The credential claim

The claim is a credential, offered to close the argument before it starts. It deserves a fair hearing, and it collapses on contact with what is then asserted.

What the credential is worth

Sitting a school subject for several years is real exposure. It is not scholarly training, any more than school biology makes a geneticist, and nobody would accept the equivalent claim in any other field.

More to the point, the claim is testable. A person who knows the religion well will describe its rulings accurately. The rulings advanced under this credential — that a woman may be married off without her consent, that she cannot testify in court, that the Qur’an licenses beating a wife into obedience — are each contradicted by the primary sources, and the contradictions are not obscure. They sit in al-Bukhari, in the plain text of Qur’an 2:282, in the verse’s own sequence.

What actually happened

What such a person mastered was a syllabus, and often a poorly taught one, delivered by an instructor who could not answer a hard question and did not welcome it. That is a real education in something. It is not an education in Islam, and the gap between the two is the entire subject of this site.

The failure being described is the failure of the teaching, and Muslims should own it rather than deflect it. A person who left because the version handed to them was indefensible left something indefensible. They did not leave Islam. They have never met it.

The honest position

Anyone is entitled to examine the religion and reject it. What is not available is rejecting a caricature and reporting it as an informed verdict on the original. The invitation is simple: bring the specific ruling, and check it against the source.