For Muslim and tafsir and why created the creator!

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jan 16, 2007 at 08:04

My dear muslim you wrote:

>after all Allah is the creator of everything in this universe

If so then who really created your Allah? This is the very simple and very profound Aristotelian problem and the same question was posed (or so we are told in Ibn Ishaq's Sirat rasul Allah by the Jews in mecca see pages 571-572) to Muhammad and if you wish to know his answer just ask. But do not expect too much as Muhammad and his Allah were into falsafa wa tafkeer 3aqli (oh silly me you do not know any Arabic. Urdu may be? But your Allah does not know any Urdu and Islam is the religion of the Arabs only).

Then you wrote:

>...there are many tafsirs but this is expected as the Arabic language is very rich in vocabulary

One word: Bogus.

As a matter of fact early on the Muslim 3Ulama realized that no one was able to understand what the Qur'an is really saying at times and it has nothing to do with the arabic language used in the Qur'an. And now we have the famous saying: "al-tafsir lel sahaba wa al-ta1weel lel 3Ulama/jamee3"

Take the case of the story of Maria al-Qibtiya in Q66. You do not find her name in the Qur'an but this does not stop al-3Ulama from guessing that may be there was such a person as Maria al-Qibtiya (see the early form of the story in Tabari) or that the tafsir of Q66 was that Muhammad ate some 3asal nahl (honey) that was not good (see ibn kathir) and in this case there was no such person as Maria al-Qibtiya so it is either Ibn Kathir was correct or Tabari was correct and they cannot be both correct. And this is why we have ther above famous saying. So your claim that the differences in tafsir is because of the rich vocabulary of Arabic is bogus.

Take also the case of the word MLK (rasm) in surat al-fatiha we read it as: Maaliki or the "owner of" in the 1924 Cairo edition of the Qur'an but it is also read as; maliki or the "king of" as in the Tunisian 1969 Qur'an so it is either maaliki or maliki it cannot be both. So much for the unaltered Qur'an.

I even challenge you to reconstruct the life of Muhammad by reading the Qur'an only! And if we need tafsir of the Qur'an to be able to reconstruct the life of Muhammad it really means that we have no clue about what really happened in the life of Muhammad.

Take also the case of these strange letters that appear in some suras and no one has any clue to what they really mean.

I agree very much with Michael Cook that this confusion in Islamic tafseer can be due to:

1. The Quranic logias and pericopes _pre-date_ Muhammad and by 632 CE when he died no one had any clue what they really mean.

2. Or that in the 3rd century of islam when tafseer was written no one had any clue what this Qur'an is all about and this means that there were circulating logias and pericopes that were not canonized until the 3rd century of Islam. And in this case so much for the 3Uthmanic recension.

Your claim about the vocabluary is just bogus... Shame

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