I am going to apostate

[Emre_1974tr]

Huh ? What's the point of reading Quran if I'm not going to understand it ? I dont even know arabic ( i know how to read it but I don't understand it's meaning ) So i should just recite Quran without knowing what I am even reciting?

You must read translations with "no interpretation". No human commentary...

Only translations...

Peace

[hawk99]

Peace Sania Haque,

What do you want, what are you trying to accomplish in your spiritual journey?
What are you looking for?
What is your goal?
learn to reflect.
Meditate.
Read.
Be patient, no one owes you anything.

                                                                                   

[tutti_frutti]

salam sania haque

hope you are well

please do NOT abandon the Quran ... it is the truth from The God

keep your faith please this is primordial ! if you have issues we are here to help

if you have any specific questions or issues you need help with please let us know issue by issue and The God willing we will help you

The God is the One who gives us knoweldge ask Him to please give you knowledge and help you (He even tells us in the Quran to ask Him for knowledge)

peace

[Sania Haque]

Well... Hi yall. More or less I have gotten the same reply from everyone that it should be me who should be striving to get my own answers. I guess no one can tell us what's wrong or what's right except Allah. I am still not sure how i am going to progress but i think it would be unfair to me if I give up without trying. Some of yall are right that the path to Allah and his guidance wouldn't be easy, we have to overcome all hardships. I was scrolling through Instagram when I came across a verse from Quran that goes something like this " Do people think that they will be let go merely by saying: "We believe," and that they will not be tested " ( i dont know from which surah it is ) but this was so eye opening for me. I feel like this was my sign and push from my creator that I shouldn't give up without trying. I am still very much afraid but i dont wanna go down without giving it at least one shot. Thank yall for your kind words and pushing me towards the right path. I hope whatever Allah has planned for me it's in favour of me

[ade_cool]

Salam Sania,

[75:16] Do not move your tongue with it to hasten it.
[75:17] It is for Us to gather it into its Quran.
[75:18] Thus, when We read it, you shall follow such a Quran.
[75:19] Then it is for Us to explain it.
[75:20] Nay, but you love instant results,

You are blessed to have realized the truth about sahih hadiths books early (I was much older than you when I realized it - I kind of envy you in this regard).

Just be patient and keep studying it. 10-20 years in the future you might realize that indeed Quran is descended in stages slowly and it is done this way for a reason 


Wassalam,

[ade_cool]

What is salat ?

Salam Sania,

Maybe as starting point, let's take a look at one verse in Quran that mentions salat.

[35:18] And no bearer may carry the burden of another. And if one who is weighed down by his load calls on another to carry it, no part  of it may be carried, even if it were a relative. You will only be  able to warn those who are concerned towards their Lord while  unseen, and they AQAMU SALAT. And whoever contributes,  is contributing for himself. And to God is the final destiny.

In 35:18, God mentions that those who can be warned are only those who are concerned with their Lord AND they maintain/keep up/establish/holding SALAT. So those who are not maintaining/keeping up/establishing/holding SALAT, giving warning to them does not have any effect at all.

Now let's look at people around us:
- We can find people who were previously atheist who didn't believe in God and now become believers. So these people definitely can be warned that God exists and that we will be responsible for our deeds in this world. Since they can be warned, they must have done AQAMU SALAT.
- We can find people who were previously christians who worshiped Jesus and now become believers. So these people definitely can be warned that God cannot have son and Jesus is God's messenger (not God himself). Since they can be warned, they must have done AQAMU SALAT.

Did those people do what Sunnis are calling SALAT when they were still atheist and christian?

All right, I guess this is enough for starting point


Wassalam,

[Sania Haque]

Salam Sania,

[75:16] Do not move your tongue with it to hasten it.
[75:17] It is for Us to gather it into its Quran.
[75:18] Thus, when We read it, you shall follow such a Quran.
[75:19] Then it is for Us to explain it.
[75:20] Nay, but you love instant results,

You are blessed to have realized the truth about sahih hadiths books early (I was much older than you when I realized it - I kind of envy you in this regard).

