"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Continuing through the Qur’an, today I read the following chapters:
Surah 108 – “Abundance” (Al-Kauther)
A three-verse chapter in which Allah tells Muhammad that He has granted him the most abundant good and cut off Muhammad’s enemies from good things in this life and the next.
Questions
Q1. Muhammad is told to “offer sacrifice to [Allah alone]”. What sacrifices did Muhammad offer?
Continuing with my chronological read through the Qur’an, today I read the following chapters: 87, 92, 89, 93, 94, 103 and 100.
Surah 87: “The most high” (Al-Ala)
Allah tells Muhammad that he will make him recite the Qur’an and remember it…unless God wants him to forget it. This relates to the rather troublesome subject of abrogation in the Qur’an where, even within the lifetime of Muhammad, some chapters were overridden or replaced.
Allah promises to lead Muhammad and his followers to true religion, but the wretched to the fires of Hell.
Questions
Q1. The text says “…the Hereafter is better and more enduring. Indeed, this is in the former scriptures. The scriptures of Abraham and Moses”. Where does the Pentateuch teach about the afterlife?
As previously mentioned, I am going to read through the Qur’an in chronological order from beginning to end. I will be writing up my notes from the chapters (“suwar”) each day, starting today with the chapters which were composed at the beginning of Muhammad’s ministry in Mecca: 96, 68, 73, 74, 1, 111 and 81.
Surah 96 – “The clinging substance”/”Recite” (Al-Alaq)
This short surah accuses a man of sinning because he sees himself as “self-sufficient”. We are reminded that God made man (with a vague description of human development), that God sees everything and that if the man does not repent, God will drag him by the hair and angels will throw him into Hell.
Questions
Q1. “Created man from a clinging substance”. Is this a reference to a fetus?
Q2. “Who taught by the pen”. Is this a reference to the Bible?
I first encountered Islam about six years ago when I was living in London. After meeting a Muslim for the first time, I decided that I should probably become more familiar with the religion, given that it is followed by 1.6 billion people, approximately 23% of the world’s population.
In my naiveté, I decided to start reading the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam. Oddly enough, I had been given a copy of the Qur’an at my (Catholic) school’s prize-giving about ten years earlier. I dug out my copy and started reading…
I’ll admit that I found the text of Qur’an very dry and I gave up after reading it when I was only about a third of the way through. Jumping straight into the Qur’an is very difficult, particularly if you don’t know much about Islam. It would have been helpful to know, for example, that the chapters (“suwar”) are not placed in chronological order, meaning that as I read sequentially through the chapters, I was jumping between very different periods in Muhammad’s life.
I’ve recently been reflecting on the subject of Islam and have concluded that the need for Christians to be familiar with this religion will only become greater with time. I’ve therefore decided to do more posts on this subject over the coming months. I have already written an introduction to Islam and the odd apologetics post, but in preparation for these upcoming articles, and for the sake of gaining credibility, I have decided to read the Qu’ran from cover-to-cover, but on this occasion I will read the chapters in chronological order.
Below you will see my reading plan, with the chapters arranged in (rough) chronological order. Discerning the exact chronology of the chapters is somewhat difficult for Muslim scholars to discern, particularly give that some chapters even contain verses from different periods. I found several different chronological orderings on the Internet, but I have chosen this one. There were other orderings I found on Christian websites, but in an attempt to limit Christian bias (which I will already bring to the text), I chose to use a chronology from a Muslim website.
My plan is to post some very brief thoughts about the chapters I read each day. I’ve also written a glossary of Islamic terms to make these easier to follow. From time to time, I’ll visit an Imam in San Diego, in order to clarify anything which I have found confusing.
By now it’s virtually impossible to not have heard about the shooting in Orlando, the worst mass shooting in US history*. Omar Mateen, a pro-ISIS Muslim, entered a gay nightclub where he killed 49 and injured many others.
