Yesterday I wrote about the Talmud, and two questions arrived, as expected, within the hour.
"Would you dare do the same with the Quran?"
And. "You would never write a post like that about the Quran and Muslims."
The answer to the first is - "What? Of course I would. What on earth should I be worried or afraid of?"
The answer to the second is - "Yes, of course I would. I have stood between Muslims and those who want them gone often enough. Because in my eyes they are Human Beings made in the image of God, exactly as I am. And so they are not to answer for an entire civilizational order."
So I spent most of the day on it. Working from sketches, ideas and notes I already had lying around for another post I had been meaning to write.
Same place. Same method. Same three questions. And I say what I find below. Also when it is not the same as with the Talmud.
Because naturally it is not.
And that is no surprise.
It is not the same faith. Not the same view of Man. Not the same picture of the world.
And that matters for everything built on top of it. What a Human Being is worth. How a society is arranged. Who holds power. And where the Law is placed.
So let us begin.
....
First, what it is.
Mecca, around the year 610. A merchant of forty, by the name of Muhammad, tells some of the people around him that an angel has spoken to him in a cave outside the city. So he begins to recite. He keeps doing it for twenty-two years, until he dies in 632.
But those twenty-two years are divided into two completely different lives.
The first twelve years in Mecca he is persecuted, mocked and without power. The verses from those years are about one God, about judgment day and about mercy.
In 622 he flees to Medina. There he becomes the city's leader, its judge and its commander. The verses from those ten years are about law, inheritance, punishment and war. And about - who is with us, and who is against.
The words from all twenty-two years are gathered into one book.
That is the Quran.
114 chapters, roughly 6,200 verses, in Arabic. The chapters do not stand in the order they were received and spoken, but roughly by length, the longest first.
So much of what you read first is some of the last that was said.
Around the year 650 - eighteen years after Muhammad's death - the third caliph, Uthman was his name, has one common text fixed. The divergent copies made in the meantime are burned.
And here is the first difference.
The Talmud is the minutes of a dispute.
It is MANY voices that DISAGREE.
The Quran is ONE voice.
For the vast majority of Muslims in the world it is God's own words, eternal and uncreated. One may argue about exactly what they mean. But one does not argue about whether they are true.
....
Then there is what Islam calls hadith.
These are accounts of what Muhammad said and did, passed on by word of mouth. The great collections were written down around two hundred years after his death.
The most respected collector, al-Bukhari, died in 870. According to tradition he spent SIXTEEN YEARS and went through 600,000 accounts. That is a good hundred a day, every single day, for sixteen years. Many were the same story told by different routes. He kept about 7,000 of them.
How do you decide whether an account of Muhammad is genuine, two hundred years after his death, you might ask?
Not by discussing what the account says. It was done by examining the chain of narrators. Who heard it from whom. Is the chain unbroken? Were the men reliable? If the answer is yes, it is called sahih. "Sound". And then it is binding.
That is the second difference.
In the Talmud the question is never whether a sentence is genuine. Everyone knows who said it, it is written there. The question is what happened next. Who stood up and objected, and what he said, and whether anyone answered back. A sentence in the Talmud is not finished until the opponent has spoken.
In hadith the question is reversed. What Muhammad said is not discussed. What is examined is whether the words are actually his. If the chain is whole, the case is closed.
The Talmud asks - who answered him?
Hadith asks - who heard it from whom?
One question keeps a dispute open. The other closes it.
....
Out of the Quran and hadith came the Law.
Four Sunni schools of law, all taking shape in the 700s and 800s. And one great Shia school. They disagree about a great deal, and that disagreement is written down and respected.
But above all the schools stands something called ijma. In English we would say - consensus.
Muhammad is reported to have said that his community will never agree on an error. So the rule is - once the scholars of one generation have agreed on something, the question is closed. Forever. No later generation may open it again.
Take an example. That a man who leaves Islam is to be sentenced to death, all four Sunni schools agreed on. That is not one man's opinion. That is consensus.
Around the year 900 the scholars begin to say that the great questions are now settled. From then on you follow your school of law, you do not think the law through from the beginning. It is called "the closing of the gate of interpretation". Some historians hold that the gate never fully closed, and let me write that here too.
But notice what happens in Islam to the one who stands outside the consensus.
He is not someone who lost an argument. He is someone who has introduced something new. In Arabic, bid'a. And that is a serious charge, because the new cannot by definition come from God when God has already finished speaking.
