One argument to disprove the Quran

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- hatoush
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One argument to disprove the Quran
Reply #90 - May 20, 2015, 02:26 AM

Quote from: happymurtad on May 19, 2015, 12:33 PM
Abrogation. The idea that the everlasting, all-knowing lord of the entire universe could not even keep on track with the same game plan for 23 years without changing his mind. And as “a day with Allah is like 1000 years of how humans reckon,” it would mean that from his perspective, the wise Allah could not keep his words valid for more than a half an hour without changing his mind.

many modern Muslim exegesis tend to downplays the concept of abrogation as it does not make any sense if you assume a divine inspiration the Quran text.

for me personally, i always find it hard to believe those stories in the Quran ( virgin birth, noah's ark, moses' stick that transformed to snake, Jonah living inside a whale !!!!).

sura 111, abu lahab , i find it extremely a poor taste !!!, basically a personal attack on a person who did not believed in muhammed teaching!!!. why would God do that !!!!
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Reply #91 - May 20, 2015, 02:38 AM

Actually, as zoatar has pointed out, Abu Lahab doesn't sound like are real name, especially when the Arabic uses of "Abu" in jokes and quips are considered. Abu Lahab is actually just a stereotypical hell-bound person, the "biography" of Abu Lahab was most likely made to explain these verses in the Quran.

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Reply #92 - May 20, 2015, 02:51 AM

I read Zoatar argument before, and i find it more satisfying !!!,
but unfortunately what is really important is not what the original meaning was, but what Tafsir is saying, but who knows maybe in the not distant future, we will have a new English translation based on the text itself, and not a 9th century understanding.
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Reply #93 - May 20, 2015, 03:01 AM

Secular scholars of Judaism consider the original book of Jonah to be a satirical novella written by Jews against prophetic excesses.

The book appears to have worked, because when next we see Jewish literature (Dead Sea Scrolls, Enoch 1-36, Daniel, etc etc etc) the living prophets are done. They are a thing of the future which means, a thing of the past to be looked forward to as a thing of the future. Other Jews of that generation made up "prophetic" books that they falsely ascribed ("pseudepigraphically") to men of the past like Enoch and Levi. Either way there was no question of, say, John the Baptist writing his own new Prophetic book. If he's even dared he'd have been baptised himself, in the middle of the Dead Sea with heavy rocks tied around his ankles.

Second Temple Judaism has its "sectarian milieu" too. Actually I think that's what got John Wansbrough started; why should secular scholars of Islam treat the formative years of Islam any differently than secular scholars of Judaism treat the Dead Sea Scrolls?
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Reply #94 - May 20, 2015, 03:08 AM

i see you are a fan of John Wansbrough's style, I have no idea what you are talking about.

by the way, we have a Muslim scholar (Mohammed arkoun) who argue that those stories in the Quran are simply myths, used to convey a message, and he argue that in an oral societies, myths are a powerful tool to transmit ideas.
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Reply #95 - May 20, 2015, 03:09 AM

Quote from: countjulian on May 20, 2015, 02:38 AM
Actually, as zoatar has pointed out, Abu Lahab doesn't sound like are real name, especially when the Arabic uses of "Abu" in jokes and quips are considered. Abu Lahab is actually just a stereotypical hell-bound person, the "biography" of Abu Lahab was most likely made to explain these verses in the Quran.

neither Muhammad of hadith or Quran was a original name ., The real name of Abu Lahab (literal meaning “the Father of Flame”) was `Abd al `Uzza b. `Abd al Muttalib. He was nicknamed Abu Lahab by his father apparently his father was Prophet's maternal uncle.... Stories are told to children that his wife apparently the one who threw garbage over the wall into the Prophet's house and laid thorny bushes on his pathway.

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Reply #96 - May 20, 2015, 03:18 AM

Quote from: hatoush on May 20, 2015, 03:08 AM
.................we have a Muslim scholar (Mohammed arkoun) ....................

dr. Mohammed arkoun .. died 5 years ago...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt6UG1ruwGM

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Reply #97 - May 20, 2015, 03:39 AM

LOL hatoush. I guess you got me there.

