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Theme Changer

 Topic: And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.

 (Read 4846 times)
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  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     OP - January 19, 2015, 04:37 PM

    Ahmad ... what is it?  Why is it there?  Well, many people aren't aware that it's not entirely there.  What do I mean?

    Here's the solitary Qur'anic reference to Ahmad, in translation, which is is Surah 61:6, in Salih Int'l translation.

    "And [mention] when Jesus, the son of Mary, said, "O children of Israel, indeed I am the messenger of Allah to you confirming what came before me of the Torah and bringing good tidings of a messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad." But when he came to them with clear evidences, they said, "This is obvious magic."

    But the translation is misleading, since the rasm here literally just means 'whose name is more praiseworthy.'  Many translators have thus just translated this literally.  Others have taken "Ahmad" to be a sort of variant of MHMD.  None of this is very satisfactory.  Who is Jesus talking about here?  Why will this other one have a name which is "more praiseworthy" than Jesus?

    A key point:  This is not the only version of 61:6!  Islamic tradition tells us that the Ubayy reading of 61:6 was remarkably different, and used the following phrase instead of "his name is Ahmad":  "whose community will be the last community and by whom God will place the seal on the prophets and messengers."

    This is interesting in many ways.  First, it parallels 33:40, considered by many a late interpolation (stating "MHMD is not the father of any of your men" but "the seal of the prophets").  Second, it strongly suggests that these ayahs regarding the name of the prophet were (1) very late and (2) heavily monkeyed with by later redactors.  Surely the parallel 33:40 statement, with the use of the term seal of the prophets, came from the same environment of Qur'anic editing and redaction that produced the Ubayy variant.  At this very late phase of Qur'anic composition, the text had to be altered to reflect the prophet's identity and status as 'final prophet' of 'the last community.'  But this was done in an environment where the text had already achieved some distribution, so that version control was failed, and multiple textual versions existed with an evolving use of the prophet's name.  The Ubayy version 'cleaned up' the older 61:6 statement, which had become embarrassingly contradictory, with the orthodox 33:40 statement, albeit it was apparently embarrassed enough by the naming conflict to delete the name MHMD entirely (rather than just replace it).

    Fascinating!  And Ubayy's variant of this critical aya deserves to be better known, particularly given that that Sanaa I palimpsest has confirmed that the reported 'companion' variants were probably almost all real variants from various real Qur'anic codices (whether they actually represented 'companion' texts, on the other hand, is very doubtful).
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #1 - January 19, 2015, 04:49 PM

    version control

    A precursor of portion control?
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #2 - January 19, 2015, 04:54 PM

    A prefiguration of #jesuisahmed, of course.

    And which of the blessings of your Lord would you deny? I mean, predicting Twitter and everything.
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #3 - January 20, 2015, 10:14 AM

    Quality post as usual, Zaotar. What are you studying again?
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #4 - January 20, 2015, 06:31 PM

    Ahmad ... what is it?  Why is it there?  ..............

    what Zaotar  discussing here is very relevant to  Gandalf Op _ Quran changes - link please

    Brain washed intellectual Islamic parrots often parrot statements like

      Gabriel Dictated to alleged Prophet of Islam and  He simply dictated the Qur'an to his followers who memorized it and wrote it down with no editing after 10 or 20 years of Muhammad demise. Some say  Muhammad thoroughly examined and approved what was written. hence  there is only one version of the Qur'an. and  is perfectly preserved word by word every word.  Hence Quran is superior to all other religious mambo-jumbo that we see to day in different religious books

     That claim of Intellectual Muslim robots is bullshit..

