Is Islam in accordance with rationality and science?

[c0de]

No, in Muhammad's time and for centuries afterward, alaqa was not used for things that cling/hang/suspend from something else, rather for "congealed" things which cling to themselves: a "clot" of blood or "clump" of mud.

--

Well that's the problem. I've never seen an example like that either, and when this passage is challenged, there never seems to be any example produced.

Your two objections still lack teeth because you have not brought any sources to back up the attack.

You said you stopped believing that you were a prophet of God when you were a kid. If that's true dude, then why are you still insisting that we just take your word for it? You are dealing with two non-arabic speakers right now. If you want to convince us that you have actually spotted a contradiction in the Quran's language, please provide credible references to back up your claims such as "no example has ever been produced" or that a certain word "was never used in that capacity" in the time of the Prophet.

Both me and farhan have said that if the issue you have raised was really such a big deal, then it would have been a BIG DEAL. I had never even heard of it before you brought it up.

but I rather abruptly came to perceive that I was not "all that" and, really, was quite a small creature in the universe.

Actually, if God exists, this is MORE true, not less. If there is no God, then we are statistical anomaly, extremely lucky to be alive, and therefore special. If God does exist, then we are just a product of His will.

It has to do with the history of religion opposing every major new discovery,

You have completely ignored the history of Islamic "golden age" and the advances in sciences therein. Some of the greatest polymaths in Muslim lands were also theologians. The only "science" that the Muslim religion rejected was astrology (and thank God for that).

but Moses is said to have killed a lot of people for rejecting his revelations.

Not according to the Quran.

Well, I'm having a good ride. Sorry your part of the world cannot figure out how to do this.

You are one of a very few in your part of the world that is having a "good ride". Most people there are not having a "good" a "ride" as you might be. In fact, you could say, most of them are being taken for a ride.

And btw, for the few "fortunate sons" like yourself, BE WARNED, your time is nigh!!

(CCR referrence FTW baby!!)

 

[bob x]

Okay, that's just unfair man. You can't say that Islam is what generates people like that

Sure I can, "Islam is what generates people like that"
I mean seriously, this is one of the outcomes from treating Muhammad's words as God's words, that he gets treated idolatrously: I use the word "idolatrously" to capture the irony that it is supposedly to avoid "idolatry" that there is this rule against pictures of him, yet in this case it is like he is being treated as a god rather than a man, singled out from all other men as the only person you cannot take the mickey out of.

There are other ironies here: this al-Amriki guy (don't you love the name?) obviously did not actually watch the South Park episode he is enraged about. The figure who is hidden from our view in the bear suit, and in a U-Haul truck, and then by a CENSORED sign when his face is exposed, is mistakenly thought by the characters to be Muhammad, but it is revealed in the end that he is Santa Claus!

And: the comments thread. Don't bother trying to read through all 1000 or however many there are, there's mostly all the same, vile language demanding that all Muslims in America be deported, or that all Muslims on Earth be exterminated, or both (yes, there's one "ship them all back where they came from, and then nuke their countries when they arrive!")-- so there! That will teach you Muslims that we Americans can't stand INTOLERANCE

Now, you can't say that America is what generates people like that-- oh, wait, yeah you can.

judges in practice are always more inclined to give the verdict that they think the mob is most likely to accept.

That may be your experience in Pakistan, but in America major judicial decisions are frequently against what the majority wishes. Brown (no segregation of the races in school) and its followups (ending other forms of segregation), Engel (schools may not lead students in prayer), Gideon and Miranda (the accused have a right to a lawyer, and to be warned they need not speak until the lawyer comes), Roe v. Wade (struck down most laws against abortion), Lawrence (struck down all laws against homosexuality), and Bush v. Gore (OK, it isn't always a good thing that our judges disregard the majority!) are all prominent cases with which angry mobs loudly disagreed.

Perfect example: Nazi Germany.

Uhhh... Nazi Germany isn't usually considered a "perfect" example of what "always" happens; it's usually considered a rare, indeed singular, extreme.

No one can deny that their judiciary basically acted like an inquisition committee. But why? Not because Hitler was breathing down their neck, but because the PEOPLE supported hitler.

This is not the way it was. Hitler found that the judiciary was stubbornly independent: in 1933 the "Reichstag fire" defendants were all found not guilty for lack of evidence. So in 1934 new "People's Courts" were founded to handle all political cases, and these judges were faithful to the Nazi line not out of any concern for the popular wishes, but because they were hand-picked Nazi true-believers themselves. In 1936, moreover, the actions of the Gestapo and SS were explicitly decreed to be extrajudicial (you did not get "sentenced" to a concentration camp after a "trial", not even a mockery of one; there was no pretense that you would get any day in court). The regular judiciary was purged, first of Jews, then of people who spoke up for the purged Jews, and finally by drafting the "politically unreliable" into the armed forces; and progressively stripped of jurisdiction, even over run-of-the-mill petty criminal cases: by the time the war was on, a burglar was less likely to be brought to court than to be swept up by the Gestapo, and either offered a chance to prove his loyalty by volunteering for the SS if he seemed likely to be a useful thug, or sent to the concentration camps as a "Kapo" to help keep the other inmates in line (if he wanted to live).

The same is the case with gay-marriage. Why did the Canadian judiciary allow it, and the Americans didn't?

The American judiciary often, though not invariably, HAS ruled in favor of gay marriage. Every state that allows it in some form was pushed into it at least in part by court decisions. Our nationwide Supreme Court has not ruled on the question, either way; this has, to be sure, largely been because our side has been afraid to take the question up to them, for fear of a precedent against us that might take a long time to overturn:

Is the question itself any different in Canada then in the U.S? If not, then why the contrary verdict? Because the people in Canada are more tolerant of homosexuality

Canada, for whatever reason, has far fewer "fundamentalists" of the kind so rife in the US, largely concentrated in the South but common enough everywhere, with very similar views to the Muslims (though they would shoot you for saying so!) on Scripture: "God said it, I believe it, that settles it!" While these are mostly Protestants, and Catholics in general are less inclined to such a position, there is also a block of Catholics whose primary loyalty is to the Vatican above our Constitution. Unfortunately, one of our Supreme Court Justices (Scalia) is openly in favor of putting religious values above the law (dissenting in Roemer and Lawrence, he wrote that the "odium" against homosexuals was perfectly justified by the long-standing religious tradition), and two of the other Catholics on the Court (Thomas and Alito) follow him almost slavishly. The three other Catholics, one right-wing but not extremely so (Chief Justice Roberts), one middle-of-the-road (Kennedy), and one left-wing (Sotomayor), are not of this block: but with three solid votes against us, we would need five out of six others, so it worries me that the "Proposition 8" case seems destined to go up to the Supremes, for good or bad. The domination of the Court by a minority religion (Catholics are 25-30% of the population) is unusual: Jews were never a majority but for a long time were over-represented, and there is still one (Ginsberg), leaving only one Protestant (Breyer) now that the other has retired (Stephens) to leave a vacancy (he was left-wing and Obama will appoint another like him, so that is a wash).

judges in the US are afraid to pass the law for fear of, well, a heap of rotten eggs at the least, and assassination at the most.

Judge Crater's disappearance in the 1930's is the last-known case of a judge being assassinated (assuming he was killed), and more like a mob hit than an expression of political opposition (or so it is believed). The US really doesn't work that way.

This is the extent of humanity's capacity to provide "justice."

I don't see why you think the Qur'an helps. Islamic judges are humans too.

Now, this might only be one of those myths, but I have heard that in law school, the first thing they teach the students is that they are here to learn "law" not justice. If they are interested in talking about justice, then they are in the wrong place and should seek to enroll in a philosophy course. Even if this is a myth, it sound about right.

It is not a myth. In first-year law school, we had to read Oliver Wendell Holmes' essay "On Legal Realism" which I will try to paraphrase:

The law is not "what people should do." The law is not even "what judges should do." The law is "what judges do." To understand this, let us look at it from the perspective of our old friend, the bad man. The bad man does not care in the least whether this or that provision written in the law books says that what he is doing is wrong. But he is intensely interested in knowing whether, in fact, a judge is likely to fine or imprison him.

I am living among billion plus "kaffirs" in China right now, who do not fit into any category of "people of the book" or the "sabiens". Now tell me, how am I required by my scripture to discriminate against them?

Your scripture with its usual vagueness tells you to "struggle" against them, but this has been quite variably interpreted: would this be approximately your position? In this passage near the bottom,

"I am frequently confronted by people who tell me, "But, Imam so-and-so says all non-Muslims are to be killed..." or "Shaykh such-and-such says that you must hate all non-Muslims..." or "Maulana whatchamacallhim said that jihad is 'holy war' against the infidel..." Frankly, I could care less about what Imam so-and-so, or Shaykh such-and-such, or Maulana whatchamacallhim says. Their words are meaningless to me. I know what God says,"

we are told to disregard "experts" if they are going against "what God says" but this again raises the whole question of how you can tell if your personal interpretation of the Qur'an is any good or not, or which "experts" to believe on the subject.

The Quran itself doesn't even specify a tax per head, most of that comes from superlative literature outside the Quran and written much later.

"Superlative" means "highest quality"; I am sure you were wanting some word more like "superfluous" ("more than necessary; extraneous"). Are you a Qur'an-only type, suspicious of hadith in general?

And you are mixing up the discrimination after kaffir with the lesser discrimination (special tax) against "people of the book". The Wiki on jizya is informative: only a single mention in the Qur'an, vague of course; a higher tax rate on "tributary" peoples was perfectly usual at the time, and for former subjects of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, the tax burden actually went down, significantly (this I had read before: the reason a minor power like Arabia could take down such empires was because they had a lot of inside help, from subjects who, regardless of religion, had an interest in seeing the regimes overthrown); Muhammad's state did encounter Zoroastrians, when it expanded as far as Bahrain, tolerating them subject to the jizya tax, so when Caliph Umar was uncertain how to deal with Zoroastrians in Persia, he looked to find the precedent from Muhammad's time. Unfortunately, later Shi'a regimes, who reject hadith, treated Zoroastrians as kaffir since the Qur'an does not list them as people of the book.

During the Prophet's time, there were many non-Muslims (some even enemies) living in Medinah, and they were not discriminated against.

Jews and Christians had to pay a special tax. Polytheists, to the best of my understanding (contradict me if you have a different understanding), had to convert, leave, or die. That would seem to apply even more stringently to atheists, but what kinds of religions might be tolerated is, as I've been saying, somewhat of a difficult question. You are not, of course, under any religious duty to compel all the Chinese around you to convert to Islam under threat of death; but that is only because you do not control the territory. The early Muslim rulers to conquer as far as Sind did still follow a policy of convert, leave, or die, as far as Hindus were concerned. As they kept penetrating into more and more thickly populated areas, this became impractical, and the Mugal rulers had wavering policies on whether they should just impose jizya on Hindus or whether they should systematically destroy all their shrines and try to destroy Hinduism over time. The Babri Masjid, built on the site of a destroyed shrine to Krishna's birthplace, remained a sore point for centuries until the violent demonstrations and finally demolition of the building a few years ago, Hindu extremist leaders of course inciting the crowds to attacks on Muslims while they had angry mobs so conveniently assembled.

The prophet was "elected" to become the leader in Medinah, by the people of medinah.

The "people"? Or a few power-brokers in the town? I don't know how the city-state was governed before: it's possible it was "general town meeting" like Athens; or elected City Council like most towns I've lived in; or a hereditary Senate from the leading families like in ancient Rome. But it sounds like it might have been more like medieval Rome: where a handful of families controlled everything, but did not meet in any kind of council, instead occasionally settling their differences by mustering their gangs for street brawls.

Well, duh! Of course it makes it okay. What are you like some hippie pacifist? (lol)

Killing to defend yourself is not wrong (as long as you kill only combatants and not start suicide bombing).

Of course, the Communists in Russia and China were always "defending the revolution" too, you know...
I'm not sure that the same principle applies when what you are "defending" is your beliefs. Jesus preferred torture and death to violent resistance.

And I don't blame Christianity for what "the Grand Inquisitor" did.

I do. As with the other Abrahamic religions, the notion of special revelations from God, so that anyone who disagrees is disagreeing with God, can easily lead to this kind of outcome.

And I dont blame communism for what Stalin did either.

I do. Uprooting the whole social structure faster than you can create new institutions is an open invitation to the bully-boys to take over.

There are some ideologies which are just built on oppression and discrimination, like nazism. But Islam, clearly, is not one of those types of ideologies.

I would not compare Islam to Nazism, and would be on your side against anyone making that kind of comparison. It has, like every other ideology, its own particular ways of getting easily twisted into some extreme form. The evils of Islamic extremism reflect the underlying flaws of Islam, as the evils of Christian (or Marxist) extremism reflect underlying flaws in Christianity (or Marxism).

No, I'm pretty sure it was God. (occasionalism, remember?)

Then my words to you are the words of God, exactly as Muhammad's.

 

[bob x]

Your two objections still lack teeth because you have not brought any sources to back up the attack.