If on top of that he denies something every Muslim is expected to know - that the Quran is God's word, that prayer is a duty, that pork is forbidden - then he is no longer in disagreement. Then he is an apostate.
In Judaism he would be a minority. Nothing more.
Judaism could cast out too. Rabbi Eliezer, one of the great scholars of the Talmud, was himself excommunicated after losing a dispute about the law. But his opinions still stand in the Talmud, under his name, page after page. He is counted today among the greatest.
That is the third difference, and it is the most important.
In Judaism the loser is written down, with his name. The Mishnah, the oldest part of the Talmud, itself says why. So that a later court can take up his opinion again and rule in his favor. A dispute can also end with - "let it stand".
In Islam a dispute can end with the question being closed forever. And the one who opens it anyway can be declared an apostate.
And apostasy, under the classical law, is punished with - death.
....
Now to the reading. Because no one reads the Quran alone.
Beside it lies "the commentary". The great one is al-Tabari's from around 900, in thirty volumes. And you read with a rule the Talmud does not have. A later verse can abrogate an earlier one.
Take one of the most quoted verses in the whole debate about Islam in our time.
"There is no compulsion in religion." Quran 2:256.
Does it still hold? Or was it abrogated by the war verses that came later in Medina?
Both answers exist among the classical scholars. Some held the verse was abrogated. Others, al-Tabari among them, held that it still applied. But only to Jews and Christians. And only if they paid the tax they call 'jizya'. A special tax per adult man, paid only by non-Muslims. In return they got the status called 'dhimmi'. It means - protected.
Christians and Jews in Islamic societies could keep their faith, their churches and synagogues and their own courts. But they lived under rules designed to show who stood on top. The rules are in the classical law books and in a pact attributed to the caliph Umar. They could not build new churches. They could not carry weapons or ride horses. They had to dress so you could see they were not Muslims. Their testimony did not count against a Muslim's in court. And a Jewish or Christian man could not marry a Muslim woman.
The Quran says it itself in 9:29. They are to pay the tax "and be subdued".
Today many Muslims explain the tax as payment in lieu of military service. That explanation exists among some of the classical scholars too. But the word "subdued" is in the verse.
So. Protected. And second-class Human Being. Both at the same time.
Was it different for Jews than for Christians? No. The law gave them the same status. Both were "People of the Book", peoples who had received a book from God. How hard it got depended on time and place. In Córdoba and in the Ottoman Empire, Jews could at times live better than in Christian Europe. Under the Almohads in Spain and North Africa in the 1100s they were, conversely, given the choice to convert, flee or die. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, was one of those who fled.
And then there is the side of the verse that is almost never mentioned. Let me repeat it - "There is no compulsion in religion."
The verse was read to mean that no one may be forced INTO Islam. It was not read to mean that one may freely go OUT.
What does that mean in practice?
Leaving Islam is called apostasy. Under the classical law a man who apostatizes gets three days to return. If he does not, he is punished with death. Women, according to one of the schools, were imprisoned instead.
And today? In most Muslim countries apostasy is no longer something the state executes for. But the death penalty still stands in the law in around ten countries, among them Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. Executions for apostasy alone are rare, though.
In many more countries it has other consequences. The marriage can be declared void. The right to inherit can lapse. The family can turn away. And does. Also here in Denmark. That is why we have associations like Foreningen Frafalden, the association for ex-Muslims. And then there is always the threat from the devout who hold that the law must be enforced regardless, also where the state does not. Because the law - that is, God - demands it.
And the attitude lives. When the American research institute Pew asked Muslims across the world in 2013, 86 percent of those in Egypt who wanted sharia as the law of the land answered that the one who leaves Islam should be put to death. In Turkey the figure was 17 percent.
That is the whole dispute in one verse.
So how many leave Islam?
No one knows. And that is no accident. You cannot count apostates in a country where saying it out loud costs your life or your family. So you count them where it costs nothing.
In the US, Pew has asked. Around one in four who grew up Muslim say today that they no longer are. And in Iran, where you cannot ask openly, a group of exiled researchers in 2020 ran an anonymous online survey with 50,000 participants. Under a third called themselves Shia Muslims. The rest answered all sorts of things, from nothing at all to Zoroastrianism.
So read the law again. It is not there to punish the few who leave.
It is there so the many do not.
....
