Posted on 05/06/2022 1:01:08 PM PDT by OddLane
I take a look at Robert Spencer's critical Quran, and explore how it can be used to witness to Muslims.
What does it mean "to witness to Muslims"? That makes no sense to me.
It means to tell them about the savior, Jesus Christ.
About The Book
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Critical-Quran/Robert-Spencer/9781642939491
A unique resource for understanding the Islamic Holy Book.
As Islamic terrorism becomes a distressingly common feature of life in North America and Europe, it has become increasingly important for non-Muslims to be aware of the ideology that animates and motivates jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others—an ideology that’s rooted in Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an.
English-speaking people, however, have found attempts to understand the Qur’an and Islam impeded by unclear, densely worded translations and explanatory notes written by Islamic apologists attempting to conceal, rather than reveal, how Islamic jihadis use the texts and teachings of the Qur’an to justify violence and supremacism, and to make recruits of peaceful Muslims.
The Critical Qur’an, in contrast, makes clear the passages that are used to incite violence. Historian and Islamic scholar Robert Spencer elucidates the Qur’anic text with extensive references to the principal tafsir, or commentaries, that mainstream Muslims use today to understand the Qur’an, showing how interpretations that sanction violence are unfortunately not outliers, but central in Islamic theology.
The Critical Qur’an is the Islamic counterpart to numerous critical and skeptical editions of the Bible that have appeared over the last century and more. It is the one edition of Islam’s book that doesn’t shy away from elucidating why the holy book of Islam is so frequently quoted and referred to with reverence by people who commit and/or justify acts of violence. It is a basic resource for everyone who wishes to understand the persistent phenomenon of Islamic terrorism, and the peculiar provenance of this most provocative book.
About The Author
Product Details
Publisher: Bombardier Books (May 3, 2022)
Length: 560 pages
ISBN13: 9781642939491
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Political Science > Commentary & Opinion
Religion > Islam > General
Religion > Islam > History
“Did Muhammad Exist?” is a great book, but I’m still baffled as to the spelling of this non-existent man’s name.
Or if you're speaking to a sensible and peaceful Muslim who's part of a community that believes only imams can read the Koran to tell you what's in it, you're not supposed to read it yourself, then one way to witness to that kind of Muslim is to read the many violent parts of the Koran to them so that they learn that their supposedly peaceful religion isn't the kind of religion they want for their kids. (I've heard of a few Christian missionaries using this tactic when speaking to white-collar Shiite Muslims in Iran.)
Islam, A Religion of Peace:
Sura (2:191-193) - “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution of Muslims is worse than slaughter of non-believers...and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”
Sura (5:33) - “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”
Sura (8:12) - “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”
Bukhari (52:177) - Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”
Tabari 7:97 The morning after the murder of Ashraf, the Prophet declared,” Kill any Jew who falls under your power.”
Ibn Ishaq: 327 - Allah said, A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.
الاسلام هو شر لا مثيل لها ، ويجب القضاء عليه
Alahwahoo Whackbar!
The Critical Qur’an: A Mighty Work of Elucidation and Scholarship That Has Few Equals
By Hugh Fitzgerald
May 3, 2022
4 Comments
In Spencer’s glosses to Qur’anic passages in The Critical Qur’an,
https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Quran-Commentaries-Contemporary-Historical/dp/1642939498/
he fills every vein with ore. A single footnote may contain some or all of the following: passages from elsewhere in the Qur’an, for the purposes of comparison and contrast; hadith, taken mainly from the “reliable” compilations of Bukhari and Muslim; excerpts from the commentaries found in a dozen tafsirs dating from the 8th to the 21st centuries; quotations from historians of early Islam; material taken from the philological studies of the Qur’an by Christoph Luxenberg. Luxenberg receives a good deal of respectful attention from Spencer. He is a native speaker of Arabic, who uses a German pseudonym for obvious reasons. Luxenberg believes that many of the obscurities in the Qur’an can be cleared up if we recognize that the Qur’an originates in a Christian lectionary (a book of readings), and that the underlying Ur-text of the Qur’an was written not in Arabic but in Syro-Aramaic. Spencer is the first translator of the Qur’an to make use of Luxenberg’s work in his own commentary to the text.
One example of Spencer’s capacious commentaries is the veritable essay he provides in his footnote to 9:29, chronologically the last and the most important verse in the Qur’an, dealing with how Muslims are to treat non-Muslims.
