The Garbled Up Quran Pt. 3

What the Scholars Say

In this part of our response https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/the-garbled-up-quran-pt-2/ we are going to see what the scholars have to say about the coherence and structure of the Quran.

Thomas Carlyle, whose comments on Muhammad in Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) are often quoted with approval by Muslims, states in reference to the Quran:

“A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite, endless iterations, longwindedness, entanglement; most crude incondite-insupportable STUPIDITY, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.” (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: On Heroes and Hero Worship [London, 1973], p. 299; bold and capital emphasis ours)

“His Koran has become A STUPID PIECE of prolix absurdity; we do not believe, like him, that God wrote that!” (Ibid, p. 344; bold and capital emphasis ours)

Author Salomon Reinach writes:

“From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is little humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it.” (Reinach, Orpheus: A History of Religion [Liveright, Inc., New York 1932], p. 176)

John McClintock and James Strong’s Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature notes:

“The matter of the Koran is exceedingly incoherent and sententious, the book evidently being without any logical order of thought either as a whole or in its parts. This agrees with the desultory and incidental manner in which it is said to have been delivered.” (Volume V, p. 151, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids MI, reprint 1982)

Noted historian Edward Gibbon describes the Quran as,

“incoherent rhapsody of fable, and precept, and declamation, which sometimes is lost in the clouds.” (Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [Milman Co., London], Volume I, p. 365)

The following citations are taken from the book, Twenty-Three Years: A study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammad (Allen and Unwin, London, 1985), which was written by the late Iranian Muslim Scholar Ali Dashti. All bold and capital emphasis ours:

“Unfortunately the Qor’an was badly edited and its content are very obtusely arranged. All students of the Qor’an wonder why the editors did not use the natural and logical method of ordering by date of revelation, as in ‘Ali b. Abi Taleb’s copy of the text.” (P. 28)

“Among the Moslem scholars of the early period, before bigotry and hyperbole prevailed, were some such as Ebrahim on-Nazzam who openly acknowledged that the arrangement and syntax of the Qor’an are not miraculous and that work of equal or greater value could be produced by other God-fearing persons.

“Pupils and later admirers of on-Nazzam, such as Ebn Hazm and ol-Khayyat, wrote in his defence, and several other leading exponents of the Mo’tazelite school shared his opinion. They saw no conflict between the theses of on-Nazzam and the statements in the Qor’an. One of their arguments is that the Qor’an is miraculous because God deprived the Prophet Mohammad’s contemporaries of the ability to produce the like of it; in other times and places the production of phrases resembling Qor’anic verses IS POSSIBLE AND INDEED EASY.

“It is widely held that the blind Syrian poet Abu’l-‘Ala ol-Ma’arri (368/979-450/1058) wrote his Ketab ol-fosul wa’ l-ghayat, of which a part survives, in imitation of the Qor’an.

“The Qor’an contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects. These and other such aberrations in the language have given scope to critics who deny the Qor’an’s eloquence. The problem also occupied the minds of devout Moslems. It forced the commentators to search for explanations and was probably one of the causes of disagreement over readings.” (Pp. 48-49)

“To sum up, more than one hundred Qor’anic aberrations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted. Needless to say, THE COMMENTATORS STROVE TO FIND EXPLANATIONS AND JUSTIFICATIONS FOR THESE IRREGULARITIES. Among them was the great commentator and philologist MAHMUD OZ-ZAMAKHSHARI (467/1075-538/1144), of whom a Moorish author wrote: ‘This grammar-obsessed pedant has committed a shocking error. Our task IS NOT TO MAKE THE READINGS CONFORM TO ARABIC GRAMMAR, but to take the whole of the Qor’an as it is AND MAKE THE ARABIC GRAMMAR CONFORM TO THE QOR’AN.’

“Up to a point this argument is justifiable. A nation’s great speakers and writers respect the rules of its language in so far as they avoid modes of expression which are not generally understood and popularly accepted, though they may occasionally find themselves obliged to take liberties. Among the pre-Islamic Arabs, rhetoric and poetry WERE WELL DEVELOPED and grammatical conventions WERE ALREADY ESTABLISHED. The Qor’an, being in the belief of Moslems superior to all previous products of the rhetorical genius, must contain the fewest irregularities.

