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I’ll provide the links for the two suras cited above for the curious:

An Nisa (the women) - https://quran.com/4, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nisa. In dowry and inheritance matters it’s actually quite advanced for its age.

Al Anfal (the spoils of war) - https://quran.com/8, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Anfal. These are, of course, orthogonal to our moral values but not more depraved than bounty customs employed hundreds of years afterwards.

Prophet Mohammed himself took one fifth of the spoils, including taking women as wives, eg see Safiyya bint Huyayy, who was his tenth wife after her tribe was killed (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safiyya_bint_Huyayy).

I’m missing your point about adhering to these “when it’s convenient”. This was standard practice for Muslim armies for hundreds of years afterwards (of course others did the same).



I understand that. It's just that many people still use these passages to the present day to justify bad behavior.


That is what all religious texts and institutions effectively do. Take moral standards of centuries and millennium before and force it on today.


Sure. But only one of them seems to result in a massively disproportionate level of violence. And not just violence due to a difference of religion, but violence done in the very name of the religion


Not just the one. Both old and new testament have lot of violence and mysognistic rhetoric if you read them literally.

It may not seem like it today , Christianity is a bloody religion of conquest throughout most of its history, just the last 500 years had countless genocides conducted all over the world in its name. Gold , Glory and God was the theme of all colonization, before that period we had the another 500 years of religious wars like the crusades.

Islam is hardly the sole or even the largest abuser of faith. It is merely newest major one


Good points. I wonder how Catholicism did away with justifying the Crusades. Although I would add that Islam has been consistently bloody since inception.


I have since learned that the Crusades were actually a direct response to Islamic aggression, so that comparison sort of goes out the window




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