I was saying that in the age when Jonah was written, which was I think in the 400s BCE or thereabouts, the Jews had lost their independence - they were under Persian rule then - and some Jews were putting themselves out as prophets. Haggai was written around this time. There were certainly other prophetic oracles which have not come down to us.

So someone wrote Jonah to depict a prophet whose prophecy did *not* come true, because everyone was already living righteous lives (due to warnings by real prophets and/or the Torah). The book of Jonah was kind of the Don Quixote of its day.

https://books.google.com/books?id=1iNGKntf0VYC&pg=PA92

As for the rest of it, "Daniel" is not a prophetic book; it contains an apocalyptic book. Prophecy and apocalyptic are different genres of literature. The notion of prophecy is that prophets warn what happens when you do X. Apocalyptic says, what is going to happen is going to happen no matter what. The latter is usually forged, so someone like Enoch will "predict" the whole Hasmonaean era, despite that Enoch lived in 5700 BCE or whatever it was, and presumably wasn't speaking Second Temple Hebrew.
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Reply #98 - May 20, 2015, 03:47 AM

thanks Zimriel, that's much better
another question if you don't mind, i have reading your posts here, and i am rather perplex, i can't figure out if you are a revisionist or a neo-traditionalist or something else at all

do you think it is safe to assume that the Quran did emerge from the Hijaz, or do you think the traditions has not even a historical core framework ?
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Reply #99 - May 20, 2015, 04:20 AM

Fred Donner called himself a "moderate revisionist" once. I agree with Donner on the origins of the "Believers'" community. But I sharply part with Donner on the Qur'an. I think that a lot of the Qur'an was written after, sometimes many decades after, the Arab prophet died. I do not go as far as Wansbrough. So I suppose I'm a less-moderate revisionist.
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Reply #100 - May 20, 2015, 04:26 AM

even Donner now talks about post muhammed Quran ( ok at least ayats !!!).

what about sanaa manuscript, we are talking here about 650 AD ? or Am I wrong ?
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Reply #101 - May 20, 2015, 04:40 AM

Well wait for 20 more years most of these college teaching scholars will start questioning "THE EXISTENCE Muhammad" itself..

what all we need is total freedom of expression and freedom to explore the Middle East History , Archaeology, geology and biology..

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Reply #102 - May 20, 2015, 04:53 AM

The Sanaa manuscripts don't have dates actually written on them; they are dated based on Arabic script palaeography and on radiocarbon-dating those sheets of parchment they are written on. So when they say "650" (/30) they are saying that is the EARLIEST they could have been written.

For instance, I could - if I had to - scrape off the letters of a parchment that had been used for something else; and I could - if I wanted to - write a lot of King James Olde English text upon it, using handwriting from the Middle Ages. This text would look old. But you and I would know, because I just told you, that the text was bogus; that I just wrote it right now.

I wouldn't however be able to teleport a piece of paper from the future; and I wouldn't be able to predict the sorts of font a future scholar might use.
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Reply #103 - May 20, 2015, 05:30 PM

I have a question about the San'aa manuscripts: I read a Muslim scholar saying that he has his "sources" within academia and that they have found that the manuscripts do not refute the traditional narrative. Is that true?
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Reply #104 - May 20, 2015, 06:03 PM

It depends on what you mean refute. The core text of the Sana'a manuscripts are pretty similar to the Quran we have today, but there are variants in some verses. Some suwar are missing if memory serves, which is common for early Qurans. It does not give us the impression that this was a totally separate book from our modern Quran, but on the other hand it does show that in certain respects the text was not fixed and that the version we have today is definitely not the perfect "imitable" Quran handed down from God to Mo.

