The Quran as a weapon in the battle of Siffin A.D. 657

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), May 21, 2012 at 17:29

Hi, dhimmi no more !

Great to see an old friend again and to read his fine comments. I am sure any Moslem seeing them must -figuratively speaking - feel roughly what the Devil feels towards the holy water. ;)

>Since 1972 the premises of this account seem to have been undermined.

> This is far from the truth and I think that we might be talking about two different things here.

If we mean by the Qur'an the 1923-1924 Cairo Qur'an then the answer is the Qur'an must have been canonized in the 3rd century of Islam and not any earlier that does not mean that some logias and pericopes did not exist.<

Will you ever manage to explain it to a Moslem who in principle doesn't think (in general thinking of Moslems is a very singular and irregular process) in terms of logias, excerpts, pericopes but in such irrational terms as "The mother of the book", "the pre-existent, pre-eternal, beginningless, and uncreated Speech of Allah" ?

> What is most amazing about all of this is the fact that you will not find the Qur'an mentioned in the extant Arabic language literary sources (see Hoyland) until the Abbassids revolution and in the first islamic law book circa 750CE called Fiqh Akbar 1 the Qur'an is not mentioned or used as source of islamic law and why is that?<

And what do think about the account of the first fitna and the battle of Siffin between Moawiya and Ali ibn Abu Talib? When Moawiya felt he was losing ground, he made his soldiers attach pages of the Koran to their spears and wave them asking for arbitration.The Koran made the zealots in Ali's camp waver and with them the rest of the army wavered too thus saving the day for Moawiya who finally usurped power.

I don't have the relevant literature on the battle at hand but this is what also such an outstanding scholar as Julius Wellhausen reports who critically follows the traditional Moslem historical account . If the account of the battle at Siffin is correct in this detail, then this would corroborate what the Sana'a Koran shows - the Koran(Koranic pericopes,fragments etc.) was known and in use in the very early period.

> and why would the penalty of al-zani wa al-zaniyya is stoning and not the Quranic whipping unless the Quranic material were not the source of islamic law early on or the Qur'an not yet canonized and to add insult to injury those Muhajiruun (this is what the invading Arabs called themselves early on) do not call themselves in the literary sources neither Muslims nor even Arabs and no mention of a Muhammad or his Qur'an and why is that?<

And may I ask you one question not necessarily connected to literary sources? In you opinion whose body is resting in the Green Mosque in Medina ? If it is not ... Mahomet, then whose body is it ? I omit two other bodies buried with him and an empty spot nearby reserved you know for whom?

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