The Qur’an might now be the most famous book never read (next
to the Bible). The Qur’an was supposedly written by Muhammad over a period of
23 years beginning in 610 AD, starting when Muhammad was 40, and concluding in
632 AD. The Quran is composed of verses (Ayah) that make up 114 chapters (Sura)
of unequal length which are classified either as Meccan or Medinan depending
upon the place and time of their claimed revelation. The interesting thing
about Muhammad is that during the time that these portions of the Qur'an were
written, they appear to change in tone from somewhat benevolent to outright
murderous and violent. It seems that in Muhammad’s movement (The Hijra/Hajj,
fleeing) through the desert from Mecca to Medina something changed him
drastically. That is why the Qur’an is often viewed as nearly two distinct
documents, one more peaceful than the other: Mecca (young and peaceful) and
Medina (older and more violent).
Most Muslims will agree that the Qur'an we see today was
canonized by Uthman Ibn Affan (653-656). Upon the canonization of the Qur'an,
Uthman had the other codices that existed at the time destroyed and burnt. I
suggest this is to standardize all text to make a claim to perfect divine
inspiration while simultaneously destroying all manuscripts and copies that
were obvious evidences of contradiction and discrepancies. This is why we now
have no extant copies of the Qur’an and no disputes because all evidence to the
contrary was destroyed centuries ago to cover Islam’s tracks so to speak. The
divinely inspired accuracy of the Qur’an is not evidence of divine inspiration
but rather evidence of duplicity and deceptive use of corroborating evidences.
The Qur’an contains 114 Suras or chapters. If you pick up a Qur’an
and thumb through it, you will notice very quickly that the long chapters are
in the beginning and the short chapters are all at the end. The only
organizational structure in the Qur’an is large to small…that’s it. That’s why
the Qur’an is so confusing. A feature that stands out is how repetitious it is.
The other thing that is striking is the Qur’an’s duality or contradictory
nature. This cancellation of one verse by another later verse is called
abrogation. But abrogation does not cancel or negate the verse because if the
earlier verse was by Allah then that verse is true because, Allah by
definition, cannot tell a lie. The Qur’an is contradictory, but both sides of
the contradiction are true. This turns out to be an insight into the mind of
Islam because it means that Muslims can hold in their mind two contradictory
ideas and accept both of them as true. This explains how Muslims after
September 11th were able to say Islam is a peaceful religion. A peaceful
religion doesn’t send out jihadists to kill 3,000 people. This of course is a
violation of the first axiom of logic called the Law of Non-contradiction. This
then begs the question. If Allah is omniscient and perfect, how can he also be
contradictory?
No comments:
Post a Comment