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Burial at sea is fine for Muslims. In this particular context the important bit is most likely this bit: " if an enemy may dig up the grave to mutilate the body, it is also allowed to bury the deceased at sea to avoid mutilation." (And if you don't trust Wikipedia on the matter, go to their source: Rules About Burial of the Dead Body.)

Given all the comments I've seen that he ought to have been buried in a box of pork chops, I think it's fair to say that this was a real concern.

I had mod points, but wasn't sure whether to mod you flambait or something else - don't quite know what.

So, I'll reply instead, on the off-chance that it was a serious question.

I am not a Muslim. Hell, I'm not really much of anything. But I've picked up a few things about religions in general and people in general. Regardless of their religion, people will act as people do - and that often means having the strength to do what they believe is necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. Whether that's "right" or "wrong" to you depends on how it affects you or people you know or your belief structures - again, that's human.

Many Muslims believe lying is prohibited, regardless of whether the person being lied to is a muslim or not. That's fine, many other religions hold similar views about lies - the Ninth Commandment, anybody?

However, there appears to be room for a practice called al-Taquiyya (see http://www.al-islam.org/ENCYCLOPEDIA/chapter6b/1.html ) Other religious scholars in other religions have likely held similar views - the early Christians under Rome kept their beliefs secret, as a matter of self-preservation. I wouldn't mind betting that Jewish theologians have debated things like "passing for non-Jewish" in the Third Reich. A strange form of Christianity evolved in Japan between when the Jesuits were kicked out and when Japan started to become more open again, because families had to keep their beliefs secret or face persecution. People will do what's necessary.

Now, on the surface, there appears to be nothing wrong with al-Taquiyya at all. Indeed, in times of persecution or harassment, what's wrong with hiding matters and keeping private things private for the sake of your survival and the survival of your family? Allah will know your intentions, and won't object if it's a matter of survival. No hypocracy required - it's better to be alive and a good person who told a necessary lie than a dead good person who never told a lie in their life. You can't do more good works if you're dead.

The trouble is, people are people - and interpret things differently, and have different priorities. One person might interptet al-Taquiyya to permit them to do what's needful - to denounce the Prophet and Allah in order to avoid being stoned by an angry mob, for example, but only in direct self-preservation or direct preservation of another. Another might perhaps interpret it as permitting the denouncement of Allah and the Prophet in order to gain access to an aircraft, because they believe it's necessary to gain access to and blow up a passenger aircraft to advance the cause of muslims everywhere. From their perspective, they'd be thinking of the bigger picture.

So, no. Asking people to denounce the Prophet of Islam wouldn't do you any good as it wouldn't necessarily reveal those you wanted to reveal - they'd perhaps consider it necessary to speak words other than those in their hearts. It would, however, probably reveal a lot of people of other faiths who believe it's inappropriate to denounce other faiths. Let's see, false-positives, false-negatives... not particularly useful.

i know the Quran much better than you do, have it memorized by heart, know and speak the Arabic language and do not need you to tell me what the Quran says and doesn't say.
Then it should be very easy for you to prove that everything that I said is wrong by quoting the Quran yourself, if indeed everything that I said was not supported by the Quran.

as i told you, slavery was abolished in islam in stages.
Fine, quote the Quran and the Hadith to prove this to me.

it was no just said outright "no slaves" because no one would have listened.
If Mohammad had made the penalty for owning slaves death or amputation of limbs as he did other crimes, almost everyone would have listened.

in addition, i don't really understand what you're trying to get at
I'm trying to get at the truth, whatever that might be.

are you more knowledgable of the Quran and the sunnah than muslims are?
According to this site, "90% of Muslims are unable to understand the [Classical] Arabic Qur'an," so maybe. Besides, knowledge does not necessarily imply a desire to honestly impart that knowledge to others.

islam is NOT pro slavery and that it did abolish it and was much more successful than the west or anywhere else ever was.
Proof from the Quran or Hadith?

