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I was very impressed with the Quran’s teachings about God
and found it unlike any other scripture that I had studied. This was once
again proving to me that this scripture was free of all human interpolation.
I was also very impressed with the way that it handled belief about God in
particular and its belief system as a whole.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
No Leap of Faith
Coming from a Christian background, I experienced what many
experienced concerning matters of belief and how to understand them. It
was virtually impossible to get straight answers concerning the very basics of
Christian beliefs from the pastors and priests. The reality is that the
concepts of belief were meant to be a “mystery” and belief in what one cannot
truly understand is what proved a person’s faith.
That approach simply did not sit well with me and I found
it, and still find it, illogical. It does not seem that the truth as
revealed by the Merciful and Wise God, who has given so many marvelous signs in
the creation, should lead one to have to say, as the 2nd-century North African
Church Father Tertullian is well known for saying: credo quia absurdum est,
“I believe because it is absurd.” Religion should not be simply “faith-based”—a
leap of faith, as such. Actually, it should be first as well
“knowledge-based,” so that both the heart and the mind find solace in it and
submit to it with a firm resolution. And this is what I found in Islam.
You should recall that the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy
and blessings of God be upon him, first encountered a people who were indulged
in idol worship. Furthermore, they, in general, did not believe in the Hereafter.
Some of them, it seems, did not have a clear perception of the Supreme Being.
It was in this environment that the Quran was
revealed. The Quran did not simply give them a command to believe.
No, indeed! The Quran gave them proof after proof, lesson after lesson,
sign after sign that should make anyone believe that there is a Creator and
that the Creator created humans and all of this wonderful working of the
Universe with a purpose, as He is not a foolish or ignorant Creator.
Hence, the Quran is filled with passages demanding that
humans think. In essence the message was this: Allah knows that if humans
do use their mental capabilities properly, they will come to recognize the
truth of what Allah is saying in the Quran. In fact, Islam teaches that
the recognition of such facts is innate within the souls of humans.
The fact is that one’s belief in Allah, the Quran and the
Prophet Muhammad is not based on mere emotion or a blind leap of faith.
It is based on real reasons and evidence.
Coming from my background, this boldness in propagating the
belief and challenging humans to think and ponder was nothing short of
miraculous.
Stealing from the Christians and Jews
One concept that many of the non-Muslim writers were
claiming was that the Prophet Muhammad simply stole most of his teachings from
the Jews and Christians. Take, for example, the title of Bell ’s book, The Origin of Islam in
its Christian Environment—which, by the way, if you tell any Arab that
Islam developed in a Christian environment, it would be a real shock to them!
I recognized that there were two possibilities:
(1) the Prophet Muhammad did steal his material or
(2) the revelation he received was from the same God
who sent Moses, Jesus and the earlier prophets, as the Prophet Muhammad himself
claimed. If it were the latter, it would explain why there would be much
overlap in the teachings and message. The same God sent the earlier
prophets and is simply recounting their stories again in the new revelation.
However, I immediately started to notice some glaring
differences between the Quran and the Bible, even with respect to the teachings
about God. If the Prophet Muhammad was “editing” what he was hearing from
the Bible—and by the way, at that time, there was no Bible available in
Arabic—then he was doing an excellent job.
I found that the strange teachings about God that one finds
throughout the Bible are completely and unequivocally missing from the Quran.
For the sake of brevity, only a few examples illustrating
this point shall be given.
The New International Version of Genesis 3:8-11,
reads,
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God
as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the
LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the
man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I
was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that
you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to
eat from?”
Here, God is pictured as walking in the garden in the cool
of the day. What is even more astonishing is that Adam and Eve were able
to hide from God and he had to ask, “Where are you?” If a human is able
to hide from Him in the garden, how is it that this Lord is going to have
knowledge of the sins that people commit? It would be difficult for any
human to gender in his heart the kind of love and fear of God that he should
have when he believes that his God is so faulty and weak that an event like
this could occur to him.
In Genesis 32:24-28,[1] there is the story and
literal description of Jacob wrestling with and defeating God. In verse
28, it says, “You [Jacob] have wrestled with God and with men, and you have won.”
In other words, the creator of the universe whom mankind is expected to worship
and submit to was defeated by a mere mortal in a wrestling match.
The Old Testament even pictures God as one who intended to
do evil but then repented. Exodus 32:14 states, “And the Lord repented of
the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (King James Version). It
would not be surprising for anyone to turn away from God and not consider Him
worthy of worship if He himself has to repent from His own evil.[2]
Footnotes:
[1] The New
King James Version reads: 24 Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man
wrestled with him until the breaking of day. 25 Now when He saw that He did not
prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of
Jacob's hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. 26 And He said, “Let Me
go, for the day breaks.” But he said, “I will not let You go unless You
bless me!” 27 So He said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28
And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel ; for you
have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
[2] Of
course, this begs the question of to whom is it that God must or should repent?
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