I have relied on the sources you brought. On alaqa, the embryology paper acknowledges that only the meaning "congealed thing" (clot/clump/leech) was known to any Muslim scholars in the centuries immediately after Muhammad; indeed I don't think it was until very recent times that any other meaning was even considered, since all the English translations I've seen use it. They are going back to the root a-l-q to find some other meaning that can be derived from it: they acknowledge doing this, and when farhan says muallaq is the derivative with the sense they want, I believe that since m- prefix is typically used that way.

On ukht, you cite a Qur'an commentator that "sister" could mean a "non-blood-relative" and Muhammad using daughter for "distant descendant", and that's it; farhan thinks there are usages of "brother" for "affiliate (not necessarily blood related) from a distant generation" and I would indeed accept that as good evidence if produced. Of course, your sources conclude "the Qur'an is right, isn't that amazing!" because what else are they going to say?

You said you stopped believing that you were a prophet of God when you were a kid.

More precisely, I was a Dawkins-style atheist as a kid, a prophet by the time I was twenty, and an ex-prophet by the time I was thirty.

please provide credible references to back up your claims such as "no example has ever been produced" or that a certain word "was never used in that capacity" in the time of the Prophet.

The burden of proof has to be on the positive side, not the negative. To prove a negative like "ukht was never used in that capacity in the time of the Prophet" I would have to show you every usage from that time, and go down the list: this isn't it; this isn't it; this isn't it.... That is why the side that makes the positive claim has the burden of proof: show me one such usage. That's all I ask. On the claim "no example has ever been produced", well I can't show you every piece of writing ever (this isn't it; this isn't it...) but in the more limited sense "no example has ever been produced in our discussion", certainly you can go through every post on this thread and see that no such example is anywhere.

Both me and farhan have said that if the issue you have raised was really such a big deal, then it would have been a BIG DEAL. I had never even heard of it before you brought it up.

Well it's like the Biblical conundrums, that most Christians have never heard of either. Show them the two genealogies of Jesus and they'll say "Huh! I'm sure there's an explanation. Nobody has ever found a contradiction in the Bible in two thousand years of trying."

Actually, if God exists, this is MORE true, not less. If there is no God, then we are statistical anomaly, extremely lucky to be alive, and therefore special. If God does exist, then we are just a product of His will.

Well, I'm no fan of the deterministic fatalism you and rodger see. I think God sees the entire tree of possibilities, every outcome that would come from every choice, but does not Himself choose among them: He lets us do that.

You have completely ignored the history of Islamic "golden age" and the advances in sciences therein.

I was answering farhan about the "European cultural baggage". My sentence was intended to be understood as "the European history of religion opposing every major new discovery"; I know that before Islam "froze", you did not have this religion/science conflict: every Western textbook acknowledges the debt we owe to the Arabs for advancing beyond the Greeks and Indians. Then your civilization "froze" (and I'm not arguing against farhan's position that the religious "freezing" was an effect rather than a cause of the civilization "freezing" because I think there is a lot of chicken-and-egg there) and there just hasn't been much science in the Islamic world lately. I cited Harun Yahya, though, as a recent Islamic parallel to the kind of stuff scientists in the West get from the Christians all the time, which is why the word "spiritual" causes a lot of scientists to sigh and roll their eyes.

Not according to the Quran.

Part of why I find the Qur'an a much lesser book than the Bible. There is not one believable human character in it from first to last. There are only good guys, who only do good, and have only good things happen to them, and bad guys, who only do bad, and have only bad things happen to them. That is not the planet I live on.

You are one of a very few in your part of the world that is having a "good ride". Most people there are not having a "good" a "ride" as you might be. In fact, you could say, most of them are being taken for a ride.

And btw, for the few "fortunate sons" like yourself, BE WARNED, your time is nigh!!

(CCR referrence FTW baby!!)

I am distinctly in the lower half, not the upper as you seem to assume. Median income in the US is $40-50 K but I have never made so much as $30 K even in my best years, of which there haven't been many. I have been on meager unemployment checks all this year; I am on the Internet so much lately because the few job leads there are to pursue do not chew up much of my days. I was evicted three months ago, was living in my car for a while and often crashing in a corner of a friend's trailer out in the woods where there was no electricity, heat, or water; but now I am apartment-sitting for a friend with a temp job in Los Angeles, covering more than half his rent so it is not pure charity, but when he is back in June I am not sure what to do. I am running out of groceries and dare not buy more, since my car is in the shop and the cost to get it back (whenever it is ready...) will already be more than the money I can foresee laying my hands on. I am better off than the homeless begging "Spare a dollar?" on the street, but I have been there in my time and may be so again.

But I am still better off than the elite in Ubaid

Look, life is good. I do not curse God for my circumstances anymore than for my sexuality or anything else in the beautiful universe. I have faith that everything will work out as it should.

 

[c0de]

I mean seriously, this is one of the outcomes from treating Muhammad's words as God's words, that he gets treated idolatrously

again with this?

That may be your experience in Pakistan, but in America major judicial decisions are frequently against what the majority wishes. Brown (no segregation of the races in school) and its followups (ending other forms of segregation), Engel (schools may not lead students in prayer), Gideon and Miranda (the accused have a right to a lawyer, and to be warned they need not speak until the lawyer comes), Roe v. Wade (struck down most laws against abortion), Lawrence (struck down all laws against homosexuality), and Bush v. Gore (OK, it isn't always a good thing that our judges disregard the majority!) are all prominent cases with which angry mobs loudly disagreed.

I beg to differ. The cases I highlighted in red are NOT against the actual majority when you take into consideration the mood of the over all public. For example, to say that Brown was against the Majority you are ignoring the fact that MOST of America by the time was anti-segregation.

As far as school prayers go, I bet if you take a national poll right now in America, you will find that most americans would be against it. I am not to familiar with the abortion issue, but from personal experience I know most people are not anti-abortion.

As far as homosexuality is concerned, I don't have any idea where the majority of the opinion in the US lies. If the South outweighs the North or not. And the Bush Gore thing was on the line anyway and if you believe the conspiracy theorists, it was mostly due to Bush's family connections.

Nazi Germany isn't usually considered a "perfect" example of what "always" happens; it's usually considered a rare, indeed singular, extreme.

--

This is not the way it was. Hitler found that the judiciary was stubbornly independent: in 1933 the "Reichstag fire" defendants were all found not guilty for lack of evidence.

Dude, you like, completely distorted my example !!! (please refrain from doing that, as it is annoying).

In 1933 the Nazis had not yet consolidated their power. The Reichstag fire was the event which would put the Nazis in absolute control, and "subsequent elections confirmed this position" Reichstag fire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I was using the German judiciary's example AFTER this happened. Once the Nazis were in supreme control of the public opinion. Once this happened, the judiciary had no hope of gaining public support if they went against Hitler. So they abandoned all sense of "justice" and adopted a "go with the flow" attitude, legitimizing the atrocities of the Nazi regime in the process.

I used this is a "perfect example" to show what happens to judicial opinion when they know their verdict will be unpopular. And this is not just the case with the supreme court. There was a study done not too long ago in which they analyzed human pattern's of judgment (e.g. standards of beauty, singing voice, art etc.) and they found that most people in positions of judgment (contests etc.) pick the winner based on what they think the majority would pick, not what they actually think is the best.

Judge Crater's disappearance in the 1930's is the last-known case of a judge being assassinated (assuming he was killed), and more like a mob hit than an expression of political opposition (or so it is believed). The US really doesn't work that way.

It doesn't happen because the verdicts they give are NOT against the majority opinion.

I don't see why you think the Qur'an helps. Islamic judges are humans too.

Dude!! the point was that for you to critique the Quran on its claim of absolute authority is meaningless unless you can prove that non-absolutist systems have produced some great solution to dilemmas here presented.

Your scripture with its usual vagueness tells you to "struggle" against them,

I don't know what you are talking about here. You apparently are taking verses out of context.

but this again raises the whole question of how you can tell if your personal interpretation of the Qur'an is any good or not, or which "experts" to believe on the subject.

Actually, it is a petty minority of scholars who think Muslims are supposed to "struggle" against every kaffir they meet. Anyone with half a brain can see those verses are specific to the defensive situation the Muslims faced in Arabia.

"Superlative" means "highest quality"; I am sure you were wanting some word more like "superfluous"

yea i wuz, my bad

Are you a Qur'an-only type, suspicious of hadith in general?

No I am not one of those Quran-only nuts. Those guys are basically rationalists.

But I reject all hadiths which do not directly relate/explain something in the Quran. For example, I do not accept any hadith which adds or subtracts to the religious commandments in the Quran. But if a hadith explains something in the Quran (like method of prayer, etc.) then I will consider it. However, I will still not consider it on par with the Quran.

Jews and Christians had to pay a special tax. Polytheists, to the best of my understanding (contradict me if you have a different understanding), had to convert, leave, or die.

You are wrong about that. Many people who had refused to support the Prophet and had worked with the enemies of the Quraish were still allowed to live in Medinah.

As for the tax, that was for exemption in military service. This is not descrimination. It is the same as non-citizens not having the benefits of certain privileges citizens do in any country.

The "people"? Or a few power-brokers in the town?

The people, and the majority of them. I already said if the majority of the city of Medinah had been against the move (which was extremely dangerous, and brought much war) there would not be any way for them to have accepted the Prophet into their city. There would have been a popular revolt.

In fact, you just had to measure how many Muslims went out to meet the enemy at the battle of badr, versus how many stayed in their homes and you will see that the majority supported the prophet and were willing to die for Islam.

Of course, the Communists in Russia and China were always "defending the revolution" too, you know...
I'm not sure that the same principle applies when what you are "defending" is your beliefs. Jesus preferred torture and death to violent resistance.

Oh come on man... that's just neither here nor there.

Islamic history up until the first four caliphs was not expansionist. This has been shown on this forum many times before, so lets not go over it again because I am bored of that already.

And the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) was the "greatest" prophet for a reason. Because his tenure as a prophet encompassed a full spectrum of human endeavors, unlike Jesus (pbuh).

I do. As with the other Abrahamic religions, the notion of special revelations from God, so that anyone who disagrees is disagreeing with God, can easily lead to this kind of outcome.

Well, just because you believe it doesn't make religion responsible for the actions of the deranged.

Then my words to you are the words of God, exactly as Muhammad's

Of course, but they carry no weight in my conscious processing, which is also "from God" because they go against the precedent, which has already been established (by God.)

 

[c0de]

I have relied on the sources you brought.

No, you have QUESTIONED the sources I brought, but without any sources of your own. Basically wanting me to trust your assertions, like this one:

On alaqa, the embryology paper acknowledges that only the meaning "congealed thing" (clot/clump/leech) was known to any Muslim scholars in the centuries immediately after Muhammad; indeed I don't think it was until very recent times that any other meaning was even considered,

see what I mean?

On ukht, you cite a Qur'an commentator that "sister" could mean a "non-blood-relative" and Muhammad using daughter for "distant descendant", and that's it; farhan thinks there are usages of "brother" for "affiliate (not necessarily blood related) from a distant generation" and I would indeed accept that as good evidence if produced. Of course, your sources conclude "the Qur'an is right, isn't that amazing!" because what else are they going to say?

Have you produced any source which agrees that your point that the Arabs have never used this word in such a way?

The burden of proof has to be on the positive side, not the negative. To prove a negative like "ukht was never used in that capacity in the time of the Prophet" I would have to show you every usage from that time, and go down the list: this isn't it; this isn't it; this isn't it.... That is why the side that makes the positive claim has the burden of proof: show me one such usage. That's all I ask. On the claim "no example has ever been produced", well I can't show you every piece of writing ever (this isn't it; this isn't it...) but in the more limited sense "no example has ever been produced in our discussion", certainly you can go through every post on this thread and see that no such example is anywhere.

I am not asking you to provide any proof, I am asking you to provide an academic source which backs up your objection. Because that way, I can just run a search on that researcher and see what the counter objections to his arguments are.

That's all I can do because I dont speak arabic.

More precisely, I was a Dawkins-style atheist as a kid, a prophet by the time I was twenty, and an ex-prophet by the time I was thirty.

WoW... at this rate, I wonder what your 60th birthday party is gonna be like

I cited Harun Yahya, though, as a recent Islamic parallel to the kind of stuff scientists in the West get from the Christians all the time, which is why the word "spiritual" causes a lot of scientists to sigh and roll their eyes.

Don't get me started on that freak. I have exposed that guy on the Islamic forum already.

Part of why I find the Qur'an a much lesser book than the Bible. There is not one believable human character in it from first to last. There are only good guys, who only do good, and have only good things happen to them, and bad guys, who only do bad, and have only bad things happen to them. That is not the planet I live on.

The Prophets are not supposed to be like you or me, that's why. The Muslim position is that the charges against the prophets in the bible are false.

