In a recent Facebook post, creepy Democrat politician Scott Wiener (some jokes just write themselves), claimed that “being Muslim doesn’t make someone a pedo”. The comments section went about as much as you’d expect.
Wiener (mustn’t… make… obvious… joke…) is, remember, the California Democrat who was responsible for what many saw as a dangerously pro-paedophile law change that widened judicial discretion to not put on the sex offender register “people who are convicted of having non-forcible sex with minors above the age of 14 and who are themselves no more than 10 years older than the minor”.
Make of that what you will.
Wiener also has a thing for appearing in public dressed like this:
Again, make of that what you will.
But Wiener’s (pfffffttttt…) claim is a typically illogical ‘progressive’ straw man. Has anyone ever said that just being Muslim will turn someone into a paedophile? The closest I can find is Southern Baptist pastor Rev Jerry Vines, who called Islam’s prophet “a ‘demon-possessed pedophile’, asserting that his 12th and final wife was a nine-year-old girl, and declared that Muslims worshiped a different God than Christians”.
Leaving aside the “demon-possessed” bit, where was Vines actually wrong? Muhammad, then in his 50s, according to Hadiths ruled “authentic” by Islamic scholars, married Aisha when she was six, and consummated the marriage at nine. Cut that any way you try, it’s textbook paedophilia.
And while it’s a commonplace to assert that the Islamic “Allah” is the same as the Christian “God”, that’s a logical impossibility. According to the principle known as “Liebnitz’s Law”, a thing is only identical if it shares all its properties. But “Allah” has very different properties to “God”, most notably unity. The Christian “God” is triune: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. According to Islam, this is “polytheism” and a dire sin against the strictly unitary “Allah”.
But it’s the Aisha Problem that brings us back to the Islam-paedophilia question.
Islam was a religion founded by a paedophile, according to its own scriptures. While there are some, such as Australian Imam Mohammad Tawhidi, who put forward a pretty good case that the six-year-old age for Aisha originated as part of a dynastic smear campaign in the schism that occurred immediately after Muhammad’s death, they remain very much minority voices. The overwhelmingly prevailing view in Islam, as Tawhidi admits, is that Aisha’s age as six is correct. This is what the vast majority of Muslims accept as true.
This, as Tawhidi also points out, has repercussions.
Another fundamental tenet of Islam, after all, is that Muhammad was “the best example for mankind”, as laid down in the Koran (Surah 33:21). The Koran being the literal words of Allah, this makes sunnah – emulating the example of Muhammad – an inescapable obligation for Muslims. Including in his marriages, obviously.
This has very real outcomes in the real world. Islamic countries like Iraq make it legally permissible to marry girls as young as nine. Across the Islamic world, child marriages are a persistent phenomenon. The same applies in Islamic communities in the West, where child marriage is common.
The Pakistani Muslim child-rape gangs in Britain are another outcome.
So, no, Islam doesn’t make someone a paedophile – but it tells them that they can be, with Allah’s blessing.
