Boreal

Remembering Uzza

If Islam was explained to me in a pub

ENDNOTES 4/4

(a work in progress)

Birth of a Cult

[385] An English translation of the Koran will run to about 77,700 words; the approximate size of a standard 300 page book. The Bible, the King James Version, is about 791,328 words, more than 10 times the number of words in the Koran.

[386] It is a testament to the power of persuasion that simply by repeating over and over again what a mortal said was written in a book whose author was God, a book no one has ever seen, not even his self-proclaimed spokesperson, that the book became self-evident proof of the alleged author's existence.

For the skeptics this is, of course, no proof at all. It makes no difference. Did Muhammad accidentally stumble upon one of the more effective methods of indoctrination, not to say brainwashing, that is repetition? Repetition is also key to making the Koran easy to remember, as the Book reminds the reader.

54:17 And We have made the Qur’an easy to remember. Is there, then, any one (sic) who will remember?

54:22 We have made the Qur’an easy to remember. Is there, then, any one who will remember?

54:32 We have, indeed, made the Qur’an easy to remember. Is there, then, any one who will remember?

54:40 We have, indeed, made the Qur’an easy to remember. Is there, then, any one who will remember?

[387]

Narrated Ibn Umar:

Allah's Apostle (p.b.u.h) said, "Keys of the unseen knowledge are five which nobody knows but Allah . . . nobody knows what will happen tomorrow; nobody knows what is in the womb; nobody knows what he will gain tomorrow; nobody knows at what place he will die; and nobody knows when it will rain."

Bukhari 17.149

[388]

33:21 You have had a good example in Allah’s Messenger; surely for him who hopes for Allah and the Last Day and remembers Allah often.

[389]

33:36 It is not up to any believer, man or woman, when Allah and His Messenger have passed a judgement, to have any choice in their affairs. Whoever disobeys Allah and His Messenger have gone astray in a manifest manner.

To live by the Book and the example of Muhammad is to abandon your rights as a human being to decide your own fate as this revelation makes abundantly clear.

The concept of free will or freedom to make your own choices is very narrowly defined in Islam. In practical terms, for believers, it means surrendering yourself to God or rejecting him. Once you have surrendered your “will” to God, your free will is effectively extinguished.

Just so we are clear on the concept:

31:22 Whoever surrenders his will to Allah, while doing the right, has surely grasped the firmest handle. Unto Allah is the ultimate issue of all affairs.

[390] Ishaq's most vocal critic was renowned authority on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet (the so-called hadiths) Malik ibn Anas (b. 711 d. 795).

The methodology pursued by Ibn Ishaq was, first and foremost, that of an historian and biographer while Malik was steeped in Islamic Jurisprudence…

The main reason why Malik and others questioned Ibn Ishaq's reliability as a hadith narrator was due largely to the fact that he had obtained information about the Prophet's military campaigns (including that of the Battle of Khaibar) from both Jewish and Christian converts to Islam.

The Muslim 100 - The Lives, Thoughts and Achievements of the Most Influential Muslims in History, Muhammad Mojlum Khan, Kube Publishing, 2008

[391]

Thanks to its success the Sira of Ibn Ishaq (as redacted by Hisham and others) is practically our one source for the life of Muhammad preserved within the Islamic tradition.

The work is late; written not by a grandchild, but a great great-grandchild of the Prophet's generation, it gives us the view for which classical Islam had settled. And written by a member of the "ulema" the scholars who had by then emerged as the classical bearers of the Islamic tradition, the picture which it offers is one-sided: how the Umayyad caliphs remembered their Prophet we shall never known.

That it is unhistorical is only what one would expect, but it also has an extraordinary capacity to resist internal criticism, a feature unparalleled in either the Skandhara [the life of the Buddha] or the Gospels, but characteristic of the entire Islamic tradition, and most pronounced in the Koran: one can take the picture presented or one can leave it, but one cannot work with it.

Stephen Shoemaker cf. Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses

[392]

[393]