Glutamic acid (symbol Glu or E; the anionic form is known as glutamate) is an α-amino acid that is used by almost all living beings in the biosynthesis of proteins. It is a non-essential nutrient for humans, meaning that the human body can synthesize enough for its use. It is also the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the vertebrate nervous system. It serves as the precursor for the synthesis of the inhibitory gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in GABAergic neurons.
Its molecular formula is C 5H 9NO 4. Glutamic acid exists in three optically isomeric forms; the dextrorotatory L-form is usually obtained by hydrolysis of gluten or from the waste waters of beet-sugar manufacture or by fermentation. Its molecular structure could be idealized as HOOC−CH(NH 2)−(CH 2)2−COOH, with two carboxyl groups −COOH and one amino group −NH 2. However, in the solid state and mildly acidic water solutions, the molecule assumes an electrically neutralzwitterion structure −OOC−CH(NH+ 3)−(CH 2)2−COOH. It is encoded by the codons GAA or GAG.
The acid can lose one proton from its second carboxyl group to form the conjugate base, the singly-negative anionglutamate−OOC−CH(NH+ 3)−(CH 2)2−COO−. This form of the compound is prevalent in neutral solutions. The glutamate neurotransmitter plays the principal role in neural activation. This anion creates the savory umami flavor of foods and is found in glutamate flavorings such as MSG. In Europe it is classified as food additive E620. In highly alkaline solutions the doubly negative anion −OOC−CH(NH 2)−(CH 2)2−COO− prevails. The radical corresponding to glutamate is called glutamyl.
Chemistry
Ionization
When glutamic acid is dissolved in water, the amino group (−NH 2) may gain a proton (H+ ), and/or the carboxyl groups may lose protons, depending on the acidity of the medium.
In sufficiently acidic environments, the amino group gains a proton and the molecule becomes a cation with a single positive charge, HOOC−CH(NH+ 3)−(CH 2)2−COOH.
At pH values between about 2.5 and 4.1, the carboxylic acid closer to the amine generally loses a proton, and the acid becomes the neutral zwitterion−OOC−CH(NH+ 3)−(CH 2)2−COOH. This is also the form of the compound in the crystalline solid state.The change in protonation state is gradual; the two forms are in equal concentrations at pH 2.10.
At even higher pH, the other carboxylic acid group loses its proton and the acid exists almost entirely as the glutamate anion−OOC−CH(NH+ 3)−(CH 2)2−COO−, with a single negative charge overall. The change in protonation state occurs at pH 4.07. This form with both carboxylates lacking protons is dominant in the physiological pH range (7.35–7.45).
At even higher pH, the amino group loses the extra proton, and the prevalent species is the doubly-negative anion −OOC−CH(NH 2)−(CH 2)2−COO−. The change in protonation state occurs at pH 9.47.
Although they occur naturally in many foods, the flavor contributions
made by glutamic acid and other amino acids were only scientifically
identified early in the 20th century. The substance was discovered and
identified in the year 1866 by the German chemist Karl Heinrich Ritthausen, who treated wheat gluten (for which it was named) with sulfuric acid. In 1908, Japanese researcher Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University identified brown crystals left behind after the evaporation of a large amount of kombu
broth as glutamic acid. These crystals, when tasted, reproduced the
ineffable but undeniable flavor he detected in many foods, most
especially in seaweed. Professor Ikeda termed this flavor umami. He then patented a method of mass-producing a crystalline salt of glutamic acid, monosodium glutamate.
Glutamic
acid is produced on the largest scale of any amino acid, with an
estimated annual production of about 1.5 million tons in 2006. Chemical synthesis was supplanted by the aerobic fermentation of sugars and ammonia in the 1950s, with the organism Corynebacterium glutamicum (also known as Brevibacterium flavum) being the most widely used for production. Isolation and purification can be achieved by concentration and crystallization; it is also widely available as its hydrochloride salt.
Function and uses
Metabolism
Glutamate is a key compound in cellular metabolism. In humans, dietary proteins are broken down by digestion into amino acids, which serve as metabolic fuel for other functional roles in the body. A key process in amino acid degradation is transamination, in which the amino group of an amino acid is transferred to an α-ketoacid, typically catalysed by a transaminase. The reaction can be generalised as such:
A very common α-keto acid is α-ketoglutarate, an intermediate in the citric acid cycle.
Transamination of α-ketoglutarate gives glutamate. The resulting
α-ketoacid product is often a useful one as well, which can contribute
as fuel or as a substrate for further metabolism processes. Examples are
as follows:
Glutamate also plays an important role in the body's disposal of excess or waste nitrogen. Glutamate undergoes deamination, an oxidative reaction catalysed by glutamate dehydrogenase, as follows:
Ammonia (as ammonium) is then excreted predominantly as urea, synthesised in the liver.
Transamination can thus be linked to deamination, effectively allowing
nitrogen from the amine groups of amino acids to be removed, via
glutamate as an intermediate, and finally excreted from the body in the
form of urea.
Glutamate is also a neurotransmitter (see below), which makes it one of the most abundant molecules in the brain. Malignant brain tumors known as glioma or glioblastoma
exploit this phenomenon by using glutamate as an energy source,
especially when these tumors become more dependent on glutamate due to
mutations in the gene IDH1.