I am distinctly in the lower half, not the upper as you seem to assume. Median income in the US is $40-50 K but I have never made so much as $30 K even in my best years, of which there haven't been many. I have been on meager unemployment checks all this year; I am on the Internet so much lately because the few job leads there are to pursue do not chew up much of my days. I was evicted three months ago, was living in my car for a while and often crashing in a corner of a friend's trailer out in the woods where there was no electricity, heat, or water; but now I am apartment-sitting for a friend with a temp job in Los Angeles, covering more than half his rent so it is not pure charity, but when he is back in June I am not sure what to do. I am running out of groceries and dare not buy more, since my car is in the shop and the cost to get it back (whenever it is ready...) will already be more than the money I can foresee laying my hands on. I am better off than the homeless begging "Spare a dollar?" on the street, but I have been there in my time and may be so again.

But I am still better off than the elite in Ubaid

No, you're not better off than the elite of Ubaid times, but you certainly are just as delusional : P

Anyways, I sincerely hope things pick up for you dude.

I have faith that everything will work out as it should.

well then, what the hell are we arguing about? cuz that is what I believe too.

 

[bob x]

No, you have QUESTIONED the sources I brought, but without any sources of your own. Basically wanting me to trust your assertions, like this one:

see what I mean?

What I see is that you are overlooking the point, and focusing instead on a side-remark. Your source says that all the Muslim scholars in the centuries after Muhammad only used the "congealed thing" meaning, and that is the point; I was idly curious about when anybody started assigning it any other meaning, and I was careful to set off my guess (that it must be very recent) from what is verified by your source, by using the phrase "I think", and to indicate what other source I was drawing from: namely, that all the English translations I'd seen (Pickthall, Usmani, Yusuf Ali) agree on "clot". So OK, I've researched some more and found a very nice online Qur'an, Arabic script with transliteration, multiple translations to English and several other languages, including a new translation that uses "clinging substance":

Transliteration Khalaqa alinsana min AAalaqin
Abdullah Yusuf Ali Created man, out of a (mere) clot of congealed blood:
Mufti Taqi Usmani He created man from a clot of blood.
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall Createth man from a clot.
Sahih International Created man from a clinging substance.

The date when people started looking for some other rendering than "clot" is sometime in between when Yusuf Ali made his translation (1934) and when the Sahih International people made theirs (1997).

Have you produced any source which agrees that your point that the Arabs have never used this word in such a way?

??? Books don't talk about what doesn't ever happen. I think we can agree that the passage does not mean that Mary was the "barber of Harun" because ukht does not mean "barber", but there isn't any book that is going to say, "In Arabic the word ukht is never used to mean 'barber'."

I am asking you to provide an academic source which backs up your objection. Because that way, I can just run a search on that researcher and see what the counter objections to his arguments are.

That's all I can do because I dont speak arabic.

Oh, I see. Easiest is to Google "sister of Harun": go quickly to this page and save the links found on it in case Google goes dark in China soon; it has the various arguments that have been advanced over the past thousand years and so.

Don't get me started on that freak. I have exposed that guy on the Islamic forum already.

Yeah: the point is, while freaks like that may be a recent phenomenon in the Islamic world, in the Christian world scientists have been dealing with that kind of rubbish for over five hundred years now, since the fight over whether the Earth moves-- and that's why Western scientists often get their back up when anybody starts talking religion at them.

The Prophets are not supposed to be like you or me, that's why.

Are they some kind of alien species infiltrating the human race? Do they shape-shift into a reptilian form? This is precisely why I don't believe the Qur'an in the slightest.

No, you're not better off than the elite of Ubaid times

No? What I have that the Ubaidi didn't:
It is a bit chilly out, but the apartment is warm, without my having to throw dried dung on a fire, and there is no hole in the roof for the smoke, and I can close all the windows, easy sliding glass panes, so if it rains, as it looks like, none will get in. When I go outside I can put on clothes, that fit. I will sleep on a mattress, not on the floor, which is carpeted not dirt, and the bed has sheets and blankets and pillows. I am sitting in a chair, even, at a table, with my mashed potatoes and sour cream spiced with two kinds of pepper, that I am eating with metal utensils, and then I am going to boil a pot of coffee, using water that I did not have to haul from a well. It comes right out when I just turn this little handle! And I have light at the flick of a switch, and music or other entertainment at the push of a button. I can read and write, and if I do not have many of my own books, I have shelves of my friend's interesting reading. And I can converse, sharing ideas with this aggravating Muslim on the opposite side of the world! Have I left anything out?
Oh yes, even at my advanced age, I am alive, and healthy.

well then, what the hell are we arguing about? cuz that is what I believe too.

We are arguing because we enjoy it

 

[bob x]

I was mistaken: here is an author who will say flat out, he's tried to look up every reference for "ukht of XXX" and it is never used that way

 

[c0de]

I was mistaken: here is an author who will say flat out, he's tried to look up every reference for "ukht of XXX" and it is never used that way

That's your source? "answering-islam.com" (LoLz)

Here is a what an academic source looks like:

From the identity of names it has been generally imagined by Christian writers that the Koran here confounds Mary the mother of Jesus with Mary of Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron; which intolerable anachronism, if it were certain, is sufficient of itself to destroy the pretended authority of this book. But though Mohammed may be supposed to have been ignorant enough in ancient history and chronology, to have committed so gross a blunder; yet I do not see how it can be made out from the words of the Koran. For it does not follow, because two persons have the same name, and have each a father and brother who bear the same names, that they must therefore necessarily be the same whereby it manifestly appears that Mohammed well knew and asserted that Moses preceded Jesus several ages. And the commentators accordingly fail not to tell us, that there had passed about one thousand eight hundred years between Amran the father of Moses and Amrean the father of the Virgin Mary: they also make them the sons of different persons; the first, they say, was the son of Yeshar, or Izhar (though he was really his brother) the son of Kahath, the son of Levi; and the other was the son of Matthan, whose genealogy they trace, but in a very corrupt and imperfect manner, up to David and thence to Adam. It must be observed that though the Virgin Mary is called in the Koran, the sister of Aaron, yet she is nowhere called the sister of Moses.
​

George Sale, The Koran, IX Edition of 1923, London, p. 38.


Do you you know why this commentator is so sure that there is no contradiction here? Because the Quran makes it clear that Moses (pbuh) and Aaron (pbuh) were brothers. And that Mary (pbuh) was the mother of Jesus (pbuh). So how is it possible for a contradiction to exist, when it has already been made clear that these personalities lived thousands of years apart in the Quran itself?

What I see is that you are overlooking the point, and focusing instead on a side-remark.

Obviously you have not even understood the objection to your argument if you are still saying stuff like this:

The date when people started looking for some other rendering than "clot" is sometime in between when Yusuf Ali made his translation (1934) and when the Sahih International people made theirs (1997).

How does that prove a contradiction in the Quran? The word's meaning is the same. It was the understanding of the audience which changed, and the word used in the Quran allowed for the shift in understanding.

Are they some kind of alien species infiltrating the human race? Do they shape-shift into a reptilian form? This is precisely why I don't believe the Qur'an in the slightest.

ur breakin my heart...

dude, i don't care what u believe.

i only care about what you can PROVE.

No? What I have that the Ubaidi didn't:

Are you serious? Dude you don't even know where you're going to live in a few months. How can you compare yourself to the elite of any society?

Do you own a house? Do you have total financial security? How about unlimited food and wine? How about your pick of the finest women (or in your case, men)? How about servants to take care of all your daily chores?

This is the kind of stuff the elites of Ubaid are sure to have enjoyed. They were the cream of their society. If you really think you come anywhere close to living like them, you are truly delusional.

We are arguing because we enjoy it

You mite, I dont.

 

[bob x]

That's your source? "answering-islam.com" (LoLz)

Here is a what an academic source looks like:

You mean, an "academic" source is one who agrees with you, as opposed to who doesn't (RoFLmAOz)
I hadn't looked at "answering-islam" before (or I would have known that the "sister of Harun" chestnut doesn't just go way back, as farhan was unwilling to believe, but was actually raised in Muhammad's lifetime) but I will point out that this "Silas" is more academic than your "Sale" because he cites his primary sources. You are misled into thinking this quote:

it manifestly appears that Mohammed well knew and asserted that Moses preceded Jesus several ages.​

means: So how is it possible for a contradiction to exist, when it has already been made clear that these personalities lived thousands of years apart in the Quran itself? because Sale is not explaining where he gets his assertion, which is not from the Qur'an itself (which nowhere hints at any time-interval between Moses and Jesus, short or long) but from a hadith (Sahih Imam Muhammad collection), which Silas cites and discusses: after this problem was brought up, Muhammad says, heh heh, of course I knew that Harun and Jesus were far apart in time. Muhammad explains, to a Muslim who couldn't answer some Christians puzzled by "sister of Harun", that "People centuries ago used such namings, referring back to prophets or saints from long before."

The main interpretation, as in the notes to your Qur'an, is that Muhammad is saying people used to use such namings as "sister of Harun" to relate back to a figure from long ago. Note, it is confirmed that no Arabic speaker in the time of Muhammad used "brother" or "sister" (as opposed to "son" or "daughter") to relate somebody from a far-later generation to the earlier figure: the Christians of Najran, who were puzzled by "sister of Harun", were Arabic speaking but did not know of any such usage; the Muslim named Mughirah, who couldn't answer their question and had to go back to the Prophet about it, obviously didn't know any such usage either; and Muhammad himself calls it an old usage from earlier times (Silas looks up all 96 usages of "brother" and "sister", literally or metaphorically, in the Qur'an: "at no time is the idiom used to represent someone being called "brother" or "sister" with respect to someone who has preceded him by hundreds of years"). The problem is: there was no such usage among the Jews of earlier times, either. Silas speaks of exhaustive searchings of the Jewish literature from centuries all around the time of Mary mother of Jesus to find ANY usage of "brother" or "sister" that way. Proving a universal negative is very difficult (it requires searching every case) but he claims that this has been done.

Perhaps aware that this explanation doesn't fly, an alternative explanation was devised, which Sale prefers, and Silas traces to three very early Muslim commentators (Siddiqi, Husain, Budzaiwi), namely that: in the hadith Muhammad is saying people used to use such namings as "Harun" to relate back to a figure from long ago. That is, "Harun" is literally, not metaphorically, the brother of Mary, but this "Harun" is not Harun the brother of Moses, rather somebody named for the old Harun. This in itself is not unlikely: there were plenty of Jews in the 1st century CE (still are in the 21st!) named Aharon in Hebrew (or nowadays, Aaron in English; even Arabic-speaking Jews who pronounce it Harun), just as there were plenty named Jacob or Joseph etc.

But there are obvious problems. If the-other-Harun is not the famous Harun, but someone who never did anything in his whole life that is worth mentioning, and addressing Mary as "O sister of Harun!" was not indicating a metaphorical or literal relationship to the famously holy Harun, but just a mundane family tie to an unremarkable nebbish, why is Mary being addressed in that manner at all? If it made sense for Mary's neighbors to make a point of mentioning the-other-Harun, because I suppose he was of some importance and respectability in the neighborhood, then the Qur'an ought to explain about the-other-Harun and why he was important, not leave in this cryptic and, seemingly, deliberately misleading reference to a character who never comes up again. And why is Muhammad being so cryptic and misleading in the hadith? He could have just said "Harun brother of Mary is not Harun brother of Moses" if that's what he meant.

And: Mary is also the "daughter of Imran" but that has to be metaphorical (great-great-...-granddaughter) unless she's the literal daughter of Imran and sister of (the famous) Harun-- or should we go on to construct the-other-Imran, father of Mary and the-other-Harun? Some Muslim commentators cited by Sale do just that, and latch onto my other favorite old chestnut, the one I beat up on Christians with, that I thought was unrelated to this one: the two genealogies of Jesus! One famous old excuse for that one is that Luke, even though he explicitly says he is tracing through Joseph, is really tracing through Mary: where it says Joseph son of Heli son of Matthan... it means Joseph son-in-law of Heli... (you can be sure that I am just as fierce with the Christians, insisting "there is no known example of 'son' being used to mean 'son-in-law' in the Bible"). Sale says some Muslims change this to Joseph son-in-law of Imran son of Matthan etc. Well, this is bogus in too many ways to count. Mary's father, according to all traditions before that excuse about Luke's genealogy was invented, was named Joachim. And while some Biblical names were very commonly re-used by Jews of the period (bushel-loads of Jacobs and Josephs and Joshuas), Hebrew Amran (Arabic Imran) is never recorded even once among the tens of thousands of Jewish names we have from back then (not as unusual as it sounds: lots of the names in the Bible never got re-used, nobody is called Serug either).

How does that prove a contradiction in the Quran? The word's meaning is the same.

No. It isn't. Saying something is "sticky" is not the same as saying it is "stacked" even though those words are from the same root (alaqa "congealed" is very similar to "sticky"; muallaq "hanging" is very similar to "stacked"). Changing the meaning to some other meaning that can be derived from the same root can make a serious difference.

It was the understanding of the audience which changed, and the word used in the Quran allowed for the shift in understanding.

