Ali Ataie – Why No Longer Debates Christian Apologists & Ex Muslims
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These people are Mustahazi.
Right? And and it's it's impermissible for us
to even sit with them.
You know? A Mustahazi is someone who mocks
and ridicules
the religion, who mocks and ridicules the prophet
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. We're not even supposed
to give them a platform.
Don't even just completely ignore them.
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, what
does he
say?
What
does
he say? Allah says, I will suffice you
with respect to the mustahazeen.
In other words,
I'll take care of them.
Like Abu Jahl and Abu Lahab.
Right?
There's a few 7 or 8 of them
that were known. All of them all of
them were killed at Badr, or they died
from disease.
You know?
So
I wouldn't engage I would be very discriminatory
as to who you engage with,
Even if you're claiming to be Christian and
they come to you with smiles and this
and that and,
you know, I I learned my lessons the
hard way. I mean, there was a Coptic
Christian guy who was smiling and talking about
love, this and that, and
he wanted to have a debate with me
in 2003.
And I said, yeah. We met the night
before at a hotel and we were very
cordial and this and that. And
and then the next day at the event,
he had 3 other debaters. So it's like
a 4 against 1.
And 2 of these guys were, like, fluent
in Arabic, and they knew, like, Baran and
Hadith and everything. I mean, he still won.
I mean, come on.
We took care of business. You know? I
remember the MSA was panicking, and they're calling.
We're gonna try to get this local imam
to come help you. I said, relax, brother.
The hawk will win.
And then, it was just
but it got it got to a point
because they were losing, it got to a
point where this man who's who's a he's
a Coptic
he's a Coptic priest, he became belligerent and
started slandering the prophet, say, salam.
And at that point, we we can't.
You know? You know? Lesson learned. Right?
But you're right. It's the same issues, you
know, they're bringing up marriages of the prophet
and
they bring up, the fact that the prophet,
say, salam, was a military
leader,
and all of this is hypocrisy.
I mean,
I mean, if you look at the if
you look at all of the casualties
in every battle of the prophet,
he did he actually
did a study on this, and he said
there's about
1,018
casualties
in all of the kazawat of the prophet,
enemy and Muslim, mushrikeen and Muslims, a 100
a 1,018 men in 23 years, all men
on the battlefield.
Right?
Musa alaihi salaam in Exodus 34, he comes
down the mountain. He sees his own people
worshiping the golden calf. He orders 3,000 men
slaughtered on the spot
in one night,
but he's a prophet. But the prophet
oh, no.
He can't be a
prophet. K? This is total hypocrisy.
And then, you know, they bring up things
like preservation of the Quran and things like
that. What they're doing is they're banking on
Muslim ignorance of their own text.
They know a lot of Muslims. They've never
heard of qira'at. They've never heard of the
Ahrefa Saba'a.
So they'll bring, like, a Quran. It says,
malik yomideen,
mal with a dagger alif, and another Quran
says malik yomideen,
malik malik. Oh, 2 different Qurans.
And then the Muslim,
the du'at, that are very young,
right, they're there and they're doing their best.
They start going they they have this cognitive
dissonance.
You wrote this Koran.
You. This is a fabrication. You're calling this
a fabrication?
Yeah. Oh, really?
You know?
So
a lot of it sort of, you know,
smoke and mirrors. It's the same stuff regurgitated.
I don't find any strong arguments coming from
the Christian side.
You know? But, you know, we we have
to be cordial with people.
These kind of debates that are highly polemical
I mean, I I debated
this other guy. I'm not gonna mention his
name. Very popular
on YouTube, and this was about 16 years
ago.
You know?
And it's a prob it was bad idea.
But,
you know, we should have adab with people.
We should be discriminatory
with people as to who we debate.
And at the end of the day,
Right? So we should inform we should inform
with adab. The Quran tells us how to
make dua.
Right?
So call people to the way of your
Lord with hikmah, which means dala'il according to
Muhammad Zamafshari and others. He says it means
with proofs, scriptural proofs, rational proofs, historical proofs.
Well
means good, absolute, good comportment,
right, with adab.
Right? So both of these have to
have to work, inshallah.
But, you know, we shouldn't we shouldn't disrespect
people's religions.
We shouldn't,
you know, mock people. This is not the
sunnah. You know, we're we're all guilty of
this, doing things like this in the past.
So we make tawba. We ask Allah to
forgive us because we'll be hindering people from
the path of Allah
We don't want that to happen. Allah says
don't curse their gods or else they're gonna
curse Allah.
Right?
So we could point things out to them,
you know, with adab. It's very difficult to
do. I don't have the temperament for debate
anymore. This is what I've learned. I don't
have the temperament because I let my ego
get involved, and I I can't do it.
I I I would I thought that when
I got older, I would be more patient,
but I've just become a crotchety old man.
I don't wanna hear these bad arguments anymore.
You can miss me with all of that
now. I don't wanna hear it anymore.
I've already dealt I've already dealt with it.