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Reply #105 - May 20, 2015, 06:04 PM

There is a thread about this subject curiousarabgirl. In my opinion, the truth is somewhere in the middle. The Sanaa palimpsest shows some changes that have been made to the 'Uthmanic' standard Qur'an. But they are relatively minor changes, scribal-type changes, added words here and there, changes word order, different readings of the rasm, etc. They are not totally different surahs or radically different theological concepts or anything like that. Also, the Sanaa text is not the 'real' or 'earlier' Qur'an, instead it is another branch on the same tree. It is a relatively late 7th century Qur'an, and both it and the standard Qur'an appear to have deviated from a somewhat earlier shared ancestor manuscript, but their deviations from that manuscript are not very exciting (so in this, I would agree with Muslims who say it doesn't show any *radical* changes, not theologically significant changes). It is pretty good evidence against the 'unchanged perfect Qur'an,' but it doesn't show dramatic differences.

The dating of the manuscript is very contentious, but I personally believe it was written relatively late in the 7th century (same as how Francois Deroche dates it), and that both it and the 'standard' Qur'an are based on a sort of earlier master compilation produced around 650-660, not really much different than the traditional Islamic chronology.
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Reply #106 - May 20, 2015, 06:06 PM

Quote from: Zimriel on May 20, 2015, 04:53 AM
The Sanaa manuscripts don't have dates actually written on them; they are dated based on Arabic script palaeography and on radiocarbon-dating those sheets of parchment they are written on. So when they say "650" (/30) they are saying that is the EARLIEST they could have been written.

For instance, I could - if I had to - scrape off the letters of a parchment that had been used for something else; and I could - if I wanted to - write a lot of King James Olde English text upon it, using handwriting from the Middle Ages. This text would look old. But you and I would know, because I just told you, that the text was bogus; that I just wrote it right now.

I wouldn't however be able to teleport a piece of paper from the future; and I wouldn't be able to predict the sorts of font a future scholar might use.

And it's also good to keep in mind that paper and papyrus was incredibly expensive in ancient times, so the fact that the paper was created on such and such a date does not mean that it must have been used for written in that year. The text itself is a palimpset, a papyurs on which the words were washed away so that the papyrus could be recycled. The palimpset is the actual imprint of the early writing underneath the ink on the papyrus, which we can read now only with radio and x-rays. This recycling of old papyri was incredibly common, so it's totally possible that the palimpset itself was written long after the paper was produced.

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Reply #107 - May 20, 2015, 06:12 PM

Supposedly there are some new articles that will be coming out about this subject. Dye is supposed to be writing one of them.

Deroche doesn't like carbon dating because it keeps getting manuscript dates badly wrong; if I recall, he sent some 8th century Qur'anic manuscripts for testing and the carbon dates came back in the mid 6th century, which would be preposterous on many levels. Something about carbon dating is not ready for prime time in this context, the dates are commonly too early for some reason (it may be the reasons that CJ gives above).
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Reply #108 - May 20, 2015, 06:13 PM

Arabic wiki shows some of the differences between the standard Quran and the Sana'a palimpset:

http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D8%AE%D8%B7%D9%88%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%AA_%D8%B5%D9%86%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%A1

Amongst other things you'll notice the rasm here is a much earlier form of the Arabic script which lacks the dots and ta7arrikaat.

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Reply #109 - May 20, 2015, 06:50 PM

Quote from: Zaotar on May 20, 2015, 06:04 PM

The dating of the manuscript is very contentious, but I personally believe it was written relatively late in the 7th century (same as how Francois Deroche dates it), and that both it and the 'standard' Qur'an are based on a sort of earlier master compilation produced around 650-660, not really much different than the traditional Islamic chronology.

if we only know the source material for the master compilation !!!
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Reply #110 - May 20, 2015, 07:08 PM

Thanks Zaotar and countjulian. I had the feeling that The Atlantic article on this topic was somewhat sensationalist so I appreciate the clarification.

@hatoush From the very limited knowledge I have on early historical Islam, my impression is that finding the source material is virtually impossible?
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Reply #111 - May 20, 2015, 07:23 PM

@hatoush From the very limited knowledge I have on early historical Islam, my impression is that finding the source material is virtually impossible?

that's right !! unfortunately, that why works done by scholars ( Zaotar is one of them) is very important, just from analyzing the text, we can have a broad idea about the author (s), and the context. but I am confident , progress will be made
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