The Islamic way of life is opposed to the immorality in modern Western culture
Stabroek News
November 18, 2001

Dear Editor,

If Oliver Barclay's [ please note: link provided by LOSP web site ] quotations from the Glorious Quran are accurate (Stabroek News 15/11/2001), Muslims are enjoined by the Quran to be misanthropists, murderers, misogynists and homosexuals.

Can Mr Barclay explain how within 60 days of the beginning of their onslaught on the 13th century world, slaughtering the Muslim Caliph and 10,000 of his subjects, the Mongols, the most ferocious and blood thirsty people the world has known, were metamorphosed from builders of towers of human heads to Muslim builders of the most ornate mosques, libraries and hospitals?

Can he explain how in the 6 centuries that the Muslims were in Spain, Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars flourished in such a glory of culture that the Muslims are credited by the West with inspiring the European Renaissance? And in Raphael's famous Renaissance painting, the Muslim Averroes (Ibn Rushd) is placed in the middle of all the enlightened ones?

Can he explain why Saladin at the head of these misanthropists and murderers, after Richard the Lionheart entered Muslim Jerusalem in 1099 AD in the First Crusade and slaughtered all its inhabitants (such that in a letter to the Pope one knight reported that their horses were ankle deep in the blood of the "Saracens"), in 1187 AD when Saladin retook Jerusalem, he pardoned all the inhabitants and the Mass continued in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre undisturbed?

Mr Barclay has quoted out of context and misquoted by omission and commission. The Quranic exhortations to the Muslims to fight after the first Muslims were banished, driven from their homes, sought sanctuary with the Christians in Abyssinia, Medina, etc., after they were given divine permission to fight but not to be aggressive, have become misanthropy. On re-entering his birthplace Mecca, Muhammad On Whom be Peace pardoned all the aggressors including the slave who had mutilated the Prophet's uncle Hamza so that his mistress could chew on his heart. Such was the philanthropy; or is this misanthropy?

Yes, indeed, Muhammad was sent, as Al Quran states, as a mercy to all the world - pagans, idolaters, Christians, Jews and animals and even the trees. Islam was spread by mercy not by the sword as the Barclays and his masters would have us believe.

And so far as misogyny is concerned, Mr Editor, please indulge me a little more space.

In an advertisement in Guyana, up to recently, 150 lb plus women were wriggling their bottoms on television to our children. A Minister teaches Guyanese to "bat with condoms". Sisters and mothers in varying stages of undress are used to sell products, to spice up films, television and novels. The "f..." word has come to punctuate every sentence. Everything, even inanimate objects are having sex. Tiltillated cinema and television viewers titter at the latest execration served up by the new cultural hegemony - "mother f...er".

The family is the bedrock of society, the cradle of the future. Illicit relations between the sexes, adultery and promiscuity in the West inexorably leaching through their media into Guyana and the rest of the world, have already led to a situation where amidst unprecedented wealth in the West, the family is breaking down. There are over one million one-parent families in the UK. They are seen as two million problems for the welfare state, schools etc. One in every three children in the USA and Western Europe is born out of wedlock.

The Islamic way of life is unapologically opposed to such a world order. If Mr Barclay can follow the logic, every act of promiscuity offends against the institution of the family. Hence Islam prescribes more rules for the relationship between male and female than any other religion.

If he cannot follow the logic, promiscuity has now brought us the deadly HIV virus and AIDS. Like a war, the UN Security Council has debated AIDS as a threat to the security of the world. They had no answers. In the US, they call condoms "prophylactics" but the UK is now beginning to re-teach chastity, the only real and true prophylactic.

Let Mr Barclay take note that the only people unafraid of AIDS are Muslims and Catholics who practise the guidance on this all-important subject in their books revealed by Almighty God and others who guard their chastity, respect the womb that bore them and respect the family that nurtured them. Such is the aim in Al Quran and no amount of misquotes can change that.

"Let there be no compulsion about the way of life, Mr Barclay, the right way is distinct from error," Ch.2 V256, The Glorious Quran.

Yours faithfully,

Shahabudin McDoom