/lit/ - Literature

>>22706700
Because Quran is all there needs to be for them. The only thing they had that was close to a "council" was the compilation of the Hadiths, which are supposed eyewitness accounts of a bunch of people on Muhammad's life.

Good for them, it's a bitter, autistic political feature of christianity

>>22706700
what would be the purpose of it? they have the Quran and the Hadith and their job is to just follow what they say

Christians started having those because they couldn’t agree if Jesus was God, and, apart from the council on icons, every council had to do with Christology.

>>22706700
It was born in schism with the Shia and Sunni division.

>>22707206
A bit like saying Christianity was born in division with the Jewish-Gnostic schism

>>22706700
Because they never had a priesthood but a bunch of independent scholars who held to the following three principals
>Since God's intentions cannot be truly known, any effort to decipher them is virtuous and therefore all interpretations are valid (i.e. they can be considered, not that they are correct)
>Agreement to disagree. There's no single opinion that we can confirm is objectively more correct than any others, so scholars have the right to disagree with each other (unlike Christianity, disagreement is not a problem that has to be solved by convening councils that issue an orthodox doctrine)
>Consensus. The only solid rules and beliefs can be determined only by unanimous consensus, that is when all scholars, even from opposing schools of thought, agree on them (e.g. daily prayer, fasting during ramadan etc.)

In practice, religious authority could be weileded by anyone with sufficient learning and knowledge, mastery of grammar and logic was added later. In Iran for example, the only way to become a Grand Ayatollah was to amass a large enough audience of followers who'd simply declare you one, but being taken seriously by other Ayatollahs you had to demonstrate your learning in someway.

Today, Ayatollahs are appointed by the state, which also has the right to strip you of your qualifications. In secular countries, the old Islamic scholars are more or less controlled by the state which has the right to recognize their authority or imprison them at will. These countries, usually form bodies of compliant scholars to issue religious edicts they find expeident or useful. So the Saudis or Egyptians will issue a statement like "protesting is unislamic" etc. Other scholars will try to operate outside the state in quietist way, but they don't have authority left and risk visits from the secret police. In places like Turkey, you have diyanet, a government ministry that manages all religious affairs. All speeches in mosques, friday sermons, etc are centrally written by the government and any mosque not affiliated with this is illegal and shut down. So in a sense, there now are councils run by secular governments but its very much an external imposition.

>>22707214
The state always had certain scholars it backed and certain scholars it imprisoned, three of the four founders of the main Sunni schools went to prisoners, with Ahmad Ibn Hanbal going for heresy. It’s just we tend to remember the scholars who went to prison rather than the bozos who sucked up to the state

>>22707236
That goes without saying. However, scholars were largely independent of the state. The state did not police scholars, create formal bureaucracies of judicial or religious officials to issue a standardized doctrine or codified religious norms and law. The scholarly establishment feircely resisted this. The case of ibn Hanbal is important for this reason, the Abbasid Caliph of the time attempted to impose a theological position on the scholarly establishment and the result was failure. Ibn Hanbal symbolized the resistance of scholars to the state and underlined the importance of being weary of the interests of kings. There is of course a big difference between institutionalized mechanisms you see in Christendom (a church or clerical body with a well defined hierarchy and the right to centrally plan law and theology) and the pre-colonial Islamic tradition where scholars effectively made law and staffed an autonomous judiciary. All a sultan could do was request that a single juristic opinion be given prority when weighing cases, appoint a court jurist as well as judges, the rest was simply out of his control.

>>22707423
Ibn Taymiyyah was imprisoned for saying triple talaq was haram. The qadis were not independent, and if you look at a fiqh manual, the primary job of a caliph is to be the supreme judge, and the reason it is wajib to have a caliph is because other qadis are appointed by him. Without a caliph (or other ruler who favors Islamic law), then qadis function as arbitrators rather than judges in the strict sense, since they lack an enforcement mechanism. They can give rulings for Muslims who want to know how to properly practice but when it comes to the real job of a judge, they lack teeth unless they have state backing. Although they don’t necessarily lack influence, we can see Abu Hanifa’s school of thought ended up becoming very influential on statescraft after his death. Imam Ahmad’s did as well though it took a very long time

