then if the Christian channel, let's say came out and they're like, oh man, that was so bad by that atheist. I'd be like, okay.  Like can you do them a little better than that? And so I do want to say, you know, folks, we do hope you feel like it's fair anyway. Thanks for listening to that spiel, Daniel. Yeah, people are asking me to do the pen trick. So I got to, please the fans, you know, are you not entertained in debate? Can juggle, can flip a pen? We have tricks here from the moderator. This is the most exciting debate ever in history. This is, yes, we are lifting it up. It's taking it to the next level. And so yeah, I definitely. Oh, by the way, James, on your stream, I think, my name is under Javad, Javad's video. So people are gonna think that I'm this. All right, he's not here to defend himself. Yeah, I'm not gonna say anything, but you'll think that I'm him. I've updated it. And I also want to apologize. One thing that people in the chat said, James, Daniel's slides aren't showing. And I wrongly assumed, so you know we're not supposed to assume, but I did it. I assumed that you just didn't, that you didn't have slides that you're reading off a word document. And then I found out what they said. No, no, no, James, like he does have slides. And it's not that he purposely didn't show anything because he doesn't have them. He has them. He just maybe forgot to share. And so I'm sorry that I dropped the ball on that. And so I'll try to remember. There was only like, it was one section. I can't remember what it was. So it wasn't the whole debate or anything, but there was one where I slipped up there. I'm sorry about that. Was it just, was it two? Cause we've done three sections so far. We have the fourth one. But so it showed for the intro, but not like the two other sections. No, I think it showed for the intro and then the first 10 minute opening for part one. And then I think it was the opening for part two that I, like I said, I'm sorry about that. That's my job. Like I should be giving a friendly reminder. And so folks in the chat, thanks for letting me know that I should do that. I always feel like, yeah, anyway, but yeah, it's technical glitches happen. It happens to me all the time. So no problem, James. Oh yeah. And then there's that too. The whole technical meltdown. You know, it's crazy. I'm really grateful. Here's why I'm grateful. Not that it happened, but that on the modern day debate side, and I'm sorry for everybody on like, who has to watch it elsewhere is that on the modern day debate side, we didn't lose the stream, which is crazy. Cause my computer literally shut down and maybe YouTube is just getting better, but my computer literally turned off and the stream somehow we reconnected to the original. So I'm grateful for that. That's great.  I will edit that out. I'll cut it out. But yeah, there is gonna be like probably three or four minutes where I was gone. And I would say, yeah, at least four minutes. But all right, Javad, my guess is you're ready to roll. I guess so. I was like, well, what even part are we doing now? It's just, but okay, I think we're at the last part. All right, let me just make sure I got the right PowerPoint. Okay, I think I am ready. Are we live or what? Oh yeah, we're still alive. We're in that intermission and we're gonna start it up. So folks, we are entering into part three. And like I said, folks, this is a, I had told Javad in an email, I said this is a really interesting story because these gentlemen have a history. They've been tweeting, going back and forth in the past, disagreeing. And so this is an interesting debate, both in terms of its subject matter, but also in terms of the fact that these guys have a genuine story. This one is part three, conquest and slavery. We're gonna have an opening by Javad and then of course by Daniel as well. Those will each be 10 minutes followed by five minute rebuttals. And 45 minutes of open dialogue followed by 10 minutes of Q and A and then our concluding statements for the night. So Javad, thank you very much. The floor is all yours for your 10 minute opening stage. Thanks James, if I could also get that one minute warning, thank you so much. And I'm just gonna share my stuff, okay? All right, oh wait, is that, I gotta close this box, just give me one second. Uh-oh, all right. You can see my screen, good? Yep. Okay, I'm gonna start now. All right, thank you very much. Okay, so the Quran is a book of peace. God is described as peace in the Quran. Heaven is the abode of peace. Mecca is the heavenly peace on earth. Islam is peace. And believers are told to spread peace. It's only sinful human beings who break the peace and shed human blood. Human life or human souls are sacred because they are God-breathed. Whoever kills a soul, it is though he kills all of humankind together. Therefore the default position in the Quran is one of sanctity of life for a human soul, a human being. Do not kill a soul which God has made sacred and this is repeated in the Quran, it's called Hurmat An-Nafs. Unfortunately, the tradition went in a different direction and they use this hadith to do it. They claim that you don't have the sanctity of life if you're a human being. It's only something that you opt into instead of being the default condition. It's an opt into if you convert to Islam, if they do it, if they convert, then their blood and property are sacrosanct. So this is unfortunate. In fact, if you were a non-Muslim living in a non-Muslim land, you were a kaffir harbi and your blood was listed to be shed. You had no sanctity of life. And unfortunately, this was the default position. Whereas the Quran considers all human souls to be universally and permanently sacrosanct. In the medieval Islamic tradition, it was the legal contract of dhimma that protected the life of the non-Muslim on a provisional basis. The kaffir dhimmi was protected, but in a subservient state. And they of course superimposed this hadith which inverted the Quran as we saw because the Quran says there's no compulsion in religion. The Quran also says that God divinely willed religious diversity. Had he willed, he would have made you all one religious community. So why are fundamentalists arguing that they want to make the entire world Muslim and Islamic and dominate the entire globe? This is a wrong understanding, unfortunately. The Quran actually says that we made you peoples and tribes so that you may come to know one another, to love one another, not to conquer one another and hate each other. The Quran actually as a professor, Patricia Krona says that when it comes to warfare, the Quran actually endorses the golden rule. The basic principle is that one should treat other communities as they treat one's own. Fighting in the Quran, she says, is declared legitimate and self-defense. The Quran insists on tit for tat, gasas, no more proportionate retaliation. Meanwhile, it's the medieval exegetes who have to postulate endless abrogation to make things fit into their imperial agenda that is offensive jihad, not jihad, jihad. The default state in the Quran is a state of peace and therefore one should peacefully preach the message. Patience in the face of insult and injury is a higher level of piety. However, according to the Quran, sometimes war is indicated to protect people from oppression and religious persecution. Even then, however, peace should always be sought and the door to reconciliation left open. It is, of course, permissible to defend yourself and this is repeated in the Quran repeatedly that you can defend yourself. However, it defends themselves. There's nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong is to retaliate more than equal retaliation or to initiate aggression. Whosoever's retaliated proportionate to what injury he received. So equal retaliation actually precludes initiating aggression. In fact, the Quran endorses a very clear non-aggression principle. This is not textual acrobatics. This is clear as day. Fight in God's cause against those who fight you but do not aggress for God does not love aggressors. In fact, here's an even clearer verse. Surah 4, 90, if they let you be, do not make war on you and offer you peace. God does not allow you to harm them. Oh, let's do some textual acrobatics and understand this verse. No, it's clear. Quran endorses a peace principle. If the, even if you fight a war of self-defense, if the enemy inclines towards peace, then you incline towards it because the Quran endorses peace. If they cease fighting you, what is past will be forgiven them. So the Quran has this peaceful and forgiving attitude and this is repeated in the Quran. So these are the Quranic principles of war, sanctity of life, non-aggression principle, proportionality principle, the peace principle and the truths of God. These are four months in which fighting is forbidden in order to cool things off and of course, these were abrogated by the medieval exegetes. Now, if you wanna look at the prophet's life story, we can do no better than looking at Ibn al-Kayyim statement which says, quote, to anyone who carefully considers the life of the prophet, it will be clear that he did not ever force anyone to adopt his religion and that he the prophet only fought those who fought him. This is an eighth century scholar, Hidri. Every chronic verse, this is what the exegetes did. What did they do with all these clear cut verses? Well, they followed the principle rule. Every chronic verse that conflicts with the view of our legal school must be taken as abrogated or better yet reinterpreted so as to agree with our position which is of course, waging offensive warfare. This is an 11th century scholar who said that Jihad goes into four stages and you can see how textual acrobatic they are. Here, they actually put in the fourth stage of Jihad, they put verse 2190 which they claim abrogates 2191 which was defensive war. What makes this even more ridiculous is that they didn't look at the rest of the verse which actually says against those who fight you but do not aggress. This is just a shoddy cut and paste job, the exact textual acrobatics that Daniel accuses me of. Now, if the wars of conquest weren't advocated by the Qur'an or by the prophet, how did they come about? They're actually not initiated by the prophet but we're actually an extension of the so-called wars of apostasy under Caliph Abu Bakr and this is supported by several historians.  So when it comes to slavery, the theological basis against slavery is in the Qur'an. It is not for any human being to say, be my slaves instead of God. In fact, it's Pharaoh's sunnah to enslave people.  This is what unfortunately the medieval Islamic tradition accepted. So my overall claim is that the Qur'an envisions an emancipatory ethic which was unfortunately not followed by later Muslims who instead followed Pharaoh's sunnah and supported a massive slave trade. The Qur'an actually calls the emancipation of slaves to be the steep path and what will explain to you the steep path? It is the freeing of the slave. What is true piety? It's not just formal acts of ritual worship. Instead, it's to give wealth despite loving it for the emancipation of slaves. Islamic modernists since the 19th century have argued that it is simply nonsensical to argue that the Qur'an calls for the emancipation of slaves while simultaneously calling for enslavement. This would make the Qur'an contradictory. The conservative traditionalists, on the other hand, made the absurd argument that abolishing slavery would take away from Muslims the ability to accrue good deeds by being able to free slaves. So you need to have slaves in order to sometimes free them. Just imagine if someday we had a major technological advancement that allowed us to with a snap of a finger get rid of poverty altogether. Should we do it? The Islamic modernists would say, of course, that will be a fulfillment of the Qur'anic ethic. The fundamentalists, on the other hand, would say, no, let's keep people in poverty so that Muslims could still get the reward of giving charity to the poor. The Qur'an repeatedly says to emancipate slaves. This is all over the Qur'an, yet there's nowhere that it says to enslave anyone. In fact, what's interesting is that the medieval tradition understood that all of these various forms of enslavement, including debt bondage punishment for a crime, kidnapping, et cetera, all of these were banned. But for some reason, they allowed enslaving prisoners of war, which was the one door that actually the Qur'an specifically mentions is closed in verse 47. No textual acrobatics. Then, free them, the prisoners of war, graciously or ransom them till the war lays down the burden. Thus shall it be. There's no verse that says to enslave prisoners of war. This is actually in the Bible, but why are there no such verses in the Qur'an? We really need to ask that question. In fact, it was the sunnah of the neighboring Byzantine empire to execute prisoners of war, ransom them or to enslave them. Similarly with the neighboring Persian, Sassanid empire to execute, massacre, enslave captives. I wonder where the early Muslims got this from. Meanwhile, the Qur'an actually says to treat captives with mercy, give them sustenance, treat them well and then at the end of the war to free them, either graciously or ransom them. The obvious interpretation, this is not a textual acrobatics medieval text says, the obvious interpretation of Qur'anic verse 47.4 is that the Imam is only entitled to pardon captives or release them on ransom. In fact, this was the earliest opinion according to some sources. Al-Hassan al-Basri backed this up. The prisoner of war should not be killed, but he may only be ransomed or set free by grace. We even have sources that say there was an Ijma or consensus of the companions. I'm not rooting my claim in Ijma by the way. These are early figures who endorse this obvious reading. Imam Shafi, now coming to the Prophet's life story, we say that Imam Shafi shows, he said, we know not of any evidence suggesting that the Prophet captured and enslaved any single person after the Battle of Hunayn. In the Battle of Hunayn, 6,000 prisoners of war were taken and they were all released without ransom. Even their Hadith reports on not taking them as historical, but they show that there was no enslavement after that. Now, unfortunately, the pre-modern exeges just took this as limiting it to Arabs and said that Arabs are a noble race because this was a Sunni Orthodox view that the Arab race is superior to the non-Arab race. I wonder if Daniel Haqqiki agrees with this. So they limited this ethic to the Arabs. But anyways, there were some scholars early on who held that the Prophet's emancipation at the Battle of Hunayn was a momentous day and that there was a command to set free all other Arabs previously enslaved and forbade future enslavement and perpetuity. As far as the Prophet himself, he freed all 12 of his