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 Topic: the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran

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  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     OP - December 11, 2014, 05:41 AM
    as we've all heard from muslim apologists, since the Quran  and the Hebrew/Christian bibles are often at odds with one another, then the explanation given for the Quran's discrepancy with previous scriptures is that the previous scriptures were corrupted. thus any disagreements the Quran had with the previous scriptures are due to not of the Quran's mistakes, but the corruption of the previous texts.

    but is this true? This link here claims that the idea of the corruption of the text of the Hebrew/Christian bibles only came about 350-400 years after Muhammad's time. they even have a tradition purportedly from Ibn Abbas that no man can change the text.

    I find the claim that the author(s) of the Quran believed in the corruption of the previous scriptures to be strange, since in many instances the Quran praised the "Taurat" "Zabur" and "Injil" as light, guidance, "furqan", etc., often without explanation or context that it implies to an original one, and that the ones present at the time of the composition of the Quran is corrupted. If one were to hold the opinion that the author(s) of the Quran believe that the past scriptures were corrupted, then I don't think certain verses of the Quran would make sense, like 10:94: "So if you are in doubt about that which We have revealed to you, then ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you" as if those reading the corrupted Scriptures, with the ideas that Ishmael is a wild ass, Jesus as the Son of God, etc being in them, would validate the message of Islam. also some verses in surah 5, telling Jews and Christians to judge by their books (5:43, 5:47), since it would be strange that "Allah" is made to order Jews and Christians to judge by a corrupt book?

    so is the claim that previous scriptures are corrupted Quranic? or non-Quranic?
    "we stand firm calling to allah all the time,
    we let them know - bang! bang! - coz it's dawah time!"
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #1 - December 11, 2014, 08:55 PM
    The Qur'an has a notoriously contradictory attitude towards the People of the Book.  Generally speaking, I take it as being fairly ecumenical, taking a position that all of these texts are pretty much saying the same thing and everybody knows it and should agree on it.  To that attitude, some parts of the Qur'an add some Christian anti-Jewish sentiment about how the Jews have added some false things to their Torah.  On the Christian side, the Qur'an openly quarrels with the trinitarian Christian *interpretation* of the Injil, but does not seem to argue that the Injil itself is somehow corrupted.  And that is entirely understandable, given that the trinitarian interpretation of the Gospels is hardly self evident, and took long to develop as a historical contingency!
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #2 - December 12, 2014, 01:27 AM
    The New Testament does speak openly about Jesus being the Son of God though and the Quran rails against that. All the gospels explicitly mention Jesus as the Son of God so this isn't merely an interpretation of the Gospels that the Quran is railing against (unless by Injil it means something other than the canonical gospels or the diatesseron).
    "I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
    -Thomas Paine
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #3 - December 12, 2014, 02:45 AM
    That is true, but the NT also calls Adam a son of God and says that Jesus's followers will be sons of God ... The term is not being used in the strong trinitarian sense that it later took on, although it does lean to that way.  The Qur'anic rhetoric is mostly about not taking this literally in a family way ... Not that the text is corrupted.  In other words, I don't see that the Qur'an itself has any sense that it is contradicting th Christian gospels on this point.  It just thinks that Christians are making claims they shouldn't, and which are a misunderstanding of the eternal message.
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #4 - December 12, 2014, 02:55 AM
    You think there were Christians that took it to mean that Jesus was literally the Son of God as in biologically?
    "I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
    -Thomas Paine
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #5 - December 12, 2014, 03:32 AM
    The Qur'an certainly rails against exactly that, but I think it is trying to show how the biological metaphor is misleading and conveys false ideas ... Not that it literally treats Christians as holding to a literal biological view, more akin to saying you shouldn't say 'face of God' because God doesn't actually have a face.  So the Qur'an considers people to have been led into shirk by the biological terminology, which was not far from the truth!
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #6 - December 12, 2014, 03:48 AM
    The thing is the Quran condemns Christians who say Jesus is the son of God (as well as Jews who say Ezra is the son of God?). It doesn't qualify it any beyond saying that they are disbelievers for saying Jesus is the son of God. This seems strange that the Quran would be so against calling Jesus a title that was even used in gospels to refer to him.

