/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3548568]

Should we all convert to Islam now?

https://(( faaaccceeebbbbookkkk)).com/HamzaAndreasTzortzis/posts/580338305309941

[Anonymous No.3548578]

Seriously, how terrible has the West gone so that a professor cannot engage properly with Islamic thought?

[Anonymous No.3548585]

>>3548568
I'm holding out as long as I can and when the time comes to jump I'll just go full dervish. Being a Sufi holy man (inb4 scimitar to the neck because only Allah pbuh is holy).

In fact, anyone got any nice books on the more crazed sort of wandering poorfag Sufism to recommend?

[Anonymous No.3548593]

>>3548585

I am finished. If a Western professor couldn't see through Mr. Hamza's tactics then the western academia is finished.

I will collect my shit and live in the woods leaving gay Europe to the Muslims.

[Anonymous No.3548608]

Bump.

[Anonymous No.3548617]

I'm sure that the debate was great in that it exposed some flaws in atheistic thought, but Islam is still a false path.

[Anonymous No.3548627]

>>3548593
I generally don't welcome Islam, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't ultimately preferable to the sort of all encompassing relativism we have now in intelligent circles. I'd prefer other cures for nihilism, but this may well be preferable to the abyss for a lot of people.

It's probably just the last swelling of Islam before it's adherents taste enough western decadence to be Islamic only by name within one or two generations though. All third generation (and a lot of second generation) immigrants that I know don't even care anymore. There's nothing like capitalism to rob people of all half decent convictions.

[Anonymous No.3548635]

Backstory?

[Anonymous No.3548660]

Can we have mods pls

[Anonymous No.3548665]

>>3548617

I am an ex-Muslim (and I know Arabic at an advanced level). Hamza is basically copying the arguments of Muslim apologists who lived over a thousand year ago (and they are already flawed), and it strikes me that contemporary atheists who debate him fall for the same traps those who lived a millennium ago fell in. I have two problems with this whole thing:

1. That atheists are jumping into debates about things they are ignorant about just to get their asses handed to them.

2. That there is a huge Muslim movement taking those arguments seriously and mobilizing themselves around them, and them actually succeeding. It looks like the history of Islam dominating the societies it conquest we is repeating itself all over again.

Seriously, what's with the linguistic argument? Why the fuck hasn't they brought a proper linguist to discuss it with them (it is totally bullshit). Hasn't a proper linguist attended any of those debates or even heard about the argument?

[Anonymous No.3548674]

>>3548627

I have reasons to believe that Islam will actually dominate Europe until Europeans internalize the religion, understand all the arguments if the apologists, and properly deconstruct them.

[Anonymous No.3548688]

>>3548665
What are those argument and how does one counter them ?

[Anonymous No.3548734]

why do people attempt to debate subjects that they know nothing about?

[Anonymous No.3548737]

why is Islam being spammed here all of a sudden

[Anonymous No.3548741]

>>3548674
So business as usual? Islam might work pretty good combined with Europeans though. We did alright with Christianity.

[Anonymous No.3548749]

>>3548688

http://www.hamzatzortzis.com/essays-articles/exploring-the-quran/the-inimitable-quran/

The argument is as follows:

1. All grammatically correct Arabic utterances that can be produced by humans can be partitioned (i.e. each utterance falls into one of the paritions at the exclusion of the others) into a finite number of partitions P_1, P_2, ... P_n (n=2 with the partitions being poetry and prose, or n=3 with the partitions being poetry, saj', and mursal).

2. Somehow the Quran does not fit in with the partitioning scheme in 1. above though being a grammatically correct Arabic utterance (some apologists would say that it falls in all partitions at the same time, others say that it falls in none).

3. From 1 and 2 above the Quran is an Arabic utterance that cannot be produced by humans.

The meat of the argument is 1. (deducing 2 from 1. should be easy, we just compare the Quran against the definitions of the paritions in 1.), the whole argument relies on it being true, which they fucking don't justify/prove; they just reproduce what al-Baqalani said 1000 years ago and sprinkle it with flowery language and shit.

For starters, they do not have precise definitions of the partitions in question. Second, they fail to show that all Arabic utterances actually are partitioned by them (they'd either have to do it deductively by fixing a version of the Arabic grammar and prove that their model achieves what they claim it says, or they do it inductively/statistically by comparing a large number of Arabic works against it), but they don't. And even if they manage to get everything in place we can still change words in the Quran in a way that their model is blind to it. Seriously, the argument is very very laughable that I am shocked that no linguistics student has cornered them on their shit yet.