>>22707214
>don’t have a priesthood
Tells you everything you need to know about Islam. It has no continuation with the new or Old Testament laws, such as priesthood. They claim all prophets are sinless, which is total bullshit if you read the Bible more than for one second. Modern scholars like to believe that the Bible was corrupted, so it can’t be trusted, which is weird considering that’s just an assumption made not because the Quran says so, but because it’s easier for them to fit the narrative that Christ ist fully man and god. Also the fact Allah is the best of deceivers, so even if you are truly a Muslim you can’t fully trust the legitimacy of the Quran, and that Allah “made” it look like Jesus was nailed to a cross lol. Either Muhammad was influenced by heretic gnostic christians or the devil (read Galatians 1:8)

>>22707452
Islam doesn’t have he same idea of the prophets as the Bible. In Islam, David didn’t kill his most loyal general to hide impregnating his wife, Noah wasn’t an alcoholic and got caught naked by his sons, Moses wasn’t genocidal (in fact he was filled with deep guilt over killing the Egyptian according to the Quran), Lot didn’t get wasted and impregnate his daughters, and so on. I’m short, getting wasted and sodomizing your daughters is not an Islamic value, it is simply a Judeo-Christian value

>>22707475
So islam is just a revisionist work of fiction. For Muslims it’s easier to believe that the Old Testament was magically changed to Adam and Eve commiting the first sin and Noah getting drunk, for some reason, than to believe that it simply is the truth. Everything that doesn’t fit into the Islamic narrative is deemed as corrupted without any evidence.
>I’m short, getting wasted and sodomizing your daughters is not an Islamic value, it is simply a Judeo-Christian value
Don’t know if you’re just taking the piss or really don’t know anything lol. Christianity forbids getting drunk. Prophets are people too. It is in our nature to sin, even to prophets. Also the fact Jesus tells us to drink his blood (that’s just another thing we later Christian’s added to the Bible though)

>>22707438
They were an independent body. Literally every historian agrees on that. Of course, some figures were persecuted for heretical views, but nevertheless this was at the behest of other scholars or court intrigue. Islamic law was not made by a legislative body or by a Sultan, nor did rulers shape theology in any meaningful way. Rulers did not issue their own legal codes or enforce a standardized set of theological and legal opinions throughout their territory via a bureaucracy of technocrats.

>if you look at a fiqh manual, the primary job of a caliph is to be the supreme judge,
Which fiqh manuals? Legal and political treatises present different ideas about the role of a ruler. Many suggest that a caliph should himself be a scholar. However, none of this was applied in practice since scholars seldom became rulers anyway.

>>22707452
>They claim all prophets are sinless, which is total bullshit if you read the Bible more than for one second.
Firstly, Muslims don't accept the accuracy of the Bible. Secondly, even if Lot committed incest with his daughters, that wouldn't necessarily be seen as a sin within the Islamic tradition. Why? Because each prophet has their own religious law imparted to them which differs from nation to nation, so what's permissible in one context is sinful in another.

>>22707475
>getting wasted and sodomizing your daughters is not an Islamic value, it is simply a Judeo-Christian value
That's just a baseless strawman. Where exactly did medieval Jews or Christians accept sodomizing your daughter? Was anal incest permissible in traditional Christian or Jewish communities? No.

>>22707503
>magically changed

Adam and Eve actually fall in Islam but Satan in the story is just Satan, not a talking snake. The Bible was not “magically” changed in Islam, rather the Quran says rabbis changed it. We find that the reason the people of Israel were wandering so long was because of Moses in the Bible (the Quran says it was their fault, not his). And the fall of Israel was because of Solomon (and again the Quran says that was their fault, not his). The people of Israel altered their Bible to be ribald (rabbis even interpreted Noah getting drunk and naked to mean his son had anal sex with him) but also to put the blame for their actions on their prophets, which in fact it was due to them *disobeying* their prophets

>just sin bro…lol get wasted and sodomize your daughter…it’s human, it’s normal…no one is perfect

>>22707452
There's almost no continuation between the Jewish faith and the Christian one. Christians pay so much more attention to the New Testament than the Old that it's not even funny. The Christian priesthood is also markedly different from the Old Testament priesthood, and modern Jews don't have priests in the same way that modern Christians do.
>>22707475
I doubt most Christians even know or think about the misbehavior of the OT prophets desu. That aside Christians tend to emphasize the sinfulness of even the best people, because the thought is that one's sinful nature is forgiven by Christ, and that one can ameliorate sinful tendencies by following Him and receiving His blessing. From my interactions with Muslims it seems that they place more emphasis on just not sinning, and that salvation is purely up to God's choice to extend grace, sort of similar to Calvinism in Christianity.

