Tiassa I am not going to begin bickering with you over this. If you are having a hard time with the article then simply refer to the passage in the koran to keep it simple for yourself.
Pay attention, Path:
• The issue is part of the larger issue of the koran being "the immutable word of god" given directly to man via mohammed and as such is infallible
• What in the world does this have to do with the SPECIFIC ISSUE of whether that occurence from mohammeds life is morally right or wrong? Honestly
• It is no doubt connected but I think part of the reason the muslim world is in the state it is in today has MUCH to do with islam.
• But AGAIN HOW DOES THIS RELATE to whether the occurence I posted was morally right or wrong?
(1) Okay. Thank you for getting around to that.
(2) This is the twenty-first century; the Quran was revealed in the seventh.
(2a) You really should read up; try
this link and refer to the verses you borrowed.
(3) How?
(4) Hmmm ... you know, in the printed Bible, there are those little headings within the chapters that tell you what's going on? The heading for the Quran passage as offered by the Tuscon Masjid reads: "
Major Error Committed by Muhammad; Muhammad the Man Disobeyes Muhammad the Prophet."
Let's take a look at your phrasing of the issue:
Topic Post
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No wonder islam is so paranoid about men being so weak and helpless in the presence of revealed female beauty (are they really so weak morally that they can't control themselves?)
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With a prophet like that setting the example for all mankind you had better cover up the misses 
(I won't even mention the child bride aisha (PBUH))
Later Posts
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The issue is part of the larger issue of the koran being "the immutable word of god" given directly to man via mohammed and as such is infallible. This leaves islam open to misinterpretation and fanaticism and using mohammed as "an example for mankind for all time" opens islam up to various breaches of modern morality.
•
So the koran is a Lie?? or has lies in it?
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So there really was no need for god to include that sura in the koran then?
See, the thing is that if you're not just recycling the incoherent spew of a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim website (and we won't even hold them responsible for what others do with that information, and that's
not actually aimed at you), you'll do some more reading on your own. And if you do that reading on your own, you might find something enlightening and simple, like a section header intended to indicate the context of the passage.
So in the end, if Muslims were to treat the passage as poorly as you have, I can see how there would be confusion. They're human; there's going to be a certain amount of confusion. Hell, if you'd bothered to search through a couple Islamic websites, you could have found the rare critical essay examining the issue that
isn't partisan propaganda.
Because as I read through, I don't see what the "problem" is with that part of Sura 33.
I don't see the connection to today; I don't see the relevance in the long term; your question seems invested in someone else's willful ignorance (e.g. Morey).
Like I said, it's an absurd argument from the outset:
Since Islam claims that Mohammed and Jesus of Nazareth were both Muslims and both prophets sent by Allah, these two mighty prophets must coincide in all points and never contradict each other. After all, if the same Allah sent both of them, it is only logical to assume that their ministries and messages cannot in principle contradict each other. Otherwise, Allah would be contradicting himself. This is, of course, received as a tenet of faith by the orthodox Muslims and is not open to question in their minds.
The author needs to establish that the necessity of non-contradiction between separate revelations is, in fact, Muslim. It's counterintuitive metaphysically and historically, and I've never heard a Muslim argue that non-contradiction between the Scriptures is a necessity.
I recently posted an excerpt from Karen Armstrong in
another topic, which I shall reiterate here:
. . . the Quran insisted that its message was simply a "reminder of truths that everybody knew. (80.11) This was the primordial faith that had been preached to the whole of humanity by the prophets of the past. God had not left human beings in ignorance about the way they should live: he had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth. Islamic tradition would later assert that there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinity. All had brought their people a divinely inspired scripture; they might express the truths of God's religion differently, but essentially the message was always the same. Now at last God had sent the Quraysh a prophet and a scripture. Constantly the Quran points out that Muhammad had not come to cancel the older rleigions, to contradict their prophets or to start a new faith. His message is the same as that of Moses, David, Solomon, or Jesus. (2.129-32; 61.6) The Quran mentions only those prophets who were known to the Arabs, but today Muslim scholars argue that had Muammad known about the Buddhists or the Hindus, the Australian Aborigines or the Native Americans, the Quran would have endorsed their sages too, because all rightly guided religion that submitted wholly to God, refused to worship man-made deities and preached that justice and equality came from the same divine source. Hence Muhammad never asked Jews or Christians to accept Islam, unless they particularly wished to do so, because they had received perfectly valid revelations of their own . . . . (Armstrong, Islam, 8-10; 203)
The issue doesn't seem quite grounded in reality. It's almost, but not quite the equivalent to the idea of me asking why direct sunlight makes water freeze.