Sura 9:29 reads: “Fight against those do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not follow the religion of truth, even if they are among the people of the book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”
Then Spencer offers an essay disguised as a footnote, where his vast learning is brought to bear:
“
Here is the one place where Muslims are explicitly directed to make war against and subjugate Jews and Christians, the ‘People of the Book,’ who once subjugated enter the dhimma, the protection of the Muslims, and become dhimmis, protected (or guilty) people. The Tafsir al-Sadi explains: “This verse contains instructions to fight the disbelievers among the Jews and Christians.”
Islamic tradition places this command within the contest of Muhammad’s attempt to take on the army of the Christian Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire. Ibn Kathir says “Allah commanded His Messenger to fight the People of the Scriptures, Jews and Christians, on the ninth year of Hijrah, and he prepared his army to fight the Romans and called the people to Jihad announcing his intent and destination.”
Ibn Juzayy says that this verse is “a command to fight the People of the Book” because of their claims that Allah has a son (9:30). Muslims must also fight them “because they consider as lawful carrion, blood, pork, etc.” and because “they do not enter Islam.” He says that “scholars agree about accepting jizya [a religious -based poll tax] from the Jews and Christians,” and adds that “the Magians/Zoroastrians have been added to them, going by the words of the Prophet, “Treat them as People of the Book,” although “there is disagreement about accepting it from idolaters and Sabians.” He specifies that “it is not collected from women, children, or the insane,” and that it signifies “submission and obedience.”
The Tafsir al-Sadi adds that the “aim of the fighting” is so that non-Muslims turn over “wealth that is given in return for the Muslims not fighting them and allowing them to stay among the Muslims, granting them safety for their lives and their property.” A hadith depicts Muhammad saying “I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and that he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf.” That is, his property and life are not protected if he does not make this declaration.
The Tafsir al-Jalalyn says that this verse specifies that Muslims must fight against those who do not follow Islam, which “confirms and abrogates” other religions. The people of the book are mentioned in the verse and traditionally have been understood as the only ones who are offered the option of paying the jizya, while other non-Muslims who do not have a written scripture that is recognized in the Qur’an must convert or die. However, the Tafsir as-Sadi explains that ‘the jizya may be taken from all the disbelievers, People of the Book and others, because this verse was revealed after the Muslims had finished fighting with the polytheist Arabs and had begun to fight the People of the Book and their ilk, so their condition is describing the real situation and is not meant to impose a restriction on accepting jizya from the People of the Book only.
…………
“Ibn Kathir says that dhimmis “must be disgraced, humiliated, and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of dhimmah or to elevate them above Muslim, for they are miserable, disgraced, and humiliated.” The seventh-century jurist Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab is said to have declared” “I prefer that the people of the dhimma become tired of paying the jizya with their own hands in complete abasement “ As-Suyuti elaborates that this verse ‘is used as a proof by those who say that it [the jizya] is taken in a humiliating way, and so the taker sits and the dhimmi stands with his head bowed and his back bent. The jizya is placed in the balance and the taker seizes his beard and hits his chin.’ Al-Zamakhshari agreed that the jizya should be collected with ‘belittlement and humiliation.’
“In explaining how the Jews and Christians must ‘feel themselves subdued,’ Ibn Kathir quotes a saying of Muhammad: “Do not initiate the Salam [greeting of peace] to the Jews and Christians, and if you meet any of them in the road, force them to its narrowest alley.
So far in this note – which goes on for many more fascinating paragraphs – Spencer has brought to bear in his scholarly discussion the tafsirs of Ibn Kathir, the Al-Jalalyn, As-Suyuti, Al-Sadi, and Al-Zamakhshari, Ibn Juzayy, and remarks by Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab and Allamah as-Sawi. He has enlarged our understanding of verses by offering quotes from the varied commentaries of these celebrated exegetes. He also refers to historical events that help explain some verses as, for example, Muhammad’s unsuccessful attempt to take on the Byzantine Empire. His knowledge is both wide and deep. In his discussion of the effect of the jizya on dhimmis he brings to bear both the remarks of the 19th century anti-Wahhabi Islamic scholar Allamah as-Sawi, and an account, dating from the 640s, of the Muslim conquest of the city of Nikou, in Egypt, and the lamentable effect of the imposition of the jizya on its Christian inhabitants “who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month.”
What does paying the jizya “with willing submission” mean?
