Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Sam Shamoun "JESUS CHRIST – THE MUHAMMAD OF THE QURAN?" (2)




With the last Qibla change, the Israelites had been definitely deposed from their spiritual leadership over mankind. , a leadership that what was for them to honourably carry 2:63-64,3:187,28:5,32:24. This prophecied supplanting, as stated by Jesus in Matt21, meant they werent worthy of carrying the flame anymore, that the geographical center of monotheism has switched to another location, under a new established nation under God 
33:45-46"We have sent you as a witness, and as a bearer of good news and as a warner, And as one inviting to Allah by His permission, and as a light-giving torch". 
This meant that their hopes of seeing the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt for the 3rd time through Divine sanction by their messianic salvific figure was over. The era of prophethood itself has now ceased 
33:40"Muhammad..is the Messenger of Allah and the khaatim of the prophets; and Allah is cognizant of all things". 
The term khaatim from kh-t-m means to seal something shut so that nothing can get in or out of it. It is used often to mean that something is finished since one seals something when it is over. It is also used for a well demarcated feature of an entity or person.

Nowhere in the NT, or in the HB in those passages which Christians retrospectively apply to Jesus, is Jesus presented conceptually as, or even named the seal of the prophets. Not even in post NT traditions and writings. Christianity also posits that one should believe in Jesus' death on the cross to earn salvation. Not merely believing in 47:2"what is revealed to the Oft-Praised One (muhammadin)" in addition to righteousness. Neither did Jesus' followers show any firmness against the disbelievers, much less in a military sense as in the direct context of 48:29. Jesus' closest disciples fled the scene at his arrest and even denied knowing him. And Jesus was certainly not, according to Christianity, a messenger like all those that passed away 3:144. The context of 3:144 is that of war. Nothing to do with the circumstances of Jesus' mission. 

It was revealed in the context of the battle of Uhud during which the Muslims were overwhelmed by the enemy and rumor spread that the prophet was killed. So many of the believers fled the battlefield and some considered apostasy. They are admonished not for stopping to fight but for depending their faith on the prophet; meaning their belief would continue as long as he lived, and disappear the moment he died, turning back to their former state after finding the guidance. The verse tells them that the religion of truth and its succesful establishment is in the hands of Allah, Muhammad has no authority in this affair, he is but a messenger charged with conveying the message and many passed away before him. This is particularly made clear when Allah mentions the war of Badr and his assitance to the believers and suddenly cuts short the speech, turning towards His Prophet to tell him, 
3:127-128"You have no concern in the affair". 
In its wider implication the verse re-states the fundamental Islamic doctrine that adoration is due to God alone, and that no human being - not even a prophet - may have any share in it. 3:144 also hints to another reality, by mentionning both the possibilities of assassination and of Muhammad dying a natural death it projects on the future behavior of the Muslims and warns them that Muhammad is naught but a messenger, that they should not idolise him and turn upon their heels after him. When prophets were sent to humanity with the guidance, wisdom and Book from Allah, it was not for their followers to be their servants and neither to be worshiped, but to worship Allah alone 3:78-79. Muslims must uphold at all costs, this religion of Ibrahim and this Quran. The striking similarity between 
3:144"Muhammad is not except a messenger, indeed, the messengers before him have passed away" 
and 
5:75"The Messiah son of Marium is not except a messenger, indeed, the messengers before him have passed away" 
comes as a sign from Allah who makes clear His communications. Only these 2 messengers are described with the exact same wording because no other prophets were inappropriately over exalted among the nations to whom they were sent and the subsequent generations, as much as these 2 
"See how We make the communications clear to them, then behold, how they are turned away". 

On a final note, finality of Prophethood seems to be a tenuous claim. After all, potentially anyone can stand up and say that he is a Prophet of God - but so far all the instances in which this has happened has failed to even come close to the scale and scope of the Prophet Muhammad's mission. Also, if we examine the entire career of these claimants - they have singularly and absolutely failed to match the life-chart of Prophet Muhammad and moreover their death poses even more questions than their life. What is even more interesting that none of them claimed to be the final Prophet, much less Jesus who predicted the coming of a powerful figure after him, the Paraclete, that shall bring justice to the world.
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Sam Shamoun "JESUS CHRIST – THE MUHAMMAD OF THE QURAN?" (1)




Some wild theories did float around in the previous century arguing that Islam could have originated in a Christian milieu. For example the Protestant theologian Gunter Luling theorized in the 1960s that Mecca was thoroughly christianized by Muhammad’s lifetime, and was a significant Christian town ruled by the Quraysh, a Christianized tribe that worshipped in the Kaaba, a Christian church built with an orientation toward Jerusalem. This assertion however remains unsubstantiated whether from Muslim or Christian sources, just as his assumption of a massive Christian presence in central and northwestern Arabia.

