What is the Koran..?

[Bink02 Profile]

When we had that "lets burn the Koran" incident awhile back , I decided to do a little research, so I went online and found a copy of the Koran and started reading it , I was amazed at the similarity between that and the bible , ( even an old dog can still learn a thing or two.. )...so I dug a little deeper and ran across a web site , that I thought , was pretty interesting .... here is a partial excerpt ... ... In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure's inner and outer roofs stumbled across a remarkable gravesite, although they did not realize it at the time. Their ignorance was excusable: mosques do not normally house graves, and this site contained no tombstones, no human remains, no funereal jewelry. It contained nothing more, in fact, than an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents -- damaged books and individual pages of Arabic text, fused together by centuries of rain and dampness, gnawed into over the years by rats and insects. Intent on completing the task at hand, the laborers gathered up the manuscripts, pressed them into some twenty potato sacks, and set them aside on the staircase of one of the mosque's minarets, where they were locked away -- and where they would probably have been forgotten once again, were it not for Qadhi Isma'il al-Akwa', then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, who realized the potential importance of the find. Al-Akwa' sought international assistance in examining and preserving the fragments, and in 1979 managed to interest a visiting German scholar, who in turn persuaded the German government to organize and fund a restoration project. Soon after the project began, it became clear that the hoard was a fabulous example of what is sometimes referred to as a "paper grave" -- in this case the resting place for, among other things, tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy scripture. In some pious Muslim circles it is held that worn-out or damaged copies of the Koran must be removed from circulation; hence the idea of a grave, which both preserves the sanctity of the texts being laid to rest and ensures that only complete and unblemished editions of the scripture will be read.

Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam's first two centuries -- they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What's more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God. .... Here is the web site ...the Atlantic online. Now be warned , it is a long read ...3 pages, but i think most of you might find it interesting . Bottom line for me , I guess , is , something profound happened in that area , a long time ago , and maybe , all of us,. just got it a little bit wrong . Peace ....

[sockpuppet Profile]

Actually, "Qur'an" means "recitation", so literally the Qur'an is the aural presentation of what we would call the text. The actual text itself is regarded as being the "Qur'an" by scholars, but the cover and bindings are considered a "mus.haf". Any book you find that is not in Arabic, by definition, is not the Qur'an- it's just a translation. That in part is why I didn't understand the fuss about the idiots burning translations on a bbq... No harm done. But what surprises me is that this finding you bring up talks about Qur'ans being buried... Now that is just weird, because unorthodox texts MUST be burned or destroyed per shariah as well as orthodox texts, OUT OF RESPECT. So I really didn't understand any of the stupidity on either side of the Qur'an burning debate...

But buried pages of the Qur'an... still very, VERY weird.

[Proto Profile]

it's weird only if you accept "the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God"

which could be compared to the orthodox Jewish belief that the Torah as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God .

and yet modern scholars claim that it was written by several different writers on several different
occasions, i tend to agree with that interpretation and i don't think the koran is any different then
the rest of the "holy" books ,they all were most likely "modified" over the years .

[zinzana Profile]

the original quran contained The Satanic Verses whice was later deleted coz they proved that mohammad was possesed by the devil and was not a real prophet
The complete text of Muhammad's episode with Satan is found in writings of the most ancient Muslim historian, Ibn Ishaq.2 The text follows with its footnotes. (T. is an abbreviation for the Muslim historian, at-Tabari.)

[Mayafan Profile]

the thirty thousand years old emerald tablet
shows the same words as showed in de bible
spoken by jezus.
makes you wondering is it all a hoax?

[zinzana Profile]

funny how the name izrael which means sead of god is translated in the quran as angel of death
fucked if i know what dictionary they are using

[Hackjames Profile]

the thirty thousand years old emerald tablet
shows the same words as showed in de bible
spoken by jezus.
makes you wondering is it all a hoax?

Pardon? When/where was this?

[zinzana Profile]

funny how the name izrael which means seed of god is translated in the quran as angel of death
fucked if i know what dictionary they are using

anyway its seed not angel of death so whats the deal excatly with tham muzzlaims trying to hijack everything and distort it to brainwash their people to hate

[Elhoff Profile]

Need to burn the Mullahs not the book.