Re: Discussion about "My Ordeal with the Qur'an"
Reply #874 - June 19, 2010, 05:17 PM
Chapter 4 - The Miraculous Nature of the Qurʾān (cont...)
Part 4 - Where is the Eloquence of the Qurʾān? (cont...)
5. Continuity is almost never maintained except in the stories and some of the legislative verses. Beyond that you see the verses scattered to the four winds (Qur'an, Sura 18, verses 46-51):
Wealth and sons are adornment of the life of this world,but the things that endure, good deeds, are best in the sight of your Lord, as reward, and and better in respect of hope.
On the Day We shall remove the mountains, and you will see the earth protruding and We shall gather them, all together, and We shall not leave out any one of them.
And they shall be brought before your Lord, standing in ranks: Now certainly you have come to Us as We created you at first. Nay, you thought that We had not appointed to you a time of the fulfillment of the promise.
And the Book shall be placed, then you will see the guilty fearing from what is in it, and they will say: Ah! woe to us! what a book is this! it does not omit a small one nor a great one, but numbers them (all); and what they had done they shall find present (there); and your Lord does not deal unjustly with anyone.
And when We said to the angels: Make obeisance to Adam; they made obeisance but Iblis (did it not). He was of the jinn, so he transgressed the commandment of his Lord. What! would you then take him and his offspring for friends rather than Me, and they are your enemies? Evil is (this) change for the unjust.
I did not make them witnesses of the creation of the heavens and the earth, nor of the creation of their own souls; nor could I take those who lead (others) astray for aiders.
One Day He will say: Call on those whom you considered to be My associates. So they shall call on them, but they shall not answer them, and We will cause a separation between them.
(18:46-51)
6. Strangely this disjointedness is not confined to imbalance in the sequence of the verses on a single page making it into an amazing assemblage of disparate verses, but this imbalance intrudes upon a single verse separating it's two ends and resulting in the last part being at odds with the first part
"To Him is referred the knowledge of the hour, and there come not forth any of the fruits from their sheaths, nor does a female bear, nor does she give birth, except with His knowledge. And on the day when He calls out to them: Where are My partners? They will say, we confess to you, not one of us is a witness (for them)." (41:47)
What has the end of this verse got to do with the first part? Why is it that those who harp on about the eloquence and miraculous nature of the Qur'an ignore this verse and its like and limit themselves to the excellent verses which no-one - regardless of his position on the Qur'an - can avoid warming to willingly or not? As for the other verses - the shaky, unstable and disordered verses that don't withstand scrutiny, they pass over them, oblivious and feigning to be oblivious. While if they do deal with them, they repair them and weave threads like a spider's web to camouflage them and conceal their flaws. The masses fall for that and even the select do, but it's inconceivable that a rare, selective shortcoming could make the truly critical eye fall for it: Even though this shortcoming obscures the truth and makes one turn a blind eye, in order to play safe.
For the believer - even if he is amongst the experts, or experts of experts - he will see things through his desire and not his senses, with his heart and not his mind. Only the unbiased inquiring eye - and few are they! - is able to penetrate deeply into matters and probe into the truth of things, until in a few blinks of an eye, the full radiance of the sun is revealed, or the true essence of things. A spider's web is indeed a spider's web. A building cannot stand upright with it, nor can it keep the suppressed in check. There is no substance to it, nor can it withstand scrutiny. However our silence dignifies it. So who is with me in removing the silence from it. Indeed the weakest of houses is the house of the spider! (Qur'anic ref)
Topic: Discussion about "My Ordeal with the Qur'an"