sad bastard

Another scholar who, with apparently good intentions (?), is completely mixed up about Islam. American Journalist Robert Wright is on the circuit pimpin his scrawl, The Evolution of God like there is no Final Judgement.

He seems to get Gabriel and God mixed up in his recap of Sura 53: An-Najm. Then he goes on to say that scholars generally agree the Qur’an has been corrupted. OK. Enter Ayatullah with the appropriate bounty and you, Robert, can see if Padma Lakshmi will marry another troll on the run. Good luck with that.

The Koran describes the glorious being—the angel Gabriel, apparently—coming within “two bows’ length” of Muhammad, after which Gabriel “revealed unto His slave that which He revealed.” At this moment, the Koran tells us, Muhammad’s “heart lied not (in seeing) what it saw.” Maybe not, but this is not a question we are in a position to address. A question we should address before proceeding further is: Does the Koran lie in reporting what Muhammad said? Whatever the inspiration for Muhammad’s subsequent utterances, is the Koran a reliable guide to them?

The Koran has a better claim to that status than the gospels have of being a reliable record of Jesus’s sayings. Parts of it may have been written down during Muhammad’s life, perhaps under his supervision. Almost certainly some of it was being written down shortly after his death, and many scholars believe it was essentially complete within twenty years of his death. Of course, twenty years is plenty of time for distortion—even wholesale fabrication—to set in. Still, two factors make a fair degree of fidelity plausible.

First, beginning in Muhammad’s day, Koranic verses seem to have been ritually recited in Muslim communities. Second, the Koran is particularly amenable to retention via recitation; in the original Arabic, much of it rhymes, at least loosely, and is rhythmic.

The contours of the Koran also suggest authenticity. By the time of his death, Muhammad had gone from being a monotheistic prophet, preaching in the largely polytheistic city of Mecca, to being the head of an Islamic state with expansionist tendencies. And in the years after his death, the Islamic state expanded rapidly. If the Koran were mainly a post-Muhammad concoction, you would expect it to mainly reflect the needs of the rulers of such a state. Yet, as we’ll see, most of the Koran consists of the kinds of things you would say not if you were a powerful political leader, but if you were a freelance prophet frozen out of the local power structure. And the smaller fraction of the Koran that seems keyed to the needs of an expanding Islamic state would, for the most part, make sense as the sayings of Muhammad himself in the final years of his career, when he had segued from prophet to statesman.

Still, no serious scholar believes that the Koran is wholly reliable as a guide to what Muhammad actually said. Indeed, ancient sources outside the Islamic tradition raise the possibility that on one key theme—Muhammad’s attitude toward Jews during the final years of his life—the Koran may have been amended, or at least creatively interpreted, after his death.

-The Evolution of God

This post: "Begging for Satanic Verses style publicity?" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

This post: "how come the ahl-e haqq/yarsan aren’t t…" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/

Religion (as opposed to conscience) is a corporate rather than an individual matter – Milton may have belonged to a sect of one, but most of us who are in any meaningful sense religious are members of corporate bodies extending through time and space. And corporate bodies to exist at all must define their boundaries: this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is how we behave. And this requires an implicitly if not explicitly excluded “not that.” This being the case, if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom.

The whole post is worth reading since in its discussion of the seeming contradictions between the origins of Hannukah and its role in American society today.

This post: "Noah Millman has an interesting post at …" was originally posted at Talk Islam - a crescent waxing eloquent. The RSS feed may not be used at other sites without permission. You can subscribe to this RSS feed for Talk Islam at http://talkislam.info/feed/