quran, hadiths, like anything, can be taken out of context, out of meaning
Ok, so set me straight. Enlighten me.

if you just want to argue, go learn arabic
I already know some Arabic. I'm working on it; however, in the mean time, can we argue in English?

you are just copying and pasting english translations of things you don't understand.
Ok, teach me.

anyone who speaks more than one language knows
I speak four languages: English, French (poorly), German (better), and a fourth (fluently) which I am not going to list for you since I don't want you to know where I'm from. I use three different English translations of the Quran from here. If you don't think any of them are correct, talk to the site administrator and the translators and set them straight.

i gave you proof
Your proof was just some random people writing, without the Quran or Hadith supporting their arguments. I wouldn't trust the Pope to tell me about Catholicism/Christianity without quoting some passages from the Bible. I've been burned in the past, and I'm not willing to make the same mistake again.

i posted more than one site and more than one link
The other sites had even less proof from the Quran or the Hadith.

i, despite being muslim and knowing this stuff already, read the sites all the way through before posting the links even
Now, why would you do that?

its apparent you have your mind set, and i am not going to try to change your mind,
Throughout my life, I have changed my mind many times about many things (for one, I used to think Islam was a nice religion). Only by admitting that one was wrong, when presented with enough evidence that one is wrong, can one come closer to the truth than they were before.

I appreaciate your curtesy and the information with which you have provided me.

It closed all avenues for obtaining new slaves except the capture of war prisoners
Mohammad certainly was quite smart; I could almost admire the man. I mean what better way to encourage people to go to war with you than by telling them that if they do, they can get free slaves, and if they don't, they'll have to buy slaves from someone else. When you said war prisoners though, you should have elaborated that this was not limited to combatants, but also their wives and children, as well as other noncombatants. Women were considered "booties" of war. Allow me to quote a surah from the Holy Quran:
[Yusufali 23:5] Who abstain from sex,
[Yusufali 23:6] Except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess,- for (in their case) they are free from blame,
[Shakir 23:5] And who guard their private parts,
[Shakir 23:6] Except before their mates or those whom their right hands possess, for they surely are not blameable,
[Pickthal 23:5] And who guard their modesty -
[Pickthal 23:6] Save from their wives or the (slaves) that their right hands possess, for then they are not blameworthy,


And that is just from the Holy Quran.
If we look at Bukhari's Hadith, we will find Mohammad approving of Muslims raping their female slaves. Even worse, he seems to say that they should not engage in coitus interruptus, but rather impregnate the raped slave girls. This can be seen in Vol. 7-#137, Vol. 5-#459, Vol. 3-#765, Vol. 5-#637. Abu Dawuds's Hadith is not much better.

how can you say that this is proving that the crazies are not in minority??!!

1. the muslim population of the world is about 1.5 billion. tell me again, how many people in total, participated in violent demonstrations all over the muslim countries? i know in Iran's capital city (Tehran) with a population of about 12 million, there were only 400 people who participated in the violent protests. well sure, it says in the news headlines that the danish embassy in tehran was set on fire, but does it emphasize that a group of 400 people in a 12 million population did that?
of course i know in some other countries the numbers where much higher, up to the tens of thousands, but still that's FAR FAR away from the majority of the muslim population.

2. last wednesday and thursday (8 and 9th Feb) some reports were putting the number of protestors in the hundreds of thousands in some countries. that has nothing to do with the cartoons. there is a two day annual religous event called Ashoora which takes place at this time of the year; and of course on the sidelines of that event, some groups where chanting slogans about the cartoons too.

i hope i've been able to convince some of you that it is not fair to conclude that the majority of muslims are violent people.

That has been particularly popular amoung Islamic real-estate buyers, because their religion forbids all leasing.

And once again, you're talking out of your ass.

An example.