Anyway.
So where do the verses come from, the ones sent around in your, my and Muslims' comment threads? Because it is just like with the Talmud and the Jews. Almost always the same tiresome few, always with a verse number after them, so it looks as if someone took the time to look something up.
They come from the pamphlets - and the pamphlets against Islam are as old as the pamphlets against the Jews.
Cluny, 1143. The abbot, Peter the Venerable, has the Quran translated into Latin. Not, however, to read it, but solely to refute it.
Around 1310 Dante places Muhammad in Hell.
In 1542 Luther translates a monk's book, "Against the Law of the Saracens", into German. The year after, he writes the preface to the first printed Quran in Europe, on the grounds that one must know one's enemy.
In 1741 Voltaire stages a play in which the prophet Muhammad is a cynical impostor.
And today. Lists on the internet everywhere. "109 verses of violence." All cut and pasted without the line before. Without the line after. And the word "taqiyya" slapped on everything a Muslim says.
But here too there was another voice.
Goethe, Germany's greatest poet, read the Quran as a young man in the 1770s and wrote a poem about Muhammad. As an old man he wrote a whole collection of poems in the spirit of the Islamic world. And around 1890 a Hungarian Jew, Ignaz Goldziher, went through the hadith literature and showed that many of the accounts had arisen centuries after Muhammad. He had himself studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, as one of the first Europeans ever. He did it with respect for what he was examining.
The pamphlet reads no line before.
Scholarship reads the whole page. So does anyone who cares about the Truth. Not to find ammunition. To understand what is written.
Because only then do you find out what you are facing.
Which God is moving in.
And what He wants.
....
So when someone sends you a verse, it can be one of three things. And they are the same three I found in the Talmud.
1. It can be something that is not there at all.
2. It can be something that is there, but means something else when you read it in context.
3. Or it can be something that is there, and is every bit as hard as it sounds.
In the Talmud nearly all of it was of the first two kinds. With the Quran it is not like that. And that is worth saying exactly loud enough that everyone can see the difference, and why.
First, what is not there at all.
Here there are only a few examples.
"The 72 virgins" are not in the Quran. The Quran speaks of companions in paradise, but gives no number. The number comes from one account in one of the great hadith collections, and the scholars have disagreed on how reliable it is. It is not God's word, as Muslims understand it. It is an account. Turned into a story that is used to belittle.
Then there is the word pulled out in nearly every conversation with Muslims online. Taqiyya. It is used, idiotically, as a trump card meant to make everything a Muslim says suspect or invalid. In my eyes it is among the most dishonorable things you can do, to tell another Human Being he is lying, without being able to confirm it in a single way.
But whatever the concept of taqiyya is, it does not mean that a Muslim may lie to everyone who is not a Muslim. The word translates as something like "caution". It is about hiding your faith to survive persecution, and it belongs first and foremost with the Shia, who for centuries were a persecuted minority among Sunni Muslims. A concept, that is, used by Muslims who had other Muslims after them.
And yes, there is an account permitting untruth in war, to make peace between two who are at odds, and between husband and wife. It is narrow. And it is not a license to deceive you.
If a Muslim uses the concept to lie to you, he breaks with his own tradition, and the elders in his own house who know it will look at him as a man who has forfeited his honor. Muhammad is reported to have said that truth leads to righteousness, and that lying leads to wickedness - and wickedness to the fire.
Which means he is not only lying to you.
He is lying to his God.
.
Then what is there, but means something else.
Here there are many. So let me just take a few -
"Kill them wherever you find them." Quran 2:191. It is there. But the verse before says - "fight those who fight you, and do not transgress."
Then there is the so-called sword verse, 9:5:
"When the sacred months have passed, kill the idolaters wherever you find them. Seize them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, perform the prayer and give alms, let them go their way. God is forgiving and merciful."
It is about Arab tribes who had broken a treaty, and they were given four months' notice. And the verse after says that whoever asks for protection shall have it, hear the word of God, and be escorted to safety.
It is still worth noting, though, what the way out is in the verse itself. To convert and become a Muslim.
"Seize them and kill them wherever you find them." 4:89. The verse after exempts those who withdraw and offer peace.
"Do not take Jews and Christians as friends." 5:51. The word means something closer to protectors or allies, and it stands in the middle of a war.
So. It is the same rule. A verse cut out of its context, without the verse before and the verse after, can prove anything. That goes for the Talmud, it goes for the Bible, and it goes here in the Quran too.