slaves that are reported to him, although there's a difference but he freed all of them, that's for sure. These are the different options that the Qur'an only offers two of them which is to free or ransom them. And here's our professor saying, although the verse is clear, it's the later Islamic tradition that went in the opposite direction. In fact, this is the same guiding principle, the Ba'at. Remember, this is the exegetal medieval exegetical Ba'at which said, every verse that conflicts with the view of our legal school, we take it as abrogated or reinterpreted. They actually nullified God's word as even this professor says, jurists found reasons to nullify God's seemingly clear instructions to free prisoners of war. Such exegetical exercises had the paradoxical outcome of seeming to mock the Qur'an. The instructions given to the conqueror of sin, Muhammad al-Qasim, read like a cruel parody of 47-4. Bind their bonds and grant freedom to no one of the enemy and spare none of them. These are historians who are saying this. The medieval exegety expanded it to four options but then actually reduced it down to just enslavement or mass execution going exactly against 47-4. Imam Malik said you could not release prisoners of war and so did Imam Abu Hanifa. And some said that this was completely not allowed to ransom or free people. The justification for enslavement at this time is not the kind of utilitarian ones that Daniel gives. Instead, it's considered a penalty for unbelief because you're considered dead if you're an unbeliever and then you can enslave or kill them. But this is philosophically incoherent and we can debate this in the open discussion. It's an unbelief that justifies it. Imam Shafi even said that the prohibition of killing women and children in war as a directive is based on financial consideration. Women and children as Shafi explains are property and property should not be damaged. This is the weird utilitarian direction that they went in. As far as the precedent for this, taking prisoners of war as slaves, it was actually Abu Bakr who during the wars of apostasy took women and children as prisoners and other companions opposed this. This was Abu Bakr Sunnah, which won against the Prophet Sunnah and we can disagree with this just as public companions did and he based this on public welfare and reciprocity because he was basing it on what the Romans did with prisoners of war, they executed them. In fact, Caliph Umrah who came after him returned the prisoners of the people of the Rida and demanded that no Arabs could be enslaved. There's sources that say that Ali actually extended this to non Arabs as well. My overall argument, whereas slavery was a de facto reality in the time of the Prophet and mentioned as such in the Qur'an, nowhere does the Qur'an endorse slavery. Not a single verse says to enslave prisoners of war. In fact, the Qur'an says to free them after the war. The Qur'an is anti-slavery and pro-emancipatory in its message, repeatedly stressing to free slaves and even marry them. The Prophet freed all of his slaves. The Prophet freed all the prisoners of war. I'm sorry that I didn't do that one minute warning. I just, that's my... So just 30 seconds. These are my specific claims for Daniel that the Qur'an forbids wars of aggression and does not allow for enslavement prisoners of war. These are what he needs to rebut and of course he'll respond this way. Thank you. And we'll kick it over to Daniel Parton that. Sorry about that. I'm just trying to keep an eye on the live chat just for questions as well as we're gonna kick it into the 10 minute opening from Daniel as well. The floor is all yours Daniel. Can we just make sure that I'm sharing the screen this time? Yes. Okay. Just one second. Let's see. Is it showing? Yes. Okay. Just let me know when to start. Ready for you.  First, let's look at the Qur'an. Traditional Islamic scholarships as rules of warfare shifted over time. There were three phases. First, while in Mecca, Muslims were small in number and weak. As such, they avoided the violent conflict but rather patiently withstood attacks. In the second phase, after migrating to Medina, the Muslim community was permitted to fight back against aggressors in defensive jihad. In the third phase, once the Muslims had grown strong in Medina, they were permitted to engage in offensive wars of conquest against even those who had not attacked them. The traditional scholarship argues that these last verses permitting offensive jihad abrogated the earlier verses. The verses that endorsed conquest are 929, 95, and 2193. We saw verse 929 in the last section. Verse 2193 reads, fight them until there is no more fitna and until worship is acknowledged to be for Allah. But if they cease, then there is to be no aggression except against the oppressors. Verse 95 reads, when the four forbidden months are over, wherever you encounter, the idolaters kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post. But if they turn to Allah, maintain the prayer and pay the prescribed alms, let them go on their way for Allah's most forgiving and merciful. On slavery, verse 3350 says, O prophet indeed, we have made lawful to you, your wives to whom you have given their due compensation and those your right hands possess from what Allah has returned to you of captives. Verse 867 reads, it is not right for a prophet to take captives before he has conquered the battlefield. Verse 474 reads, when you meet the disbelievers in battle, strike them in the neck and once they're defeated, bind any captives firmly. Later you can release them by grace or by ransom until the toils of war have ended. Verse 432 through 33 gives several rules about the rights of slaves and prohibits prostituting slaves. Obviously the verse presupposes the permissibility of owning slaves, including female slaves, regarding masters being allowed to have sex with slaves. The Quran uses the term milk yamin or right hand possessions, which is the term for female slaves. Verse 424 explicitly makes sex with female slaves licit, as well as verse 3350 mentioned earlier, in Surat al-Mu'minun, the believers are described as guarding their chastity, except from their spouses and their female slaves, same in verse 7029. Those are just a few of the many verses endorsing conquest, slavery and concubinage. The traditional position says these verses license offensive warfare, slavery and concubinage. Liberal reformists do jit-goofy gymnastics to get out of the clear meaning of these verses. So who is right? As usual, let's look at the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the actual history of the earliest Muslims. As for biology, we've already discussed the in-group versus out-group instinct that all human beings naturally have, not only humans, but even animal species have these instincts. For example, chimpanzees instinctually get into groups and engage in conflict and other groups over resources and power. Each group seeks territory, food and mates. Each group also seeks power over other groups to prevent them from attacking and to limit access to resources. This also involves females because female chimpanzees stay in areas with abundant food and water. When a group of chimpanzees takes the territory of another, it also takes control of females in that territory. Groups struggle for resources and power because attaining these things is required for survival and reproduction.  These behaviors are found in other species as well as in humans. This is why conquest, slavery, concubinage are found in every pre-modern civilization without exception. These behaviors are required for survival and even modern superpowers engage in this competition for power and resources. Within the Quantitative Social Sciences researchers note that hunter-gatherer societies, pastoral agricultural societies, industrial societies, they differ in how they engage in war and domination, but regardless of the kind of society, they all engage in aggressive expansionism. It's built into human DNA as well as the universal cultural consciousness of humanity. This is very important when we study late antique religions. The Hebrew Bible endorses conquest of others and even genocide of certain groups like the Canaanites and the Amalekites. The Bible praises Jewish kings like David for their conquests. These kings are allowed to conquer other people for power and resources. The Bible also endorses slavery and holds that female war captives may be used sexually, either as sex slaves or as forced brides. Later, rabbinic law also endorses slavery and assumes that a master can use slaves, female slaves, sexually.  In the Greco-Roman religion, it's no secret the pagan Greeks and Romans engage in constant wars of conquest and enslaved entire populations. When the Romans adopted Christianity in the third century, they retained the same policies but with alterations. The New Testament doesn't establish a clear position on war, but from early Christian times, many Christians argued that defensive and offensive warfare are permissible.   Zoroastrians also endorsed imperial warfare as well as slavery.  The polytheistic Arabs, constantly warred with each other, took slaves including sex slaves, sometimes weak tribes voluntarily submitted to slavery in return for protection. These subordinated groups were known by names like Jar, Maula and Halif. This is the context of the world at the beginning of Islam from a historical critical perspective. It's expected that the early Muslims would endorse norms on warfare, slavery, concubines, analogous to the norms found within literally every other religion and culture. Further evidence comes from contemporaneous non-Muslim accounts. An account of the Battle of Gebetha is a very early fragment from 637, only five years after the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, that describes the Muslim conquest of Syria. Another document written by a Christian apologist called the Doctrina Yekobi, dating around 640, mentions Muslims. What's interesting is that the Christian apologists argues that the Muslim prophet is a false prophet because he came armed with a sword and was involved, quote, only in shedding of men's blood. We already mentioned the account from Thomas the Presbyter in 640, describing how the Muslims invaded Byzantine territory as well as Persia. In the Sebeos document from the 660s, the bishop describes how a band of followers obedient to Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, quote, began to go up to the land of Palestine, plundering, enslaving and pillaging. So this Armenian Christian account not only describes the Muslims as engaging in conquest and taking slaves, but he also attributes all of this to the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. The Khuzestan Chronicles written in the 660s says about the Muslims attacking Persia, quote, neither walls nor gates, armor or shield and they gain control over the entire land of the Persians, end quote. The Apocalypse of Sudo Ephraim from the 7th century is a Syriac Christian text describing how Muslims attacked Christians and took the conquered people as slaves and concubines. Many, many other texts all describe the same thing. Now let's look at archeology. The archeological record proves that Muslim armies took over and replaced the religious sites of other groups. The biggest example is Masjid al-Haram, which was the primary shrine for the pagan Arabs, we already mentioned the Dome of the Rock from 690, also the Umayyad Mosque was a cathedral that was converted to a mosque in 710. The Ibrahim Mosque in Palestine was formally the tomb of the patriarchs, a site sacred to Jews and Christians. In Persia, numerous Zoroastrian fire temples were converted into major mosques. This is all hard evidence. Another piece of hard evidence is coinage. Minting coins is the mark of an empire ruling over large territories. The Sasanian empires had coins, but starting in the 650s, the Muslims conquered Persia, took the Sasanian coins out of circulation and replaced them with newly minted coins with Islamic symbols. In the 690s, Muslims did the same to the Byzantine empire. It was as if the Muslims were saying, we're replacing these empires and we're going to be an empire like they were. There's also the building of forts and garrison cities. The aim of establishing garrison cities is to maintain long-term permanent control over vast, conquered lands. Examples of these cities include Kufa and Basra, built in 638 to control Iraq. Fustat, built in 641 to control Egypt. And Bayrawan, built in 680 to control Tunisia. Finally, archaeological data proves the earliest Muslims practiced slavery. Inscriptions from the first century of Islam mentioned slave-related terms like mola. Also, the fact that there are no rock inscriptions in the Arabian Peninsula after the Islamic conquest dedicated to polytheism, Judaism or Christianity further proves hard evidence. That's what we're talking about. Hard evidence that the Muslims in the time of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and immediately thereafter were engaged in conquest. So let's see if Javad, who is supposedly a historian, will get off of the goofy gymnastics and the ad hominem and the gish galloping and the strawman arguments against the Islamic tradition and actually address the hard evidence. What about these late antique religions? What about these contemporaneous Muslim accounts? What about the coinage? What about the inscriptions? What about the dome of the rock? What about Masjid al-Haram? What about the Umayyad Mosque, which used to be a cathedral and it was made into a mosque? These all predate 750. So within a hundred years of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, these things are there as hard evidence. We'll jump into the five minute rebuttals. Javad, thank you very much. The floor is all yours. Before you do that, I need to share the screen, please. You bet. It's not allowing me to do it right now because I think he has to stop sharing. Let's see, I think Daniel, there you go. Okay, so if you just give me one second as I pull this up. Okay, so thank you very much. So Daniel, again, we're gonna see who's the real bot when it comes to interpretation and interpreting things away. He cited three verses that say that this abrogated, canceled out, nullified all those peaceful verses about not aggressing in war. He cited 9.5 and 9.29, that is Surah 9. Surah 9, this is Islamophobes who quote 9.5 and say that this killed the idolars wherever you find them. But let's actually see. 9.5 is talking about, the Surah starts out, it's talking about those whom you made a treaty with and then they violated.  