“Yet the Moorish author’s censure of Zamakhshari is open to criticism on the ground that it reverses the usual argument. This is that the Qor’an is God’s word because it has a sublime eloquence which no human being can match, and that the man who uttered it was therefore a prophet. The Moorish author maintained that the Qor’an is faultless because it is God’s word and that the problem of the grammatical errors in it MUST BE SOLVED BY CHANGING THE RULES OF ARABIC GRAMMAR. In other words, while most Moslems answer deniers by citing the Qor’an’s eloquence as proof of Mohammad’s prophethood, the Moorish author, having taken the Qor’an’s divine origin and Mohammad’s prophethood for granted, held all discussion of the Qor’an’s wording and contents to be inadmissible.” (Pp. 50-51)

“Neither the Qor’an’s eloquence nor its moral and legal precepts are miraculous. The Qor’an is miraculous because it enabled Mohammad, single-handedly and despite poverty and illiteracy, to overcome his people’s resistance and found a lasting religion because it moved wild men to obedience and imposed its bringer’s will on them.” (P. 57)

Dashti further stated that,

“The Qor’an contains many instances of confusion between the two speakers, God and Mohammad, in the same verse… Among these many passages are some, like the above, which can be easily explained, but also others which present great difficulty… The presence of confusions between God and the Prophet in the Qor’an cannot objectively be disputed. Sometimes God speaks, giving to the Prophet the command ‘say’ (i.e. to the people). Sometimes the sentence structure proves that it is the Prophet who speaks, expressing devotion to God. The impression conveyed by the Qor’an is that a hidden voice in Mohammad’s soul or subconscious mind was continually impelling him to guide the people, restraining him from lapses, and providing him with solutions to problems.” (Pp. 150-151)

And:

“Confusion between God’s and Mohammad’s words is again apparent in two verses of sura 10 (Yunos). ‘And if your Lord so wished, all the dwellers on the earth would believe together. Are you going to compel the people to be believers?’ (verse 99). ‘It is only (possible) for a soul to believe with God’s permission. And He inflicts vileness on those who are intelligent’ (verse 100). In verse 99 the words are from God and addressed to the Prophet, but in verse 100 the words appear to be Mohammad’s, a sort of self-consolation followed by an explanation of the obduracy of the polytheists who would not heed his teaching.” (P. 152)

It gets a lot worse. According to another renowned Islamist every fifth sentence of the Quran makes no sense whatsoever!

“The Koran claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or ‘clear.’ But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can’t even be understood in Arabic—then it’s not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.” (Gerd Puin, quoted by Toby Lester in “What Is the Koran?,” The Atlantic, January 1999; underline emphasis ours)

The great scholar Noldeke claims:

“On the whole, while many parts of the Koran undoubtedly have considerable rhetorical power, even over an unbelieving reader, the book aesthetically considered, is by no means a first rate performance… Let us look at some of the more extended narratives. It has already been noticed how vehement and abrupt they are where they ought to be characterised by epic repose. Indispensable links, both in expression and in the sequence of events, are often omitted, so that to understand these histories is sometimes far easier for us than for those who heard them first, because we know most of them from better sources. Along with this, there is a good deal of superfluous verbiage; and nowhere do we find a steady advance in the narration. Contrast in these respects the history of Joseph (xii) and its glaring improprieties with the admirably conceived and admirably executed story in Genesis. Similar faults are found in the non narrative portions of the Koran. The connexion of ideas is extremely loose, and even the syntax betrays great awkwardness. Anacolutha [want of syntactical sequence; when the latter part of the sentence does not grammatically fit the earlier] are of frequent occurrence, and cannot be explained as conscious literary devices. Many sentences begin with a ‘when’ or ‘on the day when’ which seems to hover in the air, so that commentators are driven to supply a ‘think of this’ or some such ellipsis. Again, there is no great literary skill evinced in the frequent and needless harping on the same words and phrases; in xviii, for example ‘till that’ occurs no fewer than eight times. Mahomet, in short, is not in any sense a master of style.” (Ibn Warraq, Why I am not a Muslim [Prometheus Books; Amherst NY, 1995], pp. 110-111; bold emphasis ours)

Richard Bell and W. M. Watt believe that the uneasiness of the Quranic structure is actual proof that the text has been altered:

“There are indeed many roughnesses of this kind, and these, it is here claimed, are fundamental evidence for revision. Besides the points already noticed—hidden rhymes, and rhyme-phrases not woven into the texture of the passage—there are the following: abrupt changes of rhyme; repetition of the same rhyme word or rhyme phrase in adjoining verses; the intrusion of an extraneous subject into a passage otherwise homogeneous; a differing treatment of the same subject in neighboring verses, often with repetition of words and phrases; breaks in grammatical construction which raise difficulties in exegesis; abrupt changes in the length of verses; sudden changes of the dramatic situation, with changes of pronoun from singular to plural, from second to third person, and so on; the juxtaposition of apparently contradictory statements; the juxtaposition of passages of different date, with the intrusion of late phrases into early verses.

