but even orthodox traditionalists and revivalist groups are becoming expert in such apologetics. The real problem with these kinds of arguments is a more acute one. For one thing, they are apologetic and try to justify the past by today’s standards. In the process, they inevitably distort history. Since modern Muslim sensibilities are offended by the rules regulating women, such as corporal punishment or the minimum marriageable age for women in Muslim antiquity, they try either to wish them away or to argue them away. There is of course the misplaced belief that the past is embarrassing. For, surely, closer scrutiny shows that in all patriarchal cultures – Christian, Jewish, and Hindu – during antiquity, women were married off at a very early age, in some cases even before they showed their first signs of menstruation.
If we have changed these practices in our world, then we have done so for our own reasons: our sense of justice, equality, and reasons consistent with our political-economy. For a whole set of reasons, we no longer consider marriage to what our modern culture deems minors, corporal punishment, and the death penalty to be acceptable practices. But surely in changing our practices we are not condemning millions of people before us and judging them as reprobate for being different from us? So why should we debate the past as if it is the present? The predisposition among many Muslim apologists is not to understand history, but rather to try to fix or correct it, with the enormous condescension of posterity.
-Ebrahim Moosa, "The Debts and Burdens of Critical Islam," p. 121-122
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