Just be patient and keep studying it. 10-20 years in the future you might realize that indeed Quran is descended in stages slowly and it is done this way for a reason 


Wassalam,

I think all the credit goes to romance novels🤭 I was hooked, addicted and I just couldn't get rid of my reading addiction. It was my first step towards questioning the mullah. And well I was also exposed to all the things in those novels that the mainstream sectarian considered taboo 😳 and for few months i was disgusted too and then I started questioning why were they considered taboo. For many years i was searching up hadiths upon hadiths to study them and one thing was clear that hadiths came in pairs. For every hadith prohibiting something there was another hadith where the the Prophet/sahabas were being hypocrite and doing the same thing they prohibited. I never had problem rejecting the hadiths because it was my own fault that I never studied the Quran. If I had studied Quran from the starting i wouldn't have had wasted my time

[Sania Haque]

Salam Sania,

Maybe as starting point, let's take a look at one verse in Quran that mentions salat.

[35:18] And no bearer may carry the burden of another. And if one who is weighed down by his load calls on another to carry it, no part  of it may be carried, even if it were a relative. You will only be  able to warn those who are concerned towards their Lord while  unseen, and they AQAMU SALAT. And whoever contributes,  is contributing for himself. And to God is the final destiny.

In 35:18, God mentions that those who can be warned are only those who are concerned with their Lord AND they maintain/keep up/establish/holding SALAT. So those who are not maintaining/keeping up/establishing/holding SALAT, giving warning to them does not have any effect at all.

Now let's look at people around us:
- We can find people who were previously atheist who didn't believe in God and now become believers. So these people definitely can be warned that God exists and that we will be responsible for our deeds in this world. Since they can be warned, they must have done AQAMU SALAT.
- We can find people who were previously christians who worshiped Jesus and now become believers. So these people definitely can be warned that God cannot have son and Jesus is God's messenger (not God himself). Since they can be warned, they must have done AQAMU SALAT.

Did those people do what Sunnis are calling SALAT when they were still atheist and christian?

All right, I guess this is enough for starting point


Wassalam,

As i said i have had heard both the arguments for salat and I feel like I am going to continue the ritual pray. At the end of the day, even if it's not mentioned in Quran, it is still invoking and glorifying Allah and there's no harm in it. The ritual prayers have been romanticised so much that the mainstream muslims believe it's like a direct connection between them and the God. Ngl I also used to feel like that and the fact that there's a probability that this ritual prayer is not Something Allah established makes me feel a little dejected. The idea that establishing ritual prayer is like conversing with God is very appealing. I am just very sad that tahajjud prayer is a lie ((((((( 😭
Ohmygod tahajjud was such an assuring prayer tbh. And i used to pray it with so much faith and enthusiasm to get my duas fulfilled ( and they did come true ) Now when i pray it's not the same anymore. I feel there's a void and I am not able to pray with any faith anymore. I guess the the ritual prayer has lost its appeal since i have got to know that it could potentially be a lie

[Anoushirvan]

I have few questions for you if you do not mind:

Peace GL,

you have something in mind when you ask your questions, and I have something in mind when I read them, and both do not necessarily match.
So I will answer with what I have in mind.

1- Who wrote(authored) Qoran and where exactly in the middle east? Please provide some kind of solid evidence ?

Who, personally, was the author of Qur'an, we, or at least I, don't know, since he did not chose to speak much of himself in Qur'an.
On the other hand, I believe that his ideas, expressed in Qur'an, are more important than who he was.

Of course, the Islamic tradition has a lot of to say on him, but this was put in writing at least 150 years after the events, so it is a bit like historians of the 20th CE would write an account of Napoleon 1st from hearsay narrated by the great-great-...-great-grandsons of his acquaintances.
There could be some truth deeply buried inside this story but packaged and surrounded by a fictitious narrative.

The earliest chronicles that we know are not Arabic but Armenian, Greek, Syriac, or Coptic, see http://www.christianorigins.com/islamrefs.html but the true reference is Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it, from which the chronicles of this website were extracted.
(Of course, for Robert Hoyland, what those ancient chroniclers saw was emerging Islam, and on this point, I don't agree. I don't necessarily interpret those texts the same way as R. Hoyland and others do).

What is intriguing is that when those texts explicitly mention a person with the name "Muhammad", we can roughly classify those texts into one of those two categories: those who saw Muhammad as a warlord, and those who saw him as a teacher of the divine Law and knowledgeable in the Scriptures (i.e. the Jewish Scriptures), but never both at the same time.

It looks like there could have been two different persons in the first half of the 7th CE, a successful Arab warlord, and a successful Arab teacher of the Scriptures, and both figures merged later as a kind of trade-off among various traditions.


Where Qur'an was written is not easy to determine, but it sounds that it was in Hijaz, as the Muslim tradition states.
My argument is based on linguistic evidences, it's really long to explain, but let's do it.

