Linguist and theologian Mark Durie has written a brilliant new book: The Qu'ran and its Biblical Reflexes. 

No, he concludes: the Koran was almost certainly not written when, where and how Muslims traditionally believe. Its Arab dialect, its geographical and historical references and carbon dating of its earliest copies suggest it was created earlier in an area closer the abandonned city of Petra than at Mecca or Medina.

In fact, the Koran does not even mention the creation of Muhammed, long worshipped as the Prophet, or actually the "Messenger", who dictated it to his followers. Indeed, the Koran names Muhammed just four times, and the reference may just be a title: "Praised One".

What's more, the very earliest copies of the Koran do not mention Mohammed at all.

In any case, concludes Durie, the Koran is inconsistent with the biographies given of Muhammed in the sacred Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet, the first of which was not written until 150 years after his death.

Durie also dismantles the popular claim of apologists that Muslims and Christians just worship the same God, given that the Koran, too, mentions God, Moses, Abraham, Noah, Lot, Heaven, Hell, Satan and even Jesus - although this Jesus is not God's son, and his mother is the sister of Moses.

Durie shows that while some of the characters of the Christian Bible have been borrowed, the Christian theology has not. Even the meanings of some of the most important of the borrowed words has been changed, so that Messiah in the Koran has come to be interpreted by some Muslim theologians as meaning simply that Christ had flat feet. (Durie quotes a former Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia on this point.)

The God in the Koran turns out be very much a creation of Arab society at the time - a God who shows compassion rather than love, and who orders rather than makes deals or a "covenant" with his people. Durie notes that Allah considers humans as "slaves".

Crucially, midway through the Koran, the "Messenger" - with his followers getting impatient with waiting for Allah to punish their enemies - hears Allah change his message. Once Allah had urged tolerance, but now he tells the Messenger that Muslims may be instruments of his justice on earth. They may kill unbelievers for him - in commands that haunt the modern world. No longer need they leave future punishment of unbelievers to their God.

Durie's book is meticulously researched and footnoted, and been praised already by scholars in Australia and abroad.

HERE is my all-to-brief Sky News interview with Mark Durie.

And here are some excerpts from Durie's book:

Even the barest outline of the life of Muḥammad — that is, that someone called Muḥammad was the Messenger figure in the Qur'an, which was sent down to him first in Mecca and then Medina — is difficult to reconcile with contemporary historical sources and the Qur'an’s own internal evidence.

The Qur'an itself has scant information on Muḥammad, only mentioning him by name (written as m-ḥ-m-d) four times (Q3:144; Q33:40; Q47:2; Q48:29), but this word could also be an epithet meaning “praised one.”...

The name Muḥammad is also mentioned surprisingly rarely in contemporary non-Muslim sources until well into the second Islamic century, and when Muḥammad first appears, it is not in reference to a religious leader....

There is no physical evidence that Mecca existed at the time of Muḥammad. It is also striking that recurring place names in the Qur'an, Thamūd, Madyan (Midian), and Ād, all refer to localities well to the north of Mecca and Medina. Another issue is the observation in Q37:137–38 that the Qur'an’s audience can pass by the remains of Lūṭ’s [Lot's] people in the morning and by night. The Biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is associated with the region around the Dead Sea... The Qur'an again implies its audience was closer to the Dead Sea than to northern Arabia when it says “the people of Lūṭ are not far from you” (Q11:89)...

Another type of evidence which points away from Mecca to the Southern Levant is the dialect in which the consonantal skeleton or rasm of the Qur'an was recorded.... This implies that the Qur'an was originally recited in the Arabic of settled areas in the Southern Levant...

Muḥammad was active as a messenger from 570 to 632 CE, and the text of the Qur'an was reportedly standardized under Uthman between 650 and 655 CE. If the Islamic account of the standardization of the Qurʾa￣ n were true, we should expect extant manuscripts to date from no earlier than 650 CE…

In the Great Mosque of Ṣanʿa￣ ʾ in Yemen, a cache of manuscripts was found behind a wall during renovations in 1972... Two leaves dated from 543–643 CE, one from 433–599 CE, one from 603–662 CE, and one from 388–535 CE... All these dates are too early to accord with the traditional account of Muḥammad’s life, who was reported to have commenced receiving Qur'anic revelations in 610 CE... Folios of the manuscript 1. or. fol. 4313, of the Berlin State Library, has been dated to 606–652 CE...

These dates are startling... Multiple instances carbon dating results cannot be reconciled with the dating of the life of Muḥammad, let alone the Uthmanic recension: the outer limit of some dates finish even before Muḥammad’s prophecies commenced.

Jasin wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2019 at 6:59pm:

BS. That's just being mentally lazy.

Frank wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2019 at 7:53pm:


Shurely shome mishtake. Muhammedism directly claims to be of the same book. Its purpose is to do away with the trinity, which Mohammed saw as pagan. Its purpose is to go directly to God. It holds its genesis in Abraham.

It follows essentially the same rules as Orthodox Judaism, with the addition of one: no alcohol. It has the same apocalyptic message as Christianity, including the second coming and final reckoning.

Hebrew and Arabic even share the same linguistic roots. Jews and Arabs can understand each other's language.

Judaism and Christianity are Middle Eastern religions. The only aspect of Christianity that's European is the idea of the trinity and the deification of Christ - essentially a Roman idea adopted by Paul.

