After 14 years of successful debates, please support the Muslim Debate Initiative to continue organising public debates on most needed topics of our time.

About Us

The MDI is formed of members from the Muslim community with experience in public speaking, apologetics, polemics, research and critical thought.

Our  speakers and researchers come from a variety of backgrounds, and bring a wealth and variety of research and experience in theological, philosophical, scientific, historiographical, jurisprudential and political fields of study.

Our Belief

MDI takes as it sole adopted beliefs, the Islamic creed (Aqeedah), that it holds there to be no God except the one God, and Muhammed (pbuh) as His final Prophet and Messenger. MDI also believes in all the preceding prophets named in the Quran. Furthermore, the MDI holds that the Quran is a revealed communication from God and thus held to be true and accurate. The examples and sayings of the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) are a universal example for us to hold onto for all times and places. Lastly, we hold that since humans have not changed in essence and nature since their beginning, the laws of Islam (shariah) are unchanging and relevant to all times and places. Thus MDI believes that Islam is intellectually sound, and a perfect and complete way of life for mankind.

Our Aims

MDI is here to support, encourage and promote debate that contrasts Islam against other intellectual, theological and political discourses for the purpose of the pursuit of truth, intellectual scrutiny with respect, and clarifying accurate understandings of other worldviews between people of different cultures, beliefs and political persuasions .

MDI seeks to enhance understanding of different beliefs amongst people from different communities and promote active intellectual discourse between them. By this, MDI seeks to demonstrate that debate can occur on any strongly held or popular doctrine, dogma or idea while being respectful, frank and openly critical.

Ultimately, MDI seeks to change minds,  inform and educate to see better quality respectful intellectual disagreements between people subscribing to any two differing intellectual positions, and to see the creation of better and well-informed political and social policies for co-existence and justice.

ince MDI was founded in 2009, MDI has been involved in hosting, or its members invited to, a number of debates, panel discussions and TV debates across the globe. Debates are a good way to critically discuss a subject, and more specifically, a question, in order to present the wider public with arguments and evidence they wouldn’t normally have access to or know of. The most important feature of such debates is primarily to facilitate the public to make an informed decision on their beliefs, politics, political ideology and worldview.

While the purpose of many people who engage in debates is to persuade, MDI holds as its ideal that the purpose of debate is to help discover truth.

MDI members therefore prefer to eschew cheap rhetoric, specious argumentation, or making unsubstantiated claims appealing to popular ignorance. MDI members are encouraged to base all arguments on use of facts, statistics, robust rational argument and clear presentation of evidence as their debate methodology  – which we view to be the best and most ethical way to persuade audiences.

Measuring Success at Debates

One of the problems many people cite is how to review debates and measure success in persuading audiences without being subjective and biased, or making assumptions about the audience’s perception of the debate.

However there are two methods of assessing the success of a person, or side, of an argument in debates – the Oxford-style method.

Many debating societies, or famous debating unions, hold “Oxford-style debates” where a motion or question is put up as the subject of the debate, with each side taking a “Yes”/”Supporting” or “No”/Opposing position. Both sides argue from their position on the motion or question, and the motion either “passes” or is “defeated”, or a question is decided, by asking the audience to vote on the position they were most convinced or persuaded by.

The Oxford-style system has two methods of doing this.

The first method is where the audience is asked to vote on the motion/question after the debate has finished, and the Motion or question is decided by a simple majority of the votes taken (what we call a “single-vote motion debate”).

The second method, which is a little more nuanced, is where the debate motion/question is decided by how many people in the audience changed their minds on the motion/question during the debate. This works by the organisers asking the audience to cast a pre-debate vote and another vote after the debate has finished (a post-debate vote). The Motion is “Passed” or “Defeated” (or the question is decided) based upon which side gained the greatest number of new votes after the debate. The new votes would indicate the number of audience members who had changed their minds or were persuaded by a side during the debate (we call this the “two-vote motion debate”).

While the single vote system may be prone to the audience’s pre-existing prejudices and biases, and therefore may not reflect how well any particular side did in the debate, the two-vote motion debate is a much more objective way of determining how well one side did, because it doesn’t measure majorities, but rather which side persuaded the most people.

MDI’s Performance Record

By the grace of God, in two-vote Motion debates (measuring which side persauded the most people), MDI and its members have maintained a 100% success record (see here: https://muslimdebate.org/2018/10/18/the-mdi-debate-success-record/) throughout its history of championing a position in debates. This means that in such debates where the winner of the debate motion was decided by which side changed the most audience members’ minds, MDI managed to change the most minds consistently for 100% of the time (al-hamdulillah).

In all single-vote Motion debates participated in by a member of MDI, where the winner of the debate motion was decided by a simple majority of the audience, MDI has achieved a success rate of 10/14 (or approximately 72%). While the single-vote system of voting doesn’t take into consideration the initial biases of the audience, the law of averages state that an average debate speaker would have at least a 50-50 chance of winning any particular debate (if all other factors being equal). So considering that all the Oxford-style debates MDI has participated in to date, were organised by majority non-Muslim organisations, in irreligious venues, debating a topic in a secular Western context, where the biases may run quite contrary to the Islamic worldview. Therefore a 72% success rate is quite a significant achievement (al-hamdulillah).