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Criticism Of Islam: Part II
Time To Tell The Truth About Islam
“The important thing about a religion,” said C.S. Lewis, “is not whether it makes one feel good, but whether it is true.”
The important thing about a religion, said C.S. Lewis, is not whether it makes one feel good, but whether it is true. This observation came to mind while reading a recent piece by Jesuit Father James Schall, titled “Speaking Honestly About Islam.”
Father Schall suggests that we haven’t been telling the truth about Islam because to do so violates the feel-good principle that currently rules Western societies. According to the feel-good principle, self-esteem is the highest value. And, therefore, every person, culture and religion has an inalienable right to feel good about oneself/itself.
People want to believe the Islam-is-peace line because they don’t want to give offense and also because they don’t want to be accused of a hate crime. It’s a well-founded fear.
In many Western societies, numerous individuals — and some of them very prominent individuals — have been put on trial for the crime of criticizing Islam: Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant in Canada, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Lars Hedegaard in Denmark and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, to name a few. In several cases, the defendants were informed that truth was no defense. The accuracy of their criticism, they were told, was beside the point (the point being that they had said hurtful things).
Honesty is the best policy, according to the old maxim, but many Western governments have adopted a deliberate policy of prevarication in regard to Islam. Hardly a day goes by when some Western leader or other isn’t explaining away the latest jihad attack as having nothing to do with Islam.
It’s not that leaders are doing nothing about the problem of jihad. A number of European countries have belatedly launched de-radicalization programs aimed at countering jihadist ideology. For example, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced a five-year plan to defeat Islamic extremism.
The trouble with these programs is that they can’t let go of the lie. The central feature of most of these initiatives is the enlistment of moderate Muslims in a campaign to convince potential jihadists that Islam has nothing to do with jihad (or else to convince them that jihad, correctly understood, is nothing more than an interior spiritual struggle).
This puts the Muslim leaders who are willing to sign up for such campaigns in a difficult spot. They are in essence trying to defend a largely indefensible position. While it’s true that Islam can be practiced peacefully (and, thank Allah, that’s the way most Muslims practice it), that can only be done by ignoring some of Islam’s fundamental teachings. As Father Schall observes, “It is senseless to pretend that a jihadist vision is not found in the Qur’an.”
He continues:
“What has to be faced by everyone is not the ‘violence’ of Islam, but its truth. We may not ‘like’ a jihadist view of the Qur’an. But we denigrate the dignity of ISIS and other violent strains in both Sunni and Shi’ite branches of Islam that clearly see that their interpretation of Islam has legitimate roots in the Qur’an, in Islamic history and in the judgment of many authoritative commentators.”
To some extent, Father Schall is playing the devil’s advocate. He does not really believe in the dignity of ISIS, but he does suggest that their beliefs are honest. What is the basic attraction that draws young men and women to Islamic movements? Father Schall replies that the main motivation is the perception that the Qur’an is true. Most jihadists wage jihad because they believe that is what Allah wants them to do.
A campaign based on the dubious notion that Allah does not command jihad is a hard sell. Both sides — the moderates and the radicals — can quote scripture to defend their positions, but the jihadists seem to be able to quote it much more extensively and convincingly. Many of the moderates are akin to “cafeteria Catholics.” They have a family or cultural attachment to Islam, but they don’t have a thorough knowledge of their faith or any great desire to follow all of its commands. They have a more Westernized and subjective understanding of Islam than their fundamentalist brethren and are inclined to say things like “That’s not my Islam” when condemning jihadist violence.
In other words, for some moderate Muslims, Islam is more of a personalized construct — a religion made in the image of their own subjective inclinations. The comparison to cafeteria Catholics is useful because it helps us to better understand the relation of the moderate Muslim to his religion. The Catholic who is accepting of abortion and same-sex “marriage” is convinced that the Church will eventually come around to the same position. The truly moderate Muslim would never resort to violence, and so he convinces himself that his religion must therefore be a religion of peace. In short, the moderate Muslim adheres to what author Stephen Kirby calls “fantasy Islam.”
