Yahya Sulaiman
1st February 2004, 04:51
Sorry about the borken HTML here, but I can't put anything in bold, so when this article says that something is highlighted in bold, it won't be--and the words in bold for emphasis will be changed too. But I think it should be easy enough to read anyway.
Introduction
There is probably no inter-religious serious debates that’s more extensive or passionate on the internet than the Muslim-Chrisitan ones. Islam is clearly coming out ahead in it, since it remains (as it has been for about the last two hundred years) the world’s fastest spreading religion, and there is no position from which people more commonly revert to Islam than Christianity. Why is this? As a Muslim I would say that it’s because the superiority of the Koran over the Bible is clearly visible in almost every verse of every surah, and that the superiority of the Islamic philosophy due to its lack of intercession (or rather, a lack of a need for intercession being falsely attributed to God’s relationship to us), is also obvious. I don’t know what a Christian would say.
I’ve written this document for all Christians who are interested in Islam or who debate Muslims, but especially for those who are missionaries, particularly the ones who are always stopping by on our message boards and offering us the tired old anti-Islamic arguments. This isn’t meant to be a scholarly article that you are to try to refute; in fact, it isn’t even meant to be a hand in the old (tiresomely old) Christian-Muslim debates. To put it another way, it’s just my turn to be a missionary now and see if I can make you realize that Islam is the true way and that Christianity is false. In doing so, I’m going to try to clear up misunderstandings, present my point of view, and show you why I think my religion is a corrected, perfected version of yours. If you want to write a rebuttal to this then of course you have the right to do so, and I will always be willing to discuss anything I’ve said with you, but this is not intended to be an attack. Think of it as my doing what you call “witnessing”.
What the Koran Does and Does Not Say About the Earlier Scriptures
Christians are fond of finding ways to invalidate the Koran by the Bible. In fact, they never seem to be able to find anything to complain about in the Koran’s actual messages, in its teachings, except that they do not contain the unnecessary extra element of the Bible, that intercession by an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God is needed in order for our sins to be forgiven. Instead, they will attack the Koran based on the details in which it differs from the Bible, since this is apparently all they can do. From this dodge comes all of their major arguments: the Koran thinks the Bible is infallible but often disagrees with it, the Koran is based on variant biblical traditions, the older scriptures judge the newer ones.
Now first, let me explain the purpose of the Koran, according to its own words (which will always be taken from A.J. Arberry’s translation The Koran Interpreted unless otherwise noted). The Koran tells us that God had sent us guidance before in the form of four earlier scriptures:
87:16 Nay, but you prefer the present life;
87:17 And the world to come is better, and more enduring.
87:18 Surely this is in the ancient scrolls,
87:19 The scrolls of Abraham and Moses.
5:46 We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing.
4:163 ...We gave to David Psalms.
So we have the Gospel, the Torah (or the Law), a scroll written by Abraham (P), and the Psalsm. But according to the Koran, the Torah and Psalms became corrupted, and the Jews were consequently given false teachings...
2:75 Are you then so eager that [the Jews] should believe you, seeing there is a party of them that heard God’s word, and then tampered with it, and that after they had comprehended it, wittingly?
2:76 And when they meet those who believe, they say, “We believe”; and when they go privily one to another, they say, “Do you speak to them of what God has revealed to you, that they may thereby dispute with you before your Lord? Have you no understanding?”
2:77 Know they not that God knows what they keep secret and what they publish?
2:78 And some there are of them that are common folk, not knowing the Book, but only fancies and mere conjectures.
2:79 So woe to those who write the Book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a little price; so woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for their earnings.
...and the Gospel and the Abrahamic scroll are long since lost or unable to be positively identified. But now God has sent us this newer text, which is an infallible, final, complete book. It repeats some of their material, but also corrects it when necessary. If it helps, think of the earlier scriptures as rough drafts and the Koran as the cleaned up, perfected final draft.
Christians tend to have a hard time grasping this concept. There is an attitude among most Christian missionaries who argue against Islam that the text of the Koran is of the opinion that the Bible is infallible. They paraphrase Koranic verses about the confirmation of the Law and the Gospel, inserting the phrases “New Testament” in parentheses after “the Gospel” and “Old Testament” in parentheses after “The Law”, as if this were a valid way of looking at things. But most translations don’t say “the Law” but “the Torah.” This makes sense because Arabic word being used is “Taurah”. Furthermore, passages like this that refer to the Law are clearly talking about the Torah in all cases:
3:44 Surely We sent down the Torah, wherein is guidance and light; thereby the Prophets who had surrendered themselves gave judgment for those of Jewry, as did the masters and the rabbis, following such portion of God’s Book as they were given to keep and were witnesses to. So fear not men, but fear you Me; and sell not My signs for a little price. Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the unbelievers.
3:45 And therein We prescribed for them: “A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation”; but whosoever forgoes it as a freewill offering, that shall be for him an expiation. Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the evildoers.
3:46 And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing.
3:47 So let the People of the Gospel judge according to what God has sent down therein. Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the ungodly.
The reference to the Law/Torah given is to the twenty-first chapter of Exodus:
When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22-25)
I know that the two passages aren’t exactly the same, but remember that the Torah has been corrupted according to the Koran. And in any case it is the Torah being referred to, and the same goes for all other references made to “the Law”. In fact, the Koran does not mention any Jewish scriptures by name except for the Torah and the Psalms. It should be unmistakable from the above quotation and from the passage from Surah 87 that “Taurah” should indeed be translated “Torah”:
Likewise, I don’t see any reason to believe that “the Gospel” means “the New Testament”. I have never heard a single Christian call the New Testament “the Gospel”, and as far as I know no Christian sect has ever called it that in all of history. The word “Gospel” can, in fact, mean only two things: (1) the “good news” that Christianity preaches, or (2) a written account of Jesus’s (P) life. The Koran is clearly using the sense of (2) when it speaks of the Gospel, because this Gospel is a scripture that it confirms, and even quotes:
48:29 Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another. Thou seest them bowing, prostrating, seeking bounty from God and good pleasure. Their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration. That is their likeness in the Torah, and their likeness in the Gospel: as a seed that puts forth its shoot, and strengthens it, and it grows stout and rises straight upon its stalk, pleasing the sowers, that through them He may enrage the unbelievers.
So which Gospel was this? As you can see from 3:46 above, it was a revelation given directly to Jesus (P), which probably means that he wrote it himself. And as you can see from the verse that immediately follows, this was a Gospel that the Arabian Christians at the time of the Koran’s writing were familiar with, probably the lost Gospel of the Nazarenes.
Now let me clear up another misconception you might be having about the Koran. When it says that it confirms the earlier revelations, this doesn’t mean that it verifies them in the sense of simply repeating them. Why would anyone write such a book if they didn’t have anything new to say, if all they were going to do is confirm something else in that sense of the word? You’d think that were that the case, the Koran would spend most of its time giving positive reviews of the earlier scriptures in a critical vein rather than repeating but also slightly altering the text in order to correct it, changing certain details and making certain laws (like the dietary laws) less stringent. No, what it means for the Koran to confirm the earlier scriptures is that it confirms the prophecies made in them:
7:157 Those who follow the Messenger, the Prophet of the common folk, whom they find written down with them in the Torah and the Gospel, bidding them to honour, and forbidding them dishonour, making lawful for them the good things and making unlawful for them the corrupt things, and relieving them of their loads, and the fetters that were upon them.
In other words, we believe that the Koran fulfills the prophecies made by both the prophets of old and by Jesus (P) and John (P) of the newer crop of prophets. It’s in much the same way that you believe that Jesus (P) fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament—with the exception that what you consider prophecies from the Old Testament never appear to be prophecies in context—at the very most you could say that they have double meanings or double contexts—whereas what we consider prophecies of the coming of Muhammad (P) (Deuteronomy 18, John 1, etc.) are always clearly and directly referring to, or at least implying, future events.
That’s the advantage we have over you, the reason why our interpretation of texts we consider to be prophetic is more likely than your interpretation of texts that you consider to be prophetic. The Old Testament passages that are cited in the Gospels as prophecies are of the sort that can at the very most be considered to have double meanings or to have been prophetic in hidden ways. But the prophecies that we claim are predicting the coming of The Prophet (P) are always clear and out in the open, never containing double meanings or double contexts. The book will be given to one who cannot read; God will raise a prophet like unto Moses; there is someone by the title of “the Prophet” who is still expected while Jesus (P) is alive; the Spirit of Truth will come to you. All of these statements and ideas were obviously prophetic from the get go, even if our interpretations of them are wrong. As you can see, we stand on a much sturdier foundation than you.
