Quranic disasters and the strange literary phenomenon of al-tifat

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jun 1, 2012 at 09:25

So our dear Ben Othman while surfing the internet which has its share of pornography web sites that cater to Malasyians came across this little gem

A question from a non Muslim reads like this;

Could you provide us with the link our dear Ben Othman otherwise did you make this one up yourself right?

Recently I became aware of some scholarly research done by German scholars into the inerrancy of the Quran.

"inerrancy"? this one is really fun

Some of their findings are discussed in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled "What Is the Koran?" written by Toby Lester, published in the January 1999 issue of that magazine.

What took him so long?

And here is a link to the article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/01/what-is-the-koran/4024/

So I invite the readers to read the article and tell us where does it say anything about the "inerrancy" of the Qur'an what ever that is

The gist of their research is that some very old fragments of the Quran found in a mosque in Yemen

Mr Einstien the gist of it fragments do not mean whole copy the likes of the 1923-1924 cairo Qur'an right? and these fragmets were written in the Quranic rasm with no short vowels or long vowels at times and no hamza or shadda consonants and many consonants were still unstable as in the case of the letter nuun which had the same morphology as the letter ra or reh and alif maksura (Syriac alip/alif) was still used in the middle of a word and at times different readings from the Cairo Qur'an 1923-1924

The Qur'an was still an evolving text well in the 3rd century of islam as in the case of al-Tabari (and not your bogus At Tabari) was still not sure how to read the biggest Quranic grammatical disaster in hadhan lasahiran and why is that if the Qur'an was well understood and read in 632CE when a certain Arabian warlord and caravan raider died

show small but significant aberrations from the standard Quranic texts.

And why is that? you tell us

In some cases, the writing on the fragments found had been washed off and different writing substituted overtop.

Let me help you with this one it means that the text was still evolving and not yet stable

The article tries to cast doubt on the Muslim view of the Quran as being absolutely reliable, and tries to show instead that it is a literary text that has been subject to change just like any other.

And that is the truth and indeed Gerd Puin was quoted as saying

"My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants. The Qur'an claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or clear, but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Qur'anic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Qur'an is not comprehensible, if it can't even be understood in Arabic, then it's not translatable into any language. That is why Muslims are afraid. Since the Qur'an claims repeatedly to be clear but is not—there is an obvious and serious contradiction. Something else must be going on.

Now you tell us what does this mean?

Indeed the Qur'an could not have been canonized before the 3rd century and what we have here is no more than a qeryana (Syriac) or parts of a lictionary that was still evolving

For the readers: and Puin is very correct as there is an interesting literary phenomenon in the Qur'an that was called by the ulama as التفات or al-tifat which means

1. لتفات - اِلْتِفَاتٌ :

   [ ل ف ت ] . ( مصدر اِلْتَفَتَ ) . " الالْتِفَاتُ إلَى الْوَرَاءِ " : مَيْلُ الوَجْهِ . . .

   المعجم: الغني - [ ابحث في المعنى ]

2. التفات :

   1 - مصدر التفتَ إلى / التفتَ بـ / التفتَ عن .
   2 - ( بلاغة ) انتقال مفاجئ أثناء الكلام إلى مخاطبة شخص أو شيء حاضر أو غائب .

Or the sudden change in the grammatical structure by sudden change in subject or object of the sentence which is an embarrassing linguistic problem in the Qur'an and i will provide the readers in the next post with examples from the Qur'an

And this very well explain why the Qur'an does not make sense most of the time. The ulama were unable to explain it but what Gerd Puin might be saying is that who ever put the Qur'an in the way we have it now was stitching literary texts in no specific order and that such switch could very well have literary lacunas et voila we now know how this strange literary phenomenon came about and more evidence that the Qur'an is a man made book mistakes and lacunas and all

I am not a Muslim,

What a lucky man

but I know that the Quran holds a position in Islam that is similar to that of Christ in Christianity.

This is true what the "event" in islam was the Qur'an and in Christianity was the Christ

In view of this, sir, how would you respond to these attempts to dispute the absolute inerrancy of the Quran?

He is now jumping from the part to the whole! Right our dear Ben Othman?

In your view, do these scholars have false motives that render their findings untrustworthy?

Oh it must be the islamophobia darn it

Or do you have another response to these attacks on the verity of the Quran? ..

well the answer here is prove them wrong if you can

So much for the literary nature of the book of Allah

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