Posted by Illuminati on 7/11/2009, 4:48 pm
75.173.17.91
Muslims take skeptical scholars at face value when they argue against the accuracy of the Bible. Islamic apologists think that by if they can disprove the verbal infallibility of the Bible, they have undermined the authority of the Bible. They don’t seem to realize that most conservative Christians welcome sound Biblical scholarship. If Christians were to reject facts about the Bible, they could not honestly claim that they are searching for truth.
So long as they are reasonable and consistent, scholars benefit Christians. By raising questions about the Bible, they help to prevent radical fundamentalism with its associated faulty methods of interpretation. To properly understand the Bible, it is necessary to understand that revelation is a combination of the divine message given through a human, who must first understand the revelation himself before is able to express it in his own language. Rigid fundamentalists will be confounded by linguistic contradictions and minor logical lapses, but more knowledgeable Bible students will not be overly concerned by these things. Only those who understand the method through which we have received God’s revelation will be able to dig beneath those superficial irregularities to mine the deeper truths found in the Bible.
Most Muslims appear to have fallen into a deep rigid fundamentalism which makes it impossible for them to move beneath the surface to understand moral truth. This is why Muslims attribute such overweening significance to children who learn to recite the Koran accurately from memory. It is the divine sound of the Koran which brings greatness to a Muslim child, not an advanced understanding of God’s mercy. Muslims view the Koran and the hadiths as rule books which contain absolute rules which are all of equal importance. Thus Muslims obsess about the length of the foreskin on mens’ penises, or about which hand they use to use to wipe their bottoms, but ignore mass murder, rape, and genocide in places like the Sudan. Indeed, the perpetrators of those vile crimes consider themselves exemplary Muslims, since among other things, they are all circumcised and all use the correct hand to wipe. Most Muslims seem to agree that a violent Muslim rapist is more righteous than a kind Hindu who has just risked his life to save a Muslim’s life. All the Muslim has to do is to declare jihad and every kaffir woman is fair prey for sexual molestation.
Because most Muslims are rigid fundamentalists, religious scholars who can penetrate their cocoon of ignorance about the history of the Koran are preforming a great service to humanity. Their research can spare everyone, including Muslims themselves, from many catastrophes. At this very moment, zealous individuals within the Muslim community are plotting how they can murder as many innocent men, women and children as possible. They will gladly sacrifice the lives of thousands their fellow Muslims, provided they can kill Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists, simply because they belong to a different religion. These crimes against humanity are primarily motivated by an unquestioning acceptance of the hadiths which in turn are interpreted through radical Muslim traditions. While the Koran appears to be a more moderate book, the key to destroying Islamic fundamentalism lies in the proper understanding of the source of the information within the Koran. Once the Koran is placed in its proper historical setting, fundamentalism is destroyed. Fortunately, there is information available to perform this task, provided scholars are courageous enough to risk their lives to speak the truth about what they know about the Koran. This is where the fires of Uthman come into the discussion.
Because the hadiths were written down almost two hundred years after Mohammad’s death, any information gathered from the hadiths is of limited historical value. Even the Muslims who recorded the hadiths recognized that there were a great number of false stories in existence when they wrote down their stories and sayings. Bukhari reportedly shifted through 300,000 sayings in order to arrive at a few thousand which he believed were authentic. Here is a statement in the Wikipedia about the challenges which faced Bukhari. Obviously, if Muslims back then had the perfect memories about which modern Muslims fantasize, there would have been no inaccurate hadiths for Bukhari to reject.
Al-Bukhari traveled widely throughout the Abbasid empire for sixteen years, collecting those traditions he thought trustworthy. It is said that al-Bukhari collected over 300,000 hadith and included only 2,602 traditions in his Sahih[11] [12] [13]; however, the later number contradicts the number given by Ibn al-Salaah, as mentioned above.http://wapedia.mobi/en/Islamic_calendar
These numbers are enough to lay to rest forever the claim that Muslims close to Mohammad’s day had phenomenal memories. Either thousands of Muslims forgot what Mohammad had actually said, or there were individuals who were making up hadiths as needed for their own purposes, or both.