So the Koran is here to confirm the prophecies of the earlier scriptures, and also to give you a corrected version of their texts—and to do a third thing that I haven’t yet mentioned, which is to explain the earlier texts, and present their ideas, in ways about which Christians and Jews had been previously misled from understanding by their religious teachers. To put it another way, the Koran contains everything in the earlier revelations that we need to know while leaving out all falsities, superfluity and corruptions they had, and is finally a guide to understanding them. All of these things are spoken of very unmistakably in the text itself:
5:15 People of the Book, now there has come to you Our Messenger, making clear to you many things you have been concealing of the Book, and effacing many things. There has come to you from God a light, and a Book Manifest whereby God guides whosoever follows His good pleasure in the ways of peace, and brings them forth from the shadows into the light by His leave; and He guides them to a straight path.
10:37 This Koran could not have been forged apart from God; but it is a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinguishing of the Book, wherein is no doubt, from the Lord of all Being.
33:40 Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of God, and the Seal of the Prophets.
The Specific Ways in Which the Bible Is Corrupted
You may have noticed, flipping through the pages of the Bible, that there are text notes all over the place saying, “Other ancient authorities insert,” “other ancient authorities add” and “other ancient authorities read”. These are places in which someone, somewhere, has obviously decided to add something into the text (which I hardly need tell you is a very dishonest thing to do), and so no one knows for sure what the original manuscript said, because you get so many different versions of it. These are, by definition, corruptions. You will find no such notes in the Koran, no cases of entire phrases or story elements being missing from this version or added into that version, as you will with say, the piercing of Jesus’s (P) side with a spear.
Now remember that the Koran’s claim in 2:75-79 was that the Jewish scriptures were corrupted. It is silent on the matter of the New Testament, because the New Testament had not been translated into Arabic, nor the Old Testament, by the time the Koran was written (Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume X, page 540, Charles Scribner’s Sons). But it is a well known fact that the Torah has been been corrupted by being made into four, alternating, contradictory texts, only parts of which might have been written by Moses (P). After all, the Torah chronicles Moses’s (P) death (Deuteronomy 34:5-10), so you know he couldn’t have written all of it, and yet as I’ve pointed out, the Koran says that the Torah was revealed to him. So naturally, we believe that the Torah has been corrupted, and that fits the facts. (More on this can be found at http://answering-christianity.com/sake12.htm).
The same goes for the Psalms. The Koran says that they were revealed to David (P). Christian tradition also attributes most of them to David. But what are these other Psalms, these Psalms not attributed to David (P)? Do you really think that a king’s book would be intended to contain things that the king himself didn’t write? Wouldn’t it be natural to expect someone to add something the king didn’t write to something he did, after the king’s death, so that all of it is in the king’s name? Do you think that people would really notice if you did that? If it’s all in the king’s name, then they would just assume that he endorsed it. It’s the kind of trick that people pull all the time in politics. Hence, we have more corruptions. The Koran’s claim fit the facts again, make sense again.
An Example of the Koran’s Necessary Revisions
But why does the Bible need to be revised? Why do we need anything after the Old and New Testaments? Can’t they stand by themselves, even with textual variants? To answer that question, let me give you an example of how the Koran cleans up and corrects the Bible while also containing everything in it that’s good. Let’s have a look at the version of the Ten Commandments given in the Torah, with the parts I’m going to discuss highlighted in bold:
You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you. You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ***, or anything that is your neighbor’s. (Exodus 20:3-17)
Going over the bold parts in order: God forbids you not from worshiping any other gods, but simply from worshiping them before him (in terms of importance). God is a jealous God, and unjustly punishes and rewards people for what other people do. God rested after making the universe. God forbids all killing. God includes wives in a list of “anything that is your neighbor’s”, right along with oxes and asses. Now let’s take a look at the Koran’s polished version of the Commandments:
6:150 Say: “Come, I will recite what your Lord has forbidden you: that you associate not anything with Him, and to be good to your parents, and not to slay your children because of poverty; We will provide you and them; and that you approach not any indecency outward or inward, and that you slay not the soul God has forbidden, except by right. That then He has charged you with; haply you will understand.
6:151 And that you approach not the property of the orphan, save in the fairer manner, until he is of age. And fill up the measure and the balance with justice. We charge not any soul save to its capacity. And when you speak, be just, even if it should be to a near kinsman. And fulfil God’s covenant. That then He has charged you with; haply you will remember.
As you can see, all of those problems are removed from the Koran’s version, as well as the completely unnecessary command not to do any work on a certain day of the week. Christians will always insist that we and the Koran are both interpreting the Bible naively in this respect, that it’s just a figure of speech to say that God rested, that we’re misunderstanding the tenth commandment, etc. Why does this never convince us? Because the Koran’s version of the Commandments is perfectly fine without the allegedly misunderstood elements. With these elements, you have, at best, a potential for misunderstanding in which most people become ensared; without them, you have the same thing but without the potential for misunderstanding. So however you figure it, the Koran’s version of the Commandments is a cleaned up, polished version of the Bible’s, clearly superior.
What a Difference A Claim Can Make
Now as long as we’re on the subject of comparing the Bible to the Koran, I think I should point out the most crucial differences between them. First, the Bible is a volume of sixty-six (or more) books, written by different authors in different languages and at different times, whereas the Koran is a single work in a consistent psalmic style. Second, there are no alternate versions of the Koran, whereas Catholics and Protestants use two, different Bibles. (Again, this has to do with the Bible being a volume rather than a single book.)
And most importantly of all, the Koran does not need exterior sources to call it the infallible word of God. The Bible is, by and large, a collection of stories and discourses regarding God and religion which are written from a clearly human point of view. The Koran, on the other hand, is a direct address from God to us. The voice speaking throughout the text is always God’s, except for a small handful of points at which Muhammad (P) and Gabriel interject comments of their own, but only as God’s angel (a vehicle for carrying out His will and words) and God’s inspired prophet (in the same vein). And to be sure, sometimes God refers to Himself in the third person in this text, but not most of the time—just as we might occasionally refer to ourselves in the third person (“Nobody does that to David Jones!”), but not most of the time. The significance of all of these things is made clear in the text itself:
16:2 High be He exalted above that they associate with Him! He sends down the angels with the Spirit of His command upon whomsoever He will among His servants, saying: Give you warning that there is no God but I; so fear you Me!
But remember that they are exceptions to the rule. The voice is direclty God’s most of the time, which is not the case in the Bible. From time to time in the Koran God inspires Gabriel or Muhammad (P) to speak His words from another point of view, in order to glorify Him through inspiration, much like David (P) did when he was given the Psalms (which, as you remember, were later corrupted), but most of the time it’s God’s voice speaking to us and in all cases it is words from God.
So we have all of these books before the Koran which professed to be infallible and always appeared to be written from a point of view that is oblivious to this claim that would be made about them after they were in wide circulation. And after enough books (the Bible, the Hindu Vedas, etc.) were dubbed infallible and inspired despite making no such claim themselves, it just began to look like people are universally lazy with their methods of assessing the historicity and authenticity of their holy texts. Calling a text the infallible word of God became really nothing more than a cliched cop-out which allows you not to have to bother trying to solve the enigmas presented by scripture.
And 1 Timothy 3:16 is no exception: it just says that all scripture is inspired, not that the Bible is inspired. For instance, what’s scripture to the Catholics isn’t always scripture to the Protestants, since there are books which the Catholics consider scripture but the Protestants don’t. Additionally, the original compilation that was known as the Bible contained scriptures that aren’t in the Bible we have today, such as The Shepherd of Hermas. So as you can see, “scripture” is a much vaguer term than “Bible”, since one category is much larger than the other. “Scripture” is a broad and arbitrary term; the Bible (or Bibles, rather) is/are a specific collection(s) of scriptures. In 1 Timothy 3:16 Paul was obviously referring to the scriptures used by the person to whom he was writing, since many books of the New Testament had not yet been written by that point. But the Koran is not a collection, not a volume, and in fact it even refers to itself, repeatedly, by name. Example:
12:1 Alif Lam Ra. Those are the signs of the Manifest Book.
12:2 We have sent it down as an Arabic Koran; haply you will understand.
12:3 We will relate to thee the fairest of stories in that We have revealed to thee this Koran, though before it thou wast one of the heedless.
Nowhere in the Bible will you find the phrase “the Bible”, nor will you even find anything telling you that the scripture you’re reading will be compiled with others into a collection that will collectively be the infallible Word of God. But the Koran does refer to itself, and it makes the specific claim to be the infallible Word of God, as you can see:
41:41 Surely it is a Book Sublime;
41:42 Falsehood comes not to it from before it nor from behind it; a sending down from One All-wise, All-laudable.
