This may well be one of the most important video clips about Islam ever, and it comes not from any secular activist, but Islamic scholar @YasirQadhi himself. The printing press was indeed declared haram by the Ottoman Empire, and the use of it was punished with death.
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So while Christian Europe underwent an Enlightenment that skewered Christian theocracy and propelled it out of the Dark Ages into the enduring and prosperous time of secular liberalism we have today, the Muslim world stayed where it was—a place where
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any and all innovation and free thought was considered heresy, blasphemy, or apostasy.
If this hadn't happened, would we have a diluted, reformed, or "protestantized" Islam today, separate from the state, as we see with Christianity?
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Would we have more lapsed Muslims, secular Muslims, and atheists who were Muslim only culturally, like we do now in Christianity and Judaism?
@MaryamNamazie says, "The Internet is doing to Islam today what the printing press did in the past to Christianity."
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We're all seeing it happen. Imagine if it had started four hundred years ago.
/end
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