The Morey article continues to slide into the mire: He exploits a common argument from atheist-Christian debates, turning an argument so classic as to be an example at
Labossiere's Fallacy Tutorial 3.0 against Islam. While I actually tend to agree with this identification of the "begging the question" issue, I'm an American who lives largely among Christians and I fail to see the difference in saying, "It's a matter of faith," for either. In other words, the argumentative norm on this starts with the idea that, religion being a matter of faith, "begging the question" is strictly a matter of faith. Many atheists have tried to penetrate this wall only to be rebuffed by the sternest and seemingly blindest of faiths. In the twenty-first century, begging the question is pretty much accepted of religions, as presently the majority of people around the world don't seem to have a problem with it. Whether or not this is right (it seems ludicrous) is left up in the air, for as the atheist knows, there is no objective anchor for reality which might define anything as absolutely right or wrong.
That the Morey article
does not account for this suggests much about either the motivation or the breadth of knowledge of the author. We can leave motivation out of it, to be honest. Robert Morey could be the best-intended fellow on the planet, and merely uninformed to any degree that can remotely accommodate his passions.
So right off the bat, the article doubles-up an irrational foundation.
Furthermore, Morey is arguing a line that bears implicit discord:
Perhaps the best way to deal with the issue is to lay aside all a priori assumptions of the inspiration of either the Bible or the Qur’an and simply compare the Bible and the Qur’an as two literary documents. This literary approach will help us stay objective in comparing the life of Jesus and the lie of Mohammed.
What an interesting and unusual yet useful notion. In the West, we don't have much discussion of the literary approach of the Bible. It is merely claimed to be the greatest human literature in history, and that's that. Nonetheless, many people in the post-Christian West
do wonder about the literary context of the Bible. Too bad Morey's article doesn't have much to say about it.
Consider the section on "Miracles":
During his lifetime, Jesus did many great and mighty miracles. He healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons, and even ruled the wind and the waves. But according to the Qur’an, Mohammed never performed a single miracle. Consider Sura 17:91-95, where the unbelievers say they will not believe in Mohammed until they see miracles . . . .
. . . . The only sign that Mohammed could point to was the existence of his “revelations” — i.e., the suras that made up the Qur’an. Alfred Guillaume points out:
Controversy with Christians on the rival merits of Jesus and Mohammed may fairly be regarded as the origin of the pretended miracles, flatly contradicting the plain statement of the great Arabian and those of many of his immediate followers that he was not sent with power to work miracles. Whether the object of the inventors was to elevate their prophet to a position equal to that held by Jesus in the estimation of His servants, or whether it was to furnish themselves and their pupils with a messenger of God who satisfied a natural craving of the human heart for a visible manifestation of divine power it is not our purpose to determine. There are good reasons for believing that deliberate imitation was resorted to for the reasons already given, and because the ashabu-l-hadith did not stop at ascribing the works of Christ to their prophet. His words and those of his apostles are freely drawn on and put into the mouth of Mohammed.
Mohammed did no miracles. He did not heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, or rule the wind and the waves. Ali Dashti comments:
"Moslems, as well as others, have disregarded the historical facts. They have continually striven to turn this man [Mohammed] into an imaginary superhuman being, a sort of God in human clothes, and have generally ignored the ample evidence of his humanity. They have been ready... to present these fantasies as miracles."
Many Iranians have been raised on a diet of myth and are ready to believe that any emamzada , of however ancestry, can at any moment perform a miracle. But if they were to read the Qor’an, they would be surprised to find no report of a miracle in it at all. They would learn from twenty or more Qor’anic passages that whenever the Prophet Mohammed was asked by doubters to perform a miracle, he either stayed silent or said that he would not do so because he was a human being like any other, with no function except to communicate, to be a “bringer of good news and a warner.”
Removed for brevity, a Quranic quote indicated in the text.
So I'm a little harsh; it would be more appropriate to say that Morey's literary criticism is scant and shallow.
In the first place, it leaves out any discussion of an obvious candidate:
Matthew 16.1-4
What better literary comparison to Muhammad's answer to the people than Jesus' answer to the people?