As noted in this forum, e.g. by Dr. Ayman Mohamed and others, there exist some divergences between Qur'anic grammar and Classical Arabic grammar, e.g. verse 2:177 sabirin instead of sabirun.

Among contemporary linguists, one of the those who are reference in Arabic is Kees Versteegh who wrote a book "Arabic Language" on the origins of the Arabic language (https://books.google.fr/books?id=RiarBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)

According to K. Versteegh, on the eve of Islam in the 7th CE, the Arabic language was roughly divided into two major families of dialects, the western dialects, and the eastern dialects.
Western dialects included the Old Hijazi dialect, spoken in Hijaz.
Eastern dialects were mainly spoken in Iraq.

Veerstegh notes that Arab grammarians wrote a lot on the western variants of Arabic and less on eastern variants. He explains this by the fact that finally Classical Arabic was build on top of eastern talks, and therefore were less in the radar of grammarians.

According to Versteegh, Qur'an Arabic seems to have initially been the one of an eastern dialect that had to be adapted for writing by scribes of Hijaz. In support of this theory, Versteegh mentions that the glottal stop ('hamza'), was natural in eastern dialects but absent from western dialects.
This theory, if correct, implies that the Qur'an messenger spoke an Arabic dialect containing a glottal stop, i.e. an eastern dialect. He couldn't originate from Mecca.
In fact, this problem arose for ancient Arab grammarians, who thought to solve this issue the following way: it existed an Arabic language of prestige, the one of the classical poetry, a koiné (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koin%C3%A9_language) close to Classical Arabic and including this famous glottal stop.
Then Qur'an would have been revealed in this koiné to put it at the same standard than classical poetry.

But there is no historical trace of this so-called koiné before the 7th CE, and even this theory of the great classical pre-islamic poetry could be seriously challenged.
On this forum, Dr. Ayman Mohamed already expressed doubts about the existence of this classical pre-islamic poetry. At best it could have been folk songs.

And on the other hand, the historian Fred Donner showed in his book Narrative of the Islamic Origins (https://books.google.fr/books/about/Narratives_of_Islamic_Origins.html?id=4GEMAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y) that Qur'an may very well have originated from Hijaz.
He shows that on certain occasions, hadithes use a different vocabulary from Qur'an. For instance to name a boat, Qur'an prefers the word "fulq" over "safina", whereas hadithes use the word "safina". There is even a hadith that explains that fulq means safina.

Donner explains that the word "fulq" was sufficiently scarce in pre-islamic poetry to have been used only in Hijaz.

Qur'an mentions a lot of biblical figures like Noah, Moses, David or Solomon. On those figures, hadithes give a lot more details than Qur'an.
But Qur'an also mentions purely Arabic prophets, unknown from the biblical tradition: Salih, Hud, Shuaib. In that case, hadithes are unable to really say more than Qur'an.

By the way, all of this implies that hadithes did not originate from the same milieu, neither the same time, than Qur'an.

Based on this above, my personal conclusion is that unlike Versteegh's theory, Qur'an was written in Hijaz, by someone speaking Hijazi dialect, but its collection, shaping and review took place outside Hijaz..

This kind of conclusion is impossible within the framework of Islamic tradition and its traditional narrative, and it has far-reaching consequences, e.g. that Uthman's Qur'an is a myth.

As you can see, external considerations (early chronicles, J. Schacht on elaboration of Muslim jurisprudence, etc.), and internal linguistic considerations point to the same direction: Qur'an actually was not the book of doctrine of the early Arab rulers, at least not until Abd al-Malik at the end of the 7th CE.

2- Give a brief history of the author who was a fierce opponent of the modality of this revolution?

Again, we don't know his personal history.

We can just know his ideas expressed in Qur'an.

As quoted, by Robert Hoyland in Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, the early chronicler Jacob of Edessa mentioned that the Arab kingdom was founded around 620/621 J.C. and that Arabs started to attack Palestine.
At that time, the Muhammad of the Sira did not even emigrate to Medina.

Parvaneh Pourshariati, in Decline and Fall of the Sassanian Empire, showed that Arabs attacks on the Persian empire started much earlier than said by the Islamic tradition, around 627 or 628 J.C.
At that time, the Muhammad of the Sira was in difficulty in Medina. What were those Arabs doing to attack Persia instead of helping their Prophet in Medina ?


Around, 620 or 621 J.C. a group of Arabs started founding a kingdom. Later Arabic papyrii of the 7th CE refer to the "era of the Arabs" (and not "hijra"), and the origin date of their calendar is around 620 / 621.
Shortly after that they started attacking their neighbours.