Those you don't attack, fulfill the treaty with them. Use lethal force against the idolars wherever you find them. But if they repent, then you stop fighting. It doesn't even say to convert to Islam there, by the way. And if any of the idolars seek safety with you, grant them safety. So long as they remain true to you, you be true to them. The Quran is only talking about those people who broke the treaty. It's right there. How could there be a treaty with God and his messenger for such people who break their treaty? How when, if they were to get the upper hand over you, they would not respect any tie with you of kinship or treaty. They are the ones committing aggression. The Quran makes sure to mention that it's not a war of aggression. Why would the Quran go out of its way to say that? And they break their oaths after the treaty with you and attack your religion. And then it's talking about fight them so that they may desist. Will you not fight a folk who broke their solemn pledges and proposed to drive out the messenger and did attack you first? So this is Sam Harris, by the way, who also used another verse. So it's not talking about offensive jihad and wars of aggression. It's against that. Then Surah 2,193 is what he cited. This is 2,193. It appears in this passage. Do not aggress. Fairly God does not love the aggressors. Deleted by Sam Harris and also by Daniel Hikikachu. Religious persecution is worse than killing, but do not fight near the sacred mosque unless they fight you there. But if they cease fighting that God is most forgiving and merciful, fight them until there is no religious persecution, fitna, and your religion is for God. Fight against them until idolatry. This is how Sam Harris interprets it, but this is not the word. It's not shirk or idolatry. It's persecution. It's fitna. So that does not support Daniel at all. And then the verse even says that religious persecution, fitna, is graver than killing. This is 2,217, which explains what fitna is. And they will not cease to fight you until they make you renounce your religion. It's giving a definition of fitna in the Quran itself. Then Daniel actually quotes 432 and 33 to justify having sex with slaves. Dude, that's 425. I already showed you that. The very next verse. Marry the believing young women. So wed them. Give them their proper bride wealth. Let's marry. Chast women, not as fornicators and lovers. Taking a concubine is taking a lover, okay? And then he cites amazingly. He cited 47.4, which I already told you 47.4 about taking prisoners of war. Dude, that's the entire verse that I quoted to you that says to free slaves. And finally he cites 867. 867 came long before the verse 47.4 and doesn't even actually say to take prisoners of war. So that's not a good argument. That's pretty much all I have because I addressed all of the Quranic verses that he brought forward. And you see that he's the one who's the bot who doesn't interpret. And I mean that he follows the exegetical strategy that if a Quranic verse goes against you, then you abrogate it. And they abrogated almost 200 verses. Or you reinterpret it. This is the strategy of the medieval exegetes. I'm showing the Quran. I'm basing my argument on the Quran. I believe in the Quran. I believe in the Prophet Muhammad. I don't have to believe in the later medieval tradition which accepted as Daniel himself says, the Roman and the Persian example. These examples, the Quran has a higher ethic. And you should believe that the Quran can have a higher ethic if you're truly a believer. And it's not just me who's saying it. Historians have also said it. Read Patricia Crona on this. She says the Islamic modernists are 100% right. She actually said initially I read the modernist as Shaltut and I said, oh, I think he's being apologetic. But then I read it a second time and I realized, you know what, he's being apologetic, but literally everything he said is right. And that's Patricia Crona who's no pro-Islamic person. So really I have the Quran on my side, Daniel does not.  Because 425 clearly says that you must. There's not a single verse that Daniel has shorting that has proven his point that you can take sex slaves, that you can have sex with slaves, you can conquer people, ways, wars of aggression. None of this, he can't prove any of it. We'll kick it over to Daniel for his rebuttal as well. I can't hear you James. We'll kick it over to Daniel for his rebuttal as well. The floor is all yours. It's 10 minutes. Let's see, I think this is your own rebuttals already. Or five minutes, five minutes. Five minutes. Oh, he went way over five minutes. Did I go over five minutes? Because I was supposed to stop. I thought it was 10 minutes. It's going way over time. I thought it was 10 minutes because he went for 10 minutes. Well, it's not me, it's I should be called out. So that's not, that's fine. Wait, just quiet both of you for a second please. I'm just trying to like get my bearing straight. It's like, were we just on the, that wasn't the rebuttals? That is the rebuttals. That was the rebuttals. I don't think you went, did you go? I don't think you went over. Maybe I'm mistaken. I thought, yeah, maybe I'm, it doesn't matter. It's fine. I was on my, like I had it set where it says set a timer for four minutes. You can talk all he wants. It's okay. Well, I'll set, I'll talk for five minutes. Okay. That's my mistake. I'm going to check and if you, if I'm, if you guys are wrong this time, I'm going to rub it and roll with your faces. Yeah, I could be wrong. Let's go to Daniel for five minutes. Okay, let me start. Okay, so my question for Javad now, do you think Islam was the first society to abolish slavery? Like as a historian, please tell me because this would be breaking news. You know, Islam is the first society. The Quran is the first emancipation document of history. Please, you know, make this claim as a historian.   Like this is an embarrassment. I'm also a Harvard graduate. This is like the best you can come up with. You know, when you have this kind of interpretation of the Quran and you're saying, oh, well these verses came later, I've noticed something with your goofy gymnastics Javad. Whenever there is a verse of aggression in the Quran, just what you presented right now, you sit like kill them wherever you find them, for example, or even jizya, you say, oh, it's for a specific event or it's just for this specific battle or oh, it's just for that specific time. What is your evidence for this? Who knows, it wasn't presented. But whenever there's a verse about peace, whenever there's a verse about mercy, oh, then that's universal, that's for all time and place. You know, this is just post-hoc reasoning. You have established no principles of interpretation. You haven't established any principles of reason or higher ethics. These are just pretty words that you refer to and you think that you're convincing people. No, it's a joke. No one can follow your argumentation because it seems all post-hoc and selective cherry picking. So, you know, this is the trend for this entire debate exactly as I predicted. Goofy gymnastics, you haven't even acknowledged this claim that I made at the very beginning, like we're still on this issue of do you accept, do you concede that language, understanding a text requires understanding the intentions of the author? Do you accept that? Like why can't we even agree on this basic point? Like this is an established scientific academic fact. You refuse to address it because as soon as you accept that scientific academic fact, then it becomes very pertinent. What is actually the beliefs and norms of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and what does the history actually say about the historical Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam? You don't want to get into that debate as you've admitted multiple times now. You don't want to have that debate. You want to talk about very granular, specific, narrow issues because you can't address that larger argument. Me on the other hand, I'm coming to this debate with the exact topics that we agreed to in advance, religious freedom, patriarchy, gender norms, restrictions on sexuality, conquest, slavery, sex with female slaves. These are very broad topics. And if we want to address broad topics, we have to appeal to large amounts of historical sources, contextual sources. We have to look, we can't just say, oh, this verse, I think it means this. I read someone in the ninth century who had this interpretation of that verse and therefore this is what it actually means. Like this is embarrassing. Like I can't believe that you are taken as a serious historical scholar. I think this debate has really exposed you as a charlatan. This is not academic at all. You can't publish any of this kind of stuff. And this is why I agree to have this debate with you because I want to expose like, what is the reality of Harvard academics? Like they Harvard academics are not people to be intimidated by these Islamic studies scholars. They're people like Juan Cole saying that the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam is like Martin Luther King or he's like a senator and he has this peace march into Mecca.  They just need certain pointers. For example, this debate, I'm bringing all of these historical sources from your own academics, from your own books that are seen as authoritative by your side. And you can't even address any of those. Like this is a complete debunking of your entire claim to be this historical critical scholar. No, it's a joke.  And this is why it's so easy. Are you going to address the inscriptions that are explicitly using slave terms? Are you going to address the coinage? Are you going to address Kufa, Basra, Fustat? Are you going, these are not like 100 years after the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. These are directly after the life of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. And you have all of these contemporaneous Christian sources that are describing what the prophet is all about. Why do you think the Christians are saying the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam is, you know, a prophet of the sword? Like where did they get that idea? Like within two years of his lifetime, like a real historical critical scholar would take that as a lot of evidence for what the actual beliefs and norms of the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam what were, but you're a propagandist.  We're going to jump into the next section. Want to remind you folks, thanks so much for all of your encouragement, your likes and your shares. It means a lot. So thank you guys out there. We're going to go into the, I'm barely hanging in there guys. I can't believe it. Are you guys ready? These coas. Open discussion. Let's go. Let's go. Open dialogue. Excited James. Open dialogue it is. 45 minutes. Yeah, but we'll do it one and a half minutes each. That's right. I've got the timer set. Here we go. Ready for it. Okay, thank you so much. I'm afraid that Daniel does not listen carefully to arguments. He's asking, talking about inscriptions that used slave terms. I've already said that Abu Bakr started the precedent about enslaving prisoners of war and that other companions opposed that. So I'm not making a claim about the post prophetic period. I'm actually saying that the tradition went in a different direction. I'm making claims about the prophet and the Quran, using the Quran. Now he asked me about how I interpret my, the problem of interpretation. Actually he's going in the post modernist, post Gadamarian way, if I understand him correctly. That in fact that it's an interpretive circle then. Because then if you have to use the Hadith to interpret the Quran, then somebody has to interpret the Hadith and it's an endless cycle. This was actually one of my arguments against traditionalism. We believe that the Quran is clear and accessible because God is the one who inspired the prophet and therefore it had to be understandable. This is what the rationalist said. As far as post hoc explanations, it's actually the medieval tradition that relies on this. In fact, we see in this how you haphazardly apply Quranic verses. You ask me where did I get the context for kill them wherever you find them, verse nine, five. I got it from the Quran itself. Look at the passage. I showed you the verses where you're not paying attention. Verse nine, five is embedded in Surah nine early, which said it's only against those who violated the treaty and initiated aggression. As far as Islam abolishing slavery, I have not claimed that Islam abolished slavery. What I have claimed is that, and the reason why there's a difference between saying that you want to abolish. So if you look at this, Professor Richard Epstein talks about the Roman law in the sixth century. He said slavery is in fact a positive legal institution. And what you discover very quickly is that it was such a pot. Okay, so I'll have to finish that point on the second one. I want to answer the question of why didn't he just abolish slavery? Go ahead. How does that make any sense? Like you're saying that Islam did not abolish slavery? I thought that was your whole argument. I thought the whole ethic of Quran, don't interrupt. The whole ethic of the Quran is abolishing slavery. This is like the most apologetic type of nonsense. Like, oh, there's so many verses in the Quran that say to free the slaves. Well, there are many verses in the Quran to give Sadaqah, to give charity. Does that mean the Quran is against private property? Like you need to give up all of your wealth because the Quran is constantly saying to give charity. Like this is the kind of argument that apologists 50 years ago would make. And now you're regurgitating it and you're crawling yourself in academic. That is a joke. Circular, you said that I'm being circular because I'm trying to interpret the Quran with hadith. Where am I referring to hadith? I'm referring to historical sources. I'm grounding all of my points in historical sources. You're just straw manning me. You have a script for this debate and you're not adapting to the actual arguments that I'm making. Where is all of the hadith that I'm citing? Where is the circularity, Javad? And you're lying. Patricia Krona did not appeal to higher ethics in interpreting Quranic verses. She appealed to history. She actually was a historian unlike you. So you're lying about Patricia Krona. I'm not a fan of her, but you're misrepresenting her. So please explain how Islam is not the first to abolish slavery, did not abolish slavery, but the Quran also somehow is abolishing slavery according to the clear verses. So this is a contradiction. You need to explain it. Yes, thank you very much. So I never claimed that the Quran abolished slavery. What I did say is that the prophet is the Quran forbade enslaving anyone. That's a difference. So there was de facto slavery or there are already slaves that already existed and the Quran said to emancipate slaves. You can look at what Professor Richard Epstein says about Roman law in the sixth century. He writes, no jurists could simply overthrow it. And it was probably something