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| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Muslim Mindset: 'The hatred is in Muhammad himself' |
| 2008-06-22 |
| To Westerners and moderate Muslims shocked by the radical form of Islam now topping nightly newscasts, the efforts of liberal-minded Muslims like Tawfik Hamid, Italian Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi and a handful of others may seem like the perfect solution. Not so for Ali Sina, who has a different suggestion: destroy Islam. Sina, who runs Faith Freedom International - an Internet forum dedicated to debunking Islam - calls himself "probably the biggest anti-Islam person alive." The publication of his latest book, Understanding Muhammad: A Psychobiography of Allah's Prophet, will likely cement that position. In it, Sina suggests that Islam's central figure suffered from a series of mental disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy and obsessive compulsive disorder. "These disorders," he says via telephone, "can explain the phenomenon known as Islam... which is nothing but one man's insanity." Sina grew up a non-practicing Muslim. Raised in Iran, educated in Pakistan and Italy and now living in Canada, he began jousting with believers in the 1990s. What bothered him, he tells The Jerusalem Post, was not the penchant for jihad and intolerance that certain fanatical Muslims displayed, but the foundation for such ills in the Koran and core Islamic texts. (Through the Faith Freedom Web site, Sina lists canonical references to Muhammad's actions and offers $50,000 to anyone who can disprove Sina's charge that Islam's prophet was "a narcissist, a misogynist, a rapist, a pedophile, a lecher, a torturer, a mass murderer, a cult leader, an assassin, a terrorist, a mad man and a looter." Respondents relentlessly attack Sina's motives, but none has won the prize.) With violent conquest and contempt for non-believers central to the tenets of the faith, Sina argues, attempts to forge a moderate form of Islam are doomed. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #4 the acknowledgement of Ali Sina's existance on JPost is something of a breakout Sina has gotten almost no mainstream media attention in the past 7 years (nothwithstanding his cogency, his knowledge of original sources, etc.). The mainstream media instead concentrates on either apologists for Islam (like various professors) or idiosyncratic reformers. |
| Posted by: mhw 2008-06-22 15:55 |
| #3 I doubt Ali Sina can walk around in public without a contingent of armed guards. What would Mohammed do (WWMD)? Probably cut his throat, an action which fundamentalist Muslims are quite fond of imitating. |
| Posted by: Gliling Lumplump3518 2008-06-22 14:02 |
| #2 Ten million readers on his site means a lot of people are pondering issues with their upbringing. Add to that the quiet apostates, whether they've lost their belief or converted, and something real is going on in the hearts and minds of the Ummah. It seems the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq and SCIRI and the Sadr Army have been taken to heart throughout the Muslim world. It is, after all, one thing to want Sharia law in abstract, quite another to be beaten because your beard isn't long enough or your little son sang a nursery rhyme as he played. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-06-22 12:05 |
| #1 Hmmm... OCD could explain all the washing, and epilepsy might be a cause of banging one's head against the ground several times a day. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2008-06-22 09:54 |