“In many cases a passage has alternative continuations which follow one another in the present text. The second of the alternatives is marked by a break in sense and by a break in grammatical construction, since the connection is not with what immediately precedes, but with what stands some distance back.” (Bell & Watt, Introduction to the Quran [Edinburgh, 1977], p. 93; as cited by Ibn Warraq in Why I am not a Muslim [Prometheus Books; Amherst NY, 1995], pp. 112-113; bold emphasis ours)

The late Thomas Patrick Hughes wrote:

“… The Qur’an is, however, generally held to be a standing miracle, indeed, the one miracle which bears witness to the truth of Muhammad’s mission, an assumption based on the Prophet’s own statements in the Qur’an (Surah x. 39, xi. 16, liii. 34), where he calls upon the people who charge him with having invented it to procure a single chapter like it. But the Mu’tazalites have asserted that THERE IS NOTHING MIRACULOUS IN ITS STYLE AND COMPOSITION (vide Sharhu’l-Muwaqif)…” (Hughes, Dictionary of Islam [Kazi Publications, Inc. (USA) 3023-27 West Belmont Ave., Chicago Il. 60618], p. 521; bold and capital emphasis mine)

And a Muslim author whom we already cited, Farid Esack, admits,

“The current arrangement of the Qur’an is neither chronological nor thematic. To those accustomed to reading in a linear or sequential fashion, this can prove tedious and frustrating. The Qur’an also does not have a clear narrative pattern where the stories neatly unfold. The story of Joseph is the only exception TO THE RULE of narratives appearing in different accounts and various bits of the same account being interspersed throughout the Qur’an. The DISJOINTED appearance of these narratives in the Qur’an have been the subject of vigorous scholarly debate, much of it losing sight of its objectivity. “Even where the narrative predominates, the story is hardly ever told in a straightforward manner but tends to fall into a series of short-word pictures; the action advances incident by incident, DISCONTINOUSLY, and the intervening links ARE LEFT TO THE IMAGINATION OF THE HEARERS” (Bell, 1970, 81). This seeming “disjointedness” is also characteristic of the rest of the Qur’an, comprised of exhortations, injunctions, or liturgical pieces.

After a short prayer, the Qur’an begins with the longest and one of the most complex chapters, one from Muhammad’s later career, which engages the full array of legal, historical, polemical, and religious issues in a fashion bewildering for the reader not immersed in the history and law of early Islam. For those familiar with the Bible, it would be as if the second page opened with a combination of the legal discussions in Leviticus, the historical polemic of the Book of Judges and the apocalyptic allusions from Revelation, with various topics mixed in together and beginning in mid-topic (Sells, 1999, xi).

“While there is unanimity around the placement of the ayat within a surah, traditional scholars have differed as to whether the sequence of all the surahs have also been divinely ordained or only some. Most Muslims have accepted this ‘disjointedness’ although there have been a number of attempts to offer structural explanations for the way the surahs are set out in the Qur’an… The overall ‘disjointedness’ of the surahs is accepted by most traditional scholars. (The Qur’an A Short Introduction, Oneworld Publications, Oxford 2002, pp. 64-65; bold and capital emphasis mine)

And:

“… The apparent unanimity around the doctrine of uniqueness is not always well-founded in early Qur’anic scholarship and what exactly formed the core or basis of its inimitability was never really resolved… Some Mu’tazilite scholars, the pioneers of scholastic theology in Islam, argued that the Qur’an was not unique by itself but that any actual attempt to imitate it is rendered futile by God. This concept of deflection, sarfa (lit. ‘turning away’), described by Wansbrough as a ‘slightly unrealistic” and “unsatisfactory’ argument ‘whose very terms were self-defeating’ (1977, 80), was rejected by the majority consensus which insisted that the intrinsic linguistic, stylistic, and meaning supremacy of the Qur’an was an inseparable component of the idea of uniqueness. Dissent, however, loomed for a long while to come. ‘Ali ibn Hazm (d. 1064), the famous Spanish-Arab theologian, for example, refused to acknowledge the aesthetic qualities of the Qur’an as proof of its uniqueness and denied that the word of God could in any way be compared to human speech (Ibn Hazm, n.d., 3:15ff.), while ‘Abd al-Malik al-Juwayni (d. 1085), who served as an iman of both the sacred mosques in Mecca and Medina and was a teacher of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, arguably the most acclaimed Islamic scholar since the medieval period, refused to recognize its unqualified aesthetic superiority altogether (al-Juwayni, 1948, 54-55).” (Pp. 103-104; bold emphasis mine)

Esack says that the Quran’s incoherent and unintelligible grammatical structure,

“… poses difficulties for those engaged in critical scholarship and these texts have been invoked in support of the notion that the Qur’an is not entirely the product if [sic] a single entity. There are also several cases where the speaker alternates between singular and plural forms adding to the notion that the Qur’an was compiled in an incoherent manner… Besides God, though, numerous ayat suggest that the Angels or the Prophet himself are the direct speakers and it is only the interpolations of translators or the comments of the exegetes that suggest otherwise. Ayat such as 19:64-65, for example, if read without interpolation of the translator, clearly suggest that the Angels are the speakers… In a few ayat, such as 27:91, the obvious speaker seems to be the Prophet and then a sudden switch occurs when he becomes the one being addressed… The fact that these ayat are often characterized by a later addition of ‘say’ (qul) suggests that the entire section may have been preceded by the unarticulated instruction ‘say’. Muslims have always understood it in this manner. In other words, the fact that they are the direct words of the Prophet or of the Angels does not detract [sic] from the other-worldliness of the Qur’an. They were merely repeating words that in the first instance came from God.” (Pp. 74-75; bold emphasis ours)

After presenting Muslim author Mustansir Mir’s summary of Amin Ahsan Islahi’s defense of the Quran’s alleged impeccable structure in his book “Tadabbur-i-Qur’an“, Esack rightly notes:

“The divisions proposed above, while certainly innovative, COME ACROSS AS ABRITRARY AND DEPEND RATHER UNDULY ON WHAT THE READER CHOOSES TO SEE. It is also somewhat difficult to imagine the Prophet and the Companions working their way through an elaborate system of textual division as presented above. Because the Qur’an is the recited word in addition to being the written word, this seeming DISJUNCTURE is of little consequence to most Muslims…” (P. 66; bold and capital emphasis mine)

Even the Concise Encyclopedia of Islam has to acknowledge that the Quran is disjointed and chaotic, but then tries to explain it away:

“The revelations are identified as having been revealed at Mecca, or at Medina. The earlier, Mecca revelations, have A MORE POETIC and enthusiastic character, throwing forth powerful images of the world’s end and existence’s reabsorption into the Divine uncreatedness. The Medinan revelations are, on the other hand, like the calm after the storm, and deal mainly with the giving of laws. However, in the canonic recension of the Caliph ‘Uthman, some Meccan chapters contain verses revealed at Medina and vice versa, so that THE TEXT’S DISJOINTED AND IRREGULAR CHARACTER has tempted Western scholars to try to rearrange it in a more apparent order.

“These attempts are ill-advised, however, for the Koran’s sudden shifts in meaning, points of view, and depth are in the very nature of the text. The Koran is heaven’s sense compressed or refracted into human intelligibility, and it is inevitable that the vicissitudes the Koran has undergone in the world, namely, its first limitation into human language, memory, understanding, and dialect, and then its historic assembly into a written text, reflect the disparity between the human order as it is- not in an ideal world- and the Divine order. Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi suggested that it is THIS VERY NATURE, OUTWARDLY CHAOTIC, that is a ‘ruse’ of the Koran TO APPROXIMATE THE CHAOTIC NATURE of the human soul, in order then to catch it, as a net catches fish, and to bring it back to absorption in the Divine from which the soul has wandered…” (Cyril Glassé, Harper & Row, San Francisco, a division of Harper Collins Publishers, second edition 1999, p. 231; bold and capital emphasis ours)

Note here that this is not referring to a translation, BUT TO THE ARABIC TEXT ITSELF!

