A wrote:

I don’t totally agree with this… they also rape and kill their own women- but they don’t call it rape or murder – its… classified as “justifiable…whatever”. For example the late Ayatollah Khomeini laid down a law that it’s a sin to execute virgin women in their “Justice” system… so he said that rather than execute a virgin (for most probably a crime which they were innocent for in the first place), that the virgins have to be raped first by the prison wardens… then executed… no-one in their “justice” system classifies this as rape!!!!!

B responded:

There are a number of issues here. Firstly, I have never heard of any such statement by Ayatollah Khomeini – please tell me where you got this from. Secondly, assuming that he said this (and I have strong doubts about its authenticity) it does not mean that it is Islamic – it means that one Muslim (or some fringe group) interpreted the religion in this way. The Shi’ite tradition is quite different in any case from the Sunni one on a range of matters.

Every religion has had people in it who interpret the injuctions of their religion in their own way, and these may or may not be the intention of the original text or founder. You need to sort out what is the core of any religion – its ideals – and not focus on how someone, who may be a fanatic, decides to impose their own values upon it and then say it represents the entire religion. If you condemn a religion because of its extremists’ views, then you have to condemn every religion because of what their extremists have done.

A:

A society like this surely cannot endure.

B:

If a society were actually based on those principles, then you would be right. But how many ordinary Muslims do you think would go along with state-initiated rape and execution? This is a bit like condemning the entire western tradition because of what Hitler did.