Because it’s based in fantasy, the whole effort to convince jihadists and would-be jihadists that Islam is a religion of peace seems doomed to failure. Granted, many Western leaders don’t really believe what they’re saying and look upon their anti-radicalization projects merely from a pragmatic point of view. But even looked at from a purely practical standpoint, it’s doubtful that a strategy based on such a massive lie can succeed.
Muslim leaders, of course, are caught in a bind on this issue. On the one hand, they need to please their Western hosts; on the other hand, they can’t afford to repudiate large parts of Islamic scripture and tradition.
But Western leaders and opinion-makers have fewer constraints. They might consider telling the truth for a change. It might prove in the long run to be a much better strategy than the current self-defeating one.
Islamic radicals have a very good case that their version of Islam is truer to the original than the moderate version. The proper way to undermine their ideology/theology is not to cast doubts on their interpretation of Islam, but to cast doubts about the truth of Islam itself.
That may seem like an impossible undertaking, but one thing that works in favor of the truth-telling strategy is that, despite their violence, many jihadists do seem to be truth-seekers. There is abundant evidence from their letters, diaries, blogs, Facebook pages and last-testament videos that they believe they have discovered what Allah truly wants them to do. For this reason, they may be more likely candidates for conversion to a higher truth than many a lukewarm Muslim.
Criticism of Islam has existed since its formative stages. Early written disapproval came from Christians, before the ninth century, many of whom viewed Islam as a radical Christian heresy, as well as by some former Muslim atheists/agnostics such as Ibn al-Rawandi. After the September 11 attacks and other terrorist attacks in the early 21st century, hatred of Islam grew alongside criticism of it.
Criticism Of Muhammad
On the other hand, those who founded sects committed to erroneous doctrines proceeded in a way that is opposite to this. The point is clear in the case of Muhammad. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent min the power of his arms — which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be. seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.
So many people can’t live their childhood properly because of him [Muhammad]. So many people are sufferers of his disasters. So many people know what’s right as wrong and what’s wrong as right because they think the darkness that he chose exists. Human emotions and human creations haven’t progressed in many ways, because of him . . . if there is a Allah, he’s not Mohammed’s.
Criticism Of The Qur’an
The Qur’an is viewed to be the scriptural foundation of Islam and is believed by Muslims to have been sent down by Allah and revealed to Muhammad by the angel Jabreel (Gabriel). The Qur’an has been criticized both in the sense of being studied as a text for historical, literary, sociological and theological analysis by secular, (mostly) Western scholars who set aside doctrines of its divinity, perfection, unchangeability, etc., accepted by Muslim scholars; but also in the sense of being found fault with by those — including Christian missionaries and other skeptics hoping to convert Muslims — who argue it is not divine, not perfect and/or not particularly morally elevated.
In historical criticism, scholars (such as John Wansbrough, Joseph Schacht, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook) seek to investigate and verify the origin, text, composition, history of the Qur’an, examining questions, puzzles, difficult text, etc., as they would non-sacred ancient texts. Opponents of Islam (such as Ibn Warraq) have worked to find internal inconsistency and scientific errors in the holy book, and faults with its clarity, authenticity, and ethical message. The most common criticisms concern various pre-existing sources that Qur’an relies upon, internal consistency, clarity and moral teachings.
Historical Authenticity
According to Islamic tradition, the Qur’an is the literal word of Allah as recited to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel. Muhammad, according to tradition, recited perfectly what the archangel Gabriel revealed to him for his companions to write down and memorize. Muslims believe that the wording of the Qur’anic text available today corresponds exactly to that revealed to Muhammad in the years 610–632.
The early Arabic script transcribed 28 consonants, of which only six can be readily distinguished, the remaining 22 having formal similarities which means that what specific consonant is intended can only be determined by context. It was only with the introduction of Arabic diacritics some centuries later, that an authorized vocalization of the text, and how it was to be read, was established and became canonical.