I actually wrote that piece of shit Hamza an email about it (and stalked him all the way to FB) and he said that what I said was interesting, and that's it.

pic related

[Anonymous No.3548750]

Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist, not a philosopher though, I'm sure any decent philosopher could tear this sand nigger a new one

[Anonymous No.3548754]

If you are a true "believer" why do you have to prove your shit to other people?

[Anonymous No.3548758]

>>3548754
Because they aren't true believers. If you reply to this post I will kill you. Pray.

[Anonymous No.3548759]

>>3548758
You are my friend and I love you.

[Anonymous No.3548761]

>>3548750
then why would he try to debate this subject?

[Anonymous No.3548767]

>>3548688

So you counter them by asking them to clearly explain what the argument means (so don't hastily assume that it is about the Quran being beautiful and shit like Lawrens did) and then taking a scientific stance where you take the argument into its constitutent parts as I did and politely ask them to provide a technical specification of the argument and the methods they used to verify them.

The problem with this argument is that it is inaccessible: You need to be an Arabic linguist to understand what it is all about. They aren't linguists (not even Arab linguists reproduce this argument, only literary authors and orientalists) and I doubt they even know how to scan an Arabic utterance, divide it into syllables, and map it into the respective syllable weight sequence (which is an elementary Arabic linguistic skill).

[Anonymous No.3548769]

>>3548761
because he's also a public intellectual and skeptic and has to get his hands in religious arguments for publicity or whatever

[Anonymous No.3548784]

>>3548767
So you went from a crazy Sunni to being a science-fan.

You aren't too good at figurings things out.

[Anonymous No.3548788]

Here is my full email to Hamza, if anyone is interested.

If European students and linguists are too stupid to be able to engage with him on this argument then Europe honestly deserves their Muslim cock.

[Anonymous No.3548790]

>>3548767
So basicly he claim his religion is right because it's written on a original pattern?
I seriously hope you guys don't believe this

[Anonymous No.3548792]

>>3548784

What science fan? I am not such thing.

What are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.3548795]

>>3548790
You are on a board where people freak out when someone reads a translation.

[Anonymous No.3548803]

>>3548792
ALLAH AKBAR

[Anonymous No.3548804]

>the muslims have something to defend but can't into proper arguments because all beliefs are fallacious
>the atheists have all the arguments but because of this remain with nothing to defend

Just learned that this is what you call a catch-22.

[Anonymous No.3548813]

>>3548804
The Catch-22 shit crossed the border and went into this thread.
Now we will have post with Catch-22 shit in two threads.

Now this is what I would call a Catch-22.

[Anonymous No.3548818]

>>3548790

You haven't been paying attention like Mr. Lawrence Kraus.

The argument is intended to come off as mathematical; it is superficially similar to the way we prove that the imaginary number i is not a real number: we show that all real numbers are either zero, positive, or negative; and then we show that i is neither positive, negative, or zeor; and we finally conclude that i is not a real number.

Hamza similarly says that all Arabic utterances that humans can produce are either P_1, P_2, ..., or P_n, the Quran is an Arabic utterance that is neither P_1, P_2, ..., nor P_n; and subsequently the Quran cannot be produced by humans.

He is not claiming that the Quran is written on an original pattern, but on a pattern that the rules of Arabic grammar cannot even logically produce (I know :/).

And they actually believe this and the growing "intellectual" Western Muslim youth consider it the core argument supporting their faith as it is supposedly an objective falsifiable claim and shit.

[Anonymous No.3548839]

And what about this:

"11. The Professor made a fool of himself when he rejected authentic and valid testimony as a source of knowledge. He argued everything has to be tested. I asked him if he did all the experiments for evolution, he said no. I then raised the point that he had to rely on someone else's say so for his beliefs and assertions, which is a form of testimony. You should have seen his face."

Testimony relies on the witness and the witness alone, but a scientist can reproduce all the published results.

This is a stupid farce!

[Anonymous No.3548846]

>>3548818
I wasn't paying attention because this reasoning is objectively shit. It's twisting words until you are right. And you can't prove a whole social system just because of that made up argument.

[Anonymous No.3548855]

>>3548839

Lawrence should have done his homework to learn that Islamic epistemology relies on three sources of knowledge:

1. The senses (aka empirical science).
2. Testimonies (for their hadith collections to work).
3. Revelation (for their Quran to work).

I find it hard to digest that there aren't any atheist students of Islamic philosophy taking part in debates with Muslim apologists like Hamza.