Now, put this in perspective to what I explained above, that Qur'an was not the book of doctrine of those Arabs.

What can you start to see ?

Does Qur'an mention this strong event (the foundation of an Arab kingdom) ?
If it doesn't, how could it remain silent on this event ?

And if it does, then how does it speak of it ?

This is where you need to learn how to decode the "language" of Qur'an and this is where learning the ancient Jewish "language" of the Scriptures is the key (and here, I don't mean Hebrew here but the metaphors and concepts of the ancient Jewish thought).

On those times, the clash of the two biggest empires of the world, Byzantium and Persia and their collapsing was seen as the coming of the end of times, and the foundation of a new kingdom as a new creation.
Read for example the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel on the take of Jerusalem in 614 J.C. by the Persians (https://pages.uncc.edu/john-reeves/research-projects/trajectories-in-near-eastern-apocalyptic/sefer-zerubbabel/).

Then this new kingdom certainly needed to setup laws and justice.

This is exactly how you have to read, e.g., surah 2 in Qur'an. The story of Adam in verse 2:30 is not the story of the creation of mankind per se. It is the metaphor of the creation of a new kingdom on Earth.
Then the story is followed by that of Moses, struggling to establish divine laws for his restive people.

And so on.

Fassad, i.e. "spreading corruption", has nothing to do with a question of morals.
In the ancient Jewish thought, advent of the world to come could only happen at the height of the ordeal (i.e. fitna in Qur'an).

A drift or aberration of this idea is that if the world to come is delayed, it could be possible to hasten its coming by spreading chaos so that to be sure we are at the height of the ordeal.

Nowadays, some Islamic terrorist movements like ISIS or al-Qaida are exactly doing this: trying to help the advent of the world to come by spreading chaos.

So it was likely the same in the 7th CE. Some people certainly wanted to add chaos to chaoss in the context of collapsing empires so that the new kingdom of God could come.
And it is exactly that idea that the messenger blames in Qur'an.
For instance, in verse 2:51, it is question of the people of Moses taking the "calf", al-3ijla.
The purpose is to make hear the verb 3ajila which means to be impatient, in the context trying to hasten the world to come.

3-Was Qoran then just for that era?

Yes and no.

In the mindset of the author of Qur'an, the new creation to come was to be forever ("khalid"), until it ended and a new creation was to take place instead, e.g. 21:104, 29:19, etc.
So basically, Qur'an was meant for the new creation to come of his era.

Nowadays, the world has so much changed that legal provisions in Qur'an are completely outdated.

4- How can Qoran be correctly understood by everybody like you seem to suggest?

In the context of the 7th CE, its meaning was certainly obvious, and this explained it widely spread even though it was not imposed by the rulers.
But nowadays, you need to study a lot of history and ancient Jewish though in order to uncover its meaning.

[good logic]

Thank you Anoushirvan for your detailed answers and your big effort  to reply to my questions.
I can see that you have done a lot of reading of historical documents.
I have read some of these documents and  I sense that we can be going back and forth to establish "the evidence" of their truthfulness. So either we take, leave them or stay with a certain doubt.
Please forgive me if I do not deal with any of them,since readers can  look at them and make up their mind.

I wanted to know specifically if there was evidence from your stand point on who wrote Qoran, you say, quote:
"Who, personally, was the author of Qur'an, we, or at least I, don't know, since he did not chose to speak much of himself in Qur'an.
no the other hand, I believe that his ideas, expressed in Qur'an, are more important than who he was."

I differ here with you because  the author of Qoran  has said a lot about himself. like:

God has revealed herein the best Hadith; a book that is consistent, and points out both ways (to Heaven and Hell). The skins of those who reverence their Lord cringe therefrom, then their skins and their hearts soften up for God's message. Such is God's guidance; He bestows it upon whoever wills (to be guided). As for those sent astray by God, nothing can guide them.

This Quran could not possibly be authored by other than God. It confirms all previous messages, and provides a fully detailed scripture. It is infallible, for it comes from the Lord of the universe.

The word of your Lord is complete, in truth and justice. Nothing shall abrogate His words. He is the Hearer, the Omniscient.

A.L.R. This is a scripture whose verses have been perfected, then elucidated.* It comes from a Most Wise, Most Cognizant.

This is the absolute truth.


Then you say,quote:
"Again, we don't know his personal history.

It seems that if we do not know much we can only be making assumption.
For me I have solid proof that Qoran is authored by GOD.. I have my proof.
Thank you for your honesty .
GOD bless you.
Peace.