It seems that the Quran’s real miracle is that it has convinced Muslims like this neophyte actually believe that it is actually miraculous, when in reality it is one of the most incoherent, unintelligible religious works ever produced.

The greenhorn’s woes are far from over, as we are about to see in the next part https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/the-garbled-up-quran-pt-4/.

To be published next month.

Source: https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/the-garbled-up-quran-pt-3/ 

IHS

The Garbled Up Quran Pt. 2

We continue from where we previously left off https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/the-garbled-up-quran-pt-1/.

Muslim scholar Farid Esack mentions the problem that Muhammad’s community faced in trying to explain the appearance of non-Arabic words in a text claiming to be written in clear Arabic:

The Qur’an itself repeatedly asserts that it is a unique and inimitable “Arabic Qur’an” (12.2, 13.37, 16.103) in order to communicate its meaning in a perfect manner to a people who took great pride in the expressive quality of their language. Much of the early discussion about the linguistic components of the Qur’an centred on the presence, or otherwise, of non-Arabic words in it – of course, based on the premise that it was essentially an Arabic text. The verses referred to above became the key supportive texts for those who argued that the Qur’an did not contain any non-Arabic terms. The earliest exegetes, particularly those associated with ‘Abd Allah ibn ‘Abbas (d. 68/67-68), a cousin of Muhammad, freely discussed a large number of non-Arabic words in the Qur’an. Hadith literature credits Ibn ‘Abbas and “his school” with having a special interest in seeking their origin and meaning. Later eminent scholars of the Qur’an such as the philologist/exegete Abu ‘Ubayd (d. 838), however continued to argue that the Qur’an contained foreign words. Others such as Ibn ‘Atiyyah (d. 541/1146), Suyuti (d. 911/1505), and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Tha’labi (d. 1468) tried to reconcile theology with linguistic principles. They argued that the foreign words in the Qur’an came into Arabic through the ancient Arab’s contacts with other languages in foreign travel and commerce but that they had been thoroughly Arabized by the time of the Prophet. Various theories were evolved to resolve THE CONTRADICTION between the notion ascribed to Ibn ‘Abbas and the one which subsequently gained greater acceptance, i.e., that the Qur’an does not contain any foreign terminology. To deal with the actual occurrence of words in the Arabic language that were also found in non-Arabic languages, some of these scholars, such as Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi (d. 204/819) and Tabari, developed the notion of tawafuq (coincidence). They argued that both Arabic and other languages employ the same words with identical meanings and that this uniformity of meaning was purely coincidental.

The idea of any language or discourse being absolutely free from expressions or words used in another language is alien to one of the most basic linguistic principles, i.e., the inter-relatedness of human speech. While this may sound trite, two factors, however, ensured that this notion was rejected by the “orthodoxy”: first, the Qur’an is not really regarded as human speech but rather God’s and God’s speech CANNOT BE SUBJECTED TO ANY LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES. Indeed, as is commonly known, Qur’anic Arabic became the standard of Arabic grammar. (The problem of God’s speech of necessity having to coincide with human speech for effect and meaning remains.) Second, for the “orthodoxy”, God’s own eternalness and self-subsistence fused with those of His revelation. The Qur’an and its language thus came to be viewed as equally timeless and independent of any “non-divine” elements, non-Arabic included. The fact of God’s revelation occurring in Arabic (or any other language for that matter) alongside the insistence that this is the unmediated medium which was used by God raises an interesting question: If all comprehensible language and speech is the result of social interaction then does this imply that God is also “limited” or confined to the limitations of language? If so, then what does this imply for the all-powerful nature of God? (The Qur’an – A Short Introduction, pp. 68-69; bold and capital emphasis mine)

A chief problem with the assertion that the Quran’s alien vocabulary really isn’t foreign because those words had been Arabicised is that this would have been common knowledge to native Arab speakers like Ibn Abbas. That an explanation was needed to explain why foreign words appear in the Quran demonstrates how weak this Muslim claim actually is!

Besides, this still leaves Muslims with the problem of believing that a speech, which is supposed to be beginningless and divine, contains loanwords from languages that didn’t even exist

This is just the start of this neophyte’s woes since he must also contend with the fact that the Muslims had a hard time explaining the following letters that are found at the beginning of certain chapters:

· Alif Lam Ra- Suras 10, 11, 12, 14, 15.