of an act of courage to even speak against it. And that's what the prophet Muhammad did. By the way, Dr. Douglas Bradburn asks, why didn't George Washington just abolish slavery because he was opposed to slavery? Well, he couldn't because they were property. According to the laws of the land, they were human property and they were owned. So the only way to free the slaves was to emancipate them. You had to actually compensate the people. And that's what the prophet Muhammad did. So in the battle of Hunain, he couldn't force the other people, only Banu Hashem listened to him. And the rest, he had to ask them by persuasion. And then he had to say that I'll give you six camels or something, that's what it was. For each slave that you free, I'll give you six camels. So you had to use persuasion and encouragement. That shows that he couldn't force them to free slaves. This was the case with George Washington. This was the case with Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln couldn't even free slaves himself. He could only free slaves in the states that were rebelling, not in the states that were part of the union. The British empire took a hundred plus years with its navy and army to force, to end the slave trade and to abolish slavery. The prophet Muhammad didn't have any of that. The only people who would listen to him directly were Banu Hashem. I'll wait for James to tell me that the time is here. Okay, so. Time. Time? Okay, thank you. Yeah, so I'm waiting for this amazing new research, Javad, that you're hopefully gonna publish in some reputable journal that Islam was the first society to forbid the taking of new slaves. This is gonna be a great groundbreaking paper. You're going to win all kinds of prizes for this amazing insight that you have. Islam was the first society to forbid taking new slaves. Wow, I'm just so amazed by your insight, Javad. That Quranic analysis that you did was so brilliant. I'm waiting for it to see on the pages of the top journals, maybe Arabic or Islamic law and society. Maybe International Journal of Middle East Studies. Can you publish this there, Javad? I'm really looking forward to it. So this is complete nonsense. And yeah, the Prophet SAW also encouraged giving charity. He encouraged giving your wealth for the sake of Allah. The companions were giving their wealth for the sake of the cause of Islam, peace be with Allah. That wasn't an abolishment of private property. So yeah, you're encouraging, you're encouraging the freeing of slaves, but that doesn't, where is the prohibition of taking slaves? Especially when we see the historical record, we see the rock inscriptions, we see all of the non-Christian accounts. We see all of that history. Once again, you cannot address a single one as a so-called historian. This is sad. Go ahead. So I'm not gonna get into ad hominem. All I'll say is that I'm doing my dissertation right now and it's in a good state and I'm at Harvard so I don't really think you can question my credentials from that standpoint. But I can question your sloppy and dishonest citations. So I'm surprised that you haven't made this sloppy claim but you've made it in the past. You cite Lawrence Kealy's war before civilization to claim that all pre-modern societies took sex slaves.  That's not what Kealy argues, I looked it up. You're so bad at looking things up. This book is not even about pre-modern civilizations. It's about prehistoric civilization, primitive civilizations before written history. That's what his book is about. And even in the page right before it, he actually says that there are people who did not take sex slaves.  Kealy in the page right before the one that you cite says there were societies and civilizations that did not enslave women, did not take slaves. So this is the exact opposite of what you are saying. So you cite stuff very sloppily and this is not even war before civilization. You cite stuff like guns, germs, and steel. You're talking about being academic.  He's talking about primitive war, warfare conducted by prehistoric and primitive societies. And in some, this is what he writes in page 113. In some primitive societies, women were spared injury or capture by enemy warriors. And they could enjoy immunity from harm. And you know what you said?  There's no third option. And you're claiming that Keeley is saying that. You said, quote, this is why Keeley argues all pre-modern civilizations took sex slaves. He did not say that. Then you use the quote very misleadingly. Keeley is not saying what you're saying. I'm sorry, you're ignorant, Javad. What Keeley says, yeah, the societies that didn't take the slaves, they didn't take women as sex slaves. You know what they did with them, Javad? In the pre, you know, in these hunter gatherer societies, they killed them.  They massacred everyone. So the societies that didn't take slaves were killing them. That's what Keeley says. You're appealing to your credentials at Harvard. I'd recommend not citing that because basically you're bringing down Harvard's name. And that's good. You know, people really need to understand that this is what Islamic studies, academics are all about. Like this is the level. Like it's a joke. Like you having a degree or a PhD from Harvard, now people will realize that it means nothing. It means like the Prophet Salli Sallam was like MLK or a senator. Like that's what they're gonna associate with Harvard, your Harvard PhD now. So societies that Keeley references, their hunter gatherers, 99.5% of societies in history were hunter gatherers. And like I said, they all, if they didn't take slaves, most of them didn't take slaves. They would just massacre. They would kill.  Like that's the consequence of not having men to protect you or men to provide for you against the forces of nature. So this is like not really a point in your favor if you wanna go back to Keeley. Time to clarify. All right. Yeah, let's, hold on. Let me share my screen again. All right. Let's see Daniel's shoddy citations. He says a good book I recommend is Lawrence Keeley's Warfare for Civilizations. And he explains that pre-modern war was, it's not about pre-modern war. It's about prehistoric war. And he's actually trying to make the argument that they were not noble, quote unquote, savages. And rather that they were quite brutal. So he's not trying to justify these, trying to show that they were actually more ruthless. But he's contrasting that with pre-modern civilizations which Daniel is trying to actually lump in. And then he says, this is Daniel on the last paragraph right there. This is why Keeley argues all pre-modern civilizations took slaves. Again, this was a necessary aspect of war. If you did not take concubines, you were at a major disadvantage in militarily because you either take concubines or people get wiped off the face of the earth. There is no third option. So given that stark reality, yes, taking slaves was not only morally justified, it was morally necessary. And that's what his argument is. But really what Keeley says, Keeley says the opposite. Keeley, Daniel just repeated it again. He said, you know what they did? They executed women. No, in the page before, quote, it's in red here. In some primitive societies, women were spared injury or capture by enemy warriors and could enjoy remarkable immunity from harm. Just admit that you got this wrong. Be honest, seed the argument. This will be better for you. Instead of attacking and being ad hominem, this is not ad hominem. This is showing how you don't cite things correctly. So that's what I would say with the Keeley arguments. As far as why the, okay. Yeah, this is a side show. Like you had that, is that slide like from the, for the debate or you just had that in your pocket to show that I'm bad with citations. Okay, no, I said exactly what Keeley says. I cited it properly. The alternative for not taking the females. Once all the men are dead within Hunter gatherer societies, that means the women and children are soon going to follow as well. So this is, it's essentially a death sentence.  If people want to understand my views on the moral necessity of slavery throughout history and the justifications for that, go to any of these other debates. Harris Sultan was the one that we specifically debated on this issue and I, where I think the Florence Keeley citation was from. So, and then Keeley is not the only source, by the way, on pre-modern warfare. So that's another thing.  Okay, that's interesting use of your time. I'm trying to talk about history. I'm trying to talk about the actual debate topics.  You're kind of like Sophia, that feminist that I also debated who is obsessed, still is obsessed with me or Mike Jones. Like he's citing like my debates from five years ago as like some kind of winner against me. It's a bizarre debate tactic. Like I try to focus on the things that you say in the actual debate, the things that you cite in the actual debate. Maybe it'd be smart to address that. A lot of back peddling there. Basically, Daniel is back peddling and trying to get out of it and just not being honest and admitting that he made a mistake. That would be more honest of him. But I'm not just bringing it up just to say that you're sloppy. Your moral argument rests on it. This is what you said. You said it's morally, not only morally justified, but morally necessary. And then you double down on it right now. You said that in pre-modern societies, if you didn't do that, then all the women would be killed. But the problem is, is that the evidence that you're using that is for prehistoric societies, hunter-gatherers as you said, it's not the case for pre-modern civilized quote unquote societies, because in that case, and this is, we see that in the Islamic medieval tradition, the problem is that it wasn't only the women on the battlefield that you would take, but it was actually in conquered territories. That was as, Clarence Smith actually talks about this. He said, this is one further step that the Islamic tradition took. Not only the people on the battlefield, but it was people in those conquered societies in their countries. So you were taking them out of their homes where they lived. You were gonna conquer that territory. And it says, the medieval Islamic tradition said, you could just take all the women and slaves.  They were living in their families and in their homes. So the entire moral justification that you raise for saying that slavery is morally justified and necessary goes out the door.  You just believe that the text says that, so you must follow it and then you use reason instrumentally. But the reality is that even Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal said that you can't even do that. Don't do reason debate. Maybe that would be better for you. But the reality is, is that the Quran itself says that you need to free slaves at the end of the war. You can take captives, you free them at the end of the war. Oh, Javad, Javad, Javad. You think that people in conquered societies, so all the men have been killed in agricultural or pastoral societies. All the men have been killed and then the women are in their homes and they can just live without men. There's no need to enslave them because they can order uber eats and they can get all their needs met by who, not the men, they're all dead. So what are you talking about? You have no conception of history. You have no conception of pastoral or agricultural societies. Like these quantitative and social science, quantity of social science that I mentioned before that academics ignore, like you're a great poster boy for that. Like you don't even understand like pre-modern society and these kinds of civilizations.  If all the men today died, who's going to maintain the infrastructure of society? Like this is a very obvious point. Women would not be able to survive if all the men disappeared. So the humane option is actually to take them as slaves, to take them as concubines. That is the humane way to do things and that's what Islam prescribes and that's what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam did in his life. If it's so wrong and it's so inhumane, well he did it. He owned slaves, so explain that. Explain how that can be possible. And then the other point that I want to make is, yeah, so which pre-modern society didn't have slavery? Which pre-modern society, these civilizations didn't have concubines? You still haven't answered that. Okay, so this is very interesting. This is now where Daniel actually becomes the apologist of the apologetic person and he's arguing that there are humanitarian reasons for taking slave women, which is funny because the medieval tradition didn't do that. The medieval, some that raised this argument, the real argument was that when you're a non-Muslim, your penalty for unbelief was death and slavery is like death and so that's the reason the justification they gave. If it was really about being humanitarian and merciful, then why did the medieval exegetes exclude Muslims from this? So Muslims went to war with each other all the time and yet the Muslim jurist says you cannot enslave Muslim women. You cannot enslave other Muslim women. So if this was a humanitarian reason, what happened? Did they just execute all the Muslim women and children? No, they saved them. So your moral philosophical argument collapses on its head. You have to then say if it's a mercy, then we should be merciful to the Muslims too and we should have the same rules for the Muslims. This shows actually that the medieval exegetes understood, the medieval scholars understood that this is a harmful thing and we don't want it on our people. The only thing that prevented them from applying it to others was unfortunately the religious chauvinism where they were like, our people are more human and we saw that. They said that the blood of only a Muslim is sacrosanct, not of a non-Muslim.  So this is the reason why they set it up. You're being an apologist by raising this argument. Just be honest, the penalty is unbelief. It's a penalty, it's like death for them.   Like that is known, like the jurist site that, this is not like a gotcha moment. Like I'm not trying to make a humanitarian defensive slavery.  