For that reason I for one find it more reasonable to take seriously the Islamic claim regarding the Koran than to take seriously the conservative Christian’s claim regarding the Bible. All the holy books up until the point of the Koran’s writing were just books that people pretended were inspired, irrationally preached were inspired, despite the fact that these books never, ever read like you’d expect a revelation from God to read: as a direct address from God to us. I think that should be a real eye-opener.
You Have Questions, God Has the Answers
Now, what else would you expect a book to be like if it were inspired by God? Well, it’s kind of hard to imagine since God is such an incomprehensible being, but there are, to be sure, certain things that I, at least, would expect a God-inspired text to do. You have a message from God in your hotmail box. What does it contain? Well, to begin with, what do people always say they want to do when they meet God? They always want to ask Him questions. God would know this, being omniscient, and so I would expect a message sent from God to answer all the questions we’re going to ask in advance. And this is just what the Koran does. Most signficantly, there are three huge, tough questions that have haunted us for centuries, and all of them are answered by the Koran. And, as I would expect from a God-inspired text, all of the answers given make perfect sense.
The first of these three questions is, “Why we are here? What is our purpose? Why did God make us?” In this e-mail of sorts from God, He says:
51:56 I have not created jinn and mankind except to serve Me.
Well there you go. And really, there is no other possible answer. Whatever God made us for, it has to be to serve Him in some way or another. Whatever we’re made to do, that’s how we serve Him. And we serve Him mainly through worshiping Him, but also through obeying Him. He wants to see us live a certain way, so we live that way. It’s the least we can do in exchange for being created in the first place and given a world to live in that gives us everything we need—food, water, shelter, companionship, places to explore, resources for us to make things to enterain ourselves, etc.
Then there’s the second biggest question: what are we? What are our souls, our selves? The answer is:
17:85 The Spirit is of the bidding of my Lord. You have been given of knowledge nothing except a little.
This will probably be clearer if we step outside of Arberry’s translation for a moment and see how M.H. Shakir translates the key phrase: “The soul is one of the commands of my Lord.” So the soul is a command from God. Now there’s probably no way to understand completely what this means, but if you think about it, a command you give does relate to you in much the same way that something created to serve you relates to you. In other words, a command is something you use to get something accomplished, and God uses us to get something accomplished. But that also means that our souls, our selves, come directly from God in the same way that a command comes right out of the mouth of the person giving it. Think of it as smoke coming from a fire. Two different substances, but one emanates from the other, the other obviously being greater.
I think that this is a perfectly reasonable explanation. If some higher power made us as self-aware beings, then you’d think we would possess some characteristics of His (after all, the Creator is obviously self-aware or else He wouldn’t be a true entity to begin with, let alone the ultimate entity) but also be completely different in other ways. We would be a different, lesser substance cast from His divine substance as smoke is cast from a fire. We wouldn’t really be made in His image, despite what the Bible says, because an infinite being cannot possibly have an image. He is totally unbound, uncontained, whereas having an image would bind and contain Him. And yet self-awareness would be something we have in common, just as smoke picks up heat from the fire which bore it despite being composed of a different chemical composition than the fire altogether.
The third and final question that has always haunted us is, “What happens to us when we die?” Well, the Koran goes on at length about Judgment Day and heaven and hell—the most frequent topics in the whole book, in fact, as they’re the most important things to be talking about when God is addressing us and thus deserve the most attention in His letter to us. But how do we know we can believe that anything of our selves will remain after we’re dead? That’s the real question, the thing that people wonder most about death. Once again the Koran has an answer, as you’d expect a long letter from God to:
41:39 And of His signs is that thou seest the earth humble; then, when We send down water upon it, it quivers, and swells. Surely He who quickens it is He who quickens the dead; surely He is powerful over everything.
When we apply inductive reasoning to the matter of death, we can see that in all of our experience, when something is destroyed it isn’t really destroyed—nothing ever really ends, and this long letter from God uses the earth as an example—it dies but is also regenerated. In much the same way, we will be regenerated after our death. That’s the natural cycle of things: life, death, rebirth. It happens all the time, all around us, even on a subatomic level (with electrons). Therefore it makes perfect sense, on an inductive level, to say that our basic selves will probably still exist after we die.
So we have now seen that the Koran has given us perfectly rational explanations for all the big questions that have always haunted us, as you’d expect a message from God to do.
Knowing Your Rebuttals in Advance
Now what else would a revelation from the Almighty bring us? What would it be like? Well, I think that if it answered our questions, it would probably also respond to any objections we might have, or any criticisms we might make of the text, ahead of time. Once again, this is evidence of the author’s omniscience, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you expect a book from an omniscient being to anticipate all the criticisms that will be brought against it and respond to them in kind?
Well, wouldn’t you know that this is just what the Koran does. I don’t see very much of that in the Bible—in fact, most of the Bible is spent not offering arguments and counter-arguments for its assertions, but simply making the assertions. None of its doctrines are argued for; you’re simply told to believe in them. As far as I know, the only parts of the Bible that make even an attempt at this sort of thing are the parts of the Gospels in which Jesus (P) debates and rebuts the Pharisees. (“How can Satan cast out Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand.”)
But as Sheikh Gary Miller says, there hasn’t been a single criticism, in all the centuries since the Koran was written, that was not being made in the time of its writing, and thus was not already replied to in the Koran itself. For instance, even back then people were making the claim that Muhammad (P) had learned about various traditions from people he knew from various belief systems, and the Koran responded to this claim:
16:103 And We know very well that they say, “Only a mortal is teaching him.” The speech of him at whome they hint is barbarous; and this is speech Arabic, manifest.
Another example can be found in the way that people at the time of the Book’s writing were already saying that Muhammad (P) had compiled a variety of folklore from various sources, along with a team of other authors (“the work of multiple hands,” as Denis Giron would have it), and the Koran responded to this claim too:
25:4 The unbelievers say, “This is naught but a calumny he has forged, and other folk have helped him to it.” So they have committed wrong and falsehood.
25:5 They say, “Fairy-tales of the ancients that he has had written down, so that they are recited to him at the dawn and in the evening.”
25:6 Say: “He sent it down, who knows the secret in the heavens and earth; He is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”
In other words, if you can make an unsupported assertion, so can we. You claim without hard evidence that the Koran is plagiarized by multiple authors; we claim without hard evidence that is is the Word of God. Pointing its resemblance to earlier traditions is not the same thing as presenting evidence, because if the Book is what it claims to be, the infallible Word of God, then that would mean that if an earlier tradition agrees with it, that tradition is simply right.
The Koran And Its Parallels in Various Traditions
It’s unrealistic to expect the canonized scriptures of a religion to be right all the time, as if the decisions of some committee that put together a volume of scriptures somehow managed to get the correct version of every story in what they compiled. In other words, resemblance to various traditions would not be evidence that the Koran is forged if the Koran is what it claims to be, but only a confirmation of those traditions, so unless you’re going to start off with assumption that the Koran is not what it claims to be—the very thing you’re trying to establish—then its resemblance to various traditions is a total moot point. So your case is either circular or irrelevant: in any case you have no real evidence.
Besides, Christians who utilize common criticisms on the Koran that it has copied its stories from various traditions don’t understand that the same sort of allegations are made about the Bible. Sometimes Christians will talk as if it’s the other way around—they say that we’re the ones who don’t understand that our book is subject to the same criticisms as theirs. But while I rarely see Muslims point out possible sources for biblical material—after all, in most cases the “source” in question would also end up being a source for our own, parallel stories—Christians are constantly chiming in with skeptics about the Koran’s “sources” in various traditions. But in fact, the skeptical critics who make such claims about the Koran make even more of such claims about the Bible, as the Bible is much longer than the Koran and thus contains more material that has the potential to be plagiarized.
For example, there is the possible influence of the flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh on the biblical account of the story of Noah’s (P) ark. The way I see it, if you can say that the Koran is a plagiaristic compilation of various traditions, then we can also say the same thing about the Bible. In the case of Noah’s (P) ark, we both lose. But the resemblance the biblical account has to the earlier version doesn’t destroy your faith, does it? No, of course not! And why? Because if you believe what the Bible says on the matter, then that just means that if an earlier account said the same thing, they got it right and simply beat the Bible to the punch. (In other words, maybe Utnapishtim and Noah [P] were the same person.) And so it is with the Koran and its various “sources”.
The Old Judging the New or the New Judging the Old?