Because there is little reliable information about early Islam, researchers are forced to rely to some extent on the hadiths even though they are of limited historical accuracy. The hadiths themselves do not support the modern Muslims’ claim that there were people who had perfect memories of the Koran who could vouch for the accuracy of Uthman’s recension of the Koran. Here is how the process in which the Koran was collected is described by Zaid bin Thabit Al-Ansari in Bukhari Volume 6, Book 60, Number 201:
Narrated Zaid bin Thabit Al-Ansari:who was one of those who used to write the Divine Revelation:
Abu Bakr sent for me after the (heavy) casualties among the warriors (of the battle) of Yamama (where a great number of Qurra' were killed). 'Umar was present with Abu Bakr who said, 'Umar has come to me and said, The people have suffered heavy casualties on the day of (the battle of) Yamama, and I am afraid that there will be more casualties among the Qurra' (those who know the Qur'an by heart) at other battle-fields, whereby a large part of the Qur'an may be lost, unless you collect it. And I am of the opinion that you should collect the Qur'an." Abu Bakr added, "I said to 'Umar, 'How can I do something which Allah's Apostle has not done?' 'Umar said (to me), 'By Allah, it is (really) a good thing.' So 'Umar kept on pressing, trying to persuade me to accept his proposal, till Allah opened my bosom for it and I had the same opinion as 'Umar." (Zaid bin Thabit added
Umar was sitting with him (Abu Bakr) and was not speaking. me). "You are a wise young man and we do not suspect you (of telling lies or of forgetfulness): and you used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah's Apostle. Therefore, look for the Qur'an and collect it (in one manuscript). " By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains (from its place) it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Qur'an. I said to both of them, "How dare you do a thing which the Prophet has not done?" Abu Bakr said, "By Allah, it is (really) a good thing. So I kept on arguing with him about it till Allah opened my bosom for that which He had opened the bosoms of Abu Bakr and Umar. So I started locating Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leaf-stalks of date palms and from the memories of men (who knew it by heart). I found with Khuzaima two Verses of Surat-at-Tauba which I had not found with anybody else, (and they were):--
"Verily there has come to you an Apostle (Muhammad) from amongst yourselves. It grieves him that you should receive any injury or difficulty He (Muhammad) is ardently anxious over you (to be rightly guided)" (9.128),
According to this hadith, there was no Koran while Mohammad was alive. Therefore, no one had memorized the entire Koran. Although parts of the Koran had been reduced to writing by the time Zaid collected the Koran, other parts were still unwritten. Although Zaid was the one who collected this particular recension of the Koran, he did not claim to personally have memorized the Koran himself. Indeed, Zaid was unfamiliar with significant portions of the Koran and had to rely on the word of other Muslims who had memorized some of Mohammad’s teachings. None of Zaid’s companions had memorized all of Mohammad’s teachings either.
In this passage, many of Mohammad’s teachings had not been written down until long after his death. For much of the Koran, Zaid was dependant on the memories of various Muslims who each remembered a different teaching. There was no group of individuals who had perfect memories of the sayings of Mohammad and could verify that the records which Zaid collected were complete. Considering the fallibility of the human memory, there is no way to verify that those men who shared their memories with Zaid are accurate. For some passages, several men may have agreed among themselves that what one remembered was what they all remembered, but that consensus falls far short of perfect recall. Without written records to verify their information, their memories could have drifted significantly over the years as they shared their stories with each other. Indeed, if the hadiths are to be believed, Mohammad’s memory itself wasn’t perfect. Since no one had written down Mohammad’s teachings, and since no one had memorized it in its entirety, the wording in the passages in the Koran may have gradually changed and evolved during Mohammad’s life time.
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