>>22707511
>Because each prophet has their own religious law imparted to them which differs from nation to nation, so what's permissible in one context is sinful in another.
What a braindead argument. So by that logic, things that normally aren’t allowed by god, he makes special exceptions to the prophets
>”you can have sex with your daughters because… YOU JUST CAN OK”
The Quran is somehow more retarded than gnostic teachings, because with the gnostics you can seee they were making shit up while Muhammad probably just said “nuh-uh” to everything he disagreed with the Bible and went on to make up some retarded story about the prophets while having schizo meltdowns

>>22707511
The political job of a caliph had always been supreme qadi, this template was set down by the first four caliphs

Reliance of the Traveler is a good example of a fiqh manual that talks about caliphs and their role in the judiciary

I don’t think scholars were ever a body in a distinct sense, since majority opinion holds no weight in and of itself, as Islam is originalist. Unanimous consensus—ijma—does but that is basically impossible to achieve except for the very early times when it can be proved in many rulings

>>22707520
>mfw I completely disregard the Old Testament prophecies

>>22707535
Sure, the Old Testament prophesied Christ. So? You can fucking read Christophanies into Norse mythology or read Maitreya as a prophecy of Christ. If the only reason you're carting around this second volume of texts is to predict the coming of Christ, and you're mostly disregarding the rest of the work, then go find a fucking Christophany in Plato or something and you'll have a more appropriate text to graft the New Testament onto.

>>22707520
Christianity evolved into a faith based religion where inward belief and goodness are more important than actual behavior i..e the old "as long as I'm a good person God doesn't care what I do" meme. Islam is orthopraxic and more about practicing rituals and religious norms correctly and maintaining a good public image, don't cause a disturbance (fitna) in public or draw negative attention to yourself or others. The idea of overcoming your sinful fallen nature through accepting Christ etc. which is why you see ex-pornstars being accepted into Christian communities with little to no stigma, while even if a pornstar type sinful women were to convert to Islam she'd still be shunned and rejected. Islam is popular with prison inmates because its disciplinarian. '

Early Christianity was more orientated to an anarchic virtue ethics where enacting in accordance with virtues preached by Christ trumped the Jewish law. So in such a context, anal sex with your daughters might be seen as acceptable if, due to contextual and objective factors, fit in with a virtuous criteria. e.g. if Lot did not have sex with his daughters his line would have died out, his daughters would be deprived of their need to exercise maternal love, have a family or sustain their lineage etc.

>>22707531
When? Where? All your doing is citing isolated books of fiqh. Did the Ottoman sultans serve as supreme qadis? No. Did the Mughals or Abbasids? No. What is the historical information on how this system actually worked in practice? Not how one or two scholars idealized it.

>I don’t think scholars were ever a body in a distinct sense, since majority opinion holds no weight in and of itself, as Islam is originalist.
They are sociologically distinct because they represented a distinct social class in society by profession, although many sustained themselves through other secondary professions. Islam isn't originalist. Islamic legal traditions have different methodologies, some of these are comparable to American originalism, but many are not.

Debates on ijma or consensus are complicated, but virtually all Muslims unanimously agree that Muhammed was a prophet or God is one etc. the rest is up for grabs and if you reject that God is one you'd be denounced as a heretic so I'd say that's an example of consensus. The problem is people nowadays see difference of opinion as a problem (a very modern way of thinking) and assume any and all differences can be resolved by sitting together, coming to a debate, and establishing a consensus which is then enforced. I don't think people were really interested in solving issues this way and difference of opinion (ikhtilaf) was seen as a healthy thing.

