Questions you're not allowed to ask
If you found this page, you are probably already asking questions you have been told not to ask. You may have asked them quietly. You may have asked them only of yourself. You may have asked an imam, or a parent, or a friend, and been told you have a problem with your iman, your faith, and that the right answer is to stop asking.
This page exists because the questions are not your problem. They are real questions. They have real answers. And you are not the first person to ask them.
What you may be asking
Section titled “What you may be asking”Some of these may be familiar. You do not need to feel them all. You only need to feel one.
- Why did the Prophet marry Aisha when she was six and consummate the marriage when she was nine? The hadith are in Sahih al-Bukhari. They are not anti-Muslim propaganda. They are in the most authoritative collections of our tradition.
- Why did the Prophet order the killing of poets, Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf, Abu Rafi’, by deception, at night, in their homes? Why is this in Bukhari, our most authoritative source, and why has no one ever explained it to me?
- Why did the Prophet’s forces kill every adult male of Banu Qurayza in a single day, six hundred or more, and enslave the women and children?
- Why is the Prophet allowed more wives than any other Muslim, by a Quranic verse (Q 33:50) that is specifically addressed to him alone?
- Why does the Quran tell me (Q 5:47) that the People of the Gospel should “judge by what Allah has revealed therein”, meaning their Gospel, if that Gospel is, as I have been told, corrupted beyond reliability? How can Allah command me to judge by a corrupted text?
- Why does Q 10:94 tell the Prophet himself to ask “those who have been reading the Book before you” if he is ever in doubt, if those Books, according to the doctrine of tahrif, were already corrupted?
- Why does the Quran (Q 5:116) imagine the Trinity as Father, Mary, and Jesus, when no Christian community has ever held this? The Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This has been the doctrine since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, three hundred years before the Quran.
- Why does the Quran deny that Jesus was crucified (Q 4:157), when every non-Christian source from the first century, Tacitus, Josephus, the Babylonian Talmud, confirms the crucifixion as a fact?
- Why is the punishment for leaving Islam death? Why does my faith require a wall of fear to keep me inside?
- Why does the Quran allow a man to strike his wife (Q 4:34), to take captive women as sexual property (Q 4:24, Q 23:6), and to inherit twice what his sister inherits (Q 4:11), and why am I told this is justice rather than asymmetry?
- Why is the consensus of Muslim scholars (ijma) supposed to be authoritative when Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have disagreed on fundamental questions, including the legitimacy of mut’ah, for fourteen hundred years?
- Why, when I bring any of this up, am I told to read more seerah, pray harder, or stop listening to “Islamophobes”, but never given a substantive answer to the specific question?
You may have other questions of your own. The ones above are common; they are not exhaustive. What they share is that the answers, when given honestly from the Islamic sources themselves, do not point where the tradition tells you they should point.
What asking these questions does not mean
Section titled “What asking these questions does not mean”It does not mean you have a weak faith. It means you have an honest one. Iman that requires you not to look at evidence is not iman; it is a closed door pretending to be a closed mind.
It does not mean you have been misled by enemies of Islam. The hadith and verses you are reading are in your own tradition’s most authoritative books. Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, these are your sources, not ours.
It does not mean you are alone. There are now substantial communities of former Muslims, ex-Muslims, Muslims who converted to Christianity, and Muslims who quietly hold both worlds at once while they sort it out. Some have done so at terrible cost; some have done so quietly and safely. None of them are unique. None of them started with all the answers.
What this site offers
Section titled “What this site offers”The other pillars of this project address each of these questions in detail. The foundations section treats the spine of the case at the depth of scholarly engagement. The debate index treats specific topics in a one-page rapid-deployment format that you can use in conversation (with someone else, or with yourself).
This pathway is different. The other pillars are for the mind. This pillar is for the person.
The questions you have are not wrong. The next four pages are about what to do with them.