Prior to this period, there is evidence that the unpointed text could be read in different ways, with different meanings. Tabarī prefaces his early commentary on the Qur’an illustrating that the precise way to read the verses of the sacred text was not fixed even in the day of the Prophet. Two men disputing a verse in the text asked Ubay ibn Ka’b to mediate, and he disagreed with them, coming up with a third reading. To resolve the question, the three went to Muhammad. He asked first one-man to read out the verse, and announced it was correct. He made the same response when the second alternative reading was delivered. He then asked Ubay to provide his own recital, and, on hearing the third version, Muhammad also pronounced it ‘Correct!’ Noting Ubay’s perplexity and inner thoughts, Muhammad then told him, ‘Pray to Allah for protection from the accursed Satan.’
Similarities With Jewish And Christian Narratives
The Qur’an contains references to more than 50 people in the Bible, which predates it by several centuries. Stories related in the Qur’an usually focus more on the spiritual significance of events than details. The stories are generally comparable, but there are differences. One of the most famous differences is the Islamic view of Jesus’ crucifixion. The Qur’an maintains that Jesus was not actually crucified and did not die on the cross. The general Islamic view supporting the denial of crucifixion was probably influenced by Manichaeism (Docetism), which holds that someone else was crucified instead of Jesus, while concluding that Jesus will return during the end-times.
That they said (in boast), “We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah”; but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no (certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not: Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise; Qur’an, sura 4 (An-Nisa) ayat 157–158.
Despite these views, scholars have maintained that the Crucifixion of Jesus is a fact of history and not disputed.
Earliest Witness Testimony
The last recensions to make an official and uniform Qur’an in a single dialect were effected under Caliph Uthman (644–656) starting some twelve years after the Prophet’s death and finishing twenty-four years after the effort began, with all other existing personal and individual copies and dialects of the Qur’an being burned:
When they had copied the sheets, Uthman sent a copy to each of the main centers of the empire with the command that all other Qur’an materials, whether in single sheet form, or in whole volumes, were to be burned.
It is traditionally believed the earliest writings had the advantage of being checked by people who already knew the text by heart, for they had learned it at the time of the revelation itself and had subsequently recited it constantly. Since the official compilation was completed two decades after Muhammad’s death, the Uthman text has been scrupulously preserved. Bucaille believed that this did not give rise to any problems of this Qur’an’s authenticity.
Muir’s The Life of Mahomet explains the outcome of these oral traditions when researching Al-Bukhari:
“Reliance upon oral traditions, at a time when they were transmitted by memory alone, and every day produced new divisions among the professors ofIslam, opened up a wide field for fabrication and distortion. There was nothing easier, when required to defend any religious or political system, than to appeal to an oral tradition of the Prophet. The nature of these so-called traditions, and the manner in which the name of Muhammad was abused to support all possible lies and absurdities, may be gathered most clearly from the fact that Al-Bukhari who travelled from land to land to gather from the learned the traditions they had received, came to conclusion, after many years sifting, that out of 600,000 traditions, ascertained by him to be then current, only 4000 were authentic!”
Regarding who was the first to collect the narrations, and whether or not it was compiled into a single book by the time of Muhammad’s death is contradicted by witnesses living when Muhammad lived, several historical narratives appear:
Zaid b. Thabit said:
“The Prophet died and the Qur’an had not been assembled into a single place. It is reported . . . from Ali who said: May the mercy of Allah be upon Abu Bakr, the foremost of men to be rewarded with the collection of the manuscripts, for he was the first to collect (the text) between (two) covers.
“It is reported . . . from Ibn Buraidah who said: The first of those to collect the Qur’an into a mushaf (codex) was Salim, the freed slave of Abu Hudhaifah.”