Along the same lines, Christians are always telling me that the old judges the new, that if there is a disagreement between a newer revelation and an older one, the newer one takes priority and so it indicates mistakes in the newer one. It would be awfully convenient for Christians if this were true, but it’s like saying that any differences between a rough draft and a final draft are mistakes on behalf of the final draft. When something comes along later to correct the mistakes of something that came earlier, it makes no sense to say that it’s wrong just because it disagrees with the thing that came along earlier. At best, it simply makes unnecessary revisions—but as I’ve point out, that is not the case.
. When you say that as a rule, the old is what judges the new, you’re leaving no possible avenue for us to establish that the Koran is superior. In essence, what it really boils down to is, “The Bible is final and that’s that,” in which case I don’t even know why you’re bothering to express your thought at all, since we’re never going to agree to it just because you said so. Besides, if it were a rule of thumb that the old always judges the new, nothing would ever change for the better. There would be no revisions; nothing would ever improve. Every rough draft would be a final draft, because any changes made to the rough draft would be wrong.
At this point the Christian is probably asking me why God would allow His revelation to become corrupted in the first place. After all, doesn’t the Koran say that no one can change His words? Well, for the answer to that question, visit http://understanding-islam.com/related/text.asp?type=article&aid=7&sscatid=89.
As for the reason why God would allow His scriptures to become corrupted, you may as well ask why God allows any imperfections to exist in His creation. Gradual improvement, slow formation to a definite outline, progress, evolution—this is the glorious way in which God has chosen to make every important event happen. He made us humans through evolution. He made the world we live in through a gradual shaping process according to Big Bang theory. (You may deny these things if you are one of the more conservative Christians, but all scientific evidence is against your position, as well as the opinions of most experts in the field.) And finally, He made our revelations in much the same way. It was all planned from the beginning—there were no mishaps, only an evolution.
The Concept of Mediation
But enough comparing the Bible to the Koran for now: let’s compare our doctrines instead. The way I see it, when it comes to the bare bones doctrines. the most significant difference between Islam and Christianity is the element of intercession. You believe that God gave Himself up, in human form, to die on a cross so that you could be forgiven. But to this very day, after many years, I have yet to hear a single satisfactory explanation as to why it is that any kind of mediation, any kind of bridge betwixt God and man, is necessary for God to forgive us if God is omnipotent and cares about us. All He has to do is say, “I forgive you.” That’s it; nothing else is required.
The only two possible reasons for belief in such a mediation as Christianity teaches are that (a) God can’t reach us without it, or (b) we can’t reach God without it, which implies that God is deliberately not reaching out to us without it, even though He can do anything he wants to and is supposed to care about us. You might tell me that He did reach out to us, by way of the crucifixion and resurrection, but this is circular reasoning. My question is: why were these things necessary in the first place? Why is anything necessary for God? What Christianity is really doing here is presenting God with a false bifurcation: either someone has to pay the price for us, or God can’t or won’t forgive us. Well, that leaves out the option of God simply forgiving us and letting that be that, with no one having to pay any blood penalty.
To have someone else be punished in your place (especially in such a carefully planned and severely painful manner) is not an act of forgiveness, but is, in fact, the opposite of forgiveness. Whether or not you realize it, your depiction of God is basically that of a big bully who just has to let His anger out on somebody, so somebody has to volunteer to be the victim. I’m not trying to insult you here; I’m just describing the situation accurately. This is not a good God we’re talking about. Forgiveness is the opposite of vengeance—the two things can never meet because they deliberately oppose each other. Either you forgive someone or you punish them—to speak of doing both at the same time is like speaking of a four-sided triangle. Could God do something so utterly absurd as that if He wanted to? Of course he could, but as I’ve pointed out, there can be no coherent reason why He should.
The way that the world’s current leading evangelist, William Lane Craig, put it (at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley1.html) is that
God finds himself in a kind of dilemma. On the one hand are His justice and holiness, which demand punishment for sin, rightly deserved. On the other hand are God’s love and mercy, which demand reconciliation and forgiveness. Both are essential to His nature; neither can be compromised. What is God to do in this dilemma?
The answer is Jesus Christ. He is the fulfillment of God’s justice and love. They meet at the cross: the love and the wrath of God. At the cross we see God’s love for people and His wrath upon sin.
This is the great sin of Christianity’s doctrine of intercession: it limits God. To think that God is so contained and imperfect as to be put into an actual dilemma! An omnipotent and omniscient being will never end up in a dilemma, wouldn’t you say? Craig was talking as if God can be cornered by a situation into a choice between only two options (punish you or punish someone else in your stead). In reality that kind of thing does not happen to a boundless and almighty Being.
Of course, Craig goes by the special definition of “omnipotent” which is in vogue right now, that God can do anything that is logically possible. It doesn’t seem to matter to Craig that nobody ever used this definition of “omnipotent” before Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine introduced it as a rebuttal to the Argument from Suffering—which basically means that they were arbitrarily redefining the word to suit their own purposes. The fact of the matter is, God cannot be totally free and completely without boundaries if He is stuck being able to do only what is logically possible.
Why do I say this? Because what we know as logic is based on the principles of mathematics. So when you say that God is incapable of doing something that’s logically impossible, you’re binding Him to these higher laws, making Him unable to break them. This means that something exists which is self-existent apart from God, and God Himself is subject to it. In all practical respects, that makes the laws of mathematics the real God. Craig is, in effect, speaking blasphemy in two ways, first by pigeon-holing God into a dilemma, and second by binding Him to something higher. And that is exactly what Christianity does: he is simply putting the blasphemy correctly.
So however you figure it, Christianity doesn’t work. There is no way in which the doctrine of the atonement cannot be blasphemous. If God cannot forgive us without sacrificing someone in our stead, He is not omnipotent. If He refuses to forgive us unless someone is sacrificed in our stead, He is not perfectly good. (How could he be, if He won’t do the easiest thing in the world by just saying, “I forgive you,” and letting that be that?) The fact is, all intercession, all mediation, all bridges, are completely pointless when you have an boundless being like God on your hands.
The Concept of Incarnation
At this point the Christian might be telling me that I am applying limited human reason to something that is clearly beyond my mortal comprehension. But as I have shown, it is not incomprehensible at all, but simply blasphemous. Modern day, orthodox Christianity is built around the concept of God becoming a human being with human limitations and even being killed. Of all the types of people in the world, only a Christian can fail to see the blasphemy involved with this. To anyone else, it is crystal clear, but dogma has a way of blinding people to obvious facts that everyone but them can see. I shall now do my best to explain the blasphemy.
Once God becomes a human being, you see, He becomes subject to human limitations. Even if it’s only a local part of him that’s in this human body, and another part of Him still transcends everything, He has still become limited by being divided, as there is now one part of Him that is God and one part of Him that is man. Christians are always saying that Jesus (P) was perfect God and perfect man at the same time. What they don’t realize is that if God is part human, He is not all God. His divinity, in other words, has been soiled, diluted, compromised. There is an piece of Him now that is not God—that’s what the word “incarnation” means—and so not being entirely Himself, He is not entirely unlimited. This is no longer the unfathomable Thing beyond all things we’re talking about, but only a watered down version of it, where a section of it can be touched and seen and smelled and tasted and heard.
In a nutshell, to be meek like Jesus (P) supposedly was is to make God into a meek being, and this is blasphemy by definition. Even if it’s only one of God’s three persons that is being incarnated, and only temporarily, this person is, for the time being, limited, and since this person is God, therefore God is, at least for a few decades of time as we understand it, not unlimited. The paradox that Christians refer to, that Jesus (P) was both perfect God and perfect man, is not really a paradox but an oxymoron—in mathematical terms, what you must end up having is a total of 200%. You cannot be all God and all man at the same time. Can you overrule this is you’re omnipotent? Of course, but as I’ve pointed out, there is no need to, since mediation has the same trick of limiting God. You’re stuck.
Conclusion
I will leave you now to think about the things I’ve said, and I hope you will think about them, long and deeply, and not simply react to them in some way. Give it some consideration, let it soak through. I think you just might find that I’m right after all. But hey, it’s up to you. You have to form your own conclusions. I’ll just leave you with these closing words from the Koran:
4:171 People of the Book, go not beyond the bounds in your religion, and say not as to God but the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only the Messenger of God, and His Word that He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and say not, “Three.” Refrain: better is it for you. God is only One God. Glory be to Him—that He should have a son! To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and in the earth; God suffices for a guardian.
5:17 They are unbelievers who say, “God is the Messiah, Mary’s son.” Say: “Who then shall overrule God in any way if He desires to destroy the Messiah, Mary’s son, and his mother, and all those who are on earth?”
5:75 The Messiah, son of Mary, was only a Messenger; Messengers before him passed away; his mother was a just woman; they both ate food. Behold, how We make clear the signs to them; then behold, how they perverted are!
