Criticism of Islam is questioning or challenging the beliefs, practices, and doctrines of Islam. Criticism of Islam can take many forms, including academic critiques, political criticism, religious criticism, and personal opinions.
Criticism of Islam has existed since Islam's formative stages. Early written disapprovals came from Christians and Jews as well as from some former Muslims such as Ibn al-Rawandi. Later the Muslim world itself received criticism. Western criticism of Islam grew after the September 11 attacks and other terrorist incidents.
Objects of criticism include the morality of the life of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in both his public and personal lives. Issues relating to the authenticity and morality of the scriptures of Islam, both the Quran and the hadiths, are also discussed by critics. Islam has also been viewed as a form of Arab imperialism and has received criticism by figures from Africa and India for the destruction of indigenous cultures. Islam's recognition of slavery as an institution, which led to Muslim traders exporting as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa, has also been criticized. The Shafi'i version of Islam has received criticism for advocating female genital mutilation and introducing this practice to Southeast Asia, where it was previously nonexistent. More recently, Islamic beliefs regarding human origins, predestination, God's existence and nature, have received criticism for their apparent philosophical and scientific inconsistencies.
Another criticism focuses on the question of human rights in the Islamic world, both historically and in modern Islamic nations, including the treatment of women, LGBT people, and religious and ethnic minorities, as shown in Islamic law and practice. As of 2014, about a quarter of the world's countries and territories (26%) had anti-blasphemy and (13%) had anti-apostasy laws or policies. In 2017, 13 nations, all of which were Muslim majority nations, had the death penalty for apostasy or blasphemy. In the wake of the recent multiculturalism trend, Islam's influence on the ability or willingness of Muslim immigrants to assimilate in the host nations has been criticized. Assimilationist arguments have also been made in other countries where Muslims are a substantial minority, such as China, India and Russia.
Historical background
The earliest surviving written criticisms of Islam are found in the writings of Christians, such as John of Damascus who was familiar with Islam and Arabic, who came under the early dominion of the Islamic caliphate. Other notable early critics of Islam included Abu Isa al-Warraq, a ninth-century scholar and critic of Islam, Ibn al-Rawandi, a ninth-century atheist, who repudiated Islam and criticized religion in general, al-Ma'arri, an eleventh-century Arab poet and critic of all religions who was known for his veganism and antinatalism. and Abu Bakr al-Razi, a Persian physician, philosopher and alchemist who lived during the Islamic Golden Age. He was critical of the concepts of prophethood and revelation in Islam. Jews similarly passed on criticism on Muhammad by oral-traditions.
There have been several notable critics and skeptics of Islam from within the Islamic world, including the blind poet al-Ma'arri, whose poetry was known for its "pervasive pessimism." He labeled religions in general as "noxious weeds" and believed that Islam does not have a monopoly on truth. In 1280 CE, the Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammuna criticized Islam in his book Examination of the Three Faiths.
During the Middle Ages, Christian church officials commonly represented Islam as idolatry or a counterfeit religion propelled by Satan. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, some academics attempted to exoticize Islam by portraying it as an Eastern religion that was distinct from the West and the religions of Judaism and Christianity. Others classified it as a "Semitic" religion, in contrast to the Indo-European religions, which included Christianity. Many academics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries referred to Islam as Mohammedanism, which allowed them to criticize Islam by criticizing Muhammad's actions. Such criticisms rendered Islam as only a derivative of Christianity and not, as Islam itself claims, as the successor of Abrahamic monotheisms, in contrast to the Christian idea of Christ's perfection. By contrast, many academics nowadays study Islam as an Abrahamic religion in relation to Judaism and Christianity.