The Sana’a manuscript contains older portions of the Qur’an showing variances different from the Uthman copy. The parchment upon which the lower codex of the Sana’a manuscript is written has been radiocarbon dated with 99 percent accuracy to before 671 A.D., with a 95.5 percent probability of being older than 661 A.D. and 75 percent probability from before 646 A.D.. Tests by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit indicated with a probability of more than 94 percent that the parchment dated from 568 to 645. The Sana’a palimpsest is one of the most important manuscripts of the collection in the world. This palimpsest has two layers of text, both of which are Qur’anic and written in the Hijazi script. While the upper text is almost identical with the modern Qur’ans in use (with the exception of spelling variants), the lower text contains significant diversions from the standard text. For example, in sura 2, verse 87, the lower text has wa-qaffaynā ‘alā āthārihi whereas the standard text has wa-qaffaynā min ba’dihi. The Sana’a manuscript has exactly the same verses and the same order of verses as the standard Qur’an. The order of the suras in the Sana’a codex is different from the order in the standard Qur’an. Such variants are similar to the ones reported for the Qur’an codices of Companions such as Ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Ka’b. However, variants occur much more frequently in the Sana’a codex, which contains “by a rough estimate perhaps twenty-five times as many [as Ibn Mas’ud’s reported variants].”
In 2015, the University of Birmingham disclosed that scientific tests may show a Qur’an manuscript in its collection as one of the oldest known and believe it was written close to the time of Muhammad. The findings in 2015 of the Birmingham Manuscripts lead Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Assistant Professor of Classical Islam, Brandeis University, to comment:
These recent empirical findings are of fundamental importance. They establish that as regards the broad outlines of the history of the compilation and codification of the Qur’anic text, the classical Islamic sources are far more reliable than had hitherto been assumed. Such findings thus render the vast majority of Western revisionist theories regarding the historical origins of the Qur’an untenable.
— Joseph E. B. Lumbard
Dr Saud al-Sarhan, Director of Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, questions whether the parchment might have been reused as a palimpsest, and also noted that the writing had chapter separators and dotted verse endings – features in Arabic scripts which are believed not to have been introduced to the Qur’an until later. Dr Saud’s criticisms was affirmed by several Saudi-based experts in Qur’anic history, who strongly rebut any speculation that the Birmingham/Paris Qur’an could have been written during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. They emphasize that while Muhammad was alive, Qur’anic texts were written without chapter decoration, marked verse endings or use of colored inks; and did not follow any standard sequence of surahs. They maintain that those features were introduced into Qur’anic practice in the time of the Caliph Uthman, and so the Birmingham leaves could have been written later, but not earlier.
Professor Süleyman Berk of the faculty of Islamic studies at Yalova University has noted the strong similarity between the script of the Birmingham leaves and those of a number of Hijazi Qur’ans in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum; which were brought to Istanbul from the Great Mosque of Damascus following a fire in 1893. Professor Berk recalls that these manuscripts had been intensively researched in association with an exhibition on the history of the Qur’an, The Qur’an in its 1,400thYear held in Istanbul in 2010, and the findings published by François Déroche as Qur’ans of the Umayyads in 2013. In that study, the Paris Qur’an, BnF Arabe 328(c), is compared with Qur’ans in Istanbul, and concluded as having been written “around the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth century.”
In December 2015 Professor François Déroche of the Collège de France confirmed the identification of the two Birmingham leaves with those of the Paris Qur’an BnF Arabe 328(c), as had been proposed by Dr Alba Fedeli. Prof. Deroche expressed reservations about the reliability of the radiocarbon dates proposed for the Birmingham leaves, noting instances elsewhere in which radiocarbon dating had proved inaccurate in testing Qur’ans with an explicit endowment date; and also that none of the counterpart Paris leaves had yet been carbon-dated. Jamal bin Huwareib, managing director of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, has proposed that, were the radiocarbon dates to be confirmed, the Birmingham/Paris Qur’an might be identified with the text known to have been assembled by the first Caliph Abu Bakr, between 632–634 A.D.