I am planning on doing several posts on the subject of Islam later this year, but given this recent tragedy, I think it is more useful for me to post an email which was sent out by a local mosque here in Seattle:
Asslamu Alaykum / Peace be Upon You All,
The dust has barely settled on Muhammad Ali’s grave. It has hardly been a day since the whole world was heaping praise on one of the greatest Americans of our time. It was only a short time when the noble example of one Muslim united the whole America. And now, we have this. A young pro-ISIS Muslim walks into a club in Orlando and murders over 50 people claiming to do so in the name of Islam. This is a tragedy of untold proportion.
MAPS stands with all of our fellow Americans, including the many Muslim organizations and mosques across the country, to express its deepest sadness and condemnation of the horrific massacre and senseless act of mass murder perpetrated against innocent civilians in Orlando, Florida. This wanton act of violence shocks the human conscience and causes us deep pain and consternation. Our hearts are with the victims of this terrible tragedy and we pray for a quick recovery for those injured. We need to understand that an assault on the rights on any minority group, including the LGBT group, is an assault on the rights of any other minority group, including Muslims. LGBT groups have been at the forefront of fighting bigotry and intolerance and have long stood with the Muslim community in opposing discrimination and prejudice. We express our deepest feelings of sympathy to the friends and families of the victims of this massacre.
I have repeatedly said that groups like ISIS and those who are influenced by them “are not us and we are not them. Their interpretation of Islam is twisted and wrong no matter how much they justify it.” And borrowing from an eminent fourteenth century Islamic scholar and jurist, “thus, any ruling that replaces justice with injustice, mercy with cruelty, common good with intolerance, or wisdom with ignorance, is a ruling that does not belong to Islam.” I have repeated this statement time and again in my addresses and emails to the community. Let me make it clear once more in unequivocal terms: the ideology of groups like ISIS is ignorant, wrong, destructive, twisted, sinful, murderous and has absolutely no place whatsoever in Islam! Our position on this is unconditional, categorical and absolute!
We pray for the day when love overpowers hatred and when each human life is valued and protected. We pray for a day when the world will be rid of terror and groups like ISIS. And we pray for a day when people think of Islam they think of the example of Muhammad Ali.
Here is what you can do:
1. Donate blood: CAIR-FL has asked the Muslim community to take part in a blood donation drive [link]
2. Familiarize yourself: SoundVision has issued certain talking points and thinking points [link]
3. Attend the vigil in Seattle tonight in solidarity with the victims [link]
Ameen
Mahmood Khadeer
MAPS President
If you’ve ever had the chance to speak about the Christian faith with a Muslim, chances are that you will have heard the following objection raised to the divinity of Jesus (whom they call “Isa”):
“Does God know everything? Of course He does! If so, why did Isa (Jesus) not know when you can get figs? In Mark’s Gospel he goes to a fig tree looking for fruit, but he didn’t even know they weren’t in season! Isa therefore cannot be God”
If you’re a Christian who knows his faith, it’s tempting to laugh at such an objection and ignore it. However, today I would like to respond to this argument. I would like to do this for two reasons. Firstly, Scripture commands us to “be ready to give an answer” (1 Peter 3:15). Secondly, I think that the Biblical text being referred to here is really interesting and one upon which we would do well to meditate.
A while ago, during a discussion in the comment section of this blog, I made the assertion that the historic Church of Christianity was the Catholic Church. A non-Catholic disputed this claim, asserting that the Catholic Church only came into existence with the reign of the Emperor Constantine.
In response to this claim, I shared with her my post entitled Before 300: Pre-Constantinian Christianity, where I provide evidence for twenty-one doctrines which were believed by Christians prior to AD 300 and the rise of Constantine. The original purpose of that post was not only to show that the Catholic Church was in existence long before Constantine arrived on scene, but also to provide non-Catholics with a simple way to compare their own beliefs to that of the early Christians.
After reading that article, my internet friend appeared to concede that the Catholic Church did actually exist from the earliest of times. Wonderful! However, despite denying its existence only moments before, she now claimed that the Catholic Church had persecuted the “true” Christians in the early centuries! I’ve heard similar claims in the past made by other Protestants as well as Muslims, in an effort to explain why the belief system that we find in the Early Church is incompatible with their own.
Today I would like to examine the assertion that the Catholic Church suppressed “true” Christianity in the early centuries and I will attempt to dismantle it using an argument which may be referred to as “The dog who never barked”…