>>22707519
>just sin bro…lol get wasted and sodomize your daughter…it’s human, it’s normal…no one is perfect
Absolutely false. Salvation is by faith and works. You can’t just sin and say “I’ll just depend and do it again.” Christians just acknowledge the fact we are full of sin, only by doing what Jesus has taught us and believing in him can we be saved.
>yeah bro just pray five times a day and have a beard you’ll get to have 72 virgins in heaven (of course I know this isn’t everything to Islam I’m just grossly oversimplifying like you did)
Not in the Bible, in the old or the New Testament are there prophecies of Muhammad (except warnings of false prophets and not to believe to the ones that add to the gospel even if they are angels) Jesus states multiple times he is god

>>22706700
Islam doesn't have a theology to debate or argue, and muslims themselves consider this a mark of islam's superiority over christianity or buddhist metaphysics, which they think need those things because their teachings are not self-evidently true in the way they consider islam to be.

>>22707561
Islam does have a theological and philosophical tradition. Modern Muslims just aren't interested in it. They've taken an extreme anti-intellectual Protestantism as their model for modernizing the religion and so now they look as retarded as rural Evangelicals.

>>22707561
Islam does have a theology, the question for example of divine command theory and occasionalism, championed by Al-Ghazali, versus natural law and efficient causation, championed by Ibn Taymiyyah, is significant. Unless by no theology you mean just one God instead of three.

>>22707589
The Muslim mid cannot comprehend the trinity

>>22707558
>ex-pornstars being accepted into Christian communities with little to no stigma
The problem with this is really the last bit, that no penance is demanded. It would be perfectly fine for a former porn star to devote herself to God and very quietly, privately, contemplate her own sin and pray for her own salvation. I find the refusal to regulate conduct in certain kinds of Protestantism (which is what you're talking about) to effectively render the religion pointless, but I also find the total emphasis on ritual and conduct which you describe in Islam to potentially lead to a case where one performs the correct behaviors but has no inner religious feeling.

I can't really comment on the question of OT prophets being contextually justified because I'm effectively a Marcionite in part due to my revulsion at OT behavior. I'm sure people do come up with a variety of explanations for it but the only one I've found palatable is that the people in question were simply morally corrupt, and that God was guiding them, as a people, to be better, which is what the OT is a history of. Unfortunately the OT has God countenancing absolutely abhorrent behavior as late as the Persian period, so I'm inclined to just treat it as extraneous to Christianity.

>>22707595
Muslims understand it better than most Christians, really. It’s Christians who say it cannot be comprehended only accepted

>>22707582
That’s not really true. Muslims are much more into theological debate amongst themselves today than Christians. Most Christians simply do not care about debates over theology anymore or even understand such debates except for terminally online ones

>>22707612
Modern Muslims are not capable of forming good arguments since the modern Muslim world values blind dogma more than philosophy and explanations. Muslim apologists just copy and paste the same things scholars say without any intention to debate to not give even a hint of reason to question their faith to the viewer, I doubt they can explain the trinity better than a Christian

>>22707630
I think it's strange that Christian dialogue on the Trinity has reduced to "you just don't understand it" instead of actually trying to prove it's biblical and logically valid.

All conversations I've had with Christians about Trinity reduce to them just repeating the Nicene creed ad nauseum which is exactly what you accuse Muslims of doing

>>22707603
>no penance is demanded
Somewhat true for Protestants and born again types, but notice the demand that ex-pornstars speak up against sin, reach out to others in the porn industry, or encourage porn addicts to clean up etc. so it's not entirely without cost. Catholics seem more reserved but religiously aren't any less accepting. Catholics, with their esoteric rituals and clerical authorities, might be intimidating to those kinds of people too. Protestant religious socializing is a lot less structured, think about AA meetings. On the other hand, Protestants don't have that amazing aesthetic tradition you see with the Papists.

>Unfortunately the OT has God countenancing absolutely abhorrent behavior as late as the Persian period, so I'm inclined to just treat it as extraneous to Christianity.
Maybe, but the moral world of Christianity has changed a lot. As I see it, people have to deal with different moralities that stake their own claim to right and wrong (e.g. in medieval society sodomizing was considered manly and manliness was a social virtue, but it contradicted the Church's teachings). The OT Prophets all revolve around a good guy trying to do the right thing when what's right and wrong is blurred by increasingly corrupt societies and different moral systems, then an extreme crisis situtation develops and the good guy somehow has to make it through and try and lead people when he's not really equipped to do that. In that sense, the OT probably has more relevance for us today.