OK then, since "brother" and "sister" are the same root in Arabic, let us understand ukht as "brother-sister" and translate that passage we were arguing about before as "O hermaphroditic clone of Harun!" You see, Mary was actually a genetic revival of Harun centuries later, with both male and female organs so she could impregnate herself; it is only now with the aid of modern science that we are finally able to understand the true meaning of the Qur'an.

If the words in the Qur'an are a secret code, that might turn out to mean something radically different from what anybody in Muhammad's time or our time would take them to mean, then how do we know for sure what anything in the book means?

dude, i don't care what u believe.

Well, I thought you were trying to persuade me that Islam was "in accordance with rationality and science". The Bible contains very human and plausible stories; even those who do not believe them as literal histories find that they repay study, for their psychological insightfulness. The Qur'an drains all the complexity out of them, reducing the heroes and villains to the kind of character we see in cartoons, not in life. This does not seem to match reality. And the ideological superstructure you build up on top of this, in which "Prophets" are these not-really-human beings, whom humans were created to obey, since God will only talk to the not-really-humans and won't talk to humans: this goes beyond what sounds rational.

 

[bob x]

Are you serious? Dude you don't even know where you're going to live in a few months. How can you compare yourself to the elite of any society?

Do you own a house?

A "house" as we would understand it, something that can be sealed against the weather with, you know, a solid roof, and windows you can open and close, was not something that was available at all to Mr. Ubaid. I do own, outright, a tent and sleeping bag, which is certainly not as roomy a space as Mr. Ubaid's mud hut, but is better insulated. Of course I would prefer to, and expect I will, live in an apartment, of the kind Mr. Ubaid could never hope to live in. Security of tenure, to be sure, is a big plus for Mr. Ubaid's situation: he would not have to worry about being evicted from his space and having to hunt for another, except when violent raiders try to dispossess him, but I have conceded to you that this did not happen nearly as often in his time as in Mr. Uruk's.

Do you have total financial security?

Money, even in the form of durable valuables like metal, which can be saved up in good times, to be exchanged for basic goods later, is not something that was available at all to Mr. Ubaid. "Security" from one year to the next was quite unobtainable: the periodic abandonment of some towns indicates that the elites as well as the commoners were starved out in really bad years. Grain was stored, but does not keep for years; grapes and other fruits and berries were made into wine precisely because they keep that way, for rather longer than raisins, but even wine did not keep as long as it now does, since corks were not available at all to Mr. Ubaid; and Mesopotamians never learned the Native American trick of turning meat into long-lasting jerky. Hides, flints, and pottery were the limit of Mr. Ubaid's durables.

How about unlimited food and wine?

I am sure that even in "lean" years (as opposed to the rare ultra-bad years that wiped out the town) the elites got all they wanted, but even on my limited budget I have a more varied, and probably healthier, diet than Mr. Ubaid. Crops like potatoes, tomatoes, corn (all American); beans and other legumes; cabbages and other leafy vegetables; rice, even apples etc. were not available at all to Mr. Ubaid, and I have many more spices than he did. I just had some chicken noodle soup: Mr. Ubaid, of course, never heard of chicken (though he caught pigeons in a net often enough) and did not know how to make flour into noodles. I seldom eat meat (on budgetary and health, not moral or ecological, grounds) whereas Mr. Ubaid surely had tasty lamb rather often: another plus for Mr. Ubaid. Even here, though, I have the advantage over Mr. Eridu, who regardless of how "elite" he was had a far greater chance of actually going hungry than Mr. Ubaid: before domestication of animals, Mr. Eridu could have no meat except what he could bring down with a spear, and had no dairy products (whereas yogurt was a staple for Mr. Ubaid).

How about your pick of the finest women (or in your case, men)?

If I were "elite" back then, I would surely not be a warrior with a harem (I have no fighting skills) but rather a priest charged with contemplating the mathematical and astronomical questions necessary for agricultural management: and priests were not permitted to keep their genitals, to prevent the position becoming hereditary. At least, this was sometimes true in Mr. Uruk's time, though scholars differ on whether that was a general practice or a rarity; in Mr. Ubaid's time we have no written records, or any mummified as opposed to skeletonized bodies, to give us more than speculation; but my tendency is to assume, as with human sacrifice, that practices which we see dying out in antiquity (as they came to be viewed with distaste) represent survivals of practices which were universal in the Stone Age.

But less us assume I was allowed to be sexual. The sexual morality of ancient societies was based on compulsory procreation: outbreeding the neighbors was vital to survival (warfare, if not as explosive as in Mr. Uruk's time, has never been absent from human history; and if you are still hanging on to any idea that the "elites" were allowed to snatch all the food for any reason except that they monopolized the weapons, please let go of it). Marriages were arranged young, and loving feelings between the couple were a bonus if they came, not an expectation; you had to impregnate your wife, early and often, whether you liked it or not. Now, in some East Asian cultures, homosexuality is fine as long as the obligation to breed is satisfied (you still have to marry a woman and fulfill your duty to the family) if you keep your lovers-on-the-side discreet, so that no-one has to notice or talk about it (it would be very wrong to cause your wife to publicly lose face; similarly, where open polygamy is not allowed, it is still fine for a wealthy hetero to keep a mistress on the side, provided he keeps this hidden enough that his wife can pretend not to know). But in the Mideast? The violence of the antipathy suggests that it is anciently rooted, though evidence before the rise of Abrahamic religions is scanty. Hammurabi had a male lover, mentioned matter-of-factly in the correspondence, so it is unsurprising that his law code says nothing about it; but I doubt that is typical. My guess is that if I were transported back to Ubaid, even if I were not castrated I would still be as desperately unhappy as in a similar village in modern Iraq.

How about servants to take care of all your daily chores?

Chores? I do not need to gather fuel for a fire (or abide its stench), just twist the thermostat, flick a switch, or turn a knob on the stove when I need warmth, light, or cooking. I do not need to haul water from the well, just turn the spigot: it even comes pre-heated, when I want my daily shower, something that was not available at all to Mr. Ubaid (even a bath, necessarily a cold one, was surely a rare experience for him). To wash the dishes or my clothes (and of course, "clothes" worthy of the name were not available at all to Mr. Ubaid), I put them in boxy machines and push buttons, although the laundry does require a ride in the car and a little money (the car, of course, was not available at all to Mr. Ubaid, though if we are talking about Mr. Ubaid II he might have had an oxcart). Occasionally sweeping the carpet (which was not at all available to Mr. Ubaid) with a vacuum cleaner is as laborious a chore as I have. And these machines do the chores without any of the aggravation involved in managing the slaves: and don't underestimate that; Thomas Jefferson wrote an essay about how the constant cajoling and threatening of slaves was degrading to the master; neither Jefferson nor I would deny that the slave, of course, had much the worse end of the bargain, but the arrangement was not pleasant for anyone.

You mite, I dont.

I'm sorry; I thought you were also a fellow enthusiast for verbal combat. Are you sticking with me just out of a sense of duty to Muhammad's honor? Listen, I'm not out to tell you to burn the Qur'an or spit on Muhammad's memory: PRAISE BE UPON HIM, his accomplishment was immense, particularly given what he had to work with. And if the Qur'an does not speak to me very much, it speaks to a lot of people, obviously. But the notion of Muhammad's "finality" is a lead weight around your necks. Recognize that prophets were human and as such, subject to errors; understand their words as the best they could do for their times, and take from those words the wisdom that is in them without feeling that you have to hang on to everything.

 

[c0de]

.

great, now i gotta deal with this while doing my laundry! I don't even know why I am still bothering with you dude.

because Sale is not explaining where he gets his assertion, which is not from the Qur'an itself (which nowhere hints at any time-interval between Moses and Jesus, short or long)

Have you ever even read the Quran? (cuz I thought you said you had) The story of Moses (pbuh) is detailed in the Quran. And so is the story of Jesus (pbuh). This is BASIC stuff. The stories of other prophets in between who came and went is also mentioned. How can you possibly claim that the Quran puts Moses (pbuh) and Jesus (pbuh) next to each other in chronology?

And by the way, I don't care what your precious "silas" says and what his "primary sources" are. He is a non-peer reviewed nameless source. Why should I take him seriously? You lifted him of a hate website, no less!

I am going to ignore his argument, and that website, and I am also going to ignore your essays on the subject until you come up with something worth my time.

No. It isn't.

Yes, it is. The word hasn't changed, it's definitions haven't changed either. The flexibility of the Quran is astonishing, isn't it?

If the words in the Qur'an are a secret code, that might turn out to mean something radically different from what anybody in Muhammad's time or our time would take them to mean, then how do we know for sure what anything in the book means?

Now you are changing your argument. You were trying to prove a contradiction where there is none. Now that you know you can't prove a contradiction you are trying to say that the flexibility of the Quran makes it useless, which is not only besides the point, but it is useless for your purposes as I can easily say that the words mean to us what God wants them to mean, period.

Well, I thought you were trying to persuade me that Islam was "in accordance with rationality and science".

Why would I care to "persuade" you of anything? Like I said, I don't care what you believe. I am here to expose your impotent attacks against the Quran. Whether or not you are convinced is irrelevant.

A "house" as we would understand it, something that can be sealed against the weather with, you know, a solid roof, and windows you can open and close, was not something that was available at all to Mr. Ubaid. I do own, outright, a tent and sleeping bag, which is certainly not as roomy a space as Mr. Ubaid's mud hut, but is better insulated. Of course I would prefer to, and expect I will, live in an apartment, of the kind Mr. Ubaid could never hope to live in. Security of tenure, to be sure, is a big plus for Mr. Ubaid's situation: he would not have to worry about being evicted from his space and having to hunt for another, except when violent raiders try to dispossess him, but I have conceded to you that this did not happen nearly as often in his time as in Mr. Uruk's.

---

Money, even in the form of durable valuables like metal, which can be saved up in good times, to be exchanged for basic goods later, is not something that was available at all to Mr. Ubaid. "Security" from one year to the next was quite unobtainable: the periodic abandonment of some towns indicates that the elites as well as the commoners were starved out in really bad years. Grain was stored, but does not keep for years; grapes and other fruits and berries were made into wine precisely because they keep that way, for rather longer than raisins, but even wine did not keep as long as it now does, since corks were not available at all to Mr. Ubaid; and Mesopotamians never learned the Native American trick of turning meat into long-lasting jerky. Hides, flints, and pottery were the limit of Mr. Ubaid's durables.

--

I am sure that even in "lean" years (as opposed to the rare ultra-bad years that wiped out the town) the elites got all they wanted, but even on my limited budget I have a more varied, and probably healthier, diet than Mr. Ubaid. Crops like potatoes, tomatoes, corn (all American); beans and other legumes; cabbages and other leafy vegetables; rice, even apples etc. were not available at all to Mr. Ubaid, and I have many more spices than he did. I just had some chicken noodle soup: Mr. Ubaid, of course, never heard of chicken (though he caught pigeons in a net often enough) and did not know how to make flour into noodles. I seldom eat meat (on budgetary and health, not moral or ecological, grounds) whereas Mr. Ubaid surely had tasty lamb rather often: another plus for Mr. Ubaid. Even here, though, I have the advantage over Mr. Eridu, who regardless of how "elite" he was had a far greater chance of actually going hungry than Mr. Ubaid: before domestication of animals, Mr. Eridu could have no meat except what he could bring down with a spear, and had no dairy products (whereas yogurt was a staple for Mr. Ubaid).


--

If I were "elite" back then, I would surely not be a warrior with a harem (I have no fighting skills) but rather a priest charged with contemplating the mathematical and astronomical questions necessary for agricultural management: and priests were not permitted to keep their genitals, to prevent the position becoming hereditary. At least, this was sometimes true in Mr. Uruk's time, though scholars differ on whether that was a general practice or a rarity; in Mr. Ubaid's time we have no written records, or any mummified as opposed to skeletonized bodies, to give us more than speculation; but my tendency is to assume, as with human sacrifice, that practices which we see dying out in antiquity (as they came to be viewed with distaste) represent survivals of practices which were universal in the Stone Age.

But less us assume I was allowed to be sexual. The sexual morality of ancient societies was based on compulsory procreation: outbreeding the neighbors was vital to survival (warfare, if not as explosive as in Mr. Uruk's time, has never been absent from human history; and if you are still hanging on to any idea that the "elites" were allowed to snatch all the food for any reason except that they monopolized the weapons, please let go of it). Marriages were arranged young, and loving feelings between the couple were a bonus if they came, not an expectation; you had to impregnate your wife, early and often, whether you liked it or not. Now, in some East Asian cultures, homosexuality is fine as long as the obligation to breed is satisfied (you still have to marry a woman and fulfill your duty to the family) if you keep your lovers-on-the-side discreet, so that no-one has to notice or talk about it (it would be very wrong to cause your wife to publicly lose face; similarly, where open polygamy is not allowed, it is still fine for a wealthy hetero to keep a mistress on the side, provided he keeps this hidden enough that his wife can pretend not to know). But in the Mideast? The violence of the antipathy suggests that it is anciently rooted, though evidence before the rise of Abrahamic religions is scanty. Hammurabi had a male lover, mentioned matter-of-factly in the correspondence, so it is unsurprising that his law code says nothing about it; but I doubt that is typical. My guess is that if I were transported back to Ubaid, even if I were not castrated I would still be as desperately unhappy as in a similar village in modern Iraq.