[Anonymous No.3548857]

OP, how about instead of getting butthurt about some guy winning a debate and moaning on /lit/ about it you arrange to debate him yourself.

this is the third thread I've seen complaining about this Hamza Tzortis guy.

[Anonymous No.3548859]

>>3548839
Western scholars are not used to fight theological arguments anymore, that's why guys like Hamza could win every debate against a atheist who just don't have the weapons to fight.

[Anonymous No.3548870]

>>3548846

A growing number of Muslim-born and Muslim conversts in Europe take it seriously. What they do is adopting a superficially philosophical attitude similar to that of Mr. Hamza, and there are even submovements that claim that Islamic philosophy is very sophisticated for the Kuffar and that it should be learnt either from original sources (e.g. the works of al-Ghazali) or in Islamic madrasas.

The whole scene is fugly.

[Anonymous No.3548880]

>>3548857

I live in another continent, and am a docile nice (i.e. beta) guy. I do not know how to deal with confrontational people like him. :(

[Anonymous No.3548887]

>>3548859

Which is at best a sign of intellectual laziness and at worst a sign of intellectual dishonesty. It is bad either way.

[Anonymous No.3548907]

>>3548880

email him again and remind him that he said he would reply.

Also, his argument and your rebuttal to it went straight over my head (I know nothing about linguistics and I'm terrible at maths), so would you mind outlining it for me in an extremely simplified form?

[Anonymous No.3548948]

>>3548907

OP? You still here?

[Anonymous No.3548990]

>>3548907

Arabic poetry is syllable weight based rather than syllable stress based like English. Traditional Arabic followed a very very strict tradition where the poems had to adhere to one of the 16 established traditional meters, and anything else was not considered poetry back then including the Quran; though it is poetry by Western standards it wasn't poetry by the standards of 7th century Arabs. A Muslim judge (al-Baqlani) shat an argument where he tried to generalize this "The Quran is not poetry" thing and prove that it beyond all the literary forms that are accessible to humans. He just said that the Quran is neither poetry (which, I reiterate, is right in light of the traditional definition of poetry) nor any of the forms of prose known to them back then (letters, speeches, etc.).

Hamza takes the same argument and runs with it: He says that any grammatically correct Arabic utterance that can be produced by humans is either poetry (and he prescribes the traditional definition of Arabic, poetry, which is absurd), saj' (rhymed poetry), or mursal (normal speech); and that the Quran is neither/or is all of them at once.

The problem with his argument is the literary forms are ill-defined: Only poetry is well specified through the very restrictive traditional definition of poetry, and other two literary forms are vaguely and ambiguosly specified; he doesn't offer tight definitions that avoid this whole argument degenerating into a game of semantics (seriously, what the fuck is normal/direct speech?). Another problem is that he offers no specification (deductive or inductive) of his claim concerning the literary forms. A third problem is that the Quran can be easily shown to be not unique under the property of lying beyond the proposed particioning scheme, which beats the purpose of the argument.

The problem with this argument is that it is inaccessible to all the parties involved. It needs a linguist well versed in Ar. stylistics to deconstruct it.

[Anonymous No.3548995]

>>3548948

Yes, was writing my reply. ;)

[Anonymous No.3549014]

>>3548907

In case you are interested, the tradition where Hamza is copying his arguments from is called il al-Kalam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilm_al-Kalam)), and the Ash'arite school in particular (it is the intellectual school that "won" the Islamic theological debates and currently the vast majority of Islamic theological thought is a reproduction of the Ash'ari though; I doubt the average Muslim has ever heard the word "Ashari" before, but they are spoon fed their theology without knowing).

[Anonymous No.3549033]

>>3548995

Ok, thanks for the reply. I've been looking around, and this Hamza guy comes off as very well prepared. Are you sure that a linguist would actually win a debate with him?

You could

1. Email him again and remind him he said he would reply

2. Email Someone (like the guy he debated) and explain this to them and ask them to organize a debate with a linguist.

2. Post your argument on his facebook wall and try to debate him there about it

Also, I noticed in this post >>3548855 that you left out one of the main sources of knowledge in Islamic epistemology (for sufis at least), the heart. Is it not held that the heart can see, hear and, with Gods noor, understand?

[Anonymous No.3549037]

>>3548990
>Another problem is that he offers no specification (deductive or inductive) of his claim concerning the literary forms.