Going back in time, some 100 years after the prophet's death, there is John of Damascus. The short passage by this esteemed "church father" is by no means representative of the Quran's contents, form or extent as it was in his time. It surely is not, considering the heavy bias and intent of the author, representative of Islamic beliefs of the time. Especially coming from a school of thought known as justifying its use of lies and deceit, so as to save people into the loving arms of Christ. The author doesnt claim to have gone through the book from cover to cover. He did not even have a manuscript while penning his work and was obviously relying on hearsay. He paraphrases very few verses as he heard them, amplifying certain aspects so as to serve the purpose of his polemic. And because he has no Quran from which he is quoting, He jumbles clear Quranic chapters, calling them "books" since the scripture of his Christian audience is composed of books, and extra Quranic material, oral and written, as well as 2nd hand reports from non-Muslims about Muslims, like Herodotus's statement about Muslims worshiping Aphrodite. 

This concise polemic is meant to resonnate to the average Christian of his time, ignorant of the teachings of their own bible on similar issues that undermine his very contentions against Muslims; Arianism, sexual depravity and parallelisms with the antichrist. Jesus' portrayal in the Quran is thus presented as partly in line with Arianism and gnosticism, Muhammad's prophethood is rejected, certain Islamic laws are amplified and misrepresented, sometimes completely distorted so as to render them offensive to flesh-hating Christians, including monastics like himself. 

As a side note, it was common for polemicists to purposefuly misrepresent Islam and its prophet so as to deride Muslims and instill hatred for them in their Christian audiences. For example Muhammad is depicted as claiming he would be married to the emaculate mother of Jesus Christ in heaven. This latter polemic was invented in the 800s by Eulogius of Cordova, making its way even among some Muslim Quran comentaries. Ibn Kathir cites it while disputing its authenticity. Among other lies of this untalented Christian hate-mongerer, there is Muhammad's failure to rise on the 3rd day following his death, as he supposedly claimed, contrary to the "risen" Jesus. Robert Hoyland observes about this writer, after sketching a portrait of the prophet's early life, most likely plagiarized from John of Damascus 
"follows a lampoon of the Qur'an, mocking the chapter titles involving animals and twisting the words of the verse on the divorce of Zayd and Zaynab (Qur'an xxxiii.37). The final section recounts Muhammad's failed attempt at resurrection, as told in John of Seville's note, adding that an annual slaughter of dogs was instituted to avenge him. This is pure invention, presumably meant to compare Muhammad unfavourably with Christ, and a similar fiction is found in the Bahira legend. "It was appropriate that a prophet of this kind fill the stomachs of dogs," concludes the author, "a prophet who committed not only his own soul, but those of many, to hell.""

Continuing with John' polemic; Islam is presented as a "heresy", but clearly not in the sense that it grew out of Christianity, rather in the sense of "false doctrine". John discusses in that polemic many other belief systems which he labels heresies, including pre-Christian religions. 

The irony is that this caricature of Islam, read through a Christian lens and aimed at a Christian audience even more ignorant than him of what Islam is, would undermine similar later criticisms of Islam, more particularily modern, by his Christ-loving peers. He for instance although is unfamiliar with the Quranic text, speaks multiple times of descendents of Abraham and Ishmael, venerating a single Book whose messenger, a "seemingly" pious man named Muhammad, received from heaven. The book was thus already present in his time, compiled as a single unit. His Muslim contemporaries whom he repeatedly "embarasses", affirmed the oral and textual corruption of his Bible. 