· Alif Lam Mim- Suras 2, 3, 29, 30, 31, 32.

· Alif Lam Mim Ra- Sura 13.

· Alif Lam Mim Sad- Sura 7.

· Ha Mim- Suras 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46.

· Ha Mim ‘Ain Sin Qaf- Sura 42.

· Sad- Sura 38.

· Ta Sin- Sura 27.

· Ta Sin Mim- Suras 26, 28.

· Ta Ha- Sura 20.

· Qaf- Sura 50.

· Ka Ha Ya ‘Ain Sad- Sura 19.

· Nun- Sura 68.

· Ya Sin- Sura 36.

The late Muslim polemicist and translator Muhammad Asad admits:

“About one-quarter of the Qur’anic suras are preceded by mysterious letter-symbols called muqatta’at (‘disjointed letters’) or, occasionally, fawatih (‘openings’) because they appear at the beginning of the relevant suras. Out of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet, exactly one-half- that is, fourteen- occur in this position, either singly or in varying combinations of two, three, four, or five letters. They are always pronounced singly, by their designations and not as mere sounds – thus: alif lam mim, or ha mim, etc.

“The significance of these letter-symbols has perplexed the commentators from the earliest times. There is no evidence of the Prophet’s having ever referred to them in any of his recorded utterances, nor any of his Companions having ever asked him for an explanation. None the less, it is established beyond any possibility of doubt that all the Companions – obviously following the example of the Prophet – regarded the muqatta’at as integral parts of the suras to which they are prefixed, and used to recite them accordingly: a fact which disposes effectively of the suggestion advanced by some Western orientalists that these letters may be no more than the initials of the scribes who wrote down the individual revelations at the Prophet’s dictation, or of the Companions who recorded them at the time of the final codification of the Qur’an during the reign of the first three Caliphs.

“Some of the Companions as well as some of their immediate successors and later Qur’anic commentators were convinced that these letters are abbreviations of certain words or even phrases relating to God and His attributes, and tried to ‘reconstruct’ them with much ingenuity; but since the possible combinations are practically unlimited, all such interpretations are highly arbitrary and, therefore, devoid of any real usefulness…” (Asad, The Message of the Qur’an [Dar al-Andalus Limited, 3 Library Ramp Gibraltar, rpt. 1993], App. II, p. 992; bold emphasis ours)

After summarizing several different interpretations, Asad concludes:

“… and so, in the last resort, we must content ourselves with the finding that a solution of this problem still remains beyond our grasp. This was apparently the view of the four Right-Guided Caliphs, summarized in these words of Abu Bakr: ‘In every divine writ (kitab) there is [an element of] mystery – and the mystery of the Qur’an is [indicated] in the openings of [some of] the suras.” (Ibid., p. 993; bold emphasis ours)

Even the late Quranic translator Abuldllah Yusuf Ali had to acknowledge:

“As shown in Appendix I (Sipara 3), the Abbreviated Letters are mystic symbols, about whose meaning there is no authoritative explanation. If the theory advanced in n. 25 to ii. 1 has any validity, and the present group A.L.R. is cognate to the group A.L.M., we have to consider and form some idea in our minds as to the probable meaning of the variation… But no one should be dogmatic in speculation about mystic Symbols.” (Ali, The Holy Qur’an – Introduction to Sura X [Yunus], p. 481; bold emphasis ours)

And here is what he further states in footnote 25, p. 17, regarding the meaning A.L.M.:

“… Much has been written about the meaning of these letters, but most of it is pure conjecture. Some commentators are content to recognize them as some mystic symbols, of which it is unprofitable to discuss the meaning by mere verbal logic. In mysticism we accept symbols as such for a time being: their esoteric meaning comes from the inner light when we are ready for it…” (Bold emphasis ours)

And even long before these men ever showed up on the scene, we have medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Kathir, considered one of the greatest commentators that ever lived, acknowledging the problem of the meaning of these letters. Ibn Kathir candidly admitted that these Arabic letters left the entire world of Islamic scholarship baffled as to their precise interpretation and purpose:

“The ‘ulama do not agree as to the interpretation of <Alif-Lam-Mim> and other similar letters at the beginning of some suras. They have been given the following interpretations:

1. The letters belong to Mutashabih (allegorical) verses, whose meaning is known only to Allah.

2. They are the names of Allah.

3. They have meaning, and Allah did not reveal them in vain and without a purpose. Those ignorant people who say that the Qur’an contains words for mere worship, that have no meaning whatsoever – are certainly in great error. There is no doubt that the letters at the beginning of some Surahs have a meaning: we say about them only what is authentically said about them by the Prophet. Otherwise, we say nothing further about them and recite the verse <‘We believe in it; it is all from our Lord.’> (3:7).