Useless for telling you anything at all.
.
And then what is there, and is hard. Here too there are many.
APOSTASY. "Whoever changes his religion, kill him." Those are Muhammad's words according to al-Bukhari, the most respected hadith collection. That is the account the death penalty for apostasy rests on. We have seen what it means today.
THE WIFE. Quran 4:34 says that men have authority over women. And of the wife whose disobedience you fear - "Admonish them, leave them alone in bed, and strike them." The classical commentators later added qualifications. The blow must be light. It must leave no mark. One of them said it should be with a siwak, the little twig used as a toothbrush. And that it is the last resort. But the word is there. And the man has the law on his side.
JEWS AND CHRISTIANS. 9:29, the tax and the subjugation - second-class human being - as we saw above. That is not an interpretation. It was the arrangement in most of the Muslim world for over a thousand years.
THE IDOLATERS. Everything above, the tax and the small humiliations, was an arrangement for those who had a book. Jews, Christians, and by an early compromise also the Zoroastrians in Persia. They could keep their faith in return for paying.
The one with no book got no such offer. For him the classical law had two options. Islam or the sword. That is what the sword verse says, and that is what stood in the law books. Look it up yourself in "Reliance of the Traveller", sections o9.9 and o11. The tax (jizya) may be accepted from People of the Book. NOT from idolaters.
It should be said that the largest school of law, the Hanafi, stretched the rule. When Muslim armies reached India they met a hundred million people with no book at all, and the Hanafis let them pay jizya and live. That is, strictly speaking, why there are still Hindus. So here too there were two voices. But one of them did not apply on the Arabian peninsula, and the other applied everywhere.
AISHA. Muhammad's youngest wife. According to al-Bukhari she was six when she was married to him, and nine when the marriage was consummated. So. Yes, you know what that means. He was over fifty. The account is considered sound. That is, truthful. Some modern Muslim writers have tried to recalculate her age up to seventeen or nineteen. But the classical tradition never doubted. And because Muhammad is the model, her age was used in law as justification for girls being married off before they are adults, by the standards of the Western world.
STONING. It is not in the Quran. But according to hadith Muhammad had married men and women stoned for adultery. The caliph Umar said stoning had once been in the Quran, but that the verse had been lost from the text. All four schools of law included it. It still stands in the law in Iran and in Brunei, and it has been used in Saudi Arabia.
WAR AGAINST GOD. Quran 5:33. Those who wage war against God and his messenger shall be "killed or crucified or have a hand and a foot cut off on opposite sides". It became the law on highway robbery.
BANU QURAYZA. A Jewish tribe in Medina which, according to tradition, betrayed the city during a siege in 627. After they had surrendered, the men were executed. Between 600 and 900 according to Muhammad's first biographer, Ibn Ishaq. Women and children were enslaved. Some modern scholars doubt the number. But the account is the tradition's own.
None of this can or should be pretended away.
It is there.
....
And then the question that decided everything in the Talmud.
Did the hard sentences become law?
In the Talmud the answer was no. The hard sentence was one man's opinion, written down, and the law went the other way. Here it goes the same way. What sounds hard was not set aside as a single scholar's reading. It became rules, written into the law books, and they are still there.
You can look it up yourself. "Reliance of the Traveller" is a legal manual from the 1300s, and the English edition from 1991 carries a stamp from al-Azhar in Cairo, the most respected seat of learning in Sunni Islam, confirming that it renders the law correctly. Look up section o8.1, which deals with apostasy. There it is, in black and white, with al-Azhar's signature.
That is the difference in one sentence. In the Talmud the hard sentence belonged to the minority, and it lost. Here it belonged to the majority.
And the Law followed it.
....
The Light is in the texts too, and I want to say that without a single "but" from my side.
"There is no compulsion in religion."
"Whoever kills one human being, it is as if he had killed all of humanity."
"We have made you peoples and tribes, that you may know one another."
Alms to the poor is one of the five pillars of Islam.
Abu Hanifa, founder of the largest school of law, held that a non-Muslim under protection had the same blood price as a Muslim.
Because Islam holds enormous beauty. And so does the Human Being raised in it. The Muslim.
Anyone can see it, just by using both eyes and looking honestly at the many proud, beautiful Muslim women and men with fire in their gaze and a smile that opens the room.