Additionally, when I read of the Iranians and their diet of myth, I am immediately brought to mind of a slightly more obscure reference, but a valid one nonetheless. Aldous Huxley wrote, in 1925,
One of the evil results of the political subjugation of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past--the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating--it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. That the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course "the Great Kings of Leinster," "the mighty Emperors of Meath." Through the centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman . . . . (Jesting Pilate, 141-2)
One thing that can be said about Iran is that the people have lived with oppression in one form or another for over two millennia. That they romanticize the center of their religious faith might simply be a reflection of that oppression. While Morey's commentary concerning Iranians seems awkward and open-ended, it becomes even more problematic an argument once we consider, say, Huxley. I've found it hard to argue against Huxley's point, but anyone's welcome to set me straight on that count.
In discussing the "Beauty of Speech," Morey simply shows ignorance; whether a willful or natural lack correct information, quite simply, he blew it:
When you study the speeches of Jesus as given in the Gospels, for example, the Sermon on the Mount, you find that Jesus was the greatest speaker who ever lived. Even His enemies had to confess that no man ever spoke as He spoke (John 7:46).
But when you turn to the ecstatic, confused speeches of Mohammed as found in the Qur’an, you do not find anything outstanding. There is nothing which matches the beauty, substance, or style of the way that Jesus preached the gospel during His lifetime.
I
could refer to Harrison Ford and George Lucas, discussing the differences between the written script and actually
saying it. (e.g. the line in
A New Hope when Solo argues with Luke about getting the coordinates into the navicomputer.) However, I don't have that particular box set at the house, so I can't cite it properly for you.
Nonetheless, it should suffice to simply point out that the Quran was originally an oral tradition, and that is where its literary power lies. The difference between the voice and the page is tremendous sometimes.
Referring once again to Armstrong:
Many of the first believers were converted by the sheer beauty of the Quran, which resonated with their deepest aspirations, cutting through their intellectual preconceptions in the manner of great art, and inspiring them, at a level more profound than the cerebral, to alter their whole way of life. One of the most dramatic of these conversions was that of Umar ibn al-Khattab, who was devoted to the old paganism, passionately opposed to Muhammad's message, and was determined to wipe out the new sect. But he was also an expert in Arabian poetry, and the first time he heard the words of the Quran he was overcome by their extraordinary eloquence. As he said, the language broke through all his reservations about its message: "When I heard the Quran my heart was softened and I wept, and Islam entered into me." (Islam, p.5)
And it just goes on. Permeating throughout is an apathy toward the simple fact that Jesus is alleged to be the "Son of God" and Muhammad merely a human being given a message by God. (e.g. "Miracles," "High Moral Example"--a spurious construction of alleged fact in itself, and from which the topic quote springs--"Dying for Others," "The Resurrection," "The Ascension" . . . it just goes on and on and on.) What seems absent from this motif, however, is any notion of
why it is significant.
A section on "A Hindu Parallel"
We are reminded of the followers of Krishna in India who, in response to the Christian teaching that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, immediately answered “Well, then Krishna, too, must have died on a cross for our sins.” This fabrication did not last long as it was revealed that in all the literary sources concerning Krishna, no such death or crucifixion was mentioned until after the followers of Krishna had engaged in debate with Christians.
In the same way, Muslim legendary material concerning the miracles of Mohammed all date after heated debates between Christians and Muslims. These myths and legends were created in response to the challenge that Jesus Christ was obviously superior to Mohammed.
This is a section Morey could afford to give more information about. This is not simply a Muslim-Christian debate. For all the footnotes he provides; it's curious when he makes such broad assertions while offering no real detail or support. Even Wikipedia can shake the utility of Morey's discussion:
For the first two periods the history of the Jews is mainly that of Palestine or Judea . It begins among those peoples which occupied the area lying between the Nile river on the one side and the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers on the other. Surrounded by ancient seats of culture in Egypt and Babylonia , by the mysterious deserts of Arabia , and by the highlands of Asia Minor , the land of Canaan (later Judea , then Palestine , then Israel ) was a meeting place of civilizations . The land was traversed by old-established trade routes and possessed important harbors on the Gulf of Akaba and on the Mediterranean coast, the latter exposing it to the influence of the Levantine culture. ("Jew")
Nobody seems to be discussing the idea that old ideas could have filtered into the Hebrews through either their periods of exile as well as their geography in general. Rather, it doesn't seem to be important to Morey's discussion, and heaven knows seeds never germinate and grow fruit. I accept the possibility that the Christ-myth evolved from collected other myths, including from the Indus and beyond. And, frankly, this is the first time I recall anyone even
acknowledging the Muslim take on it; Morey may be placing more significance on this issue than it's worth.