---


Chores? I do not need to gather fuel for a fire (or abide its stench), just twist the thermostat, flick a switch, or turn a knob on the stove when I need warmth, light, or cooking. I do not need to haul water from the well, just turn the spigot: it even comes pre-heated, when I want my daily shower, something that was not available at all to Mr. Ubaid (even a bath, necessarily a cold one, was surely a rare experience for him). To wash the dishes or my clothes (and of course, "clothes" worthy of the name were not available at all to Mr. Ubaid), I put them in boxy machines and push buttons, although the laundry does require a ride in the car and a little money (the car, of course, was not available at all to Mr. Ubaid, though if we are talking about Mr. Ubaid II he might have had an oxcart). Occasionally sweeping the carpet (which was not at all available to Mr. Ubaid) with a vacuum cleaner is as laborious a chore as I have. And these machines do the chores without any of the aggravation involved in managing the slaves: and don't underestimate that; Thomas Jefferson wrote an essay about how the constant cajoling and threatening of slaves was degrading to the master; neither Jefferson nor I would deny that the slave, of course, had much the worse end of the bargain, but the arrangement was not pleasant for anyone

wow

u have waaay 2 much time on your hands dude...

i'll just let you and your fantasies about being better then the elite 8000 years ago alone.. i couldn't care less if you actually think your better off.

I'm sorry; I thought you were also a fellow enthusiast for verbal combat.

Are you arguing for the sake of arguing? That's it isn't it? You have nothing else to do, so you are doing this.

 

[bob x]

Have you ever even read the Quran? (cuz I thought you said you had) The story of Moses (pbuh) is detailed in the Quran. And so is the story of Jesus (pbuh). This is BASIC stuff. The stories of other prophets in between who came and went is also mentioned. How can you possibly claim that the Quran puts Moses (pbuh) and Jesus (pbuh) next to each other in chronology?

The Qur'an has no chronology at all. The stories are in randomly jumbled order, and there is no particular indication of which prophets are "in between" which others. There is no mention of how many years go by either: Jesus is evidently later than Aaron, but as I said the Qur'an gives no clue whether the interval was short or long.

And by the way, I don't care what your precious "silas" says and what his "primary sources" are.

Careful: when you disdain the "primary sources" you are saying you don't care about Muhammad or the companions of the prophet. You are missing the whole point about citing primary sources: it means we don't care who Silas is and have no need to give a damn about his opinions; we can instead look for ourselves at what Imam Muslim said Muhammad said, and how Siddiqi, Budzaiwi, and Husain interpreted that, and if we have a searchable online Qur'an we can check up the claims about all the usages of "brother" and "sister" for ourselves, and if we even want to check up for ourselves the claims about usages in earlier Jewish literature he gives a helpful long list of documents to look in. By contrast, your George Sale leaves it up to us to take his word for it; I do believe he has good sources, but he doesn't give them, and you were misled as to what he was basing one of his remarks on.

You lifted him of a hate website, no less!

Don't just call anything that disagrees with you "hate"; if you have any examples of hate speech on the website, point them out. They do give feedback links at the bottom of the home page:

If you find any factual mistakes [whether misprints or a false representation of doctrines] on these pages, or things that are worded in an offensive way, contact us, we would like to correct that. See our site policies.

The word hasn't changed, it's definitions haven't changed either.

The only definition used from the time of Muhammad until the 20th century has been discarded, in favor of definitions applicable to other derivatives, which are related but different words. This seems most improper to me, but until we get an Arabic speaker here we are really stuck in yes-it-is-no-it-isn't.

I can easily say that the words mean to us what God wants them to mean, period.

That's not a bad argument: you are saying that despite the "finality" of the Qur'an, God can reveal more to us by showing new meanings in the old book? It can however lead where you don't want to go, destroying any difference between right and wrong interpretation: the jihadist thinks the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing because God wants him to think that; I think the Qur'an means an error because God wants me to think that, etc.

I don't care what you believe. I am here to expose your impotent attacks against the Quran.

You aren't doing very well, indeed have largely stopped making much defense of the Qur'an.

u have waaay 2 much time on your hands dude...

Can't dispute you there

i'll just let you and your fantasies about being better then the elite 8000 years ago alone.. i couldn't care less if you actually think your better off.

Again, 8000 years ago = 6000 BCE, before Mr. Eridu even, when there were no crops and no "elites" and nobody at all living past the age of 35. But I assume you mean more like 4000 BCE: you still have no grasp of how crude Stone Age life was; Mr. Ubaid's nearest modern analogue is the chieftain of a pre-contact tribe in the heart of Papua. I noted some advantages he had over me (roomier dwelling, that he was unlikely to be driven from; ample if somewhat unvarying food supply) but no, there is no way I would consider trading my life for his (for one thing, his chances of even being alive at all by my age were not good).

Are you arguing for the sake of arguing? That's it isn't it? You have nothing else to do, so you are doing this.

I enjoy learning new things. If this is becoming annoying or hurtful to you, we can stop. I'll let you have the last word if you want it.

 

[c0de]

The Qur'an has no chronology at all. The stories are in randomly jumbled order, and there is no particular indication of which prophets are "in between" which others. There is no mention of how many years go by either: Jesus is evidently later than Aaron, but as I said the Qur'an gives no clue whether the interval was short or long.

This is a ridiculous claim, and it only shows your ignorance of the Quran and of the subject which you are attempting to argue. The Quran is not in "randomly jumbled" order. I will cite the case from the beginning of the Quran, up till chapter 7, which is sufficient to prove the point.

Chapter 2: (in order)

• Section 5: Israelite prophecy fulfilled,
• Section 6-7: divine favours on Israel,
• Section 8: Israel's degeneration,
• Section 10: violation of the covenant
• Section 15-16:The mentioning of the departure of prophethood from the Israelites to the Ishmaelites Reminder of the Covenant with Abraham

This is Part 1 of the Quran. It begins with the story of man's fall from grace, and then talks about the immediate case of the Prophet, and then reminds us of why the Prophet was sent. There is a sublime order here. The second and third parts of the Quran deal with religious commandments, principles of Islam and moral guidelines.

In Chapter 3, of Part 3, we resume the historical narrative, and for the first time Jesus (pbuh) is mentioned (after Abraham, and after the case of the Israelites has already been mentioned).

But before Jesus (pbuh) is mentioned, the situation in chronological order is once again repeated. So in section 3 of chapter 3, God talks about the fall of the israelites. In the next section, God reminds us of the covenant (again) and in verse 32 mentions Adam, Noah, Abraham and Amran (peace be upon them) in chronological order. Only then, after all this, in verse 34, Mary (pbuh) is mentioned for the first time as a "woman of Amran".

Clearly, there is an order to the Quran, and it is even chronological where it needs to be. Just because it does not mention every single prophet in between does not mean that it is jumbled, and it does not follow from that that it confuses any of the personalities like you and your "silas" claims, and as George Sale points out.

There are many sections of the Quran which deal with history which are in perfect chronological order. For example Chapter 7, the stories of Noah, Hud (Eber), Salih and Lot and Shuaib (peace be upon them) are mentioned in perfect chronological order of their appearance.

The fact that Moses (pbuh) is dealt with alone, and in greater depth and detail in the next section (Section 13, Chapter 7) does not mean the order is "jumbled" but that special attention is given to that case for that particular chapter.

Careful: when you disdain the "primary sources" you are saying you don't care about Muhammad or the companions of the prophet.

I didn't disdain the primary sources. I rejected your "silas'" claim that he went through "all" the primary sources. Like I said, he is a non-peer reviewed nameless source.

The only definition used from the time of Muhammad until the 20th century has been discarded, in favor of definitions applicable to other derivatives, which are related but different words. This seems most improper to me, but until we get an Arabic speaker here we are really stuck in yes-it-is-no-it-isn't.

Other derivatives, of the same word. So there's no contradiction. The inconsistency was in our understanding, which changed. The word that God used 1400 years ago remains the same.

You aren't doing very well, indeed have largely stopped making much defense of the Qur'an.

Dude, you haven't yet made a successful attack to defend against.

I think you know well enough that your not getting anywhere with the contradiction argument, which is why you switched tactics and tried that other approach in your last post, which I again successfully countered, and now your only response was this:

That's not a bad argument: you are saying that despite the "finality" of the Qur'an, God can reveal more to us by showing new meanings in the old book?It can however lead where you don't want to go, destroying any difference between right and wrong interpretation: the jihadist thinks the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing because God wants him to think that; I think the Qur'an means an error because God wants me to think that, etc.

Another attempt to flank, and another waste of your time, since the Quran makes it clear in its own pages that God guides those that He wants to guide through the Quran, while He sends astray others by the same words.

God divided Man since the time of Adam, and man will not be united in this life, period. So the Quran was not sent to unite everyone with one single interpretation, or to make every human being a Muslim. These are just the fantasies of some of the Muslims who are still waiting for the final battle between good and evil, which will never come... all that awaits us are battles between evil and more evil, until this world is consumed and is finally put out of its misery.

Can't dispute you there

The fact that you have too much time on your hands does not bother me, but it should bother you. I am sure you can put yourself to better use than this.

but no, there is no way I would consider trading my life for his

Well, how nice for you.

 

[bob x]

Somehow I missed this one.

again with this ["idolatry" of Muhammad]?

Yes, AGAIN. The non-Islamic world is very, very sick of that kind of crap and doesn't see much activity by non-extremist Muslims to shut it down.

For example, to say that Brown was against the Majority you are ignoring the fact that MOST of America by the time was anti-segregation.

You are showing serious ignorance of America. By 1964-65 when the major civil rights bills were passed, yes, by then most of America was in favor (or it could not have been done legislatively)-- but this was after a decade of the courts forcing integration and the people seeing that "the sky did not fall" as a result. 1953, when the courts started this, was a very different scene. Only the blacks who took the brunt of it and a minority of thoughtful whites were opposed to segregation; a lot of whites just didn't care much, of course, but those who were serious about the issue (the "mob" you think judges bow to) were overwhelmingly and quite violently anti-integration. In the Fifties, segregation was just taken for granted: I spent some of my childhood in Pittsfield outside Ann Arbor, Michigan (far north, not south; and a college town that you might expect to have been progressive) where no black people lived (it was not until I was a teenager that I actually met any black people; our society has seriously changed over my lifespan) because no black people were allowed to move in, and there sure wasn't any sign that "MOST" people wanted that changed.

As far as school prayers go, I bet if you take a national poll right now in America, you will find that most americans would be against it.

NOW is not the question: back when the court made the decision, it was enormously unpopular. The courts take the lead on these things, and then the people come to learn that it is right (some of them anyhow; enough).

I am not to familiar with the abortion issue, but from personal experience I know most people are not anti-abortion.

Most people are in the muddled middle, perceiving lots of shades of grey; when they are asked black-and-white questions by a poll, which way you find the majority depends on how you slant the question. But the violent mob is and always has been on the anti-abortion side.

As far as homosexuality is concerned, I don't have any idea where the majority of the opinion in the US lies.

VERY hostile (I've had people try to kill me, twice). But it is improving: again, the courts take the lead, and eventually the people will adjust.

I was using the German judiciary's example AFTER this happened. Once the Nazis were in supreme control of the public opinion. Once this happened, the judiciary had no hope of gaining public support if they went against Hitler. So they abandoned all sense of "justice" and adopted a "go with the flow" attitude, legitimizing the atrocities of the Nazi regime in the process.

You are absolutely wrong. None of the judiciary started "going with the flow"; that is why the Nazis had to create fake courts with their own people and explicitly extrajudicial procedures, strip the regular judiciary of personnel and finally stop letting them decide on anything at all.

Dude!! the point was that for you to critique the Quran on its claim of absolute authority is meaningless unless you can prove that non-absolutist systems have produced some great solution to dilemmas here presented.

Despite any complaints I have ever had about our judiciary, it is overwhelmingly superior to anything I have seen in the Islamic world. Its independence from popular pressure, which you seem to have such trouble even imagining, is its greatest feature.

Actually, it is a petty minority of scholars who think Muslims are supposed to "struggle" against every kaffir they meet. Anyone with half a brain can see those verses are specific to the defensive situation the Muslims faced in Arabia.

That "petty minority" without half a brain sure does cause a lot of death and suffering (and their opinions are not "kill every kaffir they meet", rather that the intrusions of the West on the Islamic world create the same defensive situation as the Muslims faced in Arabia). It is long past time you did something about them.

No I am not one of those Quran-only nuts. Those guys are basically rationalists.

I consider being "rationalist" a GOOD thing-- but I have not found the Qur'an-only people (in my limited experience debating them) to be particularly rational.

You are wrong about that. Many people who had refused to support the Prophet and had worked with the enemies of the Quraish were still allowed to live in Medinah.

Worshipping other gods? I don't really know much about Muhammad's rule in Medinah; that's why I am asking. My impression was that polytheists had to convert or die.