Regardless of the sharpness of their arguments or whether these Muslim interlocutors are real or fictitious, putting aside their supposed legends surrounding the Kaaba and the black stone, which are conveniently embarassing and self-serving for his polemic, these Muslims still affirmed the Abrahamic legacy with the Kaaba whose stone he says Muslims rub their face upon 
"but they still assert that the stone is Abraham's". 
In his "refutation" of that Muslim claim, he appeals to his Bible which he seems as unfamiliar with as he is with the Quran and Muslim tradition. Abraham had to travel, according to Genesis for a few days from Beersheba where he gathered wood to the location of the near sacrifice in Moriah. The wood was obviously not freshly cut from a forest as it would not burn, and neither is Beersheba an area that has wooded mountains. Abraham took wood from what he had already gathered, which he simply split, traveling with what he needed and leaving the rest behind. This makes John's argument for the supposed lack of wood at the Kaaba's location irrelevant to his contention. He further deceptively states or is simply ignorant of the text he appeals to, that the wood was gathered on the spot of the sacrifice itself. 

The blunder is so gross, coming from an esteemed church father, that one can only conclude that it is a purposeful deception so as to win an argument. What is clear is that some zealous Muslim contemporaries hit a nerve for John, accusing him of idolatrous worship of the cross, while John himself was having a hard time defending the veneration of icons against many fellow Christians. 

Instead of justifying his position, as he does against the Muslim rejection of Jesus' divinity, he engages in an untenable polemical invention. The black stone supposedly is, up to his day a carving with the features of the head of Aphrodite. The Muslim historians do not shy away from naming, describing every main idol and statue introduced into the Kaaba and the surrounding sites. None has ever mentionned anything close to that claim. Not a single idol was left standing in the precincts of Mecca after its conquest, including the main idol Hubal. Why would an obscure female deity be left up to a 100 years later?
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Sam Shamoun "AHMAD OR THE HOLY SPIRIT?"



61:6"And when Isa son of Maryam said: O children of Israel! surely I am the messenger of Allah to you, verifying that which is before me of the Taurat and giving the good news of an Messenger who will come after me, his name being Ahmad, but when he came to them with clear arguments they said: This is clear magic"
Ahmad in this verse is in the grammatical form of ism tafdeel. For example a sentence might say "this person is kabeer/great but that one is akbar/greater". Ism tafdeel indicates that the characteristics described are greater in the individual concerned. It is an observable reality that the prophet Muhammad's name is much more revered than that of Jesus. That characteristic reached a point that the ism tafdeel became equivalent to the prophet Muhammad's proper name. It is reported that nobody had that name prior to the prophet. Shortly after the prophet's time however, Muslims began using it as a name. Ibn Abi Ahmad for instance, who narrated ahadith from Abu Hurayra who himself died around 59AH. Or another hadith narrator who was his contemporary, named Al Jamdi Abu Ahmad. The prophet referred to himself as Ahmad, among 5 other names. His companions did too, including in poems about him.
Ibn Ishaq in his sirah refers to "Ahmad" while relating the story of the prophet's birth.
 Hassan b. Thabit said: ‘I was a well-grown boy of seven or eight, understanding all that I heard, when I heard a Jew calling out at the top of his voice from the top of a fort in Yathrib “O company of Jews” until they all came together and called out “Confound you, what is the matter?” He answered: “Tonight has risen a star under which Ahmad is to be born.”
According to world renowned Islamicist professor Déroche, the earliest Quranic manuscripts contain the exact same wording as 61:6 (Catalogue des manuscrits Arabes). Arthur Jeffrey's proposition that 61:6 did not originally contain the reference to "Ahmad" is based on a marginal quote in a late 13th century book on qiraat by a certain "al-Marandi".  Outside what that late source supposedly says, no evidence exists for Ubay's alleged variant reading, while every early manuscript containing the passage agrees with the Uthmanic recension. Also, just because someone claims something about Islam and is Muslim means nothing in terms of authenticity. There are many variants attested to this day that do not pass the standards and that do have at least a partial chain of transmission, contrary to this supposed variant that has none.

Muhammad, through his appellation and the praises he receives virtually every second of the day, fulfilled that prophecy in both ways, as established in the Quran 
94:4"And We raised for you, your remembrance." 
Further, nobody came after the prophet Jesus claiming to be a messenger of God and whose evidences were repeatedly and consistently treated as magic 
46:7"Our clear lucid verses were read to them. But, referring to the truth as it came to them, the unbelievers said, “This is obviously a magic!”".

Further reading answering Sam Shamoun "AHMAD OR THE HOLY SPIRIT?"

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