I love Islam and cream soda

One of the most common polemics against Islam today is that Qur’an 65:4 explicitly permits child marriage. I don't believe the text supports that claim. That conclusion requires moving from what the Qur’an actually says to a particular interpretation of what it means. The relevant portion of Qur’an 65:4 says: وَاللَّائِي يَئِسْنَ مِنَ الْمَحِيضِ مِن نِّسَائِكُمْ ... وَاللَّائِي لَمْ يَحِضْنَ wa-l-lāʾī yaʾisna mina l-maḥīḍi min nisāʾikum ... wa-l-lāʾī lam yaḥiḍna The verse establishes the waiting period (ʿiddah) following divorce for women whose menstrual circumstances make the ordinary calculation impossible. It first addresses those among “your women” (nisāʾikum) who have ceased menstruating and then adds “and those who have not menstruated” (wa-l-lāʾī lam yaḥiḍna). That second expression is the center of the controversy. 65:4 Does Not Say “Little Girls” The Arabic does not say “children,” “little girls,” or even explicitly “prepubescent girls.” It says: وَاللَّائِي لَ...

  Here’s a piece of history that sounds ridiculous until you actually follow the story: Muslims created Dracula. Okay, I’m being deliberately provocative. Muslims obviously did not create vampires, and Bram Stoker—not the Ottoman Empire—wrote Dracula in 1897. But the historical chain that eventually gave us the most famous vampire in Western culture runs straight through the Muslim Ottoman world. And once you know the history, the statement “Muslims created Dracula” becomes a lot less crazy than it sounds. Before Dracula Was a Vampire, Dracula Was a Man Long before Count Dracula was creeping around a Transylvanian castle drinking blood, there was Vlad III of Wallachia , better known as Vlad the Impaler . He lived in the fifteenth century and became infamous for extraordinary violence, particularly impalement. Modern scholarship confirms that collective impalements were a real feature of Vlad's rule and warfare, although the enormous numbers given by some contemporary and later so...