Here Spencer provides several paragraphs of discussion about the meaning of giving the jizya “with willing submission,” taken from two tafsirs as well as from the 20th century scholar of Islam Franz Rosenthal:
“
“With willing submission” (an yadin) meanwhile, has been understood in different ways. It could also mean “out of hand,” in the sense not just of submission but of direct, in-person payment, as the thirteenth-century Qur’anic commentator al-Baydawi explains: “Out of hand, indicating the condition of those who pay the tribute. Out of a hand that gives willingly, in this way indicating that they submit obediently, or out of their hand, meaning that they pay the tribute with their own hands, instead of sending it through others; no one is allowed to use a proxy in this case. There are many other possible understandings of this text. The great scholar Franz Rosenthal observes that an yadin has “completely defied interpretation. All post -Qur’anic occurrences of it are based upon the Qur’an.”
“In explaining how the Jews and Christians must ‘feel themselves subdued,’ Ibn Kathir quotes a saying of Muhammad: “Do not initiate the Salam [greeting of peace] to the Jews and Christians, and if you meet any of them in the road, force them to its narrowest alley.” He then goes on to outline the notorious Pact of Umar, an agreement that was, according to Islamic tradition, made between the caliph Umar, who ruled the Muslims from 634 to 644, and a Christian community.
Spencer then brings us up to the present, with a 20th century century tafsir that bewails the Muslim failure to continue to exact the jizya payment:
“
The twentieth-century Tafsir Anwarul Bayan laments that “in today’s times, the system of Atonement (Jizya) is not practiced at all by the Muslims. It is indeed unfortunate that not only are the Muslim States afraid to impose Atonement (Jizya) on the disbelievers (kuffar) living in their countries, but thy grant them more rights than they grant the Muslims and respect them more. They fail to understand that Allah desires that the Muslims show no respect to any disbeliever (kafir) and that they should not accord any special rights to them.”
I have left out half of Spencer’s note to 9:29, but what I have quoted should be enough to convey an idea of how wide Spencer casts his scholarly net, how many Qur’anic exegetes, from the 8th to the 2lst centuries, he brings into his discussion, how many references are provided to historical and contemporary events that can be linked to 9:29 and its commands.
This is a mighty work of elucidation and scholarship that has few equals in Qur’anic studies today. Robert Spencer has provided, after an enormous and scarcely believable effort, what is a sure guide for those who are perplexed by Islam’s holy book and are eager to discover “what the Qur’an really means.” At the same time, he has built an exegetical monument – Horace’s “exegi monumentum” comes to mind — that will be impossible to ignore, one which will from now on be a constant source of embarrassment and dismay for Believers, who cannot deny its immense scholarship, but at the same time, cannot allow themselves to accept its truth.
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As opposed to the Jesus in the Koran, among other things.
In the same way that the Apostle Paul witnessed to Greek polytheists on Mars Hill in Acts 17.
Muhammad is simply the transliteration of the Arabic given name. It's a Romanized version of his Arabic name.
It's worded in a lot of different ways though, e.g. Muhammad, Mohammed, Ahmed, Mahmud, etc..
It's a moot point.
#1, According to Muhammadan doctrine, Muhammad was illiterate. He couldn't spell his own name because he couldn't read or write.
This actually is a point of big voodoo with the Muhammadans because they insist he had no choice other than commit every syllable of the Quran to memory as spoken to him by the angel Jibrīl (Gabriel) because he wasn't able to write it down.
So spell it
#2, How you spell it in English is completely beside the point because even if Muhammad had existed, and even if he had been able to write, he'd have done so in Arabic, not English. So it makes no difference whether you spell it Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhammed, Mohammed, Mohamed, or Mohumed, or any other variation, it's still isn't "authentic" because it isn't in Arabic.
And FWIW, Arabic names are always problematic. At the height of his notoriety, the AP style guide listed 14 approved English spellings for the name of Muomar Khadaffi.
From a practical standpoint, there is no "O" sound in Arabic. So "Mohammed" isn't even close. They closest they get is a "U" sound, as in "Muhammad." Which is why the rest of the (Roman alphabet-using) world spelled Bin Laden's first name as "Usama," not "Osama."
Interesting. Now explain to me why “knight” is has three silent letters...
There's a place called Mahomet in Illinois (near Champaign) but apparently that's from an American Indian name.
I’ve been saying for a long time that there needs to be a rewrite of the Koran. We take 20 woke scholars and lock them up with some history books and some Korans, and tell them they have to come up with a Politically Correct Koran. That will be the ONLY Koran allowed in America, all others to be considered terrorist documents by DHS. They want Islam to be a religion of peace then turn it into a religion of peace.
Yes. It’s where we get the term Baphomet.
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