Boreal
FAREWELL POSTINGS
Foreword
Dear...,
It is always nice to hear from you. Thanks for the pictures. Everyone looks great.
I may live another ten years, and then again, I may not. Isn’t that the situation for most people my age?
In informing me of the result of my latest thoracic echocardiogram, my doctor said that I had been dodging a bullet for years, and I may continue doing so, but the odds were no longer in my favour.
After what Lucette went through, I consider my aneurism a godsend, even if I don’t believe in the guy.
A silver lining: with my last book, Fade to Black, I thought I had nothing left to write about, and lo and behold I get to write about Lucette and me again and revisit stuff I wrote about Islam.
I am writing my Farewell Postings without the benefit of Lucette to tell me “you can’t say that”, so expect some surprises that I hope will make you smile and not make you sad.
If I beat the odds, won’t I have egg on my face.
Love You
Bernard
On February 5, 2025 I met with a cardiologist. He said there is nothing to worry about for at least another two years. While the aneurysm has grown slightly since by last echocardiogram, it’s still below the threshold for intervention.
With that piece of bittersweet news, I will now attempt to transform my Farewell Postings into another book like they do in academia when one has nothing new to add to their published scholarship. It’s revisit, rehash and recycle time.
Having said that, among the déja vu material you will find a sprinkling of never published postings going back to the start of boreal.ca in 2003; before the focus became increasingly about Islam.
Unless otherwise indicated, the verses that appear in my books are from a mainstream translation of the Koran by native Arabic speaker Majid Fakhry, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. In the translator’s own words, “We have tried to express ourselves in a simple, readable English idiom.” Publishers Weekly wrote of Fakhry’s notable accomplishment that it “succeeds in expressing the meanings of the original Arabic in simple readable English.”
One of the best examples of Fakhry's superior command of the English language is his succinct and elegant translation of Verse 48:28, one of the most significant revelations of the Koran.
Yusuf Ali: It is He Who has sent His Messenger with Guidance and the Religion of Truth, to proclaim it over all religion: and enough is Allah for a Witness.
Mohsin Khan: He it is Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad SAW) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), that He may make it (Islam) superior over all religions. And All-Sufficient is Allah as a Witness.
Majid Fakhry: It is He Who sent forth His Messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may exalt it above every other religion. Allah suffices as Witness.
Another important feature of Fakhry’s translation is that, while he cannot avoid supremacist statements like the above in rendering an accurate translation of the Koran, he does not go out of his way to highlight them like the other two mainstream translations.
Professor Khaleel Mohammad, then assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State, made the following observations pertaining to the two most widely available translations of the Koran courtesy of the Saudi government.
The Holy Qur'an: Translation and Commentary by Abdullah Yusuf 'Ali.
Among those Qur'an translations which found Saudi favor and, therefore, wide distribution, was the Abdullah Yusuf 'Ali (1872-1952) rendition that, from its first appearance in 1934 until very recently, was the most popular English version among Muslims …
While his rendering of the text is not bad, there are serious problems in his copious footnotes; in many cases, he reproduces the exegetical material from medieval texts without making any effort at contextualization. Writing at a time both of growing Arab animosity toward Zionism and in a milieu that condoned anti-Semitism, Yusuf 'Ali constructed his oeuvre as a polemic against Jews.
Several Muslim scholars have built upon the Yusuf 'Ali translation. In 1989, Saudi Arabia's Ar-Rajhi banking company financed the U.S.-based Amana Corporation's project to revise the translation to reflect an interpretation more in conjunction with the line of Islamic thought followed in Saudi Arabia. Ar-Rahji offered the resulting version for free to mosques, schools, and libraries throughout the world.
The footnoted commentary about Jews remained so egregious that, in April 2002, the Los Angeles school district banned its use at local schools. While the Yusuf 'Ali translation still remains in publication, it has lost influence because of its dated language and the appearance of more recent works whose publication and distribution the Saudi government has also sought to subsidize.
The Noble Qur'an in the English Language by Muhammad Taqi al-Din al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan.
Now the most widely disseminated Qur'an in most Islamic bookstores and Sunni mosques throughout the English-speaking world, this new translation is meant to replace the Yusuf 'Ali edition and comes with a seal of approval from both the University of Medina and the Saudi Dar al-Ifta. Whereas most other translators have tried to render the Qur'an applicable to a modern readership, this Saudi-financed venture tries to impose the commentaries of Tabari (d. 923 C.E.), Qurtubi (d. 1273 C.E.), and Ibn Kathir (d. 1372 C.E.), medievalists who knew nothing of modern concepts of pluralism...