As for the tax, that was for exemption in military service. This is not descrimination. It is the same as non-citizens not having the benefits of certain privileges citizens do in any country.

That IS "discrimination" as used in the law: the making of distinctions. Treating natives of a place as "non-citizens" is a particularly serious kind of discrimination.

The people, and the majority of them. I already said if the majority of the city of Medinah had been against the move (which was extremely dangerous, and brought much war) there would not be any way for them to have accepted the Prophet into their city. There would have been a popular revolt.

Did the city-states of Arabia have any kind of popular involvement in decision-making? Again, I don't know, so I'm asking. My impression was that the common people had no expectation of being consulted, any more than in most places back then.

In fact, you just had to measure how many Muslims went out to meet the enemy at the battle of badr, versus how many stayed in their homes and you will see that the majority supported the prophet and were willing to die for Islam.

Well now, if they had a volunteer military (again, I don't know; in most places it really wasn't up to the people when the leaders decided to fight) and you have some figures (even if, of course, only from Muslim sources which have their axes to grind) on how many were in favor of the fight and how many stayed out of it, that is about as close to the "vote totals" I asked about before (semi-sarcastically) as can reasonably be expected.

Islamic history up until the first four caliphs was not expansionist. This has been shown on this forum many times before, so lets not go over it again because I am bored of that already.

Well, Muhammad didn't war against the empires, but his state did end up stretching all the way across the peninsula as far as Bahrain out in the Gulf.

And the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) was the "greatest" prophet for a reason. Because his tenure as a prophet encompassed a full spectrum of human endeavors, unlike Jesus (pbuh).

Muhammad's career included violence which Jesus avoided; Jesus's career included submission to suffering which Muhammad avoided. Which is "greater" is rather a matter of opinion.

Of course, but they carry no weight in my conscious processing, which is also "from God" because they go against the precedent, which has already been established (by God.)

And the Qur'an carries little weight in my conscious processing, because I do not see it as "in accordance with rationality and science", which are from God.

 

[bob x]

Chapter 2: (in order)

• Section 5: Israelite prophecy fulfilled,
• Section 6-7: divine favours on Israel,
• Section 8: Israel's degeneration,
• Section 10: violation of the covenant
• Section 15-16:The mentioning of the departure of prophethood from the Israelites to the Ishmaelites Reminder of the Covenant with Abraham

Here we go through Israel misbehaving as time went by, losing its land, and from there straight to Muhammad arising in Arabia. Where does Jesus fit in to this story? In any medieval Christian retelling, the rejection of Jesus would be listed as "the last straw" showing that the Jews had turned from God and would soon afterward lose their land; but Qur'an skips over Jesus here.

In Chapter 3, of Part 3, we resume the historical narrative, and for the first time Jesus (pbuh) is mentioned (after Abraham, and after the case of the Israelites has already been mentioned).

Perhaps you have some different numberings or orderings of the suras in your Qur'an? What I find at 3:3 is "He sent down the Torah and the Gospel" (mentioned together, as usual with no particular indication of how long or short a time was between them, or that after the Torah the Jews got the Prophets and the Writings before Jesus came)

Chapter 2: (in order)

• Section 5: Israelite prophecy fulfilled,
• Section 6-7: divine favours on Israel,
• Section 8: Israel's degeneration,
• Section 10: violation of the covenant
• Section 15-16:The mentioning of the departure of prophethood from the Israelites to the Ishmaelites Reminder of the Covenant with Abraham

Here we go through Israel misbehaving as time went by, losing its land, and from there straight to Muhammad arising in Arabia. Where does Jesus fit in to this story? In any medieval Christian retelling, the rejection of Jesus would be listed as "the last straw" showing that the Jews had turned from God and would soon afterward lose their land; but the Qur'an skips over Jesus here.

In Chapter 3, of Part 3, we resume the historical narrative, and for the first time Jesus (pbuh) is mentioned (after Abraham, and after the case of the Israelites has already been mentioned).
But before Jesus (pbuh) is mentioned, the situation in chronological order is once again repeated. So in section 3 of chapter 3, God talks about the fall of the israelites.

Maybe your Qur'an has a very different numbering and ordering of the suras than mine, or the online one I linked to earlier? At 3:3 I just find "He sent you the book, agreeing with what came before; he sent the Torah and the Gospel" (mentioned together without any indication of how much or little time passed between them and no mention that after the Torah the Jews got the Prophets and the Writings, before the time of Jesus), and at 3:32 I just find "Obey God and His prophet, for if you turn away, God does not love unbelievers."

In the next section, God reminds us of the covenant (again) and in verse 32 mentions Adam, Noah, Abraham and Amran (peace be upon them) in chronological order. Only then, after all this, in verse 34, Mary (pbuh) is mentioned for the first time as a "woman of Amran".

Wherever this passage is, it does not say anything about whether the interval between Amran and Mary is short or long, or about anything happening in between. It is the immediate juxtaposition that makes it seem as if Muhammad must think Mary was of that immediate family.

There are many sections of the Quran which deal with history which are in perfect chronological order. For example Chapter 7, the stories of Noah, Hud (Eber), Salih and Lot and Shuaib (peace be upon them) are mentioned in perfect chronological order of their appearance.

What does "Hud" have to do with "Eber"??? Hud was the prophet of 'Ad, as Salih was the prophet of Thamud. From Thamud we have a fair amount of archaeology, inscriptions in a divergent form of the alphabet from fairly deep in antiquity down to classical times: not as helpful about early Arabic as we would like, mostly brief "I king So-and-so built this shrine" type of inscriptions. The Thamudites were still around in the 1st century CE when Ptolemy records "Tamudeai" south of Mesopotamia. The fall of Thamud is variously dated from 400 to 600 CE; we know little more about how they ended than Muhammad's brief description of it as abrupt. About 'Ad, in Oman and Hadhramaut, we know less because they were further from the Greeks and the area has not been explored by archaeologists as much, but its capital has now been excavated. Its downfall was a few centuries before Thamud's. Both of these are chronologically after Jesus, not before Lot.

About "Shuaib" we know nothing else at all. The name "Midian" (with several variants) was a generic word for "confederation" and was used for several different tribal leagues (the "Mittani" who ruled a chunk of Kurdistan until destroyed in the "Sea Peoples" convulsion a little after Moses, and the "Medes" who overthrew Assyria and fell to the Persians were the greatest of these) from ~2000 BCE to early centuries CE (Ptolemy still knows a little settlement of "Madyan"). "Midianites" got "destroyed" many times over, and we don't know which particular bad day for Midianites the Shuaib story is about.

I didn't disdain the primary sources. I rejected your "silas'" claim that he went through "all" the primary sources.

Well, we can check some of the primary sources he certainly did look at: the hadith per Imam Muslim, the commentaries by Siddiqi, Budzaiwi, and Husain, and the eight dozen usages of "brother" and "sister" in the Qur'an. These points are clear:

1. The "sister of Harun" conundrum is one that was raised way back; even if you don't trust Imam Muslim's word that it was raised to Muhammad himself, it was pointed out at least as early as the writing of the hadith. This and the other conundrums mentioned by farhan are why Christians and Jews did not find the Qur'an very convincing as the purported infallible word of God.

2. Neither the Christian nor the Muslim speakers of Arabic in Muhammad's day knew anything about any usage of "sister" except for contemporaries; the Qur'an itself doesn't use it or "brother" except for contemporaries, anywhere else; and Muhammad is said to have called it a usage from older times, at least by the simplest reading of what the hadith says.

3. Early commentators were already having a problem with the interpretation of "sister" as relating to someone from the deep past, and read the hadith in a different way, giving Sale's favored explanation with two Haruns (and optionally two Imrans as well).

Now when the issue is between a particular-positive (there exists at least one such-and-such) and a universal-negative (there exist no such-and-such), the burden of proof is on the particular-positive side. If I claim "There are giraffes on the Moon" and you say "There are no giraffes on the Moon", it is reasonable for you to say "Prove it: show me one picture of a giraffe on the Moon" while it is not reasonable for me to say "Prove it: show me a picture of every square meter on the Moon and that there is no giraffe anywhere there." I have read a lot of the old Jewish literature, and have never heard of the usage you claim exists, but would not dare to pretend to have read all of it; "silas" does, so I suppose I should tell you to read the whole list of works he gives?

Now, it is true that "silas" does not give his name: this has to do with that "petty minority" without "half a brain" who will threaten to kill anybody who makes widely-publicized criticisms of Muhammad; I know you're sick of hearing about it, but it's a real problem. So, we have to set aside his uncheckable claims to have gone through every source. Still, I put it to you this way: this conundrum has been studied for centuries, and surely every one of the old books has been ransacked at least once by somebody during all that time, so how come there is not one single example of the claimed usage? I wouldn't even demand that it be exactly alike: farhan said if a tribe descended from a famous ancestor like "sons of Ghassan" adopts in some non-blood-relative as a "brother" then he is called a "brother of Ghassan" or so he had heard, but he doesn't know where the claim that the word was used like that came from; an example like that would be reasonable evidence, if it exists.

Other derivatives, of the same word.

A root is not the same thing as a word. In Semitic languages, a root is three consonants, unpronounceable; you also need the derivation, which assigns vowels and perhaps extra consonants (prefixed, suffixed, or both). Both the root and the derivation are essential to the meaning of the word. It is no more correct to call alaqa and muallaq (same root, different derivations) the "same word" than it is to call muallaq and muhammad (same derivation, different roots) the "same word"; neither would hamada "(?) a word of praise" be interchangeable with muhammad "giving praise" (I am not sure if hamada actually comes up, or exactly what it means if it does; I am giving it as an example of the same derivation as alaqa applied to the same root as muhammad).

God knows I am no "expert" on Arabic, but I do know the structure of the language from studying Hebrew, which is closely related. In Indo-European languages the roots are not all of fixed pattern, and alteration of the vowels is not as major a form of derivation, but I have given you the example of "stick / sticky / stuck / stack / stacked" often enough that you should understand my point by now: they are not "all the same word" even though they are from the same root, and they do not all mean the same thing.

I think you know well enough that your not getting anywhere with the contradiction argument

On the contrary: my arguments appear to be unanswerable; you have really stopped even trying to answer.

which is why you switched tactics and tried that other approach in your last post

I had to reply to what you are doing, which is not even contesting anymore that the meanings of the words as they were in Muhammad's day indicate error, but rather arguing that replacement of Muhammad's meanings by new meanings is all part of God's plan. This relativistic view of the Qur'an's "meaning" is an interesting theory, but I don't think you have thought through all the consequences. This:

the Quran makes it clear in its own pages that God guides those that He wants to guide through the Quran, while He sends astray others by the same words.

is particularly awful: now instead of God allowing evil because it is necessary for an infinite good later, you are depicting God doing evil for no purpose except to do gratuitous evil. And since the "petty minority" without "half a brain" who are led astray by God using the Qur'an are becoming a problem, is the only defense for us to burn every copy of the Qur'an, at least as completely as we can accomplish this task?

The fact that you have too much time on your hands does not bother me, but it should bother you. I am sure you can put yourself to better use than this.

I have a job interview in a couple days, arranged through a friend who has a lot of contacts around, as does the guy I will be interviewing; something will turn up, and then I won't have this much time for the boards any more.

Well, how nice for you.

Yes, it is. I have no "chores" or any need for "slaves" to do them, since even a relatively poor American has lots of machines; my computer began spontaneously playing classical music, which puzzled me as I had not visited any music site, but that was nice. It is a little chilly today, but I can stay inside where it is warm, without burning any dried dung, or I can put on a jacket, with sleeves that fit my arms, and a zipper that fastens it snugly about me, to go out. I had black-eyed peas with rice and some tomato paste and garlic, all ingredients Mr. Ubaid never heard of; if I really want some lamb kebab with pita and yogurt and cucumbers, like Mr. Ubaid ate a lot of, I can get in my car and find a place serving just that-- or I could have Chinese.

It is bizarre to me that you think I would trade any of this for the life of a Stone Age villager, even the chieftain.

 

[c0de]

You are showing serious ignorance of America. By 1964-65 when the major civil rights bills were passed, yes, by then most of America was in favor (or it could not have been done legislatively)-- but this was after a decade of the courts forcing integration and the people seeing that "the sky did not fall" as a result. 1953, when the courts started this, was a very different scene.

Wrong, again.

Here is a map of the US prior to the Brown case and it already shows that the scene was not "very different" from what I described:





How many Red states do you see versus the Blue, Green and Yellow? Do the Math.

Only the blacks who took the brunt of it and a minority of thoughtful whites were opposed to segregation; a lot of whites just didn't care much, of course, but those who were serious about the issue (the "mob" you think judges bow to) were overwhelmingly and quite violently anti-integration. In the Fifties, segregation was just taken for granted: I spent some of my childhood in Pittsfield outside Ann Arbor, Michigan (far north, not south; and a college town that you might expect to have been progressive) where no black people lived (it was not until I was a teenager that I actually met any black people; our society has seriously changed over my lifespan) because no black people were allowed to move in, and there sure wasn't any sign that "MOST" people wanted that changed.