The thing about the point that I am making is that it's about survival. It is about, it's a necessity to take slaves. It is a necessity to take sex slaves. That's why every single pre-modern society did it. Explain to me, if it's not a necessity, if it's just some kind of barbaric thing that was introduced later in Muslim society, tell me why there's no single pre-modern society that did not enslave. Explain that. Is there no society that didn't have expansionist conquest? Why when we look at Judaism, Christianity, the Sasanians, Zoroastrianism, all of these civilizations and religions, they all have a conquest doctrine and that's represented in their texts. It's represented in their actual history. It's represented in the archeology. All of them have that. You, if you wanna make the claim that Islam was the first religion, the first culture that banned conquest and oh no, we can only have peace. If that's really your claim, publish it. You'll become a famous, world famous, the greatest historian ever who has discovered the first and only civilization that banned enslaving people and banned conquest. What an amazing genius who has proven this from Harvard. Show that, show the evidence. Wow, okay, such ad hominem, but okay. So I think you did raise one great question, which is why, this is actually what's called a slavery conundrum that Dr. Jonathan Brown raises in his book on slavery, which is a more serious take on this issue. But there are scholars who have written on this topic. I recommended two articles. One is my Michael Rota, called a moral psychology and social change, the case for abolition, and the other is by Nigel Pleasance, the moral argument is not enough. Both of them are answering the question, why did it take until modernity for people to realize that slavery is bad in total, totally bad and we should ban it and abolish it? So the answer to that is simple. You need certain factors to arrive for moral realizations to take place. Prior to that, what most people thought was they thought slavery was like poverty. Poverty is bad, it's not a good thing, but we practically don't have any reason, way to get rid of poverty. So that's what they dealt with slavery. It's not a great institution, but we can't get rid of it, so what can we do? In fact, like I told you, it took the British Army 100 plus years to get rid of it. But so that's how they dealt with it. And then Rhoda and Pleasance talk about why when you have slavery in your society and they talk about moral psychology, you like moral psychology a lot. So they talk about group think and how group think leads to motivated reasoning and that you would have powerful reasons to use motivated reasoning to justify your society taking slaves. And that's exactly what happens. And that's the exact same way that, and they give examples, like when there are, so in order for there to be the moral realization and that moral blind spot to be removed, you need to have the economic conditions and the technological advance to make an alternative possible. And that's only happened in the bottom of labor. Did chimpanzees, do chimpanzees have motivated reasoning, Javad? Are all these animal species that are taking territory, warring with each other? Like are they using motivated reasoning? Like this is something biological, dude. Like this is something that is so basic for you to deny is just blowing my mind. I can't understand how you consider yourself a historian or a serious academic. Slavery was necessary. Slavery, what you had, this is why all of these societies had it and practiced it. It was part of their doctrines. It was part of their religions. It's part of their scriptures. It's in the Hebrew Bible. It is being preached by these major Zoroastrian priests. It's found in the Greco-Roman religion. It's found in the Assyrian and Babylonian religions. All of these religions have these exact doctrines. Now, they're not exactly the same as the Islamic doctrines, but they're analogous, as I mentioned. And I cited Professor Sean Anthony, who makes this point, like there are analogs, and that's how a real historian, not like you, a real historian thinks, is about the analogs between these different traditions and how there can be interrelations and connections. So this is something that I want you to address again. What about the Dome of the Rock? What about all of these garrison cities? What about this hard archeological data? Why can't you address that, Javad? You're the historical critical academic. Address it. Okay, so what I'm gonna address right now is the claim that why are all these societies enslaving and have slavery? Well, these are actually arguments in favor of the argument I'm trying to make. That this explains why they couldn't just get rid of slavery at that time and interpreted the Qur'an a different way.  I said the prophet and the Qur'an said to stop not enslave and free people. That's the argument that I'm making. And you're showing that there were severe historical and economic reasons and pressures that were acting on the early Muslim community, which prevented them from seeing that and implementing that. And that's exactly what I was showing you in the two academic philosophical articles that I cited to you, which explain moral blindness. And so there was motivated reasoning and it was only until it became economically feasible and technologically possible to free slaves that all of a sudden that moral reasoning kicked in. And it only kicked in in those places where slavery was not present. And it's also untrue that slavery existed in all societies at all times. There are certain societies in which it died down and it went away. There was serfdom that replaced it. There were other forms of, which can be called non-free labor, but there were other forms that happened. So that's not the case. And it's all based on technological and economic factors. Now what the strange thing is that throughout this debate you are, I mean you made the amazing claim that we should look at Christian sources to understand the prophet and the Qur'an. This is actually the 1970s, Krona and Cook that you're, Hagerism that you're arguing for. You are the one who's arguing that. You're saying that we should look at the Christian sources to understand that the prophet Muhammad was a warlord and he must have had wars of aggression. Meanwhile, I'm pointing to the Qur'an and saying this is what the Qur'an is saying. This is verse after verse after verse. So we've ironically switched the roles at least as you imagine it of Orientalists. And I'm the one saying, look at the Qur'an. Look at what the Qur'an is saying. Whereas you are saying no, the Christian early sources say that Muhammad was a warlord, therefore he was a warlord. Whereas I'm pointing to the Qur'an and that's saying that's the earliest source that we have, the most accurate source that we have. And that's saying that you can't wage wars of aggression. You couldn't even cite a single verse. You cited three verses, 9.5, 9.29, and 2.193. Neither of them acknowledged wars of aggression. Patricia, Krona and other serious historians agree with me. I acknowledge that. Thank you for conceding that. That needs to be the highlight of this debate. All the historians agree with me and my points. Yes, thank you. That's exactly the point.  You're an activist, right?  And unfortunately, academia seems like they don't have the highest standards anymore. If you were a historian, you would also agree with me. But since you want to just get into this goofy gymnastics, this radical subjectivity of your personal interpretation of the Qur'an that no one in history had, none of these sects of Islam who bitterly fought over every single major point of creed, yet they all somehow agreed that, yeah, of course, Islam didn't abolish slavery. Yeah, of course, Islam didn't abolish conquest. Yeah, of course, that's something that's permissible in Islam. Yeah, of course, that's what the Qur'an endorses. Yeah, of course, that's what the Prophet SAW endorsed. All of these people, the rationalists as well, disagree with you. You're the only one who has this bizarre interpretation and you're suffering from a kind of denialism.  That's what you are. You're nothing more than that.  You still refuse. Address the dome of the rock. Address the inscriptions. Address the historical evidence. Look at these contemporaneous sources, these Christian accounts. Why don't you have an answer for this? How are you an academic and you don't have any response? Like, that's shocking to me. I thought you were going to put some kind of debate and some pressure on me on these points, but you're not. All right, so first of all, it's not my solitary opinion. This is the viewpoint that Islamic modernists have raised since the 20th century, 19th and 20th century, and this has been backed up by historians, Professor Juan Cole, who is a serious tenured academic, and not only just him, there's several Muslim academics.  Now you make the argument that chipanzis take slaves or something or dominate people, okay? That's strange.  Then you claim that, oh, these other societies, they all did that, but the Qur'an is bringing a higher ethic. Surely you believe that the prophet was divinely inspired and had certain ethical ideas in mind. This is what the rationalist believes. Now, as far as the secular historians, you're right, secular historians will not use that kind of assumption and that's why it's more impressive that Patricia Chirona actually agrees with me. When you say Patricia Chirona agreed with you, no, she didn't. She reversed that. That was in hagrism. She moved away from hagrism after that. Everybody knows that, God's sake. I'm quoting what she quoted near the end of her life when she started reading Islamic modernists and said, you know what, they're actually right. Even though I thought they were apologetic, they're actually right. She said that on jihad. She said that on freedom of speech, sorry, freedom of religion. She said that on all these things. As far as the dome of the rock and these inscriptions, I have talked about them. I'm telling you that you should look at what those scholars whose books you actually looked at, hopefully, look at what they themselves say. Michael Penn is the one who wrote this book. You should see his assessment. I agree with his assessment. His assessment shows that they actually shared mosque and church spaces. Yeah, I'm saying that people like Michael Penn, like Juan Cole, yeah, they're academics, so what? They're not making the strongest arguments. There are other academics who are actually looking at the historical sources and they're making stronger, more compelling arguments. Like someone like Sean Anthony is in another league than Juan Cole. Like Juan Cole is the guy literally saying that the prophet's life time is like MLK doing a freedom march. This is like, this is a joke. So why are you citing that?  Like so what? That's actually a point against you.  So are you saying that we should follow chimps and everything?  The argument, if you can follow it, is that these kinds of instincts for conquest, for dominating the outgroup, for defending the ingroup, these are biological instincts and that's why we see them universally. That's the argument. So it's not this kind of later accretion that these Muslim intolerant fundamentalists just invented it and back projected it onto the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. That's what the biological point rebuts. Obviously whatever animals do, that doesn't mean we follow it. It's just a proof of the biological basis and the Quran and the sunnah and the example of the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam endorse certain biological instincts and not others. We always refer ultimately to the Quran and the actual historical lived example of the prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Go ahead, Javad. So thank you so much. So you keep insisting on it that I talk about the dome of the rock. The reason why I was ignoring it, I had to be selective about which arguments I rebut and I didn't really understand what your point was. It's well known and you should know this that it's Caliph Abdul Malik at, this is when it was the shift happened that the exclusivist shift happened. This is well known, that it was a Morrowind imperial project. This is actually cited as proof by the historians and scholars to show that there was this shift towards a religiously exclusivist direction. So this is not a point in your favor. They had mosques that were sharing spaces. Like I told you, that was Michael Penn, the one that you relied upon and now suddenly Michael Penn is a joker too. He's a Stanford historian. He's a joker. Juan Cole is a joke.  Sean Anthony would not agree with that. Sean Anthony deeply respects Juan Cole. Juan Cole is a tenured professor. He got accepted, had a professorship at Yale, okay? So you don't know what you're talking about. You're not someone to speak. You don't know the literature and you don't know the scholarship. And anyways, I don't know what the Dome of the Rock matters. I've already told you that it's the Quran that says that you can't keep them enslaved, that you have to free them and that this wasn't followed post-prophetically. So what would the Dome of the Rock inscriptions help you with? I don't know. You're just saying that the early Muslims did it, but I already accepted that fact. So you haven't rebutted my argument. You haven't dealt with my argument. And the reason is that you can't deal with the Quranic evidence. The Quranic evidence that shows you that you have to marry a slave. You haven't dealt with that, 425. You haven't dealt with 474. That you have to free the slaves. And you say that this is a modernist interpretation. This was the obvious interpretation as the thick test I told you, said in the medieval times, this was the obvious interpretation, which is why they had to take it as abrogated. So you're all over the place. You cannot prove your argument. And so, I don't know what to say. Yeah, so this is why you're not, you can't be considered a historian because you don't even take the actions of the companions of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam within a year of his life. You don't take that as evidence of what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam actually believed. No historian accepts this. No, certainly not a historical critical historian says that, oh yeah, we can't use the actions of the Sahaba one year after the life of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to understand what Muhammad's policies were, what his beliefs and norms were Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. Like that's ridiculous, which historian has said this? This is a rebuttal, a repudiation of the historical critical method from you. So thank you for doing that in this debate. Also, there's many people who criticize the conclusions of some of these people like Sean Penn, or Michael Penn, sorry, and Juan Cole Reid, Joseph Spurl's article. He talks about Tillman Nagel. He talks about the German Orientalist Tillman Nagel and his recent work showing that this Pan-Abrahamic thesis is complete garbage.   So you can cite Yale. Oh, he's a professor at Yale or UChicago, big deal. Like this is actually worse for the reputation that such people make historically baseless claims that we're laughing at, plenty of people, over a thousand people are laughing at that in this stream right now.  