9-18-1
Active Member
This proves you are are unfamiliar with the scholarship on the issue.
There is an absolute wealth of critical scholarship on this issue, much of which very much contradicts the Islamic narrative and comes from people with no incentive to partake in 'dogma based resistance'. You could spend years simply reading the revisionist literature, let alone the other areas of critical scholarship. The idea that Western non-Muslim revisionists are partaking in 'dogma based resistance' and attempting to suppress the truth is tin foil hat level ludicrous.
You have it backwards - it is Eastern Muslim non-revisionists that are partaking in the 'dogma based resistance'. This is what Luling alluded to.
Critical scholarship literally starts with the axiomatic assumption that the Quran is not Divine, yet you are representing it as a branch of Islamic apologetics.
I represent no such thing - and such a default position should be expected. Unfortunately, as per my first comment Islamic approaches are inverted.
Admitting that 'the last place you would look' is among experts publishing peer-reviewed articles containing evidence and logical reasoning in support of claims which you can evaluate on their merits might be a reason you lack critical insight
That's actually not what I stated - I stated "within the field" because this is precisely where one finds the entanglements alluded to by Luling. I am happy to read any/all discourse(s) but the last place I would look for a definitive answer is in the very place that attempts to obscure it.
You claimed you had read GS Reynolds previously, do you consider him 'insufferably apologetic'? Most of his scholarship is on reading parts of the Quran as homily regarding a Biblical subtext.
I don't - insufferable apologetics is almost exclusively a characteristic of "Islamic" scholarship in my experience as "protecting" certain (untrue) traditions is placed before altruistic inquiry, which is neither scientific nor honest.
How do you factor in that Christians would likely win a 'body count' competition. How do they compare to Romans? Persians? Mongols? Chinese? etc.
You really seem to enjoy missing the point. It relates to a comment I made earlier.
The principle division between "believer" and "unbeliever" is not unique to Islam - it existed in Christianity. As such I don't care about body counts - both institutions are inherently idolatrous and essentially identical in their framework and associated bloody histories. You keep attempting to bring in lines of refutation that unnecessarily obfuscates everything into absurdity. There is not a single argument I would make against Islam that I would not make against Christianity because the former is a heresy of the latter and are thus unified as one 'thing'.
But your allusion to Christianity being responsible for a higher 'body count' is ridiculous: Islam is absolutely the winner here. However as I stated, it is a non-issue for me: they are both the same 'thing'.
No one doubts there is significant intertextuality between the Quran and Judaeo-Christian texts and traditions. What is disputed is the nature of this relationship.
People can dispute all they wish - fundamentally I only care about one thing: is it true or untrue that the Qur'an is the perfect word of god. The latter is correct and I still hold that approx. 1/3 of the Qur'an is derived from Christian strophic hymns and heretical apocryphal works originally written in a non-Arabic language(s).
As I've said before, the work you cite is naive and oversimplistic, the field of critical Islamic studies has moved on considerably in the last 30 years, let alone 100. For example, Tisdall assumes a rudimentary copying of sources ad that the Quran contains basic errors in relation to its intertextual references. This view is no longer tenable.
You can say all you wish - however to state the work of Tisdall "is no longer tenable" is asinine. If something is true, it can never become "no longer tenable". If you don't "like" his work or personally think (or don't think, and yield to whatever authority you kneel before) it is of merit, I will not encroach on your conscience.
Some views:
Indeed, a good number of Qur’ānic pericopes look like Arabic ingenious patchworks of Biblical and para- Biblical texts, designed to comment passages or aspects of the Scripture, whereas others look like Arabic translations of liturgical formulas.
This is not unexpected if we have in mind some Late Antique religious practices, namely the well-known fact that Christian Churches followed the Jewish custom of reading publicly the Scriptures, according to the lectionary principle. In other words, people did not read the whole of the Scripture to the assembly, but lectionaries (Syriac qǝryānā, Ǧreading of Scripture in Divine Service”, etymon of Arabic qur’ān), containing selected passages of the Scripture, to be read in the community. Therefore, many of the texts which constitute the Qur’ān should not be seen (at least if we are interested in their original Sitz im Leben) as substitutes for the (Jewish or Christian) Scripture, but rather as a (putatively divinely inspired) commentary of Scripture.
Not relevant but thanks.
