Going to the source

Submitted by William East (United States), Nov 17, 2011 at 22:51

I am not a scholar on any subject but I have read thru many documents online and the following capsulized view is something I believe to be true.

When Mohammed took his last breath the written Koran as you know it did not exist. The Koran had not been collected and published into a complete written canon.

Don't you find it odd that Mohammed did not command that the precious messages from God be preserved as each revelation became known? One would think that messages from God would be treated with greater respect and that written Koran would have been complete at the time of Mohammed's death.

There were however fragments that were preserved in one way or another. Some fragments belonged to a close associated of Mohammed. A man Mohammed christened as knowledgeable as himself. That man died from internal injuries, injuries suffered from a beating for refusing to destroy his fragments. Think about that for a moment, a close associated of Mohammed was beaten to death at the command of the "first rightly guided Caliphate." for refusing to defile records of his accounts of Mohammed's experiences.

This same Caliphate commissioned a chosen group of scholars to unify a book from all existing fragments, and that bit of work is today recognized as the Koran. And after "His" Koran was complete he ordered that all the original fragments be destroyed. This commission was undertaken when fractious disagreements began to appear among Muslim themselves.

I find it strange that those fragments were destroyed because for Muslims today the soiling of even a single verse of the Koran is considered heresy, punishable by death. The very individual mandating the collection and cataloging of the fragments into a book was the first to order the destruction of those parts, but nothing happened to him. Instead, those closest to Mohammed, those scribes who recorded the early fragments were chastised, beaten and murdered.

You ask us to go to the source but your source itself is contaminated. Mohammed himself did not oversee a completed text of his messages and yet you accept the version compiled by the man who ordered the destruction of the first instances of the messages you treasure as holy.

I can't get any closer to the source.

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