Whereas all the people that you cite are at Stanford and well-respected. As far as your claim that, oh, historians would look at prophets' companions, no serious historian on earth would say, oh, we look at what the prophets' companions say and then we use that as historical evidence for what the prophet said. That goes against historical critical scholarship. That's like in Jesus' studies, you would never do that just because someone else said, you don't take that for granted. In fact, this argument is so weak because we know that the prophet companions themselves argued with Abu Bakr on this very point according to the same sources that you rely upon on the two issues that you're trying to cite. This is an example, number one, the apostasy issue, and number two, on taking them as slaves. On both of these issues, Omar and the other companions disagreed with him. So how can you, they said that this is not the prophet Sunnah. So this is a weak argument from a historical perspective and this is a weak argument from a religious perspective.  It was on your slide. And then all of a sudden I said, Michael Penn said this and then you said, oh, he's not serious. Let me take Joseph Spurl who can't speak Arabic, who can't read Arabic. He's a Christian Islamophobe. He's terrible. I can't believe that you would cite Spurl. You actually don't know the academics. That's what I think is the truth. Spurl cites Tillman Nagel. Is he a joke too? He's like the leading German Orientalist. He's one of the leading academics in Germany in Islamic States. Is he a joke too? He's just, in that article, he's just conveying what Tillman Nagel says and Tillman Nagel is basing his argument on an actual analysis of the verses of the Quran and the historical record.  Your claim, basically, what your claim amounts to is that as soon as the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam passed away, the entire Muslim community rejected his message of peace and don't enslave, don't conquest. They just immediately, all collectively decided, we're going to ignore what the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said and do the exact opposite. And they went in the exact opposite and this is what the Christians cited in their works, what these garrison cities, the coinage. This is absurd, like this is a conspiracy theory. There's no historical evidence for that. You want to cite certain hadith, contrary to your rejection of hadith, but those hadith don't prove that the Sahaba were saying that, oh, if we do conquest, we're violating the Quran. Who says that? No one says that. This is all a fantasy. This is completely absurd, like I'm flabbergasted that these are the kinds of arguments you're bringing to counter my points. And furthermore, do the beliefs and practices of Jesus's direct apostles actually tell us about Jesus's message? Can you answer that, Javad? Like, if we want to know about Jesus, if we had some kind of manuscript that showed what Jesus's direct apostles believed, would that tell us more information about Jesus or not? Well, once again, Daniel C shows how he deals with, I'm answering you, Daniel. You raised a lot of points and I have bullets here. So first of all, you say Fred Donner is a joke. Fred Donner is the dawn in Islamic studies. You said that Sean Anthony is the real serious guy. I like Sean Anthony a lot. He's a great scholar. Let's ask Sean Anthony. We'll tag him on Twitter afterward and we'll see what he thinks about Fred Donner. And as far as Nigel is concerned, he's known for being an Islamophobe, or naigle, sorry. He's known for being an Islamophobe, not an Islamophobe, but hostile to Islam. So that's not a surprise. And Islamic studies scholars, they disagree with each other all the time. That doesn't prove anything, but it doesn't mean that he says Fred Donner is a joke. That's your interpretation. No serious academic would say University of Chicago tenured professor emeritus is a joke. I'm sorry, that's just you who would say that. Meanwhile, you're claiming Joseph Spurl, who's at a Christian university, a Christian Islamophobe, doesn't read Arabic, is not considered in Islamic studies or chronic studies. You think that he is the standard. I'm sorry. Let's ask Sean Anthony about that. Now, that doesn't mean that Sean Anthony will necessarily agree with my arguments. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that academics disagree all the time. And you can't just dismiss Juan Cole as a joke. Fred Donner as a joke. Anybody who disagrees with you is a joke. That's not how academics work, unfortunately, for you. And no, I'm sorry. Nobody would take the prophet's companions as automatically expressing the view of the prophet. And I've already explained it to you. You haven't dealt with this counterargument that the companions themselves disagreed and said that Abu Bakr was not doing the right thing when he was treating them as apostates and taking them as slaves. And that's why Umar reversed the decision and freed those slaves. Exactly the opposite of what you are claiming. Yeah, this is like some genius insight from you. The Sahaba disagreed. There was Iqtilaq. They had Iqtilaq during the time of the prophet, S.A.W. So what? Like this is not, you have to show that they actually claimed your claim. Your claim is that they were violating the Qur'an. OK? So are they, the question is, are they evidence? You're saying that it's not automatic. OK, fine. It's not automatic. I can see that. But that's a straw man. I'm not saying that we take what the companions did and it's automatically, that's what the Prophet S.A.W. believed. I'm saying it's evidence. And that's the point. Just like we want to know what Jesus believes and you avoided this conveniently. We want to know what Jesus believes. Then there's evidence of what he believed from his direct apostles. If we want to know what the Prophet S.A.W. believed, there's evidence based on what the early Muslim community actually did within one year, two year, three year, four year, five years of his life. That's the evidential argument. That's a real historical argument. If you were a real historian, you would be able to handle that kind of argument and provide counter historical evidence. But whenever I push you on that, you just want to refer to hadith. But you don't accept hadith. So this is just cherry picking on your part. Refer to actual historical evidence. That's what's missing in this entire debate. You have no historical evidence. You just want to debate traditionalism, the straw man of traditionalism that you've created for yourself, as opposed to defend the historical facts that no one disagrees with that I've brought before you. You don't want to address those things because they prove the traditional perspective. They prove the traditional narrative. We'll kick it over to Javad one last time and then Daniel one last time. If I remember right, we started with you, Javad, with your first minute and a half. And so Javad one last time and then Daniel one last time before we go into the Q&A. Thank you very much. So this is not cherry picking. This is the standard approach that's considered dominant now in Quranic studies in early Islamic history, which is to take the Quran as our primary historical document that goes back to the Prophet Muhammad. This is for a variety of reasons that we've already talked about that Daniel does not dispute. So that's why I look at the Quran to see what the Quran says on slavery, on sex slavery, on conquest. This is the standard strategy. You are right that we look at other historical pieces of evidence and we use them cumulatively, but the Quran stands as first and foremost number one. You keep saying that I cited hadith. I don't know what you're talking about from that perspective, the fact that I quote unquote reject hadith. I neither reject hadith from a historical perspective nor from a religious perspective. I considered a historical source that tells us about what early Muslims believe, but it doesn't go back to the Prophet Muhammad necessarily and most likely a lot of them are forged. In any case, the point is that this is all historical information that we use. The fact of the matter is, is that when we do that, we see that the Quran clearly says that you cannot take slaves, you cannot take slaves from the captives and that you need to release them. This was the obvious interpretation. It was stated in medieval fiqh book that this is the obvious interpretation. The exeggits as well, who say that that's why it's abrogated, okay? So this is not textual acrobatics. The fact that the companions deferred away from this, sunnah, this is well known. The companions themselves would say you're going, this is a Bubakar's sunnah. It's going in another direction. So they had ikhtilaf and they went in a different direction. So this is not a proof text for you. The last thing that I would say is that your whole premise is based on Sunni traditionalism where you take the companions as being completely upright and that this is a creedal matter and you never even dealt with that issue. You have to switch over to Daniel. Yeah, I mean, this is really stupid at this point, but if it's the obvious interpretation of the Quran, then it should have been even more egregious violation when you have all the companions. You keep citing Omar. Omar also was at the head of all these conquests. You realize that, right? He was at the head of, he was directing a lot of these conquests. He was at the head of taking slaves as well. So what is this point with Omar? Omar also did all of these things that you say that, oh, they clearly disagreed with Abu Bakr on. Like, what are you even talking about? The other point that I wanted to make is, what was the point? Yeah, you were saying that, give me one second. Hi, I'm mistaken. Yeah, I lost my train of thought. But yeah, if it's the obvious interpretation of the Quran, like it's not obvious. If it were obvious, who else is citing it? Who else is saying it? You have like one random citation and I don't trust your translation because you've shown like your goofy interpretation of language, you have no consistent usul, like principles of interpreting language. So any kind of citation from Arabic from you actually should be disqualified on that basis alone. You haven't presented an actual theory of language. I have presented one. I say, look at what the people actually did in order to understand the author's beliefs and norms and their further intentions. And that's a consistent usul. We'll jump into the Q&A. We're gonna move fast. There was many questions and yours is possible. Can we take a break? I gotta go to the bathroom and I should pray as well. We'll do a short intermission. Can we do 10 minutes? Cause I gotta pray as well. It went longer than we can do that. You're on the West coast. No, no, no. Like you need to pray. It takes five minutes. Go ahead. But 10 minutes, like let's do it. Daniel, you were late. You were also got, okay. But it's fine. Two minutes late. I was three minutes late. Like why didn't you set that up with the, why didn't you set up the prayer time before we had? I don't wanna limit people's prayer. Have your 10 minute prayer. That's fine. Just interesting that you didn't anticipate that. It's the bathroom as well. Okay, go to the bathroom. We are going to be starting the Q and A in a bit folks. So we do happen to have a good amount of questions to where I don't, I wouldn't recommend submitting any more questions just because I don't know for sure that we'll read them because we have such a limited time. Limited time. It's 1209 AM where I am. And this is, it's already gone to six hours. So folks, I hope you have enjoyed this. We are, we still have more. So don't leave yet folks. It's going to be tremendous. This last part, I'm going to have a little bit of melatonin because in about a half an hour we'll be done. And I have to warn you in advance folks, I'm not going to do an after show. I've got to get to bed earlier. I have got to wake up at a decent time tomorrow. So. It's like 2 AM for you. Is it 2 AM or you're not on the East Coast? Oh, I'm behind you. I'm an hour behind. So I'm, it's 12 AM here. Wow, yeah, it's one for me. Yeah, this is, is this like your, like post-dinner time?  No, I haven't had dinner. I haven't had anything so. Well, yeah, I, let's see.  Which kind of sandwich? It was the California Turkey, I think or something like the Turkey Cali. And it was good. And I mean, I'm, you know, I don't actually go to subway that often, believe it or not. I actually only go maybe once a week. If I'm traveling, it'll be more, but not your everyday. Ashley, thanks for your super chat. I can read this one because it was addressed to me and I didn't read it early. I appreciate your kind words, Ashley. Thanks for being so patient with me. I sometimes wonder if I, so, you know, so I think, yeah, Ashley, I think I told you one time that there was a gentleman that I like, you know, like we clashed a particular debater. Well, you're looking at him. He's on screen. Look at that smile. And cause one time I went off on Ashley and I felt bad. I worry a little bit. I'm not, I've never, maybe as a kid, I was, you know, a little bit temperamental. I had a little bit, you know, but I don't think I'm too bad. You know, I'm generally a happy person. Once in a while I just fly off the handle. I don't know what it is. I honestly think I'm a little burnt out. I really do. I think that once I'm done with this program, I'm gonna be happier and less burnt out. And I do think it is the burnout that once in a while I'll go from like peaceful, happy to like quiet, you know, shut up. Like, and I don't, I don't take any pride in it. I really do feel a little embarrassed and sad, but I also went on. Yeah, there was somebody in the live chat that I got in a spat with tonight. And yeah, I've got a- You're like typing in the live chat? Yes. Wow, you can really multitask. I, well- That's amazing. Normally it's always like a greeting of like, hey, so and so, how are you?  So that is me typing in the live chat folks. If you ever see that, that's me. There's nobody else that has control of the account. And I just like it to like greet people and kind of say like, hey, like we are happy to have you. And then, but this was a regular, I can't remember what he said, but yeah, it's spiraled into, you know, me saying I'm triggered.  So is that what the young people say today, Daniel? They say you're cringe? Not you personally. I'm saying what they say to people, you know, hey, you're cringe. Yeah, there's all kinds of expressions that I'm learning. That's when you realize that you're old. So I never knew what no cap meant. Have you heard of no cap? No cap? Yeah, no cap. No.  