Sameer sahab I try my best to not judge who commits a sin and who doesn’t – I think that’s God’s domain. My job is to spend my time and effort in understanding God’s message to the best of my capability and convey that message to my brothers and sisters in humanity.

Not to my knowledge. But what point are you trying to make if you could please clarify?

Sameer sahab the book of God is not a list of do’s and don’ts. As we begin to understand the depth of His message, we begin to see life with much more clarity.

Allow me to sum up my understanding of His message in an extremely concise manner. The very reason and the purpose of the existence of this universe is for God to select a group of people whom He has decided to give an eternal life of joy and comfort to. He is testing all the people in this laboratory called the world to select such people. Those of us who prove ourselves in the aspect of purity (tazkiya) shall be rewarded that eternal life of joy. Purity is required in all spheres of our lives including thoughts and actions.

Shirk is believing in partners of God without having any basis of that belief. If God had partners, it is Him who would have told us that – we have no way of reaching such knowledge. So in essence, shirk is nothing more than believing in falsehood. The right attitude is to give up such a belief because we have no evidence for it, in favor of what we do have clear evidence for.

Same attitude is required from us in every manner. When a muslim woman (one who has consciously understood God’s message and lives her life by it), makes a decision to marry a non-muslim man who may or may not be a mushrik, we’ll remind her that what she’s doing is not correct. Right now she might be taken over by emotion, or making an irrational decision for some other reason, but this will cause her problems in the future. It’s not a matter of permissibility – it’s a matter of empathetically guiding someone to help her out in making a rational decision.

Hope this helps.

Declaration of something haram (hurmat) in explicit words is not always necessary and it is not the language of Quran as well, but at the same time prohibition is so obvious from the sentence that no rational mind can deny that. Take alcohol for example, no words of explicit prohibition are used, but at the same time, the words used are clear enough for any rational mind to assume that they mean absolute prohibition. Same is the case with Riba (interest) and Gambling. There’s no prohibition mentioned for eating and drinking a man’s own waste (as per this rationale, this should also be considered allowed from a religious standpoint). Therefore, it is not a fair approach to equate prohibition of one thing with another, everything needs to be considered separately as per language and genre of Quran.

So when Quran allows men to marry women from people of the book as a temporary directive after domination of Muslims, it follows rationally that it is prohibited for Muslim women to marry men from people of the book, there’s no need to mention it separately. If you change the nature of directive for example, If Quran prohibited only women to marry people of the book, it would’ve rationally followed that the other instance is allowed.

Quran’s sensitivity to polytheism should never be equated with anything else for that matter. Therefore it naturally follows that the nature and way of expressing those directives will always be different from the rest.

This directive is inherently a directive of prohibition as well. That’s what I tried to explain earlier.