sura 17

Submitted by David Reid Ross (United States), Apr 4, 2012 at 23:39

I'm sure Dr Heribert Busse wouldn't mind 500 grand: "The Destruction of the Temple and its Reconstruction in the Light of Muslim Exegesis of Sura 17:2-8", JSAI v. 20 (1996), 1-17. The reason the exegetes thought that passage was about the Temple is because... it's about the Temple. The whole sura is heavily Deuteronomic. There is an exact analogue with the "P" source in the Torah referring to the Temple when it says "Tabernacle".

There's also what Yehuda Nevo (hardly a Muslim) noted about the exegesis of sura 50, that the Trumpet would be sounded in Iliya. It's in the appendix to "Crossroads to Islam" (Amherst: Prometheus, 2003). You can split Busse's million with Nevo's posthumous editor Judith Koren.

So that's two places the Qur'an alludes to Jerusalem. Check and MATE.

To be blunt, I'm not amused by this $1m offer stunt. You're like the creationists who offer money to anyone who can "convince them" that "Darwinism is true". You're the judge and jury of your own case. This is a clear conflict of interest.

And no, I'm not a Muslim (lol). Muslims don't quote Nevo or the JSAI articles. They also don't see the Qur'an as I do, as a "doctrinal precipitate" of Near Eastern religion, at first applicable to Jerusalem - because that's what everyone ASSUMED was the holy land in the early 600s - and later shoehorned into the Hijaz.

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