Excuse me if I don't take you as a credible witness of how things really were (all over your country).

NOW is not the question: back when the court made the decision, it was enormously unpopular. The courts take the lead on these things, and then the people come to learn that it is right (some of them anyhow; enough).

Yea it was "enormously unpopular"... in a very few states. Namely, Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama and Florida. In fact, even in Florida "the response was mixed".

Most people are in the muddled middle, perceiving lots of shades of grey; when they are asked black-and-white questions by a poll, which way you find the majority depends on how you slant the question. But the violent mob is and always has been on the anti-abortion side.

In other words, you cant prove your case on abortion either.

VERY hostile (I've had people try to kill me, twice). But it is improving: again, the courts take the lead, and eventually the people will adjust.

Wake up dude. The courts influence nothing.

Public opinion is influenced by popular media, which in turn is influenced by the public, in an endless feedback loop.

You are absolutely wrong. None of the judiciary started "going with the flow"; that is why the Nazis had to create fake courts with their own people and explicitly extrajudicial procedures, strip the regular judiciary of personnel and finally stop letting them decide on anything at all.

You are completely ignoring the point. Why did these Nazi courts survive if what the verdicts they were issuing went against German public opinion? It is a fact that by the time these show trials started the Nazi party was the only party which owned public adoration.

Despite any complaints I have ever had about our judiciary, it is overwhelmingly superior to anything I have seen in the Islamic world.

It is better, I agree, but its still a joke in any final analysis. For reasons such as this:

Its independence from popular pressure, which you seem to have such trouble even imagining, is its greatest feature.

If it is so independent from public pressure, then explain why marijuana is illegal, but alcohol isn't? Just try and explain to me how that is not a case of public attitude influencing law, which (for whatever reason) decides that alcohol is fine, but pot isn't.

I consider being "rationalist" a GOOD thing--

Depends on how and where you apply "rationalism". People who try to "rationalize" faith, like many of these Quran aloners, or even the Muslim who started this thread (and then vanished into thin air!!! Damn you Abdullah!@!) have no idea what they are talking about.

Worshipping other gods? I don't really know much about Muhammad's rule in Medinah; that's why I am asking. My impression was that polytheists had to convert or die.

Where did you get this "impression" from???

That IS "discrimination" as used in the law: the making of distinctions. Treating natives of a place as "non-citizens" is a particularly serious kind of discrimination.

Yea, tell that to Israel. The fact is that whoever wins the war, owns the land.

And the Muslims won against the Persians and Byzantines who supported Arab revolts against the Muslims following the death of the Prophet. When the Muslims (during the first 4 calips) conquered East Rome and Persia, they effectively owned the land. Natives have to accept that reality, just as the Palestinians have to accept theirs today.

Did the city-states of Arabia have any kind of popular involvement in decision-making? Again, I don't know, so I'm asking. My impression was that the common people had no expectation of being consulted, any more than in most places back then.

"There is no cumpulsion in religion" is written in the Quran. No one under the prophet has ever been recorded as being forced to convert. Bring me a single historical piece of evidence to support any such claim.

There is no question of tyranny in Medinah anyway as at this point as Islam had no power in the land. They had no weapons, they had nothing. They were on the run from the forces of the Quraish in Makkah. And the people of Medinah took them in.

Now you can say it were "only" the leaders of Mediah which invited him, but ultimately, most of Medinah willingly and voluntarily converted to Islam.

Well now, if they had a volunteer military (again, I don't know; in most places it really wasn't up to the people when the leaders decided to fight) and you have some figures (even if, of course, only from Muslim sources which have their axes to grind) on how many were in favor of the fight and how many stayed out of it, that is about as close to the "vote totals" I asked about before (semi-sarcastically) as can reasonably be expected.

Look, as far as medinah is concerned, just go and read up on whatever source you want. I have never encountered any credible academic claim of tyranny by the Prophet himself. The claims of Muslim tyranny begin once the Muslim rulers who came a century later started expanding, and the Muslim civ became imperialistic, and in fact, even then there was no forced conversions. Muslims just never had that trait, unlike the Christians.

Well, Muhammad didn't war against the empires, but his state did end up stretching all the way across the peninsula as far as Bahrain out in the Gulf.

He fought against Arab tribes, who were in an alliance with the Quraish in Makkah. This is how his rule spread accross Arabia. The Arabs kept attacking, and getting their asses kicked.

And by the way, there was almost a confrontation between Roman Syria and the Prophet. The Romans were supporting the Arab tribes against the Muslims, and there was a report that they were amassing an army at the borders. The Prophet led an army to the border to meet the threat, but when the reports proved wrong, he just turned back and came home. At that moment, he could have just conquered and looted the region easily, but he didn't, because he was purely defensive.

Muhammad's career included violence which Jesus avoided; Jesus's career included submission to suffering which Muhammad avoided. Which is "greater" is rather a matter of opinion.

You are totally ignoring the facts here. While the Muslims in Mecca suffered MORE suffering then Jesus' (pbuh) followers in Israel. For 16 years he was an outcast, his followers were tortured and some died horrible deaths. And during all this time he never drew a sword, and pleaded with his few followers to NOT retaliate, just like Jesus (pbuh).

You have to understand where and why the situation changed. When the Prophet was elected as a ruler of Medinah, he was then in a situation which was never encountered by Jesus (pbuh). This situation was more akin to Prophet-Kings like David or Solomon (peace be upon them).

This is when warfare became a necessity because their enemy was intent on genocide. And the Prophet was told to take up the sword so that God's word could be preserved for later ages.

 

[c0de]

Here we go through Israel misbehaving as time went by, losing its land, and from there straight to Muhammad arising in Arabia. Where does Jesus fit in to this story? In any medieval Christian retelling, the rejection of Jesus would be listed as "the last straw" showing that the Jews had turned from God and would soon afterward lose their land;

Do you have a point here? How does this support your argument that the Quran is "randomly jumbled" ??

but Qur'an skips over Jesus here.

The Quran picks up on Jesus (pbuh) story after the story of Israel is given, which is only logical.

Perhaps you have some different numberings or orderings of the suras in your Qur'an?

I have given you the numbers of The Quran. There is only one numbering scheme.

What I find at 3:3 is "He sent down the Torah and the Gospel" (mentioned together, as usual with no particular indication of how long or short a time was between them, or that after the Torah the Jews got the Prophets and the Writings before Jesus came)

You just don't get it do you?

Wherever this passage is, it does not say anything about whether the interval between Amran and Mary is short or long, or about anything happening in between. It is the immediate juxtaposition that makes it seem as if Muhammad must think Mary was of that immediate family.

How does it "seem" like that ??!!

The Quran mentions the histories of prophets that came between Moses and Jesus (pbut), like Solomon and David (pbut).

Your argument is ridiculous!

What does "Hud" have to do with "Eber"??? Hud was the prophet of 'Ad, as Salih was the prophet of Thamud. From Thamud we have a fair amount of archaeology, inscriptions in a divergent form of the alphabet from fairly deep in antiquity down to classical times: not as helpful about early Arabic as we would like, mostly brief "I king So-and-so built this shrine" type of inscriptions. The Thamudites were still around in the 1st century CE when Ptolemy records "Tamudeai" south of Mesopotamia. The fall of Thamud is variously dated from 400 to 600 CE; we know little more about how they ended than Muhammad's brief description of it as abrupt. About 'Ad, in Oman and Hadhramaut, we know less because they were further from the Greeks and the area has not been explored by archaeologists as much, but its capital has now been excavated. Its downfall was a few centuries before Thamud's. Both of these are chronologically after Jesus, not before Lot.

About "Shuaib" we know nothing else at all. The name "Midian" (with several variants) was a generic word for "confederation" and was used for several different tribal leagues (the "Mittani" who ruled a chunk of Kurdistan until destroyed in the "Sea Peoples" convulsion a little after Moses, and the "Medes" who overthrew Assyria and fell to the Persians were the greatest of these) from ~2000 BCE to early centuries CE (Ptolemy still knows a little settlement of "Madyan"). "Midianites" got "destroyed" many times over, and we don't know which particular bad day for Midianites the Shuaib story is about.

Do you agree that Noah (pbuh) preceeded all of them? Yes, fine. Next is mentioned Hud. Verse 65 says "To Ad we sent their brother Hud". He was a prophet, sent to the great grandchildren of Noah, in the city of Iram (Quran chapter 89: 6-13). Regarding this city:

The December 1978 edition of the National Geographic Magazine records that in 1973, the city of Ebla was excavated in Syria. The city was discovered to be 4,300 years old. Researchers found in the library of Ebla a record of all of the cities with which Ebla had done business. On the list was the specific name of the city of "Iram" (and not the name of the general region of Ubar). The people of Ebla had apparently done business with the people of "Iram".


After this, the next section mentions Thamud, and their prophet Salih (pbuh). Ptolemy has mentioned in his writings. This tribe flourished two+ centuries after Ad.

Then Lot (pbuh) is mentioned, then Shuaib (pbuh) who is mentioned as being sent to Midian. He was a decendent of Abraham (pbuh) in the fifth generation, according to my footnotes. Ptolemy has mentioned Midian by the name of Modiana on the Red Sea, which took its name from Abraham's (pbuh) son by Keturah.

Well, we can check some of the primary sources he certainly did look at

Still relying on "Silas" eh?

Now when the issue is between a particular-positive (there exists at least one such-and-such) and a universal-negative (there exist no such-and-such), the burden of proof is on the particular-positive side. If I claim "There are giraffes on the Moon" and you say "There are no giraffes on the Moon", it is reasonable for you to say "Prove it: show me one picture of a giraffe on the Moon" while it is not reasonable for me to say "Prove it: show me a picture of every square meter on the Moon and that there is no giraffe anywhere there." I have read a lot of the old Jewish literature, and have never heard of the usage you claim exists, but would not dare to pretend to have read all of it; "silas" does, so I suppose I should tell you to read the whole list of works he gives?

Yea, I am sure "silas" has

Now, it is true that "silas" does not give his name: this has to do with that "petty minority" without "half a brain" who will threaten to kill anybody who makes widely-publicized criticisms of Muhammad;

LoLz

yea, im sure he's just a hero in hiding...

I guess you can escape any call for peer-review when you use that excuse. In today's climate, when you have people like Dawkins and Hitchens, this Silas, if he actually had anything to offer to the academic world, would have no trouble publishing his views in the mainstream. Or publishing anywhere for that matter, other than on a Christian website on the net.

I know you're sick of hearing about it, but it's a real problem. So, we have to set aside his uncheckable claims to have gone through every source. Still, I put it to you this way: this conundrum has been studied for centuries, and surely every one of the old books has been ransacked at least once by somebody during all that time, so how come there is not one single example of the claimed usage?

u still don't get it do you?

Who says there is NO example of its usage?

Your hero "silas" ?? lolz

A root is not the same thing as a word. In Semitic languages, a root is three consonants, unpronounceable; you also need the derivation, which assigns vowels and perhaps extra consonants (prefixed, suffixed, or both). Both the root and the derivation are essential to the meaning of the word. It is no more correct to call alaqa and muallaq (same root, different derivations) the "same word" than it is to call muallaq and muhammad (same derivation, different roots) the "same word"; neither would hamada "(?) a word of praise" be interchangeable with muhammad "giving praise" (I am not sure if hamada actually comes up, or exactly what it means if it does; I am giving it as an example of the same derivation as alaqa applied to the same root as muhammad).


God knows I am no "expert" on Arabic, but I do know the structure of the language from studying Hebrew, which is closely related. In Indo-European languages the roots are not all of fixed pattern, and alteration of the vowels is not as major a form of derivation, but I have given you the example of "stick / sticky / stuck / stack / stacked" often enough that you should understand my point by now: they are not "all the same word" even though they are from the same root, and they do not all mean the same thing.

this doesnt help you dude. At most you can try and argue that the interpretation has shifted to another derivative, even that is shaky. The actual word is still the same even then.

I had to reply to what you are doing, which is not even contesting anymore that the meanings of the words as they were in Muhammad's day indicate error, but rather arguing that replacement of Muhammad's meanings by new meanings is all part of God's plan. This relativistic view of the Qur'an's "meaning" is an interesting theory, but I don't think you have thought through all the consequences.

Both me and Farhan has said that the Quran is not meant to be a text on embryology. The understanding since the prophet's time has changed. But the words of the Quran allow for that shift in understanding.

is particularly awful: now instead of God allowing evil because it is necessary for an infinite good later,

Nothing is "neccessary" for God.

you are depicting God doing evil for no purpose except to do gratuitous evil. And since the "petty minority" without "half a brain" who are led astray by God using the Qur'an are becoming a problem, is the only defense for us to burn every copy of the Qur'an, at least as completely as we can accomplish this task?

Gimme a break. Those idiots would have been led astray one way or another. With or without the Quran. Their idiots! And idiots do idiotic things.