The hospitality. The dignity. The seriousness about God, which we ourselves have forgotten.
They are Human Beings like everyone else. And so they have the same possibility as everyone else of standing luminous in reality, as a lighthouse for the best their tradition has to give the world.
It is for them that I write.
Not against.
....
And then the Hillel test.
In the Talmud the school that rendered its opponent correctly won. The losers were written down, with their names.
In Islam too there have of course been thinkers through the ages who said that reason must be allowed to judge the text.
The Mutazilites, for example, who held that the Quran was created in time and was not eternal - but they were declared heretics after 848. They had used force themselves while they had the caliph's favor, and that must stand here too. But their writings were lost for a thousand years and only found again in a library in Yemen in the 1950s.
The philosopher Ibn Rushd, whom Europe called Averroes, had his books burned in Córdoba in 1195. The Sudanese reform thinker Mahmoud Taha turned the rule of abrogation itself around. He taught other Muslims that the gentle verses from Mecca are the eternal message, while the laws and war verses from Medina were written for one people in one century and had now done their work. For that he was hanged in Khartoum in 1985. He was seventy-six.
The Egyptian professor Nasr Abu Zayd, who read the Quran as a text in history, was declared an apostate by a court in Cairo in 1995 and had to flee.
And then Salman Rushdie, who was no reform thinker at all, but a novelist. He was born Muslim and wrote a book for which Iran's supreme leader sentenced him to death in 1989, from a podium in Tehran, without a trial. Rushdie lived in London. In 2022, thirty-three years later, he was stabbed on a stage in upstate New York by a man who had not been born when the sentence was passed. He lost an eye.
The sentence for apostasy, in other words, has no passport. Because the Law in Islam does not follow the country. It follows the Human Being. And it does not let go of him because he moves.
The Talmud writes the losers down.
Here their books were burned.
They themselves were sent out.
Or hanged.
....
And before you judge, look up your own book, as we did yesterday.
Psalm 137. Luther. The Crusades. Every tradition a thousand years old has hard sides. That is not what I criticize. The question is what it did, or does, with them.
Judaism put them in a book of disagreement and let them lose.
Christianity put them into law too. For centuries. The heretics' pyres were law. But it could never make them fit its own book, and in the end it was the laws that were abolished. What remains is a history it is ashamed of.
Islam put them into the law.
And there they still lie.
....
And now to what I was really getting at.
Because the books are not just books. They are architecture for the soul, and so each raises its own Human Being. And that Human Being builds its own kind of society.
Let us start from another angle.
Take the story behind the name Israel. Jacob stands alone by a river at night, on his way home to a brother he has cheated, who is coming to meet him with four hundred men. And a man comes out of the dark and wrestles with him. All night. At daybreak the stranger strikes him on the hip, so that he limps for the rest of his life, and says - let me go, it is getting light. And Jacob answers - I will not let you go until you bless me.
Then the stranger asks his name. And gives him a new one. Israel. "He who has struggled with God and with Men, and has not gone under."
That is the name an entire people bears.
Not the obedient one. Not the pious one.
The one who held on until it got light.
And it runs all the way through. Abraham stands before God and haggles over Sodom, fifty righteous, forty, thirty, down to ten, and asks him straight to his face - shall not the judge of all the earth do right? Job sues him. And in the Talmud, a thousand years later, Rabbi Eliezer loses a dispute about the law, calls heaven to witness, and a voice from heaven rules in his favor. And the other scholars answer - the law is not in heaven. The Law was given to Men. And the Talmud tells what God did in that moment. He laughed. And said - my children have defeated me.
THAT is the Jewish Human Being. The name Israel means - he who struggles with God. Abraham haggles with God over Sodom. Job sues him. Man stands in a covenant, as a party who may answer back. Even to God himself. And that Human Being builds a house of dispute. A court where the minority is written down. A people that has survived two thousand years without a state and without an army, because the law lived in the conversation.
The Christian Human Being inherits all of it. And moves the law. Inside.
"I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts", says God through the prophet Jeremiah about the new covenant. Paul says the same of the Conscience, that it is a law Man carries within himself. And Jesus calls those who follow him not servants, but friends. That is no small difference. A servant does what he is told. A friend knows what the other wants, and chooses it himself.