“As for the wisdom behind these letters, some scholars have said it is:

1. To alert the polytheists so that they might listen to the words of Allah. This is a very weak reason in light of the fact that such disconnected letters do not appear at the beginning of every Surah. Besides al-Baqarah and al-‘Imran that follows it, both start with these letters, and both were revealed in Madinah where there were no polytheists.

2. Others believe that they are an example of the miraculous wonder of the Qur’an and the people are unable to confront it. This opinion is held by many scholars, including the Sheikh of Islam, Ibn Taymiyya. This opinion is borne out by the fact that all disconnected letters mentioned in the Qur’an are followed by a mention of the Qur’an itself and its revelation by Allah, Lord of the worlds. For example: <Alif-Lam-Mim. This is the Book …> (2:1), <Ha. Mim. By the Book that makes things clear, that is this Qur’an)> (43:1), <Alif-Lam-Mim. Allah! There is no god but Him, the Living, the Self-Subsistent. He has revealed to (Muhammad) the Scripture> (3:1-3). <Alif-Lam-Ra. (This is) a Scripture which We have revealed unto you (O Muhammad) …> (14:1) (Tafsir Ibn Kathir – Part 1 Surah Al-Fatiha Surah Al-Baqarah, ayat 1 to 141, Abridged by Sheikh Muhammad Nasib Ar-Rafa’i [Al-Firdous Ltd., London 1998], pp. 55-57; bold emphasis ours)

That Ibn Kathir’s second explanation is unconvincing can easily seen by the fact that certain suras begin by mentioning the Quran without the mysterious letters preceding it:

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who hath sent His Servant the Book, and hath allowed therein no Crookedness. S. 18:1 – cf. S. 24:1; 25:1; 39:1-2; 52:1-3; 55:1-2; 97:1)

In other suras, we find the letters appearing without any reference to the Quran:

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Kaf. Ha. Ya. Ain. Sad. (This is) a mention of Zakariya. S. 19:1-2

And:

In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. Alif-Lam-Mim. Do men think that they will be left alone on saying, “We believe”, and that they will not be tested? S. 29:1-2 – cf. S. 30:1-2; 68:1)

QUESTION FOR IBN ANWAR

Since Muslim renowned Muslim scholars like Muhammad Asad plainly confessed that there is no report suggesting that Muhammad spoke about these mysterious letters in his recorded utterances, why then would Allah make them part of his “revelation” which the Muslims had to reciting seeing that these letters left them perplexed and confused?

Furthermore, no report has come down to us indicating that the Companions had inquired of Muhammad on the meaning of these mysterious letters. This is indeed strange since, had these letters really been part of the original revelation, why then would the Companions not have asked about their meaning? This seems to suggest that scribes added these letters much later and hadiths were then forged to establish their authenticity.

Finally, do you really want us to believe that these letters are a part of the uncreated speech of Allah, when this implies that the speech of your lord has eternally contained incoherent, unintelligible words, phrases, sentences etc., and in Arabic to boot!?

So I challenge this neophyte to please explain the mystery of these “revealed” letters, especially since the Quran itself claims to be a perspicuous book that provides a detailed explanation for everything:

Shall I seek other than Allah for judge, when He it is Who hath revealed unto you (this) Scripture, fully explained? Those unto whom We gave the Scripture (aforetime) know that it is revealed from thy Lord in truth. So be not thou (O Muhammad) of the waverers. S. 6:114 Pickthall

And the day We shall raise up from every nation a witness against them from amongst them, and We shall bring thee as a witness against those. And We have sent down on thee the Book making clear everything, and as a guidance and a mercy, and as good tidings to those who surrender. S. 16:89 Arberry

A Book whereof the Verses are explained in detail; A Qur’an in Arabic for people who know. S. 41:3 Hilali-Khan

We have more for this Muslim greenhorn in the next part of our refutation https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/the-garbled-up-quran-pt-3/.

Source: https://answeringislamblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/the-garbled-up-quran-pt-2/ 

IHS