Now that the story's off the front page, it's probably safe to blow off the anonymous-posting feature, an idea dating back to a time when the churches put a lot more than Slashdot karma at stake for the heretic. :)

St. Augustine was basically the heir to St. Paul's "better chastity than marriage, better marriage than Hell" mentality. Google came up with this accurate but admittedly-one-sided summary of Christian sexual morality, http://www.al-islam.org/m_morals/chap1.htm, written by someone who has an Islamic axe to grind. I don't know much about Islam, but it's not relevant in any case: the psychosexual issues the author raises are, as far as I know, quite valid.

My understanding is that Augustine was what Christians would call a "reformed homosexual." When the object of his affection died, it prompted his own Damascene ephiphany in which he rejected the passions of the flesh in favor of immersion in a higher spiritual calling. Nowadays, we just spend a week locked in our room playing Quake when we get jilted, but things were different back then, when intellectual and moral crises lurked around every corner.

Unfortunately, just like Paul before him, Augustine proceeded to project his neuroses on the rest of Christendom. The Church has spent millennia cultivating a distorted sense of sexual morality and human nature, telling us that some of our most fundamental biological impulses are sinful and shameful, barely worthy of tolerance in limited circumstances (marriage) and only worthy of repression elsewhere. I have a problem with that.

Speaking personally, I was raised in a heavily Christian (Southern Baptist) environment, albeit in a non-churchgoing family. In my youth, I spent a lot of time reading both Testaments and looking for the answers to the usual questions that pop up during adolescence and puberty. Are women a Good Thing or not? Is it OK to ask God for a new Camaro? How many times per week can I jack off without staining either my sheets or my soul? While my childhood was short on genuine moral crises, it was saturated with contradictions: what was up with all the French kissing on the church bus on the way back from the Petra concert? Why was the state of the new girl in town's virginity the chief topic of discussion at Bible camp, along with the near-theological question of who would be the first among us to settle the issue once and for all?

The trouble was, it was easy enough for me to dismiss St. Paul as a party-pooping congenital loser, but Christ Himself was something else. He seemed like a smart guy, a fellow who really had His shit together. As the article above points out, He didn't talk much about the old in-out, in-out, but when He did, He came straight to the point. But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

That was a problem. Not much room for pubescent rationalization there, friends and neighbors.

Eventually, I came to realize that Christ demanded I choose between my own nature as a human being, or an ideal made apparently unachievable by the biological code His own Father built into me. That kind of thinking was obviously dangerous: according to the church, it was the sort of argument you could expect when someone tried to recruit you into Satan's posse. But since I had never bought into the whole organized-religion thing to begin with, it wasn't hard for me to walk away from the whole idea of Christianity with a clear conscience. I didn't have much at stake besides the fate of my soul... which, once I realized was only a metaphorical gun held to my head by people who were flesh and blood like myself, was easy enough to get past.

Priests of celibate orders, on the other hand, have more than their souls in this precarious moral balance. Their careers, lives, vows, and identities are inextricable from Pauline and Augustinian morality. That's what I meant by my flippant "2,000 years of chickens coming home to roost" remark. The human mind is a powerful thing; when you hold it to unreasonable or impossible standards, you shouldn't be too surprised to see it fail in catastrophic ways.

terrorism def= peacetime equivalent of a war crime.

you think calling things like anti-competitive behaviour and government lobbying terrorism makes you broad-minded, but in fact, it merely makes you unable to stick to any reasonable definition of terrorism.

if I was conducting a Jihad, I wouldn't trust the internet either.

Jihad is not terrorism. In fact, the Qur'an prohibits terrorism against innocent civilians. Islam is a religion of peace, and jihad does not refer to a "holy war" but merely "struggle ... such as an internal struggle to follow Islam, a struggle against oppression, or a struggle for peace" (source:).

if I was conducting a Jihad, I wouldn't trust the internet either.

Jihad is not terrorism. In fact, the Qur'an prohibits terrorism against innocent civilians. Islam is a religion of peace, and jihad does not refer to a "holy war" but merely "struggle ... such as an internal struggle to follow Islam, a struggle against oppression, or a struggle for peace" (source:).