You might consider these quotes insulting, but I think they make some good points—really, the same points I have made earlier. And I hope that you will consider them.
Introduction
There is probably no inter-religious serious debates that’s more extensive or passionate on the internet than the Muslim-Chrisitan ones. Islam is clearly coming out ahead in it, since it remains (as it has been for about the last two hundred years) the world’s fastest spreading religion, and there is no position from which people more commonly revert to Islam than Christianity. Why is this? As a Muslim I would say that it’s because the superiority of the Koran over the Bible is clearly visible in almost every verse of every surah, and that the superiority of the Islamic philosophy due to its lack of intercession (or rather, a lack of a need for intercession being falsely attributed to God’s relationship to us), is also obvious. I don’t know what a Christian would say.
I’ve written this document for all Christians who are interested in Islam or who debate Muslims, but especially for those who are missionaries, particularly the ones who are always stopping by on our message boards and offering us the tired old anti-Islamic arguments. This isn’t meant to be a scholarly article that you are to try to refute; in fact, it isn’t even meant to be a hand in the old (tiresomely old) Christian-Muslim debates. To put it another way, it’s just my turn to be a missionary now and see if I can make you realize that Islam is the true way and that Christianity is false. In doing so, I’m going to try to clear up misunderstandings, present my point of view, and show you why I think my religion is a corrected, perfected version of yours. If you want to write a rebuttal to this then of course you have the right to do so, and I will always be willing to discuss anything I’ve said with you, but this is not intended to be an attack. Think of it as my doing what you call “witnessing”.
What the Koran Does and Does Not Say About the Earlier Scriptures
Christians are fond of finding ways to invalidate the Koran by the Bible. In fact, they never seem to be able to find anything to complain about in the Koran’s actual messages, in its teachings, except that they do not contain the unnecessary extra element of the Bible, that intercession by an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God is needed in order for our sins to be forgiven. Instead, they will attack the Koran based on the details in which it differs from the Bible, since this is apparently all they can do. From this dodge comes all of their major arguments: the Koran thinks the Bible is infallible but often disagrees with it, the Koran is based on variant biblical traditions, the older scriptures judge the newer ones.
Now first, let me explain the purpose of the Koran, according to its own words (which will always be taken from A.J. Arberry’s translation The Koran Interpreted unless otherwise noted). The Koran tells us that God had sent us guidance before in the form of four earlier scriptures:
87:16 Nay, but you prefer the present life;
87:17 And the world to come is better, and more enduring.
87:18 Surely this is in the ancient scrolls,
87:19 The scrolls of Abraham and Moses.
5:46 We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing.
4:163 ...We gave to David Psalms.
So we have the Gospel, the Torah (or the Law), a scroll written by Abraham (P), and the Psalsm. But according to the Koran, the Torah and Psalms became corrupted, and the Jews were consequently given false teachings...
2:75 Are you then so eager that [the Jews] should believe you, seeing there is a party of them that heard God’s word, and then tampered with it, and that after they had comprehended it, wittingly?
2:76 And when they meet those who believe, they say, “We believe”; and when they go privily one to another, they say, “Do you speak to them of what God has revealed to you, that they may thereby dispute with you before your Lord? Have you no understanding?”
2:77 Know they not that God knows what they keep secret and what they publish?
2:78 And some there are of them that are common folk, not knowing the Book, but only fancies and mere conjectures.
2:79 So woe to those who write the Book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a little price; so woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for their earnings.
...and the Gospel and the Abrahamic scroll are long since lost or unable to be positively identified. But now God has sent us this newer text, which is an infallible, final, complete book. It repeats some of their material, but also corrects it when necessary. If it helps, think of the earlier scriptures as rough drafts and the Koran as the cleaned up, perfected final draft.
Christians tend to have a hard time grasping this concept. There is an attitude among most Christian missionaries who argue against Islam that the text of the Koran is of the opinion that the Bible is infallible. They paraphrase Koranic verses about the confirmation of the Law and the Gospel, inserting the phrases “New Testament” in parentheses after “the Gospel” and “Old Testament” in parentheses after “The Law”, as if this were a valid way of looking at things. But most translations don’t say “the Law” but “the Torah.” This makes sense because Arabic word being used is “Taurah”. Furthermore, passages like this that refer to the Law are clearly talking about the Torah in all cases:
3:44 Surely We sent down the Torah, wherein is guidance and light; thereby the Prophets who had surrendered themselves gave judgment for those of Jewry, as did the masters and the rabbis, following such portion of God’s Book as they were given to keep and were witnesses to. So fear not men, but fear you Me; and sell not My signs for a little price. Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the unbelievers.
3:45 And therein We prescribed for them: “A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and for wounds retaliation”; but whosoever forgoes it as a freewill offering, that shall be for him an expiation. Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the evildoers.
3:46 And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing.
3:47 So let the People of the Gospel judge according to what God has sent down therein. Whoso judges not according to what God has sent down—they are the ungodly.
The reference to the Law/Torah given is to the twenty-first chapter of Exodus:
When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22-25)
I know that the two passages aren’t exactly the same, but remember that the Torah has been corrupted according to the Koran. And in any case it is the Torah being referred to, and the same goes for all other references made to “the Law”. In fact, the Koran does not mention any Jewish scriptures by name except for the Torah and the Psalms. It should be unmistakable from the above quotation and from the passage from Surah 87 that “Taurah” should indeed be translated “Torah”:
Likewise, I don’t see any reason to believe that “the Gospel” means “the New Testament”. I have never heard a single Christian call the New Testament “the Gospel”, and as far as I know no Christian sect has ever called it that in all of history. The word “Gospel” can, in fact, mean only two things: (1) the “good news” that Christianity preaches, or (2) a written account of Jesus’s (P) life. The Koran is clearly using the sense of (2) when it speaks of the Gospel, because this Gospel is a scripture that it confirms, and even quotes:
48:29 Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another. Thou seest them bowing, prostrating, seeking bounty from God and good pleasure. Their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration. That is their likeness in the Torah, and their likeness in the Gospel: as a seed that puts forth its shoot, and strengthens it, and it grows stout and rises straight upon its stalk, pleasing the sowers, that through them He may enrage the unbelievers.
So which Gospel was this? As you can see from 3:46 above, it was a revelation given directly to Jesus (P), which probably means that he wrote it himself. And as you can see from the verse that immediately follows, this was a Gospel that the Arabian Christians at the time of the Koran’s writing were familiar with, probably the lost Gospel of the Nazarenes.
Now let me clear up another misconception you might be having about the Koran. When it says that it confirms the earlier revelations, this doesn’t mean that it verifies them in the sense of simply repeating them. Why would anyone write such a book if they didn’t have anything new to say, if all they were going to do is confirm something else in that sense of the word? You’d think that were that the case, the Koran would spend most of its time giving positive reviews of the earlier scriptures in a critical vein rather than repeating but also slightly altering the text in order to correct it, changing certain details and making certain laws (like the dietary laws) less stringent. No, what it means for the Koran to confirm the earlier scriptures is that it confirms the prophecies made in them:
7:157 Those who follow the Messenger, the Prophet of the common folk, whom they find written down with them in the Torah and the Gospel, bidding them to honour, and forbidding them dishonour, making lawful for them the good things and making unlawful for them the corrupt things, and relieving them of their loads, and the fetters that were upon them.
In other words, we believe that the Koran fulfills the prophecies made by both the prophets of old and by Jesus (P) and John (P) of the newer crop of prophets. It’s in much the same way that you believe that Jesus (P) fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament—with the exception that what you consider prophecies from the Old Testament never appear to be prophecies in context—at the very most you could say that they have double meanings or double contexts—whereas what we consider prophecies of the coming of Muhammad (P) (Deuteronomy 18, John 1, etc.) are always clearly and directly referring to, or at least implying, future events.
That’s the advantage we have over you, the reason why our interpretation of texts we consider to be prophetic is more likely than your interpretation of texts that you consider to be prophetic. The Old Testament passages that are cited in the Gospels as prophecies are of the sort that can at the very most be considered to have double meanings or to have been prophetic in hidden ways. But the prophecies that we claim are predicting the coming of The Prophet (P) are always clear and out in the open, never containing double meanings or double contexts. The book will be given to one who cannot read; God will raise a prophet like unto Moses; there is someone by the title of “the Prophet” who is still expected while Jesus (P) is alive; the Spirit of Truth will come to you. All of these statements and ideas were obviously prophetic from the get go, even if our interpretations of them are wrong. As you can see, we stand on a much sturdier foundation than you.