Critical research of historic events and timeliness of eyewitness accounts reveal the effort of later traditionalists to consciously promote, for nationalistic purposes, the centrist concept of Mecca and prophetic descent from Ismail, in order to grant a Hijazi orientation to the emerging religious identity of Islam:
“For our attempt to date the relevant traditional material confirms on the whole the conclusions which Schacht arrived at from another field, specifically the tendency of isnads to grow backwards.”
In their book 1977 Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, written before more recent discoveries of early Qur’anic material Patricia Crone and Michael Cook challenge the traditional account of how the Qur’an was compiled, writing that “there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century.” Crone, Wansbrough, and Nevo argued, that all the primary sources which exist are from 150–300 years after the events which they describe, and thus are chronologically far removed from those events.
It is generally acknowledged that the work of Crone and Cook was a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, but the theory has been almost universally rejected. Van Ess has dismissed it stating that “a refutation is perhaps unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it in detail. Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts, this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put upside down, their approach is disastrous.” R. B. Serjeant states that “[Crone and Cook’s thesis] is not only bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a ‘leg pull,’ pure ‘spoof.’” Francis Edward Peters states that “Few have failed to be convinced that what is in our copy of the Qur’an is, in fact, what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his own words.”
In 2006, legal scholar Liaquat Ali Khan claimed that Crone and Cook later explicitly disavowed their earlier book. Patricia Crone in an article published in 2006 provided an update on the evolution of her conceptions since the printing of the thesis in 1976. In the article she acknowledges that Muhammad existed as a historical figure and that the Qur’an represents “utterances” of his that he believed to be revelations. However she states that the Qur’an may not be the complete record of the revelations. She also accepts that oral histories and Muslim historical accounts cannot be totally discounted, but remains skeptical about the traditional account of the Hijrah and the standard view that Muhammad and his tribe were based in Mecca. She describes the difficulty in the handling of the hadith because of their “amorphous nature” and purpose as documentary evidence for deriving religious law rather than as historical narratives.
The author of the Apology of al-Kindy Abd al-Masih ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (not the famed philosopher al-Kindi) claimed that the narratives in the Qur’an were “all jumbled together and intermingled” and that this was “an evidence that many different hands have been at work therein, and caused discrepancies, adding or cutting out whatever they liked or disliked.” Bell and Watt suggested that the variation in writing style throughout the Qur’an, which sometimes involves the use of rhyming, may have indicated revisions to the text during its compilation. They claimed that there were “abrupt changes in the length of verses; sudden changes of the dramatic situation, with changes of pronoun from singular to plural, from second to third person, and so on.” At the same time, however, they noted that “[i]f any great changes by way of addition, suppression or alteration had been made, controversy would almost certainly have arisen; but of that there is little trace.” They also note that “Modern study of the Qur’an has not in fact raised any serious question of its authenticity. The style varies, but is almost unmistakable.”
A recent study has argued that the Qur’an we have today is exactly the same as the one compiled by ‘Ali ibn Abi-Talib, and that the reading of Hafs from his teacher ‘Asim to be the unaltered reading of ‘Ali. This is because ‘Asim’s teacher, Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami, had learned the Qur’an from ‘Ali. Furthermore, Hafs was a Companion of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq and it is claimed that the latter had inherited ‘Ali’s Master Copy of the Qur’an. The study provides a case that it was ‘Ali’s Master Copy which formed the basis of the ‘Uthmanic canon. As for the reading of Hafs, the study presents evidence that the latter had learned the Qur’an from two sources: ‘Asim who was his main teacher, and Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq who provided him with a corrective of ‘Asim’s reading. If future research can validate these preliminary findings, then this could very well mean that the reading of Hafs from Asim is the de facto reading of ‘Ali which he inherited from the Prophet till the very last dot.”
Criticism Of Islam: Part II
Last Updated: 08/2021
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