I'm not lying, I'm telling the truth. Wow, I haven't even heard that. Ashley, have you heard that? She's in chat, she's a regular, so she's been on for debates. We appreciate you, Ashley, and they've been lively debates. And certain general, Shane, have you heard that? He's in live chat right now. Folks, if you're watching over at Daniel's channel, tell me, I'll pop into the chat over there, and you can tell me if you've heard of these phrase. These phrases. Cringes, like cringe is common, cringe-based. This is, what else? Let me pop over there, because I've, yeah, I'm trying to think of the most recent that I've heard, because those have been around for a while. What are some of the really new ones? Bustin, bustin. Bustin, really? Something's bustin. That's funny. Bustin, I guess is, in my generation, we had the word cool, like, oh, that's so cool, right? So bustin means cool, I guess. That's, okay, bustin. Wow, man, things are changing fast. It seems like this- We're dinosaurs, we're old, we're like the grandpas, grumpy old men. It's crazy, I don't feel old. I still feel like, and I know I don't look like a guy in his early 20s, but I feel like that. I always feel like my mentality is behind my body.  I still feel like, or I'm just like, kind of like a, so much to learn kind of guy that, you know, is pretty inexperienced. Oh, my laptop ran out of juice.  But it seems like things change faster nowadays. Yeah, maybe this is the nature of social media, and there's just so much content now that everyone has access to, so you can't follow the subcultures, like you could in the past. You just have such a diversity of media, so it just multiplies all the subcultures, as opposed to in the past, where there was limited forms of media. The internet just changed everything, you know? I've tended to think that the internet, one huge thing the internet did was like, on a broader principle, it helped people find each other. So for example, like a buyer's and a seller on eBay, or flat earthers, because, you know, you would have been afraid to tell your neighbor next door that you're a flat earther, but you could go to an anonymous chat room and share that you're a flat earther and you can find other ones, I don't know. But all right, let's get to it. Oh no, hold on. All right, we're gonna start the Q&A right now, right? Yeah. Okay, Justin. They're all gonna be for Daniel. His fame. I gotta grant that to you. Do you agree with Minor, Mary? Do you think the eyes show was nine years old? Yeah. 10 questions. Or half of them, half the questions don't make sense. That's, I wonder what people are doing when they're typing in the questions. Yeah, no spell check. Yeah, exactly. Two seconds. Well, it is late, so I guess that's one of the reasons. It's true. My laptop, it died and now I've got, but I got a spare right here that, because I can't even get it to start up. This is, you guys have, it's true.  You know, it's gonna be really long James. And I was like, oh, I don't worry about it. I'm young and spry. And now here I am, I'm, but you know, let me just, okay, I'm almost there. But yeah, Javad, you're on the East Coast, right? So it is like 2 a.m. I'm on the West Coast now. Oh, okay. Well, then good. We try to pray before like midnight is the issue. I'm almost there. For the final prayer, for the final prayer. But yeah, folks, I appreciate your questions. We all appreciate them. Also thanks for hitting like. Seriously, we really think it makes a difference. So, and it really does. Like when I, don't worry, this is loading. When I look at the likes and I say, hey folks, can you hit like? It means more than you know. And then I see them go up and I'm like, oh, thanks. Like someone really, you know, people really do that because it's like a personal favorite of me where I'm like, thanks for really doing that. So we're almost to 400 last I checked. So we appreciate that folks. Is your laptop really gonna die? Your power cord is not working. I've got it now. Thanks for your patience. I remember we were gonna start with the super chat. So someone, El Arante says this, Muhammad, they put in quotes, already asked like seven questions. Okay, Minecraft player says, anyone wanna play Minecraft scavenger? Thank you for that. Daniel, these, another one says, Daniel, is it true under Islamic? Law, Dimmies can't build or rebuild places of worship, can't ride horses and have to be humiliated while playing while paying jizya. From the traditional scholarship, the exact rules can vary. So certain things were found in Sham, you know, in the Syria in Iraq that weren't applied in Persia, the Kongi's conquered territories weren't necessarily applied in Egypt. So there's a difference of opinion amongst many of the traditional scholars throughout history on what exact rules to apply for the Dimmies. Like is it wearing different kinds of clothes? So Christians, for example, did they have to wear a belt to distinguish themselves from the Muslims? Where could they actually build their homes? Not even just their churches, but were they limited to certain parts of a city? These kinds of rules, there's a wide variety that span across the Islamic empire, which span from Andalusia all the way to East India. So these kinds of differences are there, but the overall principle is based on the Quran, and that's the verse that I cited multiple times, which specifically talks about exacting tribute, jizya, from the Dimmies, and also keeping them in a subjective status, subjugated status. So everything is consistent with that. Legatus says, Javad, do you think that religious tolerance extends to Satanism and apostapharianism? So I believe, like the Quran says, that religion, as far as belief is concerned, is a matter of the heart and the conscience. So according to the Quran, there could not be anything possibly worse than what the Arabian pagans believed. It was a shirk of the highest hype, and yet, and they were even persecuting the prophet. And the Quran allowed them and said in more than 200 verses that you have your religion unto me, my religion and unto you, your religion. And so yes, I believe that you have freedom of conscience according to the Quran. That's when it comes to belief. As far as actions are concerned, no, the pagans could not persecute the believers. That's when jihad in self-defense and against religious discrimination or persecution justified a just response back. You got it. This one from a picture of Iraq. No username says, oh boy, the CIA is definitely gonna take you out the payroll. You're supposed to be an insurgent to convince Muslims, but no Muslim believes your clear kafir. They say only the atheists are clapping for you. I don't know who that's for. That's for Javad. That's actually for Daniel. Daniel, they believe that you're an agent and are trying to, that's why they encourage that you go on to different podcasts to describe Islam in this version of fashion. I'm not the, okay, if it's for me, then I'll respond. Like I'm not the one who's on the payroll of an organization that is getting funding directly from the Department of Homeland Security. That's our argument for tomorrow. That's our argument for tomorrow. No, I'm responding to the claim.  I'm responding to the claim. I'm responding to the claim. People are accusing, I need to do this.    Okay. I didn't show you. Tomorrow after this. You both work for the CIA. Okay, this, Zulu Zolo says, Actually, it's spy versus spy actually. We just don't realize it. We're both undercover. Zulu Zolo says, ask Javad, one could say about his argument, one could meditate instead of pray, salah, and fulfill the general principles of salah instead. So I believe, as Daniel said, so he was asked right now about, should you implement demi-laws? For example, a turban for Jewish people, a belt for Christians. So you have to make interpretive choices and interpretive decisions.  But what the rationalist believes is that use your ethical reasoning to arrive at a conclusion. And we are just open with the fact that you have to make these interpretive choices. And when you do, you do so ethically. Now, modernists have always said that when it comes to worship, acts of worship, we don't change those. Those are fixed. In fact, that goes back to the rationalists who said that revelation is meant to augment what our moral reasoning cannot attain to. So our moral reasoning can tell us that we need to thank the benefactor that is God, but it doesn't tell us how to thank the benefactor. And so it's revelation that tells us how to do that in what way to worship him. And so that's what we follow. So that is fixed and does not change. You got it. Thank you very much for your question coming in from PHX576 says question for, they say Javad script. They say, why do you act? Or no, they're saying question for Javad. And then they're saying, this is your script. They say, why do you act tough on Twitter with slander and personal attacks, but play victim here? And why do you defend garbage, such as apostate, prophet, sorry, Ridvan, who attack Islam? Why do I defend people like apostate, prophet? I've never defended apostate, prophet. However, I don't believe in using nicknames. No, I'm not perfect. Sometimes I will fall prey to that. Even in this one conversation, I can fall prey to the weaker parts of our soul, but I do try and debate to be decent and cordial. I did see, I've watched Daniel before in debates and I thought that he usually conveys, conducts himself in a good fashion. And I planned on doing that here. As far as my behavior on Twitter, I think I'm in general courteous, but I'm not perfect and I work to improve myself. And that's all I can say to that. But I do think that we should treat each other with decency and cordiality.  All of these high terms. I never called you an arrogant buffoon. That's a lie, I never called you that. No, I never used those terms.  You called me ISIS.  I'm one step away from that. I didn't call you ISIS. I called you ISIS light and we'll talk about that tomorrow. Yeah, because you defend views of ISIS. What can be worse than that? What can be worse than that? Well, that's your views.  What could be worse than that? What could be worse? It's super late. Yeah, what could be worse than a different rate? You don't use any ad hominem, Javad. Gentlemen, I hate to do it, but we have all my tomorrow. Zulu Zolo says, another question for Javad. Is it not problematic that you reject Hadeeth claim chains, that you say, but could the same not be said about the Koran's chain and compilers? This is a standard traditionalist argument. The argument is very simple. It's that, oh, if you doubt the Hadeeth, then you're also doubting the Koran, because it's carried by the same people. Professor Sean Anthony, who Daniel praised immensely, just responded to this actually very recently, or at least I saw the tweet very recently, where he explained it very simply. And you can watch Dr. Joshua Little on this as well. The people who carried the Koran were not the same people who has carried the Hadeeth. There was some minor overlap, but in general, there was two different groups of people. The method of preservation of the Koran and the Hadeeth was completely different. The Koran was, at a very early stage, it was part of a Khalifa project to compile the Koran. Whereas actually, the evidence shows us that there was likely a ban on writing down Hadeeth in the early period. In fact, probably throughout the four early caliphs, there was a ban on writing down Hadeeth. So it's the exact opposite of the case, because what historians want, you want a written text as soon as you possibly can, because that stops oral tradition from shifting and doing drastic shifts, which is exactly what we see when it comes to Hadeeth. So it's the exact opposite situation. And the proof is in the pudding. You can just look at the historical anachronisms or lack thereof. The Koran doesn't have these historical anachronisms, whereas the Hadeeth literature, including the Sahih canon, is full of them as even Jonathan Brown had to admit in an article which he was writing for an academic press. This one from Elorante says, my Central Asian brother, Usinov, is correct. Thank you for that. Dr. Omar Muslim Theist says, Daniel, do you believe that Hadeeth abrogate the Koran, yes or no? No Gishgalaphing as you have done all night long, yes or no period. So the Koran and the Hadeeth should be taken together. They're both a part of revelation. How many times do I have to answer this question? They're both a part of revelation because the Koran says to follow the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. So there are things in the Koran that are explained by the actions of the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, his statements and the things that he approved of. Like you people have a very simplistic understanding of traditional Islam. And this debate wasn't about explaining all the nuances and details of Usul al-Faq and all of these Islamic principles. But even from your questions, it's clear that you have this very simplistic understanding of what the Islamic tradition is all about. So do you think, yes, that it can abrogate the Koran? Sorry, Javad. Don't answer, you dodged the question. You dodged a great question. I didn't dodge. I answered it very clearly. Eric the Great says, how would both Hashmi and Hakikachu deal with the issue of apparent contradictory Hadeeths and Koranic verses on relations with Jews and Christians? Some seem to promote both religious pluralism and Islam only perspectives. So I think this question is for both of us. You can go first, Daniel, go ahead. Yeah, so there are verses of the Koran that will praise Christians and Jews or people of the book for certain practices that they have, but there are many more verses that will criticize them for, for example, changing their religion or engaging in kinds of shirk. So Islam has no problem. And even the earliest Muslims had no problem with collaborating or having treaties with non-Muslims, whether Jews or Christians. So that's not really a contradiction for Islam. It's not a contradiction for the traditional perspective to have those kinds of verses found in the Koran. So from my answer, I, it was for me too, that question just real quick. It's very simple. You can just look at verse 3, 113 of the Koran. It says they are not all alike. Of the people of the scripture, there's a staunch community who recite the revelations of Allah in the night season, and then it condemns other. So that's the, it's very simple. The verses are, some of them are praising a group and another group is blameworthy. So that's very simple how to reconcile that. As far as Hadiths, Hadiths are also contradict, are actually directly contradictory. And those are what we're actually used to go into completely religiously exclusive as direction from a historian standpoint, you would not take these as saying what the prophet Muhammad preached.  I criticize you out of love as a Muslim brother. Please get legitimate mentors.  