So the Koran is here to confirm the prophecies of the earlier scriptures, and also to give you a corrected version of their texts—and to do a third thing that I haven’t yet mentioned, which is to explain the earlier texts, and present their ideas, in ways about which Christians and Jews had been previously misled from understanding by their religious teachers. To put it another way, the Koran contains everything in the earlier revelations that we need to know while leaving out all falsities, superfluity and corruptions they had, and is finally a guide to understanding them. All of these things are spoken of very unmistakably in the text itself:
5:15 People of the Book, now there has come to you Our Messenger, making clear to you many things you have been concealing of the Book, and effacing many things. There has come to you from God a light, and a Book Manifest whereby God guides whosoever follows His good pleasure in the ways of peace, and brings them forth from the shadows into the light by His leave; and He guides them to a straight path.
10:37 This Koran could not have been forged apart from God; but it is a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinguishing of the Book, wherein is no doubt, from the Lord of all Being.
33:40 Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of God, and the Seal of the Prophets.
The Specific Ways in Which the Bible Is Corrupted
You may have noticed, flipping through the pages of the Bible, that there are text notes all over the place saying, “Other ancient authorities insert,” “other ancient authorities add” and “other ancient authorities read”. These are places in which someone, somewhere, has obviously decided to add something into the text (which I hardly need tell you is a very dishonest thing to do), and so no one knows for sure what the original manuscript said, because you get so many different versions of it. These are, by definition, corruptions. You will find no such notes in the Koran, no cases of entire phrases or story elements being missing from this version or added into that version, as you will with say, the piercing of Jesus’s (P) side with a spear.
Now remember that the Koran’s claim in 2:75-79 was that the Jewish scriptures were corrupted. It is silent on the matter of the New Testament, because the New Testament had not been translated into Arabic, nor the Old Testament, by the time the Koran was written (Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume X, page 540, Charles Scribner’s Sons). But it is a well known fact that the Torah has been been corrupted by being made into four, alternating, contradictory texts, only parts of which might have been written by Moses (P). After all, the Torah chronicles Moses’s (P) death (Deuteronomy 34:5-10), so you know he couldn’t have written all of it, and yet as I’ve pointed out, the Koran says that the Torah was revealed to him. So naturally, we believe that the Torah has been corrupted, and that fits the facts. (More on this can be found at http://answering-christianity.com/sake12.htm).
The same goes for the Psalms. The Koran says that they were revealed to David (P). Christian tradition also attributes most of them to David. But what are these other Psalms, these Psalms not attributed to David (P)? Do you really think that a king’s book would be intended to contain things that the king himself didn’t write? Wouldn’t it be natural to expect someone to add something the king didn’t write to something he did, after the king’s death, so that all of it is in the king’s name? Do you think that people would really notice if you did that? If it’s all in the king’s name, then they would just assume that he endorsed it. It’s the kind of trick that people pull all the time in politics. Hence, we have more corruptions. The Koran’s claim fit the facts again, make sense again.
An Example of the Koran’s Necessary Revisions
But why does the Bible need to be revised? Why do we need anything after the Old and New Testaments? Can’t they stand by themselves, even with textual variants? To answer that question, let me give you an example of how the Koran cleans up and corrects the Bible while also containing everything in it that’s good. Let’s have a look at the version of the Ten Commandments given in the Torah, with the parts I’m going to discuss highlighted in bold:
You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you. You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ***, or anything that is your neighbor’s. (Exodus 20:3-17)
Going over the bold parts in order: God forbids you not from worshiping any other gods, but simply from worshiping them before him (in terms of importance). God is a jealous God, and unjustly punishes and rewards people for what other people do. God rested after making the universe. God forbids all killing. God includes wives in a list of “anything that is your neighbor’s”, right along with oxes and asses. Now let’s take a look at the Koran’s polished version of the Commandments:
6:150 Say: “Come, I will recite what your Lord has forbidden you: that you associate not anything with Him, and to be good to your parents, and not to slay your children because of poverty; We will provide you and them; and that you approach not any indecency outward or inward, and that you slay not the soul God has forbidden, except by right. That then He has charged you with; haply you will understand.
6:151 And that you approach not the property of the orphan, save in the fairer manner, until he is of age. And fill up the measure and the balance with justice. We charge not any soul save to its capacity. And when you speak, be just, even if it should be to a near kinsman. And fulfil God’s covenant. That then He has charged you with; haply you will remember.
As you can see, all of those problems are removed from the Koran’s version, as well as the completely unnecessary command not to do any work on a certain day of the week. Christians will always insist that we and the Koran are both interpreting the Bible naively in this respect, that it’s just a figure of speech to say that God rested, that we’re misunderstanding the tenth commandment, etc. Why does this never convince us? Because the Koran’s version of the Commandments is perfectly fine without the allegedly misunderstood elements. With these elements, you have, at best, a potential for misunderstanding in which most people become ensared; without them, you have the same thing but without the potential for misunderstanding. So however you figure it, the Koran’s version of the Commandments is a cleaned up, polished version of the Bible’s, clearly superior.
What a Difference A Claim Can Make
Now as long as we’re on the subject of comparing the Bible to the Koran, I think I should point out the most crucial differences between them. First, the Bible is a volume of sixty-six (or more) books, written by different authors in different languages and at different times, whereas the Koran is a single work in a consistent psalmic style. Second, there are no alternate versions of the Koran, whereas Catholics and Protestants use two, different Bibles. (Again, this has to do with the Bible being a volume rather than a single book.)
And most importantly of all, the Koran does not need exterior sources to call it the infallible word of God. The Bible is, by and large, a collection of stories and discourses regarding God and religion which are written from a clearly human point of view. The Koran, on the other hand, is a direct address from God to us. The voice speaking throughout the text is always God’s, except for a small handful of points at which Muhammad (P) and Gabriel interject comments of their own, but only as God’s angel (a vehicle for carrying out His will and words) and God’s inspired prophet (in the same vein). And to be sure, sometimes God refers to Himself in the third person in this text, but not most of the time—just as we might occasionally refer to ourselves in the third person (“Nobody does that to David Jones!”), but not most of the time. The significance of all of these things is made clear in the text itself:
16:2 High be He exalted above that they associate with Him! He sends down the angels with the Spirit of His command upon whomsoever He will among His servants, saying: Give you warning that there is no God but I; so fear you Me!
But remember that they are exceptions to the rule. The voice is direclty God’s most of the time, which is not the case in the Bible. From time to time in the Koran God inspires Gabriel or Muhammad (P) to speak His words from another point of view, in order to glorify Him through inspiration, much like David (P) did when he was given the Psalms (which, as you remember, were later corrupted), but most of the time it’s God’s voice speaking to us and in all cases it is words from God.
So we have all of these books before the Koran which professed to be infallible and always appeared to be written from a point of view that is oblivious to this claim that would be made about them after they were in wide circulation. And after enough books (the Bible, the Hindu Vedas, etc.) were dubbed infallible and inspired despite making no such claim themselves, it just began to look like people are universally lazy with their methods of assessing the historicity and authenticity of their holy texts. Calling a text the infallible word of God became really nothing more than a cliched cop-out which allows you not to have to bother trying to solve the enigmas presented by scripture.
And 1 Timothy 3:16 is no exception: it just says that all scripture is inspired, not that the Bible is inspired. For instance, what’s scripture to the Catholics isn’t always scripture to the Protestants, since there are books which the Catholics consider scripture but the Protestants don’t. Additionally, the original compilation that was known as the Bible contained scriptures that aren’t in the Bible we have today, such as The Shepherd of Hermas. So as you can see, “scripture” is a much vaguer term than “Bible”, since one category is much larger than the other. “Scripture” is a broad and arbitrary term; the Bible (or Bibles, rather) is/are a specific collection(s) of scriptures. In 1 Timothy 3:16 Paul was obviously referring to the scriptures used by the person to whom he was writing, since many books of the New Testament had not yet been written by that point. But the Koran is not a collection, not a volume, and in fact it even refers to itself, repeatedly, by name. Example:
12:1 Alif Lam Ra. Those are the signs of the Manifest Book.
12:2 We have sent it down as an Arabic Koran; haply you will understand.
12:3 We will relate to thee the fairest of stories in that We have revealed to thee this Koran, though before it thou wast one of the heedless.
Nowhere in the Bible will you find the phrase “the Bible”, nor will you even find anything telling you that the scripture you’re reading will be compiled with others into a collection that will collectively be the infallible Word of God. But the Koran does refer to itself, and it makes the specific claim to be the infallible Word of God, as you can see:
41:41 Surely it is a Book Sublime;
41:42 Falsehood comes not to it from before it nor from behind it; a sending down from One All-wise, All-laudable.