Traces of Bilingualism/Multilingualism in Qur'anic Arabic
The Qur’ān’s complex manipulation of the Aramaic Gospel Traditions is,
furthermore, neither accidental nor haphazard. It is rather, quite deliberate and
sophisticated. It wood behoove readers to realize a basic fact concerning dogmatic
re-articulation as we have laid it out herein, namely that the Qur’ān excercises
complete control over its challenging or re-appropriation of passages from the
Aramaic Gospels—not vice versa. This is evident both implicitly and explicitly
within the text... Finally, consider that the text skillfully translates or interprets
Hebrew and Aramaic terminology and seamlessly integrates them into the overall
literary, rhetorical, and theological coherence of the particular passage or Surah
wherin they occur, which is the unmistakable intention behind zakariyyā in Q 19:2
and s.arrah in Q 51:29 for example.
Dispensing with hasty and superficial readings of the text—which may incorrectly
yield ‘mistakes’ or ‘contraditions’ in the qur’ānic re-telling of Biblical narratives
or post-Biblical controversies—is the first step in truly appreciating its
linguistic, structural, and thematic integrity... The point is that such a dexterous command
of Biblical and post-Biblical literature as a whole, and such strong volition on the
part of the Qur’ān’s authorship, is central to our understanding of its dogmatic rearticulation
of the Aramaic Gospels Tradition. (The Quran and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions. - E El-Badawi)
I am reminded of Luling's warning. I'm personally not interested in the work of El-Badawi as his motivations are clearly nowhere near altruistic, given his affirmation in/of the Islamic faith, but of course you are free to post whatever you wish.
However I will state the last paragraph falls into my own category of "insufferably apologetic".
Even a brief perusal of the Arabic Qurʾān is sufficient to convince the first-time reader that the text presumes a high degree of scriptural literacy on the part of its audience. In it there are frequent references to biblical patriarchs, prophets, and other gures of Late Antique, Jewish, and Christian religious lore. One hears of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, David, Solomon, Job, and Jonah, among others from the Hebrew Bible. Similarly, one reads of Jesus, Mary, Zecharaiah, John the Baptist, and Jesus’ disciples from the New Testament, but no mention of Paul and his epistles. What is more, there are numerous echoes in the Qurʾān of non- biblical, Jewish and Christian traditions, some of them otherwise found in so-called apocryphal or pseudepigraphic biblical texts. So prominent is this scriptural material in the body of the Islamic scripture that one twentieth- century Western scholar of Islam was prompted to speak of the Qurʾān as “a truncated, Arabic edition of the Bible.” But in fact the Qurʾān is much more than just an evocation of earlier biblical narratives; it incorporates the recollection of those earlier scriptures into its own call to belief, to Islam and its proper observance, as it says, in good, clarifying Arabic"
S. Griffiths - The Bible in Arabic
I've not read anything from this author but given the above, I care not to. The last alone reeks of apologetics: the Arabic of the Qur'an is far from "good, clarifying Arabic". The Arabic of the Qur'an is not Arabic - some of it is Syriac which when rendered into the Arabic completely changes the meanings. For example the notion that man was created from a "clot of blood" is actually a poor rendition of a Syriac word which originally (should have) meant "mud/clay" as is consistent with the Biblical narrative. Muslims are now confused by this as the Hebrew word 'adama' is the stuff which composes 'Adam' who was made of the dust (mud/clay) of the earth, not a blood clot. There are innumerable such conflations throughout the Qur'an which are exceeding painful to point out given how wrong they are. As such regarding the above quote, the Qur'an is far from "clarifying" - it is actually the inverse (obfuscating).
(source above) said:Here Jesus belongs to the most important figures in the Qur’ān. Furthermore, in some other respects, he is even the most eminent character, since he is alone in enjoying a very high status: he is the only one to be called the word and spirit of God (4:171); he is born miraculously of the virgin Mary (the only woman named in the Qur’ān); he is the only prophet to receive a revelation from the cradle (19:30-33); his return to earth is the sign of the end of time (43:61); moreover, the holy spirit (rūḥal-qudus) is mentioned only four times in the Qur’ān, and in three cases, precisely about Jesus (2:87, 253; 5:110).
...which is once again consistent that much of the (early) body of the Qur'an was derived from Christian literature.
Passing the time by correcting your basic errors for anyone reading who might be interested in the issue.
If this is how you fill your time - arguing against someone allegedly on the same side of the table as you are - there are some more basic errors more deserving of your attention. Unfortunately they are of a nature that can not be addressed by appealing to outside authority.
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