I have a job interview in a couple days, arranged through a friend who has a lot of contacts around, as does the guy I will be interviewing; something will turn up, and then I won't have this much time for the boards any more.

Good, I hope you get it.

Yes, it is. I have no "chores" or any need for "slaves" to do them, since even a relatively poor American has lots of machines; my computer began spontaneously playing classical music, which puzzled me as I had not visited any music site, but that was nice. It is a little chilly today, but I can stay inside where it is warm, without burning any dried dung, or I can put on a jacket, with sleeves that fit my arms, and a zipper that fastens it snugly about me, to go out. I had black-eyed peas with rice and some tomato paste and garlic, all ingredients Mr. Ubaid never heard of; if I really want some lamb kebab with pita and yogurt and cucumbers, like Mr. Ubaid ate a lot of, I can get in my car and find a place serving just that-- or I could have Chinese.

It is bizarre to me that you think I would trade any of this for the life of a Stone Age villager, even the chieftain.

What's bizarre is that you actually think most people on the bottom of the social ladder are better off then the chieftans of Ubaid... but whatever.

 

[farhan]

Precisely my objection to the concept of Muhammad as a "final" prophet.

Not even comparable. Muhammad doesn't ask you not to look into the universe. Infact many places asks actually asks people to go out & understand how universe works. As far as finality of social standards are concerned, give it your best shot. You think human values are man-made, that human can device a value by voting. I think humans are too hopelessly capricious & prone to emotional fits to be capable of doing that. I believe human values are absolute, & they come from other-than-man sources. You have experimented with them, your civilization is dying. There are signs everywhere.

It has to do with the history of religion opposing every major new discovery, particularly heliocentrism and evolution but in other cases as well, out of a belief that we should freeze our knowledge to the level of the ignorance when Scriptures were written thousands of years ago. Harun Yahya is a parallel in the Islamic world.

Its a very egoistic western behavior to pigeonhole every spiritual philosophy into the "religion" box. Religion didnt oppose every major new discovery, christianity did. Taoism didnt oppose gunpowder or paper, neither did hinduism oppose zero. Buddhism is in its core experiential. Islam & science went together for a long time. The church was obviously against anything new. Which causes a common western scientist to oppose anything spiritual.

I used to BE one of them. In my previous autobiographical post, I told how as a child I regarded the Bible as just one more fascinating collection of mythological and folklore stories, and vehemently rejected Christianity; I was a big fan of science, and became a "smarty-pants atheist" of the Dawkins type, not just rejecting religion myself, but eager to argue against
religious people and show them why they were wrong. But to continue the story:In my late teens, I began to have visionary seizures (I use the term "seizures" advisedly: I was never diagnosed, but I am sure this was a neurological condition) and swung completely in the opposite direction, to a hyper-religious megalomania. My religion at the time (I will not go into the belief-system) could be summarized, "There is no God but The God, and *I* am His Prophet!" A fearsome prophet indeed I was; my duties included bringing peace to the Middle East: during the embassy-hostage crisis, I offered myself to Khomeini in exchange, and he released one of the hostages; after Sabra and Chatila, I denounced Menachem Begin, demanding and receiving his resignation as Prime Minister. But before my visions ceased, I had some which "deflated" me: it is hard to explain,
if you have never felt the intoxicating sense of importance which can accompany some insanities (paranoids feel it too: if the CIA is out to get you, why then, you must matter a lot!), but I rather abruptly came to perceive that I was not "all that" and, really, was quite a small creature in the universe. I turned to Buddhism, whose talk of the unreality of the "ego" was a helpful cure for the pridefulness that had become a spiritual sickness for me.

Wow man, cool. Anyways......what I have come to realize, by studies not visions, is that man is a five plane being, with only one-half plane open to him. Things like these happen when the barriers between human planes of being accidently break. If you break them be planning/practice, you would remain sane (Now what is sanity, thats another big question).

How to differentiate between kind of spiritual accident/disease & a real revelation? pretty difficult, I guess the only yardstick I have is by judging its temporo-spatial success. If its based on some solid principles, it would go on.

BTW have you tried perennialists? Schoun, Gueneon, Nasr, Eaton etc. If not try them

Was Muhammad a robot?

No idea. Quran was the word of God. Other than that it seems his actions were inspired by God. Not a Robot IMO. There are places in Quran where God admonishes him.

I don't see any stories where Abraham acted like a slaver, but Moses is said to have killed a lot of people for rejecting his revelations.

Any new ideology kills people. Thats how things happen among humans. Ahinsa is suicide around here.

I have always tried to look at them all, and indeed (see above) I have found humility to be important. The Qur'an just doesn't do much for me.

There is a time for everything. It took me almost 5 years to unlock it. Most probably you are reading too shallowly. Try to be a little bit abstract, broad-scoped, & go with the rhythm (like Tao-te-ching), it works. If you read like a newspaper (literal & shallow), you wont get anything

If a passage in the Qur'an said hamid would you approve of substituting the meaning of mahmud to make it true?

To my knowledge its not possible. But their are many other words where substitution can be done. Like Sayyra means both planet & car, najm means both stars & herbs, hatif means both caller & phone.

No, in Muhammad's time and for centuries afterward, alaqa was not used for things that cling/hang/suspend from something else, rather for "congealed" things which cling to themselves: a "clot" of blood or "clump" of mud.It did not say an alaqa of dam "blood"; but it was understood by those Muhammad spoke to as meaning congealed blood rather than congealed mud or some other substance.

And this isn't the word used, but the embryologists want to substitute the meaning of muallaq although they acknowledge that Muslim scholars in the time immediately after Muhammad knew alaqa as a word with a different meaning.

Alaqa back then & still now is used for anything that clings. Aliqat nafsuhu shayin (His mind clung to that thing), Qad aliqal kibru ma'aliqatu (Old age has taken hold in its holding places), Aliqat marasiha (their anchors have clung), Alaq ashshayin khalfahu (he hung the thing on his back)......there are lots of example. The thing doesnt haveto cling to itself.

Muhammad didnt say bloodclot. In his parlance he said clinger, which was understood by his people as bloodclot, which from guidance POV is no big deal (Quran gives you social standards, not embryological ones).

I gave the example of muallaq only to describe that if a word thats more formed has crossed two languages & sustaines its root meaning, why cant a word thats less formed sustain its orignal meaning in its orignal language. Otherwise the word Muallaq couldnt have been used here. Its used when there is too much hanging, like "I hung a rope from the tree".

Exactly. The word used means what Greek science taught people of the time, and didn't bear the meaning that is now wanted to fit modern science.

And it means something else too, that fits modern science. Now was he a clever premonitor or what?

I would not know about the poetry, since Arabic has largely defeated me. We have a saying "Poetry is what is lost in translation", and the Qur'an is notorious for losing its very heart when rendered in another language, unlike the Bible, which has always traveled very well. In English it comes across as very repetitive, "To the good people, good things happen, and to the bad people, bad things happen, indeed very bad things to the very bad people, and very good things to the very good people," blah blah blah over and over, and if there are poetic nuances in the original, I can't know them.

AFAI remember, OT was resurrected from some IE language, NT was written in Greek. SO if Bible has traveled well throughout the IE peoples, that's no big deal. The original language & poetry is lost for ever.

Yes, translations of Quran do sound repetitive & dry/flat. They dont "move to the music", the music is lost & one is left with words. Try reading song lyrics, they are always repetitive & boring.

And its not just Arabic or Quran, try reading Rumi in English & then in Persian. I am trying to understand "Secret of Golden Flower" right now, really impossible to comprehend in English.

On a side note, try getting translations by Muhammad Asad, Tim Winter (AbdulHakim Murad) & Thomas Cleary. Also Approaching Quran by Michael Sells. If you are able to bear with all that I can give you a lot more.

I thought the embryo was the modern chestnut, and sister-of-Harun the ancient one. Whatever. We could talk about Dzu al-Qarnain, and whether it's Alexander the Great or someone else, and how it looks like a really ignorant fairy-tale, but: I'm sure there is a whole list of standard excuses for that one too,

Jews asked who was DzulQarnain, Muhammad answered satisfactorily, thats all. Back then it was a miracle, because Jews knew an Arab cant know this. Now was he Alexender or Hulagu is a non-issue from guidance POV.

According to modern scholars he was Cyrus.

If so, Ethiopians should mention it in their histories, with of course a hostile spin on the story about how he was a wicked traitor or whatever, like Christian sources on Julian the Apostate (emperor a couple generations after Constantine, converted back to paganism). With no other source, it is difficult to put much trust in yours.

I dont necessarily disagree with you here. But then Egyptian records don't say anything about Moses incident either.

Well, I'm having a good ride. Sorry your part of the world cannot figure out how to do this.

Thats the laziness abundance brings. Why are three quarter of humans hungry? Remember its the economic system you imposed upon the world. Why are people fighting everywhere?
Remember its the political system that you & your predecessors imposed upon the world. I am not saying you are solely responsibly for that, but you were the ones who had this implemented in the first place. So the blame falls on you. Chinese were the only ones who were able to reverse engineer your inherently fascist systems, you didnt give them an easy ride either. Muslims on the other hand are usually too "faithful to slavedom" to think freely. Southern Africans are still suffering from the stupid nation-states Europeans left them with.

Also, good ride isnt right ride. Enjoying the journey is not equivalent of reaching the right place (or anyplace)

 

[farhan]

Jews and Christians had to pay a special tax. Polytheists, to the best of my understanding (contradict me if you have a different understanding), had to convert, leave, or die. That would seem to apply even more stringently to atheists, but what kinds of religions might be tolerated is, as I've been saying, somewhat of a difficult question. You are not, of course, under any religious duty to compel all the Chinese around you to convert to Islam under threat of death; but that is only because you do not control the territory. The early Muslim rulers to conquer as far as Sind did still follow a policy of convert, leave, or die, as far as Hindus were concerned. As they kept penetrating into more and more thickly populated areas, this became impractical, and the Mugal rulers had wavering policies on whether they should just impose jizya on Hindus or whether they should systematically destroy all their shrines and try to destroy Hinduism over time. The Babri Masjid, built on the site of a destroyed shrine to Krishna's birthplace, remained a sore point for centuries until the violent demonstrations and finally demolition of the building a few years ago, Hindu extremist leaders of course inciting the crowds to attacks on Muslims while they had angry mobs so conveniently assembled.

Jews & Xtians had to pay a special tax because they werent giving the Muslim tax. It was a protection tax kind of thing. If they were willing to join the army, even that wasent taken from them (Turks had different rules I guess). Polytheists werent harmed unless they start harming the state. For example after the conquest of Mecca there was no pressure upon them to convert. Havent heard about Athiests back then, because everybody did believe in something. Uptill 10th-12th century there were Zoroastrians in Persian territories & uptill now there are Hindus in Sindh. So I dont think Caliphs followed convert or die policy. Mughals considered Hindus people of the book (for whatever reasons). There is no proof that Babri Masjid was made upon some Ram Mandir site. There are ofcourse other buildings (Like Qutub Minar Complex) that were made by bricks of demolished hindu buildings (religious or common I dont know)

The "people"? Or a few power-brokers in the town? I don't know how the city-state was governed before: it's possible it was "general town meeting" like Athens; or elected City Council like most towns I've lived in; or a hereditary Senate from the leading families like in ancient Rome. But it sounds like it might have been more like medieval Rome: where a handful of families controlled everything, but did not meet in any kind of council, instead occasionally settling their differences by mustering their gangs for street brawls.

There used to be 3 Jewish tribes & 2 Arab ones. Medinan Arabs were pretty egalitarian. Dont know about the Jewish ones. Infact just before they came to Muhammad, all their Arab leaders were killed in a decades long civil war. So I guess they were all common people

Part of why I find the Qur'an a much lesser book than the Bible. There is not one believable human character in it from first to last. There are only good guys, who only do good, and have only good things happen to them, and bad guys, who only do bad, and have only bad things happen to them. That is not the planet I live on.

The Qur'an has no chronology at all. The stories are in randomly jumbled order, and there is no particular indication of which prophets are "in between" which others.

Quran isnt a history book. So it isnt supposed to tell you how many nails did the window on that particular floor of Noah's Arc had. Or how many generations were there between him & Adam. Its order is not chronological, its didactic. There are a few links here.
http://www.interfaith.org/forum/coherence-in-quran-7206.html

And there are places where bad things happen to good people too.

Muhammad's career included violence which Jesus avoided; Jesus's career included submission to suffering which Muhammad avoided. Which is "greater" is rather a matter of opinion.

I didnt want to say this, but Jesus didnt do anything. He was send as a sign, his people didnt take the sign, so the deal was off. His people were severely tortured & then were Hellenized. Muhammad left his people with a united nation & a sustainable state. That lateron conquered huge portions of land. Who is greater, ofcourse its a matter of opinion.

 

[farhan]

Not even comparable. Muhammad doesn't ask you not to look into the universe. Infact many places asks actually asks people to go out & understand how universe works.

Its supposed to be:

Not even comparable. Muhammad doesn't ask you not to look into the universe. Infact many places Quran asks people to go out & understand how universe works