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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

The OP has fallen into the common trap of applying the Christian concept of sin to the Islamic context. Christianity is generally a binary system of sins. Things are forbidden or they are not. Islamic is full of more subtle interpretations. Things are good and bad, some worse or better than others. This allows for contradictions, such as an Islamic wine jug. I chalk this up to how the hadith were compiled.

This medieval jug can also no more tell us about "Islam" than a pot from 13th century Ireland can tell us about Lutheranism . At best they are tiny snapshots within an epic history.

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That's an important difference. Christians believe good is from God and evil is from Satan. (Forgive me if I'm mistaken, I know that's a gross oversimplification.) Muslims believe good and evil are both creations of God. So most things have both good and evil in them, including alcohol:

They ask you about wine and gambling. Say, "In them is great sin and [yet, some] benefit for people. But their sin is greater than their benefit."

-- 2:219 http://quran.com/2/219

Keep in mind that the Quran was revealed piece by piece over two decades. The later parts add to the earlier parts. That can be a source of ambiguity to Western readers (not to mention that the chapters are not in chronological order), which is why it's important to understand it as a whole rather than its individual verses or chapters.

Careful. Two or more people agreeing on Islam in a positive way probably triggers a MIB bot. And I've got a flight in a couple hours.

The jug can at least tell us "people sometimes wrote things about Allah on jugs like this". Your Irish pot predates Lutheranism by three centuries.

It can tell us about different "Islams" at different times and places. It's analogous to studying clerical marriage in the Medieval Western Church.

> I chalk this up to how the hadith were compiled.

What do you mean?

>> Each hadith is based on two parts, a chain of narrators reporting the hadith (isnad), and the text itself (matn). Individual hadith are classified by Muslim clerics and jurists as sahih ("authentic"), hasan ("good") or da'if ("weak"). However, there is no overall agreement: different groups and different individual scholars may classify a hadith differently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadith

The result is a very large body of knowledge, on the order of 10k, some accepted as trustworthy and others not. The Christian tradition has seen various books included or excluded from the bible, with anything not making the cut deemed heretical. Everything included became sacrosanct and above debate. The more varied approach applied to hadith spills over into Islamic culture, especially law. Arguably, current Islamic extremist movements are a fusion of Islamic rules interpreted through a very Christian mindset: in or out, forbidden or not, with little room for debate. They focus only on the Koran, as Christians historically focused only on the bible.

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