WikiIslam:Sandbox/Debating Muslims
This article provides some inspiration for non-Muslims on how to debate Muslims and criticize Islam.
Muslim mentality
First off, it's important to understand the sources of the Islamic irrationality. It is easy to debunk Islam using rational arguments, but in practice, it doesn't work that well with Muslims due to the following reasons.
Fear of hell and greed for heaven
Islam manipulates people into believing in it by threatening them with hell full of torture if they don't believe it and promising them heaven with virgins if they believe it. Muslim children, who are not yet able to think critically, are being traumatized by their parents, who scare them with terrible visions of hell. Since emotions are usually stronger than rationality [1], when that reason for belief is challenged rationally, a Muslim might just give up on rationality and prefer to feel like going to heaven and escaping the hell.
The best way to fight this is probably to simply point it out.
Anti-Scientific method
The scientific method starts with observing a phenomena, then raising questions, making hypothesis, experiment and finally reach the conclusions. If we were to scientifically decide whether Islam is true we would observe everything about Islam, raise questions about it, make hypothesis, test it and then reach to the conclusion whether Islam is true or not. But Islamic apologists do it kind of backwards and some Muslims also tend to think in this way: They start with the conclusion that Islam is undoubtedly true and then try to manipulate all the evidence to make them point to that conclusion.
The best way to fight this is probably to simply point it out.
Confirmation bias
Islam claims to be the only true religion and it considers those who say otherwise to be liars. If a Muslim believes that Islam is undoubtedly true, then it might not seem important for him to patiently analyze arguments against Islam and he might just automatically consider them to be lies. And since he believes Islam is undoubtedly true, he might also consider every silly argument for Islam to be valid.
This mentality might also make a Muslim live in an "echo chamber". That is an environment where only opinions which agree with his conviction are expressed.
If a Muslim thinks everything against Islam is false, then it's good to use quotes from the Quran and from the sources that he trusts. If you quote a verse form the Quran, he cannot say it's a lie.
Intellectual dishonesty
This section overlaps with the previous sections. It is rather a more general name for it. Intellectually dishonest Muslim willingly commits fallacies in his arguments.
This list was not a description of mentality of every Muslim. There are also open-minded Muslims who are willing to debate honestly.
Classical "arguments" for defending Islam
You have to read the Quran in Arabic to understand it
Who is the most entitled to understand the Arabic language as it was at the time of Muhammad? Probably learned people from that time. So the best way to understand the Quran is through the hadiths and tafsirs. The major hadith collections were translated in to English and many classical tafsirs as well. If you're debating about a certain Arabic word in the Quran, it's good to look into the tafsirs, which often explain the ambiguous words.
Also on the internet there are word-by-word translations of the Quran, including grammatical analysis, so what exactly are non-Arabs missing?
But anyways, it's good to know at least the Arabic alphabet and be able to pronounce the Arabic words and expressions which look weird in the sometimes heavily compromised English transliteration. The Islamic terms also sound more professional when pronounced in Arabic. And it feels good to see an Arabic word and be able to pronounce it, or type it into a translator.