He offers no JUSTIFICATION (not specification, sorry).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_justification

[Anonymous No.3549054]

REQUESTING LITERATURE ON DERVISHES AND SUFI ASCETIC SADHU LIKE TYPES

[Anonymous No.3549072]

>>3549033

>Also, I noticed in this post >>3548855 that you left out one of the main sources of knowledge in Islamic epistemology (for sufis at least), the heart. Is it not held that the heart can see, hear and, with Gods noor, understand?

Sufi mysticism is not considered mainstream Islam (and many Sufi sects would be considered by the majority of Muslims now deviant and/or heretic). At any rate, it is the asharite school that won at the end of the debate, and they didn't consider the heart a source of knowledge.

People have to understand that it is not vanilla Islam they are engaging with but a particular Islamic theological school that happened to dominate Islam (Ash'arism and its little brother Matrudism). Any other theology is marginal and not mainstream.

> Are you sure that a linguist would actually win a debate with him?

A linguist like Joan Maling (http://www.brandeis.edu/facultyguide/person.html?emplid=7071fdd35b3e032323445b80c64c973b942c72b8)) can win a debate over this particular argument (and nothing beyond that), especially since her doctoral thesis was written on al-Xaliilian Arabic meters. Good luck getting her interested.

You have given me a very good idea. I will email Prof. Lawrens Kraus and tell him what went wrong. A guy of his calibre can get someone like Joan Maling interested, unlike me. :D

[Anonymous No.3549083]

>>3548804
>beliefs
>fallacious

you sure like to pull shit out of your ass don't ya?

[Anonymous No.3549087]

>>3549083
unwarranted would have been a better term perhaps

[Anonymous No.3549099]

>>3549087
your mom is warranted to my penis

[Anonymous No.3549107]

I have one last question while your here, a very important one. The wiki you linked on Ilm al Kalam stated that Kalam is forbidden in the Hanafi madhab (which is the majority of Muslims today), yet you say that Ash'arism is mainstream?

[Anonymous No.3549156]

>>3549107

Ilm al Kalam started with al-Mutazilate who argued that the Quran is a creation and not Allah's direct speech (that is, that the words in the Quran are Allah's creation and not the words coming from his mouth, putting in mind that there is nothing like God and that he has no mouth of course). That school of Kalam was frowned upon, and that the Hanafi madhab forbade adhering to a particular Kalam school: Mutazilate. Another school emerged (that of Asharite) and went through many stages of evolution until it matured at al-Ghazali with occidentalism and the sophisticated metaphysics he proposed (Asharite atomism, where all matter is made of atoms that Allah recreates at every moment), among other things (and they did say a lot of things). People like Neil Tyson say that al-Ghazali ended science, which isn't right: He ended the theological Islamic debate concerning metaphysics and shit and actually provided the philosophical foundation for modern European philospohy (Kant, Hume, etc.), the other camp (Averroes et. al) defended a theology that was a synthesis of Neoplatonism and Islam and WAS WRONG, their rationalist ideology soon died.

What rustles my jimmies is that Westerners seem to almost know nothing about Islamic thought, and consequently fail to address it properly. Shit tards like Hamza lazily copy-paste 1000 years old arguments and kick asses with them (like what happened with Lawrence Krauss). They need to realize that Islam isn't Christianity and take it seriously; what they are doing is stupid and destructive.

Anything else?

[Anonymous No.3549169]

>>3549107
>>3549156

Goddamit, my jimmies are still rustled.

Europe and Muslim communities alike need Islamic thought to be properly deconstructed for this religion to get neutered and start secularizing.

I am definitely going to write Lawrence Krauss a harsh email tomorrow.

[Anonymous No.3549180]

>>3549169

I'm very interested in this and will be keeping an eye on Hamza Tzortis in the coming months. thanks for taking the time to go through this with me.

Out of sheer curiosity, what would your reaction be if this debate occurred and Hamza came out on top?

[Anonymous No.3549195]

>>3549054
GUYS

[Anonymous No.3549206]

>>3549156

BTW, it were consequences of the Mutazilate's position on the Quran (being a creation and not Allah's speech) that made other theologians itchy. For instance, the Quran being a creation implied, within their logical framework, that the Quran is bound by space and time, and that there is nothing special about it; that is, that the Quran is not inimitable (I hope you can now see why the inimitability arguments started emerging) and that it is not eternal in the sense that its teaching are not good for all places and all times, and that rationality was theologically enough for Muslims to put laws and the like (i.e. rationalist secularizm). Many schools of thought emerged to counter the Mutazilate, and the Asharite won and dominated Islamic theology. Because of the Asharite we have a seemingly inpenetratable Islamic theology that keeps the fucking religion from secularizing.