Man is the image of God. He can fall. And he can be raised again. Sin and forgiveness belong together, and that is why Christianity can be ashamed. It has a measure that stands above its own institutions. The Crusades were a crime against the gospel, measured by the gospel itself. The king under the law, the law under the Truth. And the Human Being raised in that builds a society of persons who each answer for themselves. From within. Conscience as the final court.
That is where the rule of law comes from, and human rights, and the right to leave everything - church, party, family, country - and still be a whole Human Being afterwards. Also for those who have never set foot in a church.
And then there is the Muslim Human Being. And here I want to be precise, because it is easy to get wrong, and easy to belittle. So follow closely.
The word Islam means submission. The word Muslim means - one who has submitted. It is not me saying that. It is the tradition's own pride. The highest title a Human Being can bear in Islam is 'abd Allah. Servant of God. Muhammad himself is reported to have said that he must not be exalted as the Christians exalted the son of Mary, for he was only a servant, and one should call him God's servant and messenger. And no more. The Quran also calls Man God's steward on earth, khalifa. But the steward administers a law he had no part in writing. It is finished. It came down, complete, and it stretches from prayer through inheritance to the state.
One may argue about what it means, and the scholars do. But not about whether it applies. The Quran says it itself, in one of the last verses Muhammad received - "This day I have perfected your religion for you". Perfected. Then there is nothing more to add. Only to follow.
And that is why the Law lives somewhere else.
It does not live in the conversation, as with the Jews. It does not live in the conscience, as with the Christians. It lies down over Man, from outside, carried by the umma, the community, and enforced by those with the power to do so. That gives an order that is hard to shake - and make no mistake about it, that is why it has stood unmoved and unmovable for 1,400 years. But it also gives a Human Being whose highest virtue is obedience. And whose worst sin is to leave the ranks.
That is why Rabbi Eliezer gets a page in the Talmud, and Mahmoud Taha gets a rope.
Not because Muslims are lesser Human Beings. They are not. But because the house they are raised in has no room for the loser. A dispute with the Law is not a dispute. It is a farewell.
Three Human Beings.
The one who struggles with God.
The one who is God's child.
And the one who is God's servant.
And they build three different societies.
One where you may object.
One where you must answer for yourself.
And one where you must obey.
And they look differently at the world outside.
The Jews do not proselytize. They never have. The Law was given to one people, and whoever wants in is advised against it three times before he is allowed. The rest of the world is not meant to become Jewish. It is just meant to behave decently, and for that the rabbis have seven commandments, not 613.
The Christians proselytize. But what they carry out is a message, not a law. "My kingdom is not of this world", he said to Pilate. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's." The Church has held power, and it has abused it, but it has never had a law for the state in its book, because there is none in the Bible. The kingdom is within, and so Caesar may be whoever he is.
Islam carries a law out. And so the classical scholars divided the world in two. "The house of peace", dar al-islam, where the Law applies. And "the house of war", dar al-harb, where it does not yet. The words are not in the Quran. They are the jurists', from the first centuries, and many Muslim scholars today say the division belonged to another age, that there is a third house, "the house of treaty", and that a country with treaties and UN membership is not the house of war. That must stand here. But notice what the division itself says about what the world is.
It is not a place where there are different peoples. It is a place where the Law, sharia, has either arrived or has not arrived yet. And why it must arrive is also written.
Three times, in nearly the same wording, the Quran says that God sent his messenger with the religion of truth - "to make it prevail over all religion". 9:33. 48:28. 61:9.
So.
A people that keeps to itself.
A message that travels without a law.
And a Law that travels to prevail over all the others.
And now the three live on the same street. Here.
...
So the next time someone sends you a verse from the Quran, ask the same three questions.
Is it there?
The Quran is free online, in English, verse by verse.
What surrounds it?
Read the verse before and the verse after.
Did it become law?
Look in the law books. Not in a pamphlet. And not in a sermon.
Because the clown exists on both sides.
The one who quotes 9:5 without 9:6 has not read the Quran. And the one who says it is all about "peace" has not read 9:29.
And finally it is worth remembering that this was never about the people. Most Muslims you meet have never opened a legal manual. They live their lives, as you live yours. Lovely and warm and fun to be around.
It is the arrangement. The architecture.
Where the Law lives. And where the conversation is allowed to end.
And whichever of the three sets the agenda decides which society you live in.
....
(Written in Danish on October 16, 2026. And no, I have not read all thirty volumes of al-Tabari either. But I looked it up. That is still the whole difference.)