For that reason I for one find it more reasonable to take seriously the Islamic claim regarding the Koran than to take seriously the conservative Christian’s claim regarding the Bible. All the holy books up until the point of the Koran’s writing were just books that people pretended were inspired, irrationally preached were inspired, despite the fact that these books never, ever read like you’d expect a revelation from God to read: as a direct address from God to us. I think that should be a real eye-opener.
You Have Questions, God Has the Answers
Now, what else would you expect a book to be like if it were inspired by God? Well, it’s kind of hard to imagine since God is such an incomprehensible being, but there are, to be sure, certain things that I, at least, would expect a God-inspired text to do. You have a message from God in your hotmail box. What does it contain? Well, to begin with, what do people always say they want to do when they meet God? They always want to ask Him questions. God would know this, being omniscient, and so I would expect a message sent from God to answer all the questions we’re going to ask in advance. And this is just what the Koran does. Most signficantly, there are three huge, tough questions that have haunted us for centuries, and all of them are answered by the Koran. And, as I would expect from a God-inspired text, all of the answers given make perfect sense.
The first of these three questions is, “Why we are here? What is our purpose? Why did God make us?” In this e-mail of sorts from God, He says:
51:56 I have not created jinn and mankind except to serve Me.
Well there you go. And really, there is no other possible answer. Whatever God made us for, it has to be to serve Him in some way or another. Whatever we’re made to do, that’s how we serve Him. And we serve Him mainly through worshiping Him, but also through obeying Him. He wants to see us live a certain way, so we live that way. It’s the least we can do in exchange for being created in the first place and given a world to live in that gives us everything we need—food, water, shelter, companionship, places to explore, resources for us to make things to enterain ourselves, etc.
Then there’s the second biggest question: what are we? What are our souls, our selves? The answer is:
17:85 The Spirit is of the bidding of my Lord. You have been given of knowledge nothing except a little.
This will probably be clearer if we step outside of Arberry’s translation for a moment and see how M.H. Shakir translates the key phrase: “The soul is one of the commands of my Lord.” So the soul is a command from God. Now there’s probably no way to understand completely what this means, but if you think about it, a command you give does relate to you in much the same way that something created to serve you relates to you. In other words, a command is something you use to get something accomplished, and God uses us to get something accomplished. But that also means that our souls, our selves, come directly from God in the same way that a command comes right out of the mouth of the person giving it. Think of it as smoke coming from a fire. Two different substances, but one emanates from the other, the other obviously being greater.
I think that this is a perfectly reasonable explanation. If some higher power made us as self-aware beings, then you’d think we would possess some characteristics of His (after all, the Creator is obviously self-aware or else He wouldn’t be a true entity to begin with, let alone the ultimate entity) but also be completely different in other ways. We would be a different, lesser substance cast from His divine substance as smoke is cast from a fire. We wouldn’t really be made in His image, despite what the Bible says, because an infinite being cannot possibly have an image. He is totally unbound, uncontained, whereas having an image would bind and contain Him. And yet self-awareness would be something we have in common, just as smoke picks up heat from the fire which bore it despite being composed of a different chemical composition than the fire altogether.
The third and final question that has always haunted us is, “What happens to us when we die?” Well, the Koran goes on at length about Judgment Day and heaven and hell—the most frequent topics in the whole book, in fact, as they’re the most important things to be talking about when God is addressing us and thus deserve the most attention in His letter to us. But how do we know we can believe that anything of our selves will remain after we’re dead? That’s the real question, the thing that people wonder most about death. Once again the Koran has an answer, as you’d expect a long letter from God to:
41:39 And of His signs is that thou seest the earth humble; then, when We send down water upon it, it quivers, and swells. Surely He who quickens it is He who quickens the dead; surely He is powerful over everything.
When we apply inductive reasoning to the matter of death, we can see that in all of our experience, when something is destroyed it isn’t really destroyed—nothing ever really ends, and this long letter from God uses the earth as an example—it dies but is also regenerated. In much the same way, we will be regenerated after our death. That’s the natural cycle of things: life, death, rebirth. It happens all the time, all around us, even on a subatomic level (with electrons). Therefore it makes perfect sense, on an inductive level, to say that our basic selves will probably still exist after we die.
So we have now seen that the Koran has given us perfectly rational explanations for all the big questions that have always haunted us, as you’d expect a message from God to do.
Knowing Your Rebuttals in Advance
Now what else would a revelation from the Almighty bring us? What would it be like? Well, I think that if it answered our questions, it would probably also respond to any objections we might have, or any criticisms we might make of the text, ahead of time. Once again, this is evidence of the author’s omniscience, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you expect a book from an omniscient being to anticipate all the criticisms that will be brought against it and respond to them in kind?
Well, wouldn’t you know that this is just what the Koran does. I don’t see very much of that in the Bible—in fact, most of the Bible is spent not offering arguments and counter-arguments for its assertions, but simply making the assertions. None of its doctrines are argued for; you’re simply told to believe in them. As far as I know, the only parts of the Bible that make even an attempt at this sort of thing are the parts of the Gospels in which Jesus (P) debates and rebuts the Pharisees. (“How can Satan cast out Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand.”)
But as Sheikh Gary Miller says, there hasn’t been a single criticism, in all the centuries since the Koran was written, that was not being made in the time of its writing, and thus was not already replied to in the Koran itself. For instance, even back then people were making the claim that Muhammad (P) had learned about various traditions from people he knew from various belief systems, and the Koran responded to this claim:
16:103 And We know very well that they say, “Only a mortal is teaching him.” The speech of him at whome they hint is barbarous; and this is speech Arabic, manifest.
Another example can be found in the way that people at the time of the Book’s writing were already saying that Muhammad (P) had compiled a variety of folklore from various sources, along with a team of other authors (“the work of multiple hands,” as Denis Giron would have it), and the Koran responded to this claim too:
25:4 The unbelievers say, “This is naught but a calumny he has forged, and other folk have helped him to it.” So they have committed wrong and falsehood.
25:5 They say, “Fairy-tales of the ancients that he has had written down, so that they are recited to him at the dawn and in the evening.”
25:6 Say: “He sent it down, who knows the secret in the heavens and earth; He is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”
In other words, if you can make an unsupported assertion, so can we. You claim without hard evidence that the Koran is plagiarized by multiple authors; we claim without hard evidence that is is the Word of God. Pointing its resemblance to earlier traditions is not the same thing as presenting evidence, because if the Book is what it claims to be, the infallible Word of God, then that would mean that if an earlier tradition agrees with it, that tradition is simply right.
The Koran And Its Parallels in Various Traditions
It’s unrealistic to expect the canonized scriptures of a religion to be right all the time, as if the decisions of some committee that put together a volume of scriptures somehow managed to get the correct version of every story in what they compiled. In other words, resemblance to various traditions would not be evidence that the Koran is forged if the Koran is what it claims to be, but only a confirmation of those traditions, so unless you’re going to start off with assumption that the Koran is not what it claims to be—the very thing you’re trying to establish—then its resemblance to various traditions is a total moot point. So your case is either circular or irrelevant: in any case you have no real evidence.
Besides, Christians who utilize common criticisms on the Koran that it has copied its stories from various traditions don’t understand that the same sort of allegations are made about the Bible. Sometimes Christians will talk as if it’s the other way around—they say that we’re the ones who don’t understand that our book is subject to the same criticisms as theirs. But while I rarely see Muslims point out possible sources for biblical material—after all, in most cases the “source” in question would also end up being a source for our own, parallel stories—Christians are constantly chiming in with skeptics about the Koran’s “sources” in various traditions. But in fact, the skeptical critics who make such claims about the Koran make even more of such claims about the Bible, as the Bible is much longer than the Koran and thus contains more material that has the potential to be plagiarized.
For example, there is the possible influence of the flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh on the biblical account of the story of Noah’s (P) ark. The way I see it, if you can say that the Koran is a plagiaristic compilation of various traditions, then we can also say the same thing about the Bible. In the case of Noah’s (P) ark, we both lose. But the resemblance the biblical account has to the earlier version doesn’t destroy your faith, does it? No, of course not! And why? Because if you believe what the Bible says on the matter, then that just means that if an earlier account said the same thing, they got it right and simply beat the Bible to the punch. (In other words, maybe Utnapishtim and Noah [P] were the same person.) And so it is with the Koran and its various “sources”.
The Old Judging the New or the New Judging the Old?
Along the same lines, Christians are always telling me that the old judges the new, that if there is a disagreement between a newer revelation and an older one, the newer one takes priority and so it indicates mistakes in the newer one. It would be awfully convenient for Christians if this were true, but it’s like saying that any differences between a rough draft and a final draft are mistakes on behalf of the final draft. When something comes along later to correct the mistakes of something that came earlier, it makes no sense to say that it’s wrong just because it disagrees with the thing that came along earlier. At best, it simply makes unnecessary revisions—but as I’ve point out, that is not the case.