[Anonymous No.3549213]

It boils down to the same old argument:

Science cannot explain the big bang, so Mohammed is the profit of got praise be upon him.

An utter non sequitur.

He never tries to justify his own beliefs, just pokes holes in the gaps of others and asserts this means his view is correct.

[Anonymous No.3549218]

>>3549180
>Out of sheer curiosity, what would your reaction be if this debate occurred and Hamza came out on top?

You mean with Joan Maling? He won't, his argument literally has not content, it is just involved like the Kalam cosmological argument and inaccessible due to its nature.

I am a mathematician and I am anal about checking arguments/proofs/justifications. I have literally spent hours researching this argument.

[Anonymous No.3549235]

>>3549213
which makes it all the more pathetic that his opponent couldn't defeat him

[Anonymous No.3549237]

>>3549213

Exactly.

The only difference is that he has a very sophisticated and complex metaphysics imposed over his beliefs that Westerners (including Lawrence Kraus) are ignorant about.

What he does throughout the debate is pulling the discussion into his metaphysical arena which Prof. Kraus hastily assume is identical to that of Christianity only to be told that it isn't. The whole debate is literally nothing but Hamza ridiculing Kraus's ignorance of Islamic thought, but his enthusiastic audience (based on the comments on both Hamza's and Kraus's pages) is too emotionally invested to notice that. This is exactly what I hate about Muslims and why I hate to see my people (I am an ex-Muslim) dominating anything.

[Anonymous No.3549241]

>>3549235

This is true. It seems like he went into the debate unprepared and as soon as he touched on anything to do with Islamic culture Hamza showed how ignorant Krauss was on the subject.

Pointless excercise anyway.

[Anonymous No.3549242]

>>3549235

Because he fucking didn't do his homework and hastily assumed that Islamic theology is interchangeable with Christian theology.

Get your shit together, Westerners, and learn how to engage properly with Islamic thought before shit hits the fan.

[Anonymous No.3549253]

>>3549242

I don't buy this.
Krauss shouldn't have gone near islamic thought. He should have stayed straight with the western traditions of logical positvism etc and shown Islam to be lacking.

No one is criticising Hamza for being ignorant of Hume or Foucault, yet that doesn't seem to matter for some reason.

[Anonymous No.3549259]

>>3549241
>Pointless excercise anyway.

Not pointless.

Hamza now can confidently say that he was able to kick a big scientist's ass. This will be reproduced over, and over again, and memetic mutations of this incident will pop up all over the Internet. Now the Muslims who follow Hamza ALL OVER THE WORLD will push themselves forward knowing that a Muslim apologist managed to kick Lawrence's ass, and will use this debate to convert people.

This is exactly how Muhammad used to debate with his opponents and how Islam managed to theologically dominate the societies it conquered.

Get your shit together, goddamit.

[Anonymous No.3549269]

>>3549259

>i aint too worried bro.jpg

[Anonymous No.3549275]

>>3549253
>No one is criticising Hamza for being ignorant of Hume or Foucault, yet that doesn't seem to matter for some reason.

Because you accepted to fight in Hamza's arena and play by his rules.

Muslims believe that Western thought is the bastard son of Islamic thought, and that Westerners are stupid and don't understand the superset of Western thought that is Islamic thought. Muslims reject Western traditions like logical positivism and consider empiricism just one epistemological source of knowledge inferior to revelation.

[Anonymous No.3549277]

>>3549269

I am worried, though.

[Anonymous No.3549283]

>>3549275
>Muslims believe that Western thought is the bastard son of Islamic thought, and that Westerners are stupid and don't understand the superset of Western thought that is Islamic thought. Muslims reject Western traditions like logical positivism and consider empiricism just one epistemological source of knowledge inferior to revelation.

To be fair, contemporary Muslim thinkers don't know shit, they are just regurgitating the traditional Muslim thinkers who lived over a millinum ago.

[Anonymous No.3549304]

Anyone wants to learn anything else from me (the ex-Muslim guy telling you about Ash'arite school) before I leave?

[Anonymous No.3549349]

>>3549304

Aaaand I am gone (so don't bother asking any questions as I am shutting my machine down and going to bed).

[Anonymous No.3549505]

>>3549349

10/10 best new thread

extremely fascinating comments

[Anonymous No.3549535]

tl;dr atheists are annoying poopyheads that want everyone to be depressed and nihilistic

>atheism
>no afterlife
>everything else
>a afterlife

i know what i'm gonna choose, fuckers