From the beginning, the Hilali and Muhsin Khan translation reads more like a supremacist Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian polemic than a rendition of the Islamic scripture…
Although this Saudi-sponsored effort, undertaken before 9-11, is a serious liability for American Muslims in particular, it still remains present in Sunni mosques, probably because of its free distribution by the Saudi government.
THE FIRST KORAN
The first written Koran was put together in a hurry from second-rate sources after those who remembered Allah’s revelations best were killed putting down a rebellion against Muslim rule known as the War of the Apostates.
In the last phase of that war, at the battle Yamama, 7,000 so-called apostates (mainly Muslims who refused to pay Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr, the Zakat, an obligatory charity that the Prophet set up largely to finance his successful war against the pagans of the Peninsula) were surrounded and slaughtered. Seventy of the best reciters of the Koran—Muhammad had decreed that the Koran not be written down but memorized, as is done to this day—perished in the assault on the apostates.
The loss of the best "Koranic memories" meant that the young man tasked with putting together the first written Koran had to depend on less reliable sources to create a written record of what Allah first told the angel Gabriel, and who, in turn, revealed it to Muhammad.
Narrated Zaid bin Thabit Al-Ansari who was one of those who used to write the Divine Revelation:
Abu Bakr sent for me after the (heavy) casualties among the warriors (of the battle) of Yamama (where a great number of Qurra' (reciters of the Koran) were killed). Umar was present with Abu Bakr who said, “Umar has come to me and said, ‘The people have suffered heavy casualties on the day of (the battle of) Yamama, and I am afraid that there will be more casualties among the Qurra (those who know the Qur'an by heart) at other battle-fields, whereby a large part of the Qur'an may be lost, unless you collect it. And I am of the opinion that you should collect the Qur'an.’"
Abu Bakr added, "I said to Umar, 'How can I do something which Allah's Apostle has not done?'"
Umar said (to me), "By Allah, it is (really) a good thing."
So Umar kept on pressing, trying to persuade me to accept his proposal, till Allah opened my bosom for it and I had the same opinion as Umar.
(Zaid bin Thabit added:) Umar was sitting with him, Abu Bakr, and was not speaking to me). "You are a wise young man and we do not suspect you (of telling lies or of forgetfulness): and you used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah's Apostle. Therefore, look for the Qur'an and collect it (in one manuscript)."
By Allah, if he (Abu Bakr) had ordered me to shift one of the mountains (from its place) it would not have been harder for me than what he had ordered me concerning the collection of the Qur'an. I said to both of them, "How dare you do a thing which the Prophet has not done?"
Abu Bakr said, "By Allah, it is (really) a good thing."
So I kept on arguing with him about it till Allah opened my bosom for that which He had opened the bosoms of Abu Bakr and Umar. So I started locating Quranic material and collecting it from parchments, scapula, leaf-stalks of date palms and from the memories of men (who knew it by heart).
I found with Khuzaima two Verses of Surat-at-Tauba which I had not found with anybody else, (and they were): "Verily there has come to you an Apostle (Muhammad) from amongst yourselves. It grieves him that you should receive any injury or difficulty He (Muhammad) is ardently anxious over you (to be rightly guided)" (9:128)
The manuscript on which the Quran was collected, remained with Abu Bakr till Allah took him unto Him, and then with Umar till Allah took him unto Him, and finally it remained with Hafsa, Umar's daughter.
Bukhari 60.201
Thabit's original, which the daughter of Caliph Umar kept under her bed, was retrieved on the order of Uthman who succeeded Umar as caliph.
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Hudhaifa bin Al-Yaman came to Uthman at the time when the people of Sham and the people of Iraq were Waging war to conquer Arminya and Adharbijan. Hudhaifa was afraid of their (the people of Sham and Iraq) differences in the recitation of the Qur'an, so he said to Uthman, "O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before."
So Uthman sent a message to Hafsa saying, "Send us the manuscripts of the Qur'an so that we may compile the Qur'anic materials in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you."
Hafsa sent it to Uthman. Uthman then ordered Zaid bin Thabit, Abdullah bin AzZubair, Said bin Al-As and 'Abdur Rahman bin Harith bin Hisham to rewrite the manuscripts in perfect copies.
Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, "In case you disagree with Zaid bin Thabit on any point in the Qur'an, then write it in the dialect of Quraish, the Qur'an was revealed in their tongue."
They did so, and when they had written many copies, Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsa.
Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied, and ordered that all the other Qur'anic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.
Said bin Thabit added, "A Verse from Surat Ahzab was missed by me when we copied the Qur'an and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it. So we searched for it and found it with Khuzaima bin Thabit Al-Ansari. (That Verse was): 'Among the Believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah.'" (33:23)
Bukhari 61.510
The finished product that was made available to selected cities, and which spawned so many recitations, contains no timeline per se. The only allowance given to any kind of order is the sequencing of most of the 114 chapters from longest to shortest. Because no attention seems to have been given to arranging the chapters and verses in chronological order, you get answers to questions that have yet to be asked and accounts of events in reverse order.
Also, little evidence of scholarship is evident in the proliferation of duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate and even quintuplicate verses telling the same story despite having gone through two iterations under Bakr and Uthman respectively.
The lack of scholarship is also manifest in the transposition in space and time of stories from the Bible that defy facts that should have been known at the time, such as the Samaritans could not have part of the Exodus (see Chapter “Moses II/Moses vs. the Bad Samaritan,” Shared Prophets, Boreal Books).
THE MODERN KORAN
The Cairo Edition, the source document from which all mainstream translations of the Koran are derived is recent by historical standards, dating back to the 1920s.
Forgotten Witness:
Evidence for the Early Codification of the Qur’an
Estelle Whelan, Columbia University
Excerpt from Journal of the American Oriental Society,
vol. 118, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–14.
Oral recitation nevertheless remained the preferred mode of transmission, and, as time passed, variant versions of the text proliferated - the kind of organic change that is endemic to an oral tradition.
In addition, because of the nature of the early Arabic script, in which short vowels were not indicated and consonants of similar form were only sometimes distinguished by pointing, writing, too, was subject to misunderstanding, copyist's error, and change over time.
In the early tenth century, at Baghdad, Abu Bakr Ibn Mujahid (d. 936) succeeded in reducing the number of acceptable readings to the seven that were predominant in the main Muslim centers of the time: Medina, Mecca, Damascus, Basra, and Kufa.
Some Qur'an readers who persisted in deviating from these seven readings were subjected to draconian punishments.
Nevertheless, with the passage of time, additional variant readings were readmitted, first "the three after the seven," then "the four after the ten."
The modern Cairo edition, prepared at al-Azhar in the 1920s, is based on one of the seven readings permitted by Ibn Mujahid, that of Abu Bakr ‘Âsim (d. 745) as transmitted by Hafs b. Sulayman (d. 796).
MY BOOKS
Farewell Postings keeps alive the hope of getting you interested in my books. That’s me in smoke-filled bar celebrating the publication of my first, and most successful book, Canada – The Fractured Nation Interviews.
PAIN, PLEASURE AND PREJUDICE
The Complete Koran by Topic and Explained in a Way We Can All Understand has been broken up into the following six paperbacks:
Getting to Know Allah
Shared Prophets
Shared Prophets Biblical Figures in the Koran - What They Said and Did
The Islamic Hereafter
Jihad in the Koran
Women and the Koran
From Merchant to Messenger
Muhammad’s Struggle for Legitimacy as Revealed in the Koran
SPECIAL
Let Me Rephrase That
Your Layman's Guide to Abrogations
Children and the Koran
The End of Empathy
Teach Your Children Well
PLAY/SCRIPT
Remembering Uzza
If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub
Alice Visits a Mosque to Learn About Judgment Day
THE PROPHET
1001 Sayings and Deeds of the Prophet Muhammad
END-GAME
Fade to Black
Triumph of the Irrational
MIX
Love, Sex & Islam
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Shooting the Messenger
Till Death Do Us Part
OUT-OF-PRINT
Canada The Fractured Nation Interviews
Farewell Postings keeps alive the hope of getting you interested. Of course, for those who have not read anything I wrote, and decide to take the plunge with my latest and likely last book, it will all be new.
Farewell Postings begins with mainly remembrances and sentiments of a personal nature before the focus becomes overwhelmingly what I have been writing about for the past quarter century, concentrating on the foundational glue that binds all believers: War (against unbelievers), Worship and Sex.