surat al-Qadr or Christmas in the Qur'an

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), May 19, 2012 at 17:54

Thank you Dr. Pipes for a great review of a very interesting book

Puzzling verses about the "Night of Power" commemorating Muhammad's first revelation make sense when understood as describing Christmas. Chapter 97 of the Koran, astonishingly, invites readers to a Eucharist

There is no doubt that the way Luxenberg reads Surat al-Qadr Q97 makes sense (the word qadr indeed puzzled the ulama as the meaning of the word is unclear) and he reads it as a Syriac word and the meaning of the word is really destiny and the night of destiny/power in Syriac Christianity is really Christmas and indeed if you read the exegesis of this sura the ulama had no clue about what to make of it and deciding that such night is 27 or Ramadan and that the Qur'an was revealed on such night is very late

Another puzzle in the sura is the word salam which in this context means peace which is a rare Quranic use of such word and the peace is the night when Jesus was born

But what is most puzzling is why would it be this way that the ulama in the 3rd century of islam when the great masoritic commentaries were written had no clue about what to make of all these Quranic allusions or about how they came about and why would it be called Qur'an which is really a Syriac word qeryana or lectionary and not the Arabic word al-Qira'a or the reading as we are told by the masorites about what the Qur'an is supposed to be and why is his name Muhammad and we are told that this means the praiseworthy when the Arabic word for praiseworthy is really Mahmoud and not Muhammad and that the word in Syriac for Praiseworthy is really MHMD and why we can find his name only 4 times and one time he is called Ahmad and maybe Taha

And indeed it makes you wonder do we really know what the Qur'an says?

It was Wellhausen that wrote and I'm paraphrasing here that historians of early Islam must look for what is really Arabic in the Qur'an and i do believe him

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