    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim
     
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #5 - January 20, 2015, 09:59 PM

    Sure, and I've never quite understood how Muslims explain the fact that the Qur'anic rasm doesn't even have consistent spelling within its own text.  For example, the rasm for 'Ibrahim' is spelled differently in Surah 2 than it is in the rest of the Qur'an ... in Surah 2 the rasm is written in a way that allows the name to be read "Abraham", like the Christians and Jews pronounce it.  But in the rest of the Qur'an, the rasm for the name has been vowelized in a more full way to force the standard Muslim reading "Ibrahim," or possibly a non-Muslim archaic Arabic "Ibrahaym," with Imala that was mistranscribed in the reformed orthography.  You can read about it here in this article from Gerd Puin:

    http://quranconference.nd.edu/assets/11215/the_alif_in_the_qur_an_short.pdf

    The Qur'anic rasm is written in a way that is completely inconsistent with the idea that any single person ever sat down and wrote the entire Qur'an in a unified way.  The orthography of the rasm includes multiple conflicting vowelization schemes for different words, which is only possible if it is a compilation of different texts that were vowelized inconsistently by different writers over time, and then not made consistent.  This inconsistency in the rasm was 'smoothed out' over several centuries by additional Masoretic markings that tell you how to recite the rasm in a more consistent Orthodox tradition of recitation.  As Gerd Puin says:

    "The orthography of the Standard Text is full of inconsistencies, as if they became petrified in a time when orthographic reform had started already, but which had not yet become effective in the whole Qur'an.  It is just this 'defect,' however, which enables us to reveal many details of its orthographic history.  The more so if we take the early manuscripts of the Qur'an into account, because, for lack of a critical edition of the Qur'an, we cannot rightly be sure at all that the Standard Text is really the 'Rasm 'Uthmani,' i.e. the earliest possible shape of the text."

    Muslim scholars were of course aware of this problem with the inconsistent rasm text, which is why they invoke the 'continuous oral tradition' argument to try to explain why the inconsistent base Qur'anic text is not a problem.  You must have faith in the perfection of one of the orthodox qira'at, and consider the mushaf secondary to that alleged oral transmission.

    But even if you have that (unwarranted) faith in qira'at as seven unbroken telephone games going from the Prophet to you, you still have to explain *as a historical matter* why the Qur'anic rasm was compiled in a way that uses different orthographies, not only between different variant Qur'anic manuscripts, but also between the surahs of any particular Qur'anic manuscript.
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #6 - January 20, 2015, 10:09 PM

    Btw, I realized my discussion about Ahmad may be easier to follow with comparative translations of the aya in question.  Here they are:

    http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=61&verse=6

    Most leave the name Ahmad untranslated, but Pickthall strangely translates it by using a literal translation for the name "Mohammed," "The Praised One," when Ahmad if it is translated at all should be translated as the phrase "More Praised."

    Surah 61 itself strikes me as a prototypical example of aggressive preaching to the mujahideen about their jihad and their duty to follow the teachings of the 'messenger,' which is the path to victory, just as Israel was previously split into the camp who followed Jesus (the Christians) and were therefore split over the camp that failed to heed Jesus and thus were defeated by the righteous (meaning the Jews, who the Christians conquered and subjugated).  The Arabic messenger is thus a repetition of this cycle, and the mujahideen must follow him and then they will be victorious.
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #7 - January 20, 2015, 10:47 PM

    Btw, I realized my discussion about Ahmad may be easier to follow with comparative translations of the aya in question.  Here they are:

    http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=61&verse=6

    Most leave the name Ahmad untranslated, but Pickthall strangely translates  .....

    I don't think one should give too much importance to one word of Quran and how it is translated by a translator born in West.  Moreover that English convert Marmaduke William Pickthall, 7 April 1875 – 19 May 1936 translated Quran when he was in    British India with a richest local Muslim king.,  So his translation gets skewed with Turkish folks  who knew Arabic that Muslim king  employed to help his translation..

    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim
     
  • And His Name Shall Be Ahmad. Sort of.
     Reply #8 - January 20, 2015, 11:19 PM

    My point was not that Pickthall's translation was correct -- I was actually saying he was *incorrect*, or at least he did something very strange with the name, substituting a translation of the word "Mohammed" rather than translating the word "Ahmad."  You'd think he'd either translate the word or leave it untranslated, not translate a different word (Mohammed) that doesn't appear in the text here, and which isn't even translated as "the Praised One" when it does appear in other parts of the Qur'an.

    The other translations (seven given in that link) just leave it as a name "Ahmad" without giving a literal translation, but they generally use lots of [parentheticals] to try to explain what it means.
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