. When you say that as a rule, the old is what judges the new, you’re leaving no possible avenue for us to establish that the Koran is superior. In essence, what it really boils down to is, “The Bible is final and that’s that,” in which case I don’t even know why you’re bothering to express your thought at all, since we’re never going to agree to it just because you said so. Besides, if it were a rule of thumb that the old always judges the new, nothing would ever change for the better. There would be no revisions; nothing would ever improve. Every rough draft would be a final draft, because any changes made to the rough draft would be wrong.
At this point the Christian is probably asking me why God would allow His revelation to become corrupted in the first place. After all, doesn’t the Koran say that no one can change His words? Well, for the answer to that question, visit http://understanding-islam.com/related/text.asp?type=article&aid=7&sscatid=89.
As for the reason why God would allow His scriptures to become corrupted, you may as well ask why God allows any imperfections to exist in His creation. Gradual improvement, slow formation to a definite outline, progress, evolution—this is the glorious way in which God has chosen to make every important event happen. He made us humans through evolution. He made the world we live in through a gradual shaping process according to Big Bang theory. (You may deny these things if you are one of the more conservative Christians, but all scientific evidence is against your position, as well as the opinions of most experts in the field.) And finally, He made our revelations in much the same way. It was all planned from the beginning—there were no mishaps, only an evolution.
The Concept of Mediation
But enough comparing the Bible to the Koran for now: let’s compare our doctrines instead. The way I see it, when it comes to the bare bones doctrines. the most significant difference between Islam and Christianity is the element of intercession. You believe that God gave Himself up, in human form, to die on a cross so that you could be forgiven. But to this very day, after many years, I have yet to hear a single satisfactory explanation as to why it is that any kind of mediation, any kind of bridge betwixt God and man, is necessary for God to forgive us if God is omnipotent and cares about us. All He has to do is say, “I forgive you.” That’s it; nothing else is required.
The only two possible reasons for belief in such a mediation as Christianity teaches are that (a) God can’t reach us without it, or (b) we can’t reach God without it, which implies that God is deliberately not reaching out to us without it, even though He can do anything he wants to and is supposed to care about us. You might tell me that He did reach out to us, by way of the crucifixion and resurrection, but this is circular reasoning. My question is: why were these things necessary in the first place? Why is anything necessary for God? What Christianity is really doing here is presenting God with a false bifurcation: either someone has to pay the price for us, or God can’t or won’t forgive us. Well, that leaves out the option of God simply forgiving us and letting that be that, with no one having to pay any blood penalty.
To have someone else be punished in your place (especially in such a carefully planned and severely painful manner) is not an act of forgiveness, but is, in fact, the opposite of forgiveness. Whether or not you realize it, your depiction of God is basically that of a big bully who just has to let His anger out on somebody, so somebody has to volunteer to be the victim. I’m not trying to insult you here; I’m just describing the situation accurately. This is not a good God we’re talking about. Forgiveness is the opposite of vengeance—the two things can never meet because they deliberately oppose each other. Either you forgive someone or you punish them—to speak of doing both at the same time is like speaking of a four-sided triangle. Could God do something so utterly absurd as that if He wanted to? Of course he could, but as I’ve pointed out, there can be no coherent reason why He should.
The way that the world’s current leading evangelist, William Lane Craig, put it (at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley1.html) is that
God finds himself in a kind of dilemma. On the one hand are His justice and holiness, which demand punishment for sin, rightly deserved. On the other hand are God’s love and mercy, which demand reconciliation and forgiveness. Both are essential to His nature; neither can be compromised. What is God to do in this dilemma?
The answer is Jesus Christ. He is the fulfillment of God’s justice and love. They meet at the cross: the love and the wrath of God. At the cross we see God’s love for people and His wrath upon sin.
This is the great sin of Christianity’s doctrine of intercession: it limits God. To think that God is so contained and imperfect as to be put into an actual dilemma! An omnipotent and omniscient being will never end up in a dilemma, wouldn’t you say? Craig was talking as if God can be cornered by a situation into a choice between only two options (punish you or punish someone else in your stead). In reality that kind of thing does not happen to a boundless and almighty Being.
Of course, Craig goes by the special definition of “omnipotent” which is in vogue right now, that God can do anything that is logically possible. It doesn’t seem to matter to Craig that nobody ever used this definition of “omnipotent” before Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine introduced it as a rebuttal to the Argument from Suffering—which basically means that they were arbitrarily redefining the word to suit their own purposes. The fact of the matter is, God cannot be totally free and completely without boundaries if He is stuck being able to do only what is logically possible.
Why do I say this? Because what we know as logic is based on the principles of mathematics. So when you say that God is incapable of doing something that’s logically impossible, you’re binding Him to these higher laws, making Him unable to break them. This means that something exists which is self-existent apart from God, and God Himself is subject to it. In all practical respects, that makes the laws of mathematics the real God. Craig is, in effect, speaking blasphemy in two ways, first by pigeon-holing God into a dilemma, and second by binding Him to something higher. And that is exactly what Christianity does: he is simply putting the blasphemy correctly.
So however you figure it, Christianity doesn’t work. There is no way in which the doctrine of the atonement cannot be blasphemous. If God cannot forgive us without sacrificing someone in our stead, He is not omnipotent. If He refuses to forgive us unless someone is sacrificed in our stead, He is not perfectly good. (How could he be, if He won’t do the easiest thing in the world by just saying, “I forgive you,” and letting that be that?) The fact is, all intercession, all mediation, all bridges, are completely pointless when you have an boundless being like God on your hands.
The Concept of Incarnation
At this point the Christian might be telling me that I am applying limited human reason to something that is clearly beyond my mortal comprehension. But as I have shown, it is not incomprehensible at all, but simply blasphemous. Modern day, orthodox Christianity is built around the concept of God becoming a human being with human limitations and even being killed. Of all the types of people in the world, only a Christian can fail to see the blasphemy involved with this. To anyone else, it is crystal clear, but dogma has a way of blinding people to obvious facts that everyone but them can see. I shall now do my best to explain the blasphemy.
Once God becomes a human being, you see, He becomes subject to human limitations. Even if it’s only a local part of him that’s in this human body, and another part of Him still transcends everything, He has still become limited by being divided, as there is now one part of Him that is God and one part of Him that is man. Christians are always saying that Jesus (P) was perfect God and perfect man at the same time. What they don’t realize is that if God is part human, He is not all God. His divinity, in other words, has been soiled, diluted, compromised. There is an piece of Him now that is not God—that’s what the word “incarnation” means—and so not being entirely Himself, He is not entirely unlimited. This is no longer the unfathomable Thing beyond all things we’re talking about, but only a watered down version of it, where a section of it can be touched and seen and smelled and tasted and heard.
In a nutshell, to be meek like Jesus (P) supposedly was is to make God into a meek being, and this is blasphemy by definition. Even if it’s only one of God’s three persons that is being incarnated, and only temporarily, this person is, for the time being, limited, and since this person is God, therefore God is, at least for a few decades of time as we understand it, not unlimited. The paradox that Christians refer to, that Jesus (P) was both perfect God and perfect man, is not really a paradox but an oxymoron—in mathematical terms, what you must end up having is a total of 200%. You cannot be all God and all man at the same time. Can you overrule this is you’re omnipotent? Of course, but as I’ve pointed out, there is no need to, since mediation has the same trick of limiting God. You’re stuck.
Conclusion
I will leave you now to think about the things I’ve said, and I hope you will think about them, long and deeply, and not simply react to them in some way. Give it some consideration, let it soak through. I think you just might find that I’m right after all. But hey, it’s up to you. You have to form your own conclusions. I’ll just leave you with these closing words from the Koran:
4:171 People of the Book, go not beyond the bounds in your religion, and say not as to God but the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only the Messenger of God, and His Word that He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and say not, “Three.” Refrain: better is it for you. God is only One God. Glory be to Him—that He should have a son! To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and in the earth; God suffices for a guardian.
5:17 They are unbelievers who say, “God is the Messiah, Mary’s son.” Say: “Who then shall overrule God in any way if He desires to destroy the Messiah, Mary’s son, and his mother, and all those who are on earth?”
5:75 The Messiah, son of Mary, was only a Messenger; Messengers before him passed away; his mother was a just woman; they both ate food. Behold, how We make clear the signs to them; then behold, how they perverted are!
You might consider these quotes insulting, but I think they make some good points—really, the same points I have made earlier. And I hope that you will consider them.