Let's Scrutinise Certain 'Facts' In the Al-Furqan
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
7 May 2022
The
Undotted And Oddly Vowelled Quran Was Generating Wildly Different Explanations
Of Itself, As It Still Does Because The Written Arabic Has Two Features That
Make It Difficult For An Outsider To Learn
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Where is the need to justify verses such as, "Take not the Jews
and Christians for friends/protectors (5:51),"
When it comes to rejecting verses that are of doubtful divinity, we
Muslims are either too cowardly or too lazy. We would tie ourselves in knots
trying to justify the unjustifiable rather than admit honestly that some
man-made verses have crept into our holy book.
By Ghulam
Mohiyuddin 04/05/2022 16:13:40
“Justification,
clarification and interpretation are manifestations of dishonesty, “wrote
Pakistani apostate of Islam Ibn Warraq, quoting Rene Descartes. That the
aforementioned verse in the Quran needed laboured and completely unconvincing
interpretation for being authentic and justifiable is a sure sign of it being
SPURIOUS and a later-day INTERPOLATION.
Why's the
god, creator or Allah so ambiguous as to concoct every verse that needs an
elaborate explanation at some point in time? Shouldn't every message, passage
and verse in a holy book be unambiguous and unequivocal for every human to
understand?
Why do poor
followers require a battery of exegetes, interpreters and apologists for
greater and better understanding of religious verses?
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Also
Read: Qur'an
5:51 - A Humanistic Interpretation
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When I was
a student of comparative religions and theology, I'd often laugh with my
erudite professors seeing the anomalies, inconsistencies, aberrations and
discrepancies in the scriptures of all man-made faiths, not just Islam. The
laboured and ludicrous explanations to justify the scriptural passages of all
faiths made them all the more recondite and abstruse. When Truth is so
meandering and full of empty verbiage, it can be anything but Truth. Truth is
and should be axiomatic. In other words, it must be self-evident and
self-explanatory. Despite the theo-scriptural boorishness of any religion, all
faiths have accepted the fallibility of their holy books, albeit grudgingly,
except for Islam. Christopher Hichens tellingly wrote in his epochal book, '
God is NOT great' that ' Reformation' has meant, for Jewish and Christians, a
minimal willingness to reconsider holy writ as if it were (as Salman Rushdie so
daringly proposed in his turn) something that can be subjected to literary and
textual scrutiny. The number of possible ' Bibles' is now admitted to be
immense and we know for example that the portentous Christian term ' Jehovah'
is the mistranslation of the unuttered spaces between the letters of the Hebrew
' Yahweh.' Yet, no comparable project has ever been undertaken in Quranic
scholarship. No serious attempt has been made to catalogue the discrepancies
between its various editions and manuscripts, and even the most tentative
efforts to do so have been met with almost inquisitional rage.
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Also Read: According To Quran
5:51, Can Muslims Not Accept Non-Muslims As Friends?
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Though
Christianity and Church executed those who questioned the outlandish claims in
Bible during the medieval times, it mellowed down with the passage of time and
accepted that Bible is fraught with factual and scientific errors such as Seven-Day
Creation, Tower of Babel, Human Evolution, A Global Flood, about Stars (The
Bible makes it clear that stars are objects in the sky that will fall down when
Jesus comes back) and many more. Now a SANE Christian will concede that these
are indeed embarrassing 'facts' in his holy book written by our cave-dwelling,
prehistoric ancestors.
But will a
Muslim openly accept that a great many Quranic 'facts' have failed the test of
time and science? Earth and heavens created in six days, Earth created before
stars, similar size of the sun and moon (by the way, modern science has
revealed that 64.3 million moons could fit in the sun!), moon split in two,
meteors as stars fired at devils, Flat-Earthism, the sky/heaven as a ceiling,
humans created from clay, Adam and Eve (Sahih Hadiths say Adam was 60 cubits-or
90 feet-tall!), sperm originating between the backbone and ribs! Humans were
created from a clot of blood, Gender decided at clot stage, Bones formed before
flesh and many more. Critics typically argue that an all-knowing, perfect
communicator would nevertheless have been able to avoid statements in the Quran
that reinforced misconceptions of the time, caused future generations to have
doubts about its perfection, and on a scale that critics contend is an
overwhelming weakness.
Now come
the linguistic and stylistics aspects: Quranic Arabic is a little over
1400-yr-old. In other words, the Quran is a 7th-century scripture. But in
reality, Arabic script itself wasn't standardized until the later part of the
9th century and in the meantime, the undotted and oddly vowelled Quran was
generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it still does because
the written Arabic has two features that make it difficult for an outsider to
learn: it uses dots to distinguish consonants like ' b ' and ' t, ' and in its
original form, it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which could be
rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. This INTERPRETATIVELY AMORPHOUS
and SEMANTICALLY SPECULATIVE nature of written Arabic was keenly observed by an
American scholar of Islam and modern and ancient Arabic when he wrote that the
Arabic words written on the outside of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are
different from any version that appears in the Quran!
Secondly,
Muslims' claim that Quranic Arabic is the quintessential example of the finest
Arabic, spoken by Allah. Sorry, read passages from the books penned by the
blind scholar of Arabic, Dr Taha Hussain, Naguib Mahfouz (1988 Nobel laureate
for Literature), Dr Edward W Said (Jerusalem-born Dr Said could speak better
Arabic than the native speakers in addition to speaking sublime Hebrew) or even
The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia (Mu'allaqat). I'm afraid, pitted against
these exquisite samples of literary and oral Arabic, Quranic Arabic simply
pales in comparison. In a nutshell, Quranic Arabic is too obscure to be
understood even by the scholars of Arabic. It has been further obfuscated by
the exegetes and apologists of the Quran and Islam.
Now the
point is: In spite of all these absurd inaccuracies, the Islamic apologists
will continue to call their Quran, the INFALLIBLE book of Allah and even a mere
suggestion to scrutinise these verses and 'facts' may result in the severance
of your head from your torso.
----
An occasional columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in
comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed
articles to world's premier publications in several languages including
Persian.
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-pluralism/facts-al-furqan-quran-/d/126950
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