His conclusion, even, is weak:
Anyone who rationally examines the differences between the biblical Jesus and the quranic Mohammed must come to the conclusion that Jesus and Mohammed did not both represent the same God. They did not live or preach like each other. On all the essential issues, they were poles apart.
There's no problem with the last two sentences, I don't consider the absurdity of his early justifications of his thesis something, nor his extremely narrow framing of the "literary" comparison something that can be justly called a "rational examination."
Now, this all is
immediately apparent to me; these are the things that strike me on the first reading and reaffirm themselves in the second; the third has not cleared them up for me. The
only surprise this argument has provided is indeed the section heading within Sura 33; I hadn't seen those headings anywhere, and, well ... it was, at my first consideration of my topic, the second Quran link I came across in Google. To the one, I'm not going to blast you by any means for not having seen these before,
per se; after all, I hadn't seen them, either. But to the other, this was the
first full text of the Sura I found. (The first Quran link was a verse-by-verse display.) So I must reiterate something I said earlier:
You really should read up.
Your topic post started coming unknit by comparing it to the Quran itself. And when we examine Morey's chapter, we get something of a hint as to why.
Indeed, as I noted, the whole argument makes less and less sense the more I look into it.
The problem with Morey's chapter and this topic is that seems to rely on simplicity. What was your advice?
If you are having a hard time with the article then simply refer to the passage in the koran to keep it simple for yourself.
I am keeping it rather simple, Path. However, I would suggest that your need for simplicity is excessive, as demonstrated by the fact of your attempting to mount a topic for any allegedly serious inquiry on Morey's article. And that even
if we write off your tone in the topic post and unwillingness to clarify. Look how long it takes you to get to the issue:
•
The issue is part of the larger issue of the koran being "the immutable word of god" given directly to man via mohammed and as such is infallible. This leaves islam open to misinterpretation and fanaticism and using mohammed as "an example for mankind for all time" opens islam up to various breaches of modern morality.
Now ... that's fine. That's
great. And there's a little bit of, "whatever," that goes there, too. It's something to work with, at least.
Now then ... how do those issues pertain to the present, as you seem to believe they do? Connect a few dots for us, show us how this passage relates to the various breeches of (
which?!) modern morality.
And the whole time, I assure you, you're working with a bad foundation in the Morey chapter. You really do need to find a different platform to shoot from; the one you're using is unstable and, if I may say so, collapsing.
Lastly,
I think you will agree that in christianity it is also the faithful who see the bible as the divine word of god instead of parables inspired by god to help guide peoples lives who are the most fanatic and most likely to misinterpret it's message.
Yes. The connections are more apparent to me. At the core of what I view to be Christianity exists the potential for hideous damage, and the planet has seen it before. Admittedly, the sickened required other parts of the Bible to justify their deeds, and I'll only mention the difference between the Wiccan Rede and the Law of Thelema in passing; it's a good, simple illustration of the difference between the same idea being guarded and being left unguarded against unintended damage. They both say, "Do what thou will." Only one of them, however, prefaces that with, "An' thou harm none." In the other, you're supposed to be smart enough to figure a few things out about the practical limits of doing what you desire.
And there are definitely relationships between the Quran and the people that contribute to unintended damage. Steven Brust once noted that humans are ingenious when it comes to finding new and inventive ways to hurt themselves.
But you're barking up the wrong tree on this one.
____________________
Notes:
• The Quran, Sura 33. See http://www.masjidtucson.org/quran/noframes/ch33.html
• Morey, Robert. "Mohammed and Jesus Christ." Between Christ and Mohammed: The Irreconcilable Differences Between Christianity and Islam. ed. Charles Welty (?) See http://charleswelty.net/1891833545-08.htm
• Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History. New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2000.
• Labossiere, Michael C. "Begging the Question." Fallacy Tutorial 3.0. See http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
• USCCB. New American Bible. See http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/index.htm
• Huxley, Aldous. Jesting Pilate. New York: Paragon House, 1991. (1926)
• Wikepedia. "Jew." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew
- See also:
• Sciforums. "The Most Widely Read Book in the World." See http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=34541