Don't waste your talent. Wassalam. I appreciate that's very kind of you to say. I take all Naseerah seriously. So I have mentors and I could always use more mentors. So shizakalakher, make dua for me, pray for me. I appreciate that greatly. Leith says, great debate. Heard a nice quote I'd like to share. Quote is, quote, inspiration is a luxury. Motivation, a privilege. Neither are necessary. Let's get to work. Thanks for sharing that, Leith. And bite me, XD. You know, it's gonna be good when that's their name. Thanks, so James, this is for coffee. Thanks for your support. I want to remind you folks, our guests are linked in the description. What are you waiting for? If you want to hear more, you certainly can hear for more from Javad and from Daniel. Click those links in the description box, including at the podcast. El Arante says, we Muslims are grateful for hosting this debate. A generosity is a trait of a Muslim. Someone is triggered in comments, LOL. Don't worry, be happy. Thank you for that. A lot of triggering in the comments. El Arante says, compassion does not reduce testosterone. No MGTOW, which if anybody's new to that, this is one of those young people phrases. Daniel taught me this. This means men going their own way. No MGTOW, I'm just kidding. Door red pill innovations into Islam, please. We are masculine instead of talking about it. No thoughts? Any real questions? Daniel or Dr. Omar says, Dr. Omar says Daniel throughout tonight, Dr. Javad showed numerous chronic verses. You couldn't answer any of the chronic verses. You wasted the time of viewers. Okay, I answered every single chronic verse. I showed many chronic verses that show defending all the positions that we were supposed to debate. What Javad did is engage in goofy gymnastics. That was the entire, I anticipated that that's what he was going to do. And that's what he actually did. No one could follow these convoluted acrobatics that he was performing throughout his presentation of the chronic verses that somehow are endorsing all of these liberal values. Like that was a complete joke. I responded to all of his verses and I showed contrary verses that show, that explain how his interpretation is absolutely incorrect, not to mention all the historical, biological resources, the archeological record, the contemporaneous Christian sources, all of that shows that his interpretation is detached from reality.  This one coming in from Eric the Great says to both speakers, what are your thoughts on the recent alignment between Muslims and Christian conservative parents in the West against LGBT ideology in schools? You wanna go first or should I go first? Not go ahead. I think your views are well known on this. So this is an extremely sensitive topic and I am representing MPAC outside of this debate. And so I can't really say too much without as a nonprofit, you represent them. From my own personal perspective, what I would say is this, I do think that Christians and Muslims have a lot in common and religious liberty is very important and that Muslims, Christians, all believers should have freedom of religion and not be forced in certain ways. And I do think that that is going on right now. At the flip side, I do think that we have to coexist with people and we can't kill them. And Daniel seems to have an issue with even that. He was criticizing navigating differences on that front and we can look at what he said just a few years ago to see what he was saying on that. And that I think is just a little bit of a question. I've never advocated killing anyone. I've never advocated anything illegal. I didn't say that. Try not to be a fed for a minute. Hey, don't interrupt my answer. The question is for both of us.  I never advocated for killing anyone, stopping a fed for a minute and implying that that's what I have said. I think it's great that Christians, well, let me answer. I think it's great that Christians and Muslims are collaborating to fight back against this. I think it's very telling that Javad avoided giving a direct answer, but he did imply that religious liberties are being violated. So are you aligning with the right wing, the far right Javad? You think that parents should protest at these school boards for against this trans curriculum or whatever.  This is a big revelation to M-PAC and all of your followers. There's one comment. I don't consider myself left or right. I believe that we should be principled in our advocacy no matter what. And I don't believe that we should be aligned with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. This one going in from El Orante says, we don't learn Islam from chimpanzees. I think that's with regards to your chimpanzees, Daniel. Yeah, you look at animal species to understand what are biologically intrinsic instincts that humans have, biologically rooted behaviors, instincts, beliefs, emotions. This is standard within the study of psychology. So anyone who knows anything about psychology knows that you look at childhood development. You do all kinds of experiments on psychology, look at brain imaging, hormonal imaging or hormonal studies. All of this gives us information about what is actually natural to human beings. And we can understand different religions. We can understand world history by understanding human biology. This is something critical and we can understand more about Islam. We can understand about other religions on the basis of these biological insights. That's not to say that everything that a chimpanzee does or behaves in, it means that that's what Islam endorses. This is a strawman. This one from Pseudo-Nim says, Daniel, you're supposed to be against evolution. Why use biology, DNA, chimps in your Islam debate? I explained it in the second presentation where I made the analogy with evolutionists who say, oh, chimps and human beings have similarities. That's evidence of evolution and a common ancestor. And the creationists, I'm a creationist, they don't deny the similarity between chimpanzees and humans, but they say, no, this is not evidence of evolution. This is evidence of a common creator. And the same thing when it comes to biological insights to help us understand certain aspects of Islam, the same God, the creator who revealed Islam is also the one who created human beings with a certain biology, with a certain psychology, with a certain set of instinctual beliefs and norms. Like that's the logic of it. There is a correlation and actually a confluence in that way. So this is a very coherent and compelling worldview or paradigm to operate in understanding Islam. Last two questions.  They're matriarchal. So that I don't think is correct. Maybe you're referring to Bonobos, but it doesn't really matter. Like that's not the point of the argument. If you read actual psychologists and these biologists, they'll point to all kinds of animal behaviors. It doesn't mean that everything that we find in the animal kingdom is applicable to humans. Like this, again, is not the argument. You have to, I guess, have a certain level of education or intelligence to understand this argument. Maybe there are people who haven't gone to college so they can't understand or follow a basic argument, but people are repeating the same points over and over in every debate. And last, chocolate walla says 425 only limits the sexual intercourse of the one that cannot afford under a contract. That concubine still has an owner. Did we forget that? Also, Sura Nisa came after Newman Noon. That one is for me. And what the verse says, as I already have shown, is that if you cannot afford to marry a free wife, the free woman, then and only then you'll marry a slave girl. And that means that the options are only those two not to take her as a concubine. So the person who's asking this question is simply presupposing that you can't have a concubine. That's the entire debate. And the verse wouldn't make any sense. It would say, don't take them as fornicators or lovers. So that argument simply doesn't hold water and I'll show that again in my concluding statement. As far as the order that I used, the order that I used, like I said, I told you by source already. You can look at Sinai's chronology and see that. So that's my answer to that. Can a slave give meaningful consent? I think you already, so the verse says that you cannot force people. You cannot coerce. It says, do not coerce. And I already showed you that verse and I'm gonna show it again once again, so don't worry about that. Even if the slave says yes, even if she says yes, is that a real consent? Because she's a slave. How can she give meaningful consent? You're 100% right, which is why the slavery should be abolished. That's why you should follow the Quranic ethical trajectory. The Quran says that you shouldn't enslave further and you should emancipate. I already answered that question by telling you that the Prophet didn't have the capacity to abolish slavery because you had to compensate the people who had slaves, which is exactly what the Quran said to do. We gotta save some juicy content for tomorrow. So I do want to, we do want to go into the conclusions, which are 10 minutes first by Javad and then by Daniel. So let me set the timer here. Do want to say thanks for all of your support folks. If you have a friend who enjoys topics like these, hey, consider sharing this debate with them and we're gonna kick it over to Javad. The floor is all yours. Sorry if you can wait just a seconds. Figuring how to do this again. Okay. And then please do give me the one minute warning, please. All right. Oh, wait, sorry, one more time. These pop-ups just are so annoying. Okay. All right, I am ready. Okay, thank you. Yep, I'm gonna start now. Thank you so much. So I just want to show, this is the exchange that we had on Twitter. Where I said very clearly, and I listed out my explicit positions are stated here. And they are here. And this is exactly what I have argued today. So Daniel, who tried to stack the deck against me, unfortunately, you didn't look at what I read or you were not careful, but I have stayed on track completely. In any case, I raised five general arguments for Islamic modernism, which was part of our debate by the way, if you notice right here. And the metathesis I would defend will be the following. Islamic modernism is more faithful to the Qur'an and the prophet than conservative traditionalism and a better way forward for Muslims. So we were to argue which one is better, modernism or traditionalism. And that's what I did in my opening statement. I raised four specific arguments that Daniel will need to refute. Let's see how he did on that front. And three arguments against Sunni traditionalism. Let's take a look. Let's grade Daniel. Let's see how he did. Well, these are more of my own, this is less for him to refute, but these are my arguments for why Islamic modernism is better because it's historical, it's originalist. It's more chronic. We've clearly seen that. I'm the one who's been continuously quoting the Qur'an and going back to the Qur'an. It's more rational. That's not even debatable. It's definitely more moral. It doesn't have you embrace raping people and that kind of thing. And it's definitely more family oriented as we saw the pre-modern Islamic tradition allowed you to have concubines, eunuchs normalized that and also pedorasty. And read Before Homosexuality by Khaled al-Rayhib where he specifically says in the introduction that I am not only using poetry, but he's actually using multiple streams of evidence, including the juristic literature to make his arguments as well as travel log literature. All right, the four arguments that I specifically raised for Daniel to refute, he was unable to refute any of them. Number one, on sexuality, the Qur'an mandates that sexual intercourse can only take place within a marriage contract. Nikaah, this was shown in multiple verses. I'll show the strongest verse, but there were multiple verses. He was unable to deal with this. His entire argument was, this is how Muslims did it, therefore it must be true. This is how the tradition interpreted. And only you are coming up with this random interpretation. First of all, it's not just only me. It's the 20th century. Islamic modernists have argued this. And the fact is that our entire debate was about whether or not the tradition is correct or not. You can't just presuppose that the tradition is correct because it's the tradition. That's question begging and your entire argument has been question begging. Why did you even come to debate then? The whole question is, is the tradition right or wrong? On religious freedom, the Qur'an allows the freedom to choose or leave a religion and apostasy laws are therefore anti-choronic. He could not show any proof from the Qur'an that apostasy laws are shown to be something that there's a legal punishment for it. I showed eight specific verses and a multitude of verses that show that you're free to choose your religion. On warfare, the Qur'an categorically forbids wars of aggression. I showed that. And on slavery, the Qur'an does not allow the enslaving of prisoners of war. He actually cited 47.4 in his favor, which is against him. So I also raised four arguments against Sunni traditionalism. I knocked down the Sunni view, the traditionalist view of the Qur'an, which is their theory of language, by the way. He said I didn't address that point. They actually viewed the Qur'an as dim, ambiguous and incomplete. That God's speech was incomplete and impartial and dim and therefore had to be through the hadith and the tradition that you understand it. But this leads to an infinite regress. Since you need someone to interpret the interpretation of the interpreter, he did not deal with this argument. The second argument was that hadith criticism is flawed from the very beginning, but it's no narrator criticism was done on the very first level that is of the companions. So no hadith can actually be shown to be authenticated. Instead, they simply just wave the wand and said all of the companions are Udul. But that is that they're upright, but that doesn't sell anything about their memory. So this is completely flawed and circular logic, especially because they didn't even narrate, they would refuse to narrate reports that spoke ill of the companions. So that's circular logic, even though of course many reports survive that show the companions did lie, did fight, did do all these things. Finally, I attack Ijma or consensus. The consensus supposedly gives certain knowledge according to the tradition, but in order for it to grant certain knowledge, you have to have ground Ijma itself in certain knowledge. That is not the case because there's no Qur'anic verse that's not open to more than one interpretation that you could ground that in. That's not me saying it, this is actually the traditional scholars who said that. And you can read Halak's article on this which tries to take a positive spin on it, but it itself says, and you can also read Hurrani's article on this, which shows that they were unable to ground Ijma in a Qur'anic verse and not even able to water Hadith. Therefore, consensus is based on nothing other than we hav