    And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse are they!  9:30

    I think you may be too strongly convicted that the author(s) of the Quran were fully familiar with the gospels (or the combined gospel: the diatesseron). Perhaps they just didn't realize that such terminology was used in the gospels themselves.
    "I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
    -Thomas Paine
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #7 - December 12, 2014, 04:17 AM
    No, that's my point ... They don't seem to care about the Gospel text.  They care about a religious argument, and don't seem aware that it might contradict the Gospels.  In other words, they don't seem to believe that they are saying something that means the Gospel is corrupted.  Rather they are focused on what the Christians *say*, which is wrong and misleading, they shouldn't say it.

    But this is just my take!  It is very very far from clear!  And like I mentioned from the start, the Qur'an takes different positions at different points.
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #8 - December 12, 2014, 04:26 AM
    Sorry if I got your point wrong. I thought you were arguing that the Quran is not fighting against the title of Son of God but merely how the Christians were using it.

    So you think the author was unaware of the gospels using the title or do you think the authors didn't care if they contradicted the gospels?
    "I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
    -Thomas Paine
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #9 - December 15, 2014, 03:33 AM
    Zoatar, as you yourself have pointed out, some of the crude anti-trinitarian screeds in the Quran are clearly later interpolations. The base text of the Quran was fairly ecumenical, a la Donner "the believers movement", but it was later overlayed by later "Islamic" interpolations to make it more strenuously anti-trinitarian and Christologicaly "Arian."
    إطلب العلم ولو في الصين

    Es sitzt keine Krone so fest und so hoch,
    Der mutige Springer erreicht sie doch.

    I don't give a fuck about your war, or your President.
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #10 - December 15, 2014, 05:19 PM
    Yep, and I look forward to scholars disentangling these attitudes and how they reflect on the Qur'an's composition.  It is somewhat of a scandal that scholars have contented themselves for so long with trying to explain the contradictory attitudes and interpolations by fitting them within the traditional biography of Mohammed's life, rather than as you would in any other context -- explaining them as dueling factions who wrote and modified the text to suit their own ideological concerns.  Instead of "what Mohammed was saying" about the texts of these other groups, it should be better analyzed as (a) what the original texts were; (b) how they were modified to suit specific ideologies; and (c) what the characteristic features of such modifications/interpolations are.

    David Powers' book is one of the first really sophisticated examples of that type of analysis.

    The baseline assumption, I would think, is that the Qur'an consists of pre-Islamic Christian texts that were modified by the Believers in the wake of Mohammed's death, in stages.  The 'Meccan/Medinan' division is spurious (if read as historical background rather than textual distinction), and likely reflects earlier and later stages in the believers' exertion of military force and political command.  The so-called Medinan surahs were probably the most heavily re-worked to fit the ideology of the believers in the early conquest era.

    So when you talk about attitude towards Christians and Christian texts, what you see are actually several attitudes, reflecting this complex composition and historical background.  In that regard, I can't wait for these items to come out -- it is mind-boggling that such articles/books were not written decades ago:

    https://www.academia.edu/3372907/A_Messianic_Controversy_Behind_the_Making_of_Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_as_the_Last_Prophet_2015_Upcoming_Conference_Paper

    http://www.academia.edu/7050551/Re-Imagining_Islam_in_the_Late_7th_Century_with_Guillaume_Dye_2017_Upcoming_Book
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #11 - December 15, 2014, 05:38 PM
    Is the Mecca Medina distinction a recent apologetic invention to "explain" obvious differences?
    When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.