As a book, the Quran predates Western genres. It's neither "history" or "self-help" manual. It blends two subjects: Muhammed's struggle to bring warring tribes together on the Arabian peninsular and being human and having a relationship with God. It positions this struggle as an inner battle with your personal demons. In Islam, happiness is when you give this struggle to God. The act of submitting is an act of acceptance. The act of jihad is one of fighting inner obstacles: greed, sloth, envy, etc. Like Christianity, this struggle can be aimed outwards to achieve social justice.

Like the Torah, the Quran has been enshrined as a holy text to be memorised and recited. But it is, essentially, just a book. Any merit it produces is reflected in the behaviour of its readers. The aim of the Quran is to foster humble, resilient and meditative qualities in people.

Religious Muslims respect these qualities. I've known Muslims to respect and praise other people's spirituality. Wise and reflective people are highly valued by Muslims. Islam propagates a mystic sensibility. All the rules are aimed at that.

If Muslims value what you call the performative over and above the objective, I'd say they've got it wrong. Cat Stevens made a similar observation when he decided to go back to music. He realised he'd been too inflexible. He realised he had been given the gift of music and it's important to use this.

The God of the Mohammedan is the same as that of the Jew or Christian, and its book follows the same textual lineage.

Jasin wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2019 at 6:59pm:


BS.

That's just being mentally lazy.     [plagiarised by Yadda]




Conflating Christianity and ISLAM,     is giving a moral equivalency and a theological equivalency to Christianity and ISLAM.
.....[and, it is what moslems continually do on the WWW]

And it is a crock, imo.






JaSin = = ANOTHER APOLOGIST FOR ISLAM




.




Jasin wrote on Feb 3^rd, 2019 at 6:59pm:


JaSin bot,

FYI, the content of many of your posts consistently fail the Turing Test.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Frank  wrote: 1st. post
Quote:


That's it in a nutshell, the qur'an becomes a book of pure hatred of non-believers the apostates and corrupters. The qur'an then decided that rape, thieving, lying, torture and mass murder were all perfectly O.K. for muslims to use against said non-believers apostates and corrupters.

karnalwrote Reply #4:
Quote:


I love seeing the apologists and *moderates* all hiding from the *there is  no god but allah* , they all shy away from using his name in their posts, why is that, what are they trying to hide??


Quote:


Like flying donkeys, not praying when the sun is too close to satan, satan farts so he can't hear the call to prayers, men sitting down to take a leak, playing with their old fella after having said leak, trees and rocks can talk, clean the devil out of their left nostril, Cut clitorises out of little girls, Rape little girls with their forced child marriage, Stop themselves from laughing too much, Dip flies in their drink because one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease, etc. etc. etc..

Mystic sensibility in islam?

polite_gandalf wrote on Feb 4^th, 2019 at 10:13am:



He would know because he is literate - unlike Mohammed and many of his sons and daughters.




Early history

The early history of Mecca is still largely disputed, as there are no unambiguous references to it in ancient literature prior to the rise of Islam.[31] The Roman Empire took control of part of the Hejaz in 106 CE,[32] ruling cities such as Hegra (now known as Mada'in Saleh), located to the north of Mecca. Even though detailed descriptions were established of Western Arabia by Rome, such as by Procopius, there are no references of a pilgrimage and trading outpost such as Mecca.[33] The first direct mention of Mecca in external literature occurs in 741 CE, in the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle, though here the author places it in Mesopotamia rather than the Hejaz.[33]

Given the inhospitable environment[34] and lack of historical references in Roman, Persian and Indian sources, historians including Patricia Crone and Tom Holland have cast doubt on the claim that Mecca was a major historical trading outpost.

33.Holland, Tom; In the Shadow of the Sword; Little, Brown; 2012; p. 303: ‘Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca – not one’

on that page:

Even the few cameltrains that still plodded northwards from Himyar, heading for a Roman market that had long since lost its appetite for incense, went by a road that bypassed Mecca altogether. 11 A merchant from Alexandria might cheerfully discourse about the trading opportunities in entrepôts as far afield as India, and never even so much as allude to Mecca—on his doorstep though it effectively was.
In gazetteers written by Muhammad’s contemporaries—whether diplomats, geographers or historians— mentions of it are notable by their glaring absence.
Even in the Qur’an itself, the word appears just once. “In the belly of Mecca, it was God who held their hands back from you” 14—an allusion that might as well be to a valley as to a city. Otherwise, in all the vast corpus of ancient literature, there is not a single reference to Mecca—not one.
Only in 741, more than a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, does it finally crop up on the pages of a foreign text—and even then the author locates it in Mesopotamia, “midway between Ur and Harran.”
Clearly, then, whatever else Mecca might have been in the early seventh century, it was no multicultural boom-town.

polite_gandalf wrote on Feb 5^th, 2019 at 2:38pm:



Ah, the old hyperbole to re-position yourself facing an opponent you'd prefer, rather than an opponent you actually face. Old trick, try something better. A meshuggeneh is not a beast.  A meshuggeneh is an idiot, like Bwian or gweggy or PB and, well, you.

As for "What is it with you and dumbing everything down to such simplistic 'yes/no' dichotomies." - how about the dichotomy of the shahada itself? How much more dumbed down yes/no can you BE????

Frank wrote on Feb 5^th, 2019 at 5:44pm:


Oh, about as dumb as Mark's admonition that "anyone who believes and is baptised will be saved", old boy.

You?