For Hamilton: and reading the sources in their primary languages!

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Oct 4, 2006 at 18:42

My dear hamilton: I'm going to be very blunt:. You do not know any Arabic or Syriac or Hebrew or Greek and you are debating a subject that is really far beyond you....But you still have the audacity to discuss such topic that pertians to not just one language but several languages across a very long span of time..

You wrote:

"my argument was in response to those who argued that the God of the Christians was not the God of the Muslims."

Now here is your flawed argument: There is no way that you can prove _OR_ disprove such a point by examining the Bible and the Qur'an because it is called circular reasoning. I just wonder why is Aristotelian logic beyond Muslims!

So what do we do for such problem?

You resort to something called literary criticism of sources external to the canon and this is indeed what Wansbrough did to the early Muslim literature by examining the Sira-Maghazi literature and you can read his book, but you must know Arabic very well.

So what were his conclusions?

1. The Good news is that he places Islam in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

2. The bad news is Muslim literature (hadith, sira, tarikh etc...) are the product of _polemics_ (and this is why the title of his book was "Sectarian Mileau" ) in a Judeo-Christian mileau and the end result was Islam. It also means that Islam is the product of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and the rule of the Arabs in their own religion was marginal at best!

Did you ever wonder about this great pre-occupation of Mulims like you with the Trinity? This is what Islam is all about. It is about polemics and it is not about making you a better person. Now do you get it?

As for debating Arabic and Syriac with you it is not worth my time or your time. Is this blunt enough?

But the word God in Syriac is Alaha/Allaha (remember your little gem about "cognate" words?) However, the the word "my god" in Syriac is Eli or in Arabic Elahi ( Ilahi in the proper transliteration).

Now calling Ganesh a God and calling your Allah God does not mean that Ganesh and allah are one and the same! Therefore even if Jesus would have said: Alaha/Allah it would not have meant that Allah is the God that he was addressing. Now do you get it? I suspect that if you are Urdu speaker you will not have any difficulty understanding let us say Hindi.

Get it?

As for Jesus in the Qur'an: Your little gem about the fact that I did not quote any ayat is silly. You can open the Qur'an and look up the word Jesus and see what it says....

But here they are: "the clay birds" see Q2:253 (and your bonus here is that you can find the same little story in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas extant in Coptic which makes you wonder that Muhammad plagiarized it. After all he also "borrowed" the stories of fiction from the Syians and the greeks and called it the word of God and examples here would be the story of "The Romance of Alexander" and called it "Dhul Qaranian" the "Seven Sleeprs of Ephesus" and called it Ahl al-Kahf and had the audacity tocall such fiction the word of his Allah)

You can also find the ayat where it says that Jesus did not die period please see: Q4:157-158 (if you wish that I provide you with a linear translation I will be glad to do so)...

Do us all a favor: stop your pre-occupation with polemics and learn to accept others! Go and read a good book, see a movie, watch beautiful women passing by ... check a museum, have a glass of wine ( it is not going to kill you and remember the great Persian mystic Hafiz)) but just be a good person (in the Buddhist sense) that is what it is all about

Why do I have no like for Islam? It was the 9/11 Atrocity that did it.

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