As mentioned, early Christians weren't legalists, they were more relative. Social morals are fluid and there isn't a single right way, but what matters most is that any action accords with Christ's teachings. That's why they could tolerate seemingly immoral behavior and practices. Lot impregnating his daughters could be interpreted as a fulfillment of Christian love, which ism more important than any laws that were broken along the way.

>>22707621
They really aren't though. If you just look at the number of publications in theology, there's thousands of books that come out each year. In Islam, you have the secular academic work, which mostly treat Islam as a historical or anthropological object and describe the views of Muslim theologians and philosophers without making meaningful contributions to theology, and Muslim apologetic literature which is mostly written by retards who haven't read any serious theology beyond wikipedia entries and see people like Ibn Arabi etc as heretics. Muslims are the only people in history who've been duped into attacking their own intellectual giants whereas the average devoted Catholic at least respects Aquinas.

>>22706700
>>22706762
>>22707214
>caliphate was suppoed to be elected as the best ruler amongst all the learned people in like a semi democratic manner and be both the ruler militaryily and economically of all muslim people but also the spirtual head, not spirutally better than you but still like a hyper good theologian

>only really lasted until the 5th caliphate where then it became a monarchy system instead

this is basic fucking knowledge OP, holy shit do basic research

>>22707689
Ibn Arabi said Noah was a fool for attacking idols since God is in everything and so worshipping idols is tawheed. Of course many see him as a heretic in spite of the west loving him for the same reason they do Rumi

A ton of theological works are cranked out every year in Arabic and Urdu. The fact is that secular ones are the ones taken seriously in the west and so that is why most available in English are those. Only Saudis have actually put serious effort into translation of a lot of old and new texts into English

Great scholars of Islam like Imam Ahmad, Imam Malik, Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Shafi’i, Imam Nawai, Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Taymiyyah are definitely known and studied, and popularly known as well

>>22707789
Ibn Arabi said a lot of things and without putting his statements in their proper context, his magnificant ontological and theological theories, they can easily be misconstrued or misinterpreted. What your doing is exactly what Protestant Evangelical psychos do when they point to Aquinas' stance on prostitution to prove he was a heretic, stripping away his reasoning and arguments, and dragging him through the mud via an appeal to obvious truisms that emotionally manipulate people to take your side.

>spite of the west loving him for the same reason they do Rumi
Nobody in the West cared about Ibn Arabi untill Henry Corbin came along. Before then, majority of orientalist studies focused on Avicenna and Averroes. Ibn Arabi was beloved throughout the Islamic world before the colonial period. His views were standard and orthodox, you see him cited by Muslims in China, Malaysia, Balkans and North Africa. His works were widely translated and studied even before print, so clearly he wasn't some fringe weirdo that only rose to promenence because of the heckin west. Rumi was read widely in the Ottoman and Mughal empires. His Masnavi was recited in mosques every friday evening during Ramadan. There are more commentaries on Ibn Arabi and Rumi between the 1400s and the 1800s than there were of Ibn Taymiyyah in the same period.

Abu Hanifa, Malik, Ibn Hanbal etc. were not theologians, excluding Fiqh al-Akbar by Abu Hanifa, and Ibn Taymiyyah was not a prominant theologian either. His theological works were considered minor and fringe and he's a pretty awful crude literalist. al-Ghazzali had views simmilar to Ibn Arabi and his books on fiqh and ethics are more well known than his philosophical and theological works.

How many Muslims read Avicenna? How many even know who he is? How many Muslims know Mulla Sadra? Virtually none. The average Muslim couldn't tell you anything about Islamic theology beyond "one God duh" and that's fucking atrocious. Modern Muslims are midwits. Some orientalist or psycho Christian comes along and says "Islam is simple desert monotheism and legalism" and Muslims chuckle to themselves and say "uhhh but thats a good thing." It's like black man going around calling himself a proud nigger. "Persian poetry? Throw it out! Philosophy? Throw it out! Ibn Arabi? lol the fusus filters people throw it out! Oh yeah we are a simple dumb midwit tier religion any moron can understand. It's just Christianity without the trinity bro. Also muh science and reason we're perfectly compatible with science and technology and rampant capitalism."