Furthering Syed Kamran Mirza's Critique of The Quran
By
Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
1 June 2024
Mr Ghulam
Mohiuddin has rightly quoted Syed Kamran Mirza, who has a Ph.D. in biological
science and who taught in the University in Bangladesh. He says, "The Holy
Quran is full of inaccuracies, contradictions, inconsistencies, redundancies, a
lack of chronologies or chapters, grammatical errors etc. One can find hundreds of
contradictions/errors/inconsistencies in the Holy Quran and the above mentioned
Ayats are just selected samples from the Quran. But still, it is a
miracle to those who are blindfolded bigots."
It's nor
required for the western and American scholars of the Quran and Arabic studies
to reject Islam's 'holy' book as written by a band of uneducated individuals
and desert yokels. In fact, any sane person, without religious prejudice and
stupor, will be able to see the glaring inconsistencies in the Quran. The book
miserably lacks coherence and its Arabic is also flawed. I'll come to that
later.
The problem
with zealots, particularly Muslim fanatics, is that they've conditioned
themselves to accept a flawed and inflexible belief, rather an axiom, that the
Book descended from heaven via Muhammad and no adulteration took place in the
process. In short, the Quran's perceived infallibility is its undoing. The
followers of all other man-made faiths have conceded that their respective
Books are flawed. But Muslims are morbidly obstinate on this count. So, a host
of apologists and exegetes cropped up to explain away the dubious verses right
from the inception of Islam nearly 1500 years ago. They've been trying tooth
and nail to make you believe that whatever is written in the Quran is
irreproachable. To them, the Quran is Caesar's wife, above suspicion.
Now the
fundamental question is: Is Islam a separate religion at all? It initially
fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or special creed, and is forever
identified with their language and their impressive later conquests, which,
while not as striking as those of the young Alexander of Macedonia, certainly
conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will until they petered out at the
fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when examined is not
much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarism, helping
itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. It
makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or 'surrender' as
a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers
into the bargain. There's nothing -absolutely nothing- in its teachings that
can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.
Now we come
to the language of the Quran. The written Arabic language 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. Vastly different readings even of Utthman's version
were enabled by these variations. Arabic script itself was not standardized
until the later part of the 9th-century, and in the meantime the undotted and
oddly voweled Quran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as
it still does. The Quran was written in the Arabic of 7th-century and prior to
that when its script was flawed and inadequate. That's why, unprejudiced
scholars of Quranic Arabic often quip, " Does Allah speak incorrect
Arabic? " Yet, fanatic Muslims will aver that the Quranic Arabic is
unblemished and impeccable. To take one instance that can hardly be called
negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem are different from any version that appears in the Koran.
When
Muslims say that the Arabic of Quran is impeccable as Allah speaks flawless
Arabic, it becomes imperative to analyse Koranic Arabic from a linguistic
perspective.
The great
German scholar Theodor Noldeke pointed out the stylistic weaknesses of the
Koran long ago:
'On the
whole, while many parts of the Koran undoubtedly have considerable rhetorical
power, even over an unbelieving reader, the book aesthetically considered, is
by no means a first rate performance.....Let's look at some of the more
extended narratives. It has already been noticed how vehement and abrupt they
are where they ought to be characterised by epic repose. Indispensable links,
both in expression and in the sequence of events, are often omitted, so that to
understand these histories is sometimes far easier for us than for those who
heard them first, because we know most of them from better sources. Along with
this, there's a good deal of superfluous verbiage; and nowhere do we find a
steady advance in the narration. Contrast in these respects the history of
Joseph (xii) and its glaring improprieties with the admirably conceived and
admirably executed story in Genesis. Similar faults are found in the non
narrative portions of the Koran. The connection of ideas is extremely loose and
even the syntax betrays great awkwardness. Anacolutha (want of syntactical
sequence; when the latter part of a sentence doesn't grammatically fit the
earlier) are of frequent occurrence and cannot be explained as conscious
literary devices. Many sentences begin with a "when" or "on the
day when" which seems to hover in the air, so that commentators are driven
to supply a " think of this" or some such ellipsis. Again, there's no
great literary skill evinced in the frequent and needless harping on the same
words and phrases; in xviii, for example " till that" occurs no fewer
than eight times. Muhammad in short, is not in any case, a master of style.'
Further, In
verse 162 of surah 4, which begins, " But those among them who're
well-groomed in knowledge, the believers....and the performers of the prayer
and the payers of the alms-tax," the word for '' performance '' is in the
accusative case; whereas it ought to be in the nominative case, like the words
for " well-grounded", " believers ", and "
payers." In verse 9 of surah 49, " If two parties of believers have
started to fight each other, make peace between them," the verb meaning
" have started to fight" is in the plural, whereas it ought to be in
the dual like its subject " two parties." (In Arabic, as in other
languages, verbs can be conjugated not only in the singular and plural, but
also in the dual, when the subject is numbered at two). In verse 63 of surah
20, where Pharaoh's people say of Moses and his brother Aaron, " These two
are magicians," the word for " these two" (Hadhane) is in
the nominative case; whereas it ought to be in the accusative case (Hadhayne)
because it comes after an introductory particle of emphasis.
Iranian
ex-Muslim scholar and now an atheist, Ali Dashti concludes this example by
saying,
Othman and
Aesha are reported to have read the word as Hadhayne. The comment of a
Muslim scholar illustrates the fanaticism and intellectual ossification of
later times: " Since in the unanimous opinion of the Muslims, the pages
bound in this volume and called the Quran are god's word, and since there can
be no error in god's word, the report that Othman and Aesha read Hadhayne
instead of Hadhane is wicked and false." Ali Dashti estimates that
there are more than one hundred Koranic aberrations from the normal rules and
structure of Arabic.
The problem
with most of the Muslims is that they read and recite Quranic verses (the way
Hindus parrot Sanskrit hymns) without understanding the Arabic language and
even those who know a smattering of it, think that their Allah follows
different rules of grammar!
There's
also a psycho-theological need for Muslims to assert repeatedly that the Quran
is divine and consistent. With this pathologically fanatic assertion of divine
infallibility of the Quran all the time, Muslims try to prove that while other
scriptures are flawed because their followers themselves have conceded, the
Quran remains unique as a flawless screed. This underscores the divinity and
greatness of the book and faith (read Islam). A clever logic, one must say.
-----
A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul
is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He
has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several
languages including Persian.
URL:
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