Dear Mr Ali Sina

I have received the response from you today. Call it my laziness or lack of understanding of the technicalities of internet, I am solely responsible for this delay. On top of it, your response is pretty "loaded". It will take a little while more before I get back to you. The purpose of this message is to assure you and the visitors to your site that delay from our side shouldn't be construed as withdrawal. The discussion is very much on.

Khalid Zaheer



Dear Prof. Zaheer

I published your message for everyone to see. Please don’t worry about time. We all know how busy you and Dr. Ghamidi are. As for not understanding the technicalities of computer and the Internet, welcome to the club. I must confess that our entire site is set up and operated by other friends. Our wonderful administrator is the one who has set it up, repairs it and keeps it greased so it runs smoothly. Left on my own I would be left in the cold. I hope now you feel a bit better.

Actually we are so grateful that you realize the importance of this debate and answer the questions that many have about Islam. Obviously, these questions must be answered sooner or later. They have never been answered. In the past, when fundamental questions like the ones we discuss were raised, the ignorant Mullahs’ response has always been intimidation and violence. Scholars, in the Muslim world were naturally fearful for their lives to ask these questions openly. Hafiz and Khayyam resorted to very subtle questioning of Islam through their poetries. If anyone was reckless enough to challenge Islam directly, they would have been put to death and their books would have been disappeared. The rationalists were all exterminated. Al Gazzali vaunted that if Plato and Abu Ali Sina were alive, he would have killed them. Zakaria Razi wrote a book refuting all prophets, calling them bearded billy goats, liars and charlatans. All is left from his book are a few paragraphs and that is thanks to an Ismaili scholar who wrote a refutation to Razi’s book and quoted those paragraphs in order to refute them. Here is an extract from what this great rationalist wrote:

“All men are by nature equal and equally endowed with the faculty of reason that must not be disparaged in favor of blind faith; reason further enables men to perceive scientific truths in an immediate way. The prophets—these billy goats with long beards—cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. These billy goats pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves in spouting their lies, and imposing on the masses blind obedience to the "words of the master." The miracles of the prophets are impostures, based on trickery, or the stories regarding them are lies. The falseness of what all the prophets say is evident in the fact that they contradict one another: one affirms what the other denies, and yet each claims to be the sole depository of the truth; thus the New Testament contradicts the Torah, the Qu’ran the New Testament. As for the Qur’an, it is but an assorted mixture of ‘absurd and inconsistent fables,’ which has ridiculously been judged inimitable, when, in fact, its language, style, and its much-vaunted ‘eloquence’ are far from being faultless. Custom, tradition, and intellectual laziness lead men to follow their religious leaders blindly. Religions have been the sole cause of the bloody wars that have ravaged mankind. Religions have also been resolutely hostile to philosophical speculation and to scientific research. The so-called holy scriptures are worthless and have done more harm than good, whereas the writings of the ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Hippocrates have rendered much greater service to humanity.”

“The people who gather round the religious leaders are either feeble-minded, or they are women and adolescents (suggestible). Religion stifles truth and fosters enmity. If a book in itself constitutes a demonstration that it is true revelation, the treatises of geometry, astronomy, medicine and logic can justify such a claim much better than the Qur’an”

For the first time in history the critics of Islam have the chance to ask these old questions and not fear for their lives. All the Muslim authorities can do is ban sites like ours, but these cowardly acts will not help them in the long run because the sun is out and no matter how much they try to close the shutters and hide themselves in the basement, the penetrating light of the truth will eventually reach the masses.

Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that this is a historic debate. Although I have no claim to be a scholar, I can rehash the old unanswered questions raised by great minds such as Razi and Khayyam. You and Dr. Ghamidi are celebrated Islamic scholars and now for the fist time the public has the opportunity to hear both sides of the story and see how these old questions are answered.

We look forward to your response and I remain

Cordially yours

Ali Sina

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