    A.A. Milne,

    "We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #12 - December 15, 2014, 06:00 PM
    As far as I know it is a relatively archaic distinction that probably emerged in the Abassid caliphate, alongside the sirah.  But I don't know the history of the distinction within Islamic exegesis.
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #13 - December 15, 2014, 08:17 PM
    Ironically after I typed the above Zeca posted an awesome Crone article that I'd never read before, and which makes the point that the "hegra" concept in Early Islam was focused entirely on militant expansion outside of Arabia, and was limited to Arabs.

    https://www.hs.ias.edu/files/Crone_Articles/Crone_First_Century_Concept_of_Higra.pdf

    The hegra concept was subsequently re-interpreted to confinement within Mohammed's own life, and allegedly terminated at the conquest of Mecca.  According to the traditional Muslim narrative, this original meaning of Mecca was then wrongly distorted by the Umayyads into a concept of militant Arab expansion, and later 'restored' by Abassid exegetes to its meaning within Mo's own life.  Madelung (who pretty much exemplifies the failure of traditional Early Islamic studies) follows that traditional view.  Btw, it is amazing that the word "hegra" is not even used by the Qur'an ... rather it talks about those who have emigrated, the duty to emigrate, etc., but there is no "hegra."

    As Crone says, the 'classical' Muslim concept of hegra as Mo's flight to Mecca (formed in Abassid era) appears to be completely backwards, the archaic concept of hegra was one of militant expansion, jihad.  It is precisely in the context of open-ended hegra by the Arabs that much of the Qur'anic text was presumably composed -- and this period of militant hegra went on for decades after Mohammed's death!

    What is particularly amazing to me is how obvious such points are, or should be, to any critical reader of the Qur'an, and yet how blinded Western scholars have been by the classical Islamic narratives.
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #14 - December 15, 2014, 08:33 PM
    Quote from: Zaotar on December 15, 2014, 08:17 PM
    Ironically after I typed the above Zeca posted an awesome Crone article that I'd never read before, and which makes the point that the "hegra" concept in Early Islam was focused entirely on militant expansion outside of Arabia, and was limited to Arabs.

    https://www.hs.ias.edu/files/Crone_Articles/Crone_First_Century_Concept_of_Higra.pdf

    The hegra concept was subsequently re-interpreted to confinement within Mohammed's own life, and allegedly terminated at the conquest of Mecca.  According to the traditional Muslim narrative, this original meaning of Mecca was then wrongly distorted by the Umayyads into a concept of militant Arab expansion, and later 'restored' by Abassid exegetes to its meaning within Mo's own life.  Madelung (who pretty much exemplifies the failure of traditional Early Islamic studies) follows that traditional view.  Btw, it is amazing that the word "hegra" is not even used by the Qur'an ... rather it talks about those who have emigrated, the duty to emigrate, etc., but there is no "hegra."

    As Crone says, the 'classical' Muslim concept of hegra as Mo's flight to Mecca (formed in Abassid era) appears to be completely backwards, the archaic concept of hegra was one of militant expansion, jihad.  It is precisely in the context of open-ended hegra by the Arabs that much of the Qur'anic text was presumably composed -- and this period of militant hegra went on for decades after Mohammed's death!

    What is particularly amazing to me is how obvious such points are, or should be, to any critical reader of the Qur'an, and yet how blinded Western scholars have been by the classical Islamic narratives.


    So technically all those that go on hajj should be expanding the area of Islam's influence, not "going back" to Mecca (putting aside arguments against a Mecca centred origin of Islam)?
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #15 - December 15, 2014, 08:41 PM
    That's the point Crone discusses, the duty to emigrate in Allah's way (which the Qur'an is chock full of) got 'abrogated' in classical Muslim exegesis by declaring it ended with Mo's conquest of Mecca.  If we were really good Qur'anists, however, and really followed the earliest historical records about the hegra, we'd all be going out and emigrating in the cause of Allah, along with undertaking jihad.

    Put differently, Islamic State is doing it correctly.  The Muslims going on the Hajj are doing it wrong.
  • the veracity of previous scriptures according to the quran
     Reply #16 - December 15, 2014, 08:45 PM
    Quote from: Zaotar on December 15, 2014, 08:41 PM
    That's the point Crone discusses, the duty to emigrate in Allah's way (which the Qur'an is chock full of) got 'abrogated' in classical Muslim exegesis by declaring it ended with Mo's conquest of Mecca.  If we were really good Qur'anists, however, and really followed the earliest historical records about the hegra, we'd all be going out and emigrating in the cause of Allah, along with undertaking jihad.

    Put differently, Islamic State is doing it correctly.  The Muslims going on the Hajj are doing it wrong.


    Good info here for all readers of this site, I shall keep on asking the questions  Tongue!

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