Extracellular glutamate in Drosophila brains has been found to regulate postsynaptic glutamate receptor clustering, via a process involving receptor desensitization. A gene expressed in glial cells actively transports glutamate into the extracellular space, while, in the nucleus accumbens-stimulating group II metabotropic glutamate receptors, this gene was found to reduce extracellular glutamate levels.
This raises the possibility that this extracellular glutamate plays an
"endocrine-like" role as part of a larger homeostatic system.
Stiff person syndrome
is a neurologic disorder caused by anti-GAD antibodies, leading to a
decrease in GABA synthesis and, therefore, impaired motor function such
as muscle stiffness and spasm. Since the pancreas has abundant GAD, a
direct immunological destruction occurs in the pancreas and the patients
will have diabetes mellitus.
Glutamic acid, being a constituent of protein, is present in foods
that contain protein, but it can only be tasted when it is present in an
unbound form. Significant amounts of free glutamic acid are present in
a wide variety of foods, including cheeses and soy sauce, and glutamic acid is responsible for umami, one of the five basic tastes of the human sense of taste. Glutamic acid often is used as a food additive and flavor enhancer in the form of its sodium salt, known as monosodium glutamate (MSG).
Nutrient
All meats, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy products, and kombu
are excellent sources of glutamic acid. Some protein-rich plant foods
also serve as sources. 30% to 35% of gluten (much of the protein in
wheat) is glutamic acid. Ninety-five percent of the dietary glutamate is
metabolized by intestinal cells in a first pass.
Plant growth
Auxigro is a plant growth preparation that contains 30% glutamic acid.
In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment
is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is
created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be
run. The name comes from the compile time and runtime division from compiled languages,
which similarly distinguishes the computer processes involved in the
creation of a program (compilation) and its execution in the target
machine (the run time).
Most programming languages
have some form of runtime system that provides an environment in which
programs run. This environment may address a number of issues including
the management of application memory, how the program accesses variables, mechanisms for passing parameters between procedures, interfacing with the operating system, and otherwise. The compiler
makes assumptions depending on the specific runtime system to generate
correct code. Typically the runtime system will have some responsibility
for setting up and managing the stack and heap, and may include features such as garbage collection, threads or other dynamic features built into the language.
Overview
Every
programming language specifies an execution model, and many implement
at least part of that model in a runtime system. One possible definition
of runtime system behavior, among others, is "any behavior not directly
attributable to the program itself". This definition includes putting
parameters onto the stack before function calls, parallel execution of
related behaviors, and disk I/O.
Most scholarly papers on runtime systems focus on the
implementation details of parallel runtime systems. A notable example
of a parallel runtime system is Cilk, a popular parallel programming model. The proto-runtime toolkit was created to simplify the creation of parallel runtime systems.
The runtime system is also the gateway through which a running program interacts with the runtime environment.
The runtime environment includes not only accessible state values, but
also active entities with which the program can interact during
execution. For example, environment variables
are features of many operating systems, and are part of the runtime
environment; a running program can access them via the runtime system.
Likewise, hardware devices such as disks or DVD drives are active
entities that a program can interact with via a runtime system.
One unique application of a runtime environment is its use within an operating system that only
allows it to run. In other words, from boot until power-down, the
entire OS is dedicated to only the application(s) running within that
runtime environment. Any other code that tries to run, or any failures
in the application(s), will break the runtime environment. Breaking the
runtime environment in turn breaks the OS, stopping all processing and
requiring a reboot. If the boot is from read-only memory, an extremely
secure, simple, single-mission system is created.
Examples of such directly bundled runtime systems include:
Between 1983 and 1984, Digital Research offered several of their business and educations applications for the IBM PC on bootable floppy diskettes bundled with SpeedStart CP/M-86, a reduced version of CP/M-86 as runtime environment.
Some stand-alone versions of Ventura Publisher (1986–1993), Artline (1988–1991), Timeworks Publisher (1988–1991) and ViewMAX (1990–1992) contained special runtime versions of Digital Research's GEM as their runtime environment.
In the late 1990s, JP Software's command line processor 4DOS was optionally available in a special runtime version to be linked with BATCOMP pre-compiled and encrypted batch jobs in order to create unmodifyable executables from batch scripts and run them on systems without 4DOS installed.
Examples
The runtime system of the C language
is a particular set of instructions inserted by the compiler into the
executable image. Among other things, these instructions manage the
process stack, create space for local variables, and copy function call
parameters onto the top of the stack.
There are often no clear criteria for determining which language
behaviors are part of the runtime system itself and which can be
determined by any particular source program. For example, in C, the
setup of the stack is part of the runtime system. It is not determined
by the semantics of an individual program because the behavior is
globally invariant: it holds over all executions. This systematic
behavior implements the execution model of the language, as opposed to implementing semantics of the particular program (in which text is directly translated into code that computes results).
This separation between the semantics of a particular program and
the runtime environment is reflected by the different ways of compiling
a program: compiling source code to an object file
that contains all the functions versus compiling an entire program to
an executable binary. The object file will only contain assembly code
relevant to the included functions, while the executable binary will
contain additional code that implements the runtime environment. The
object file, on one hand, may be missing information from the runtime
environment that will be resolved by linking.
On the other hand, the code in the object file still depends on
assumptions in the runtime system; for example, a function may read
parameters from a particular register or stack location, depending on
the calling convention used by the runtime environment.
Another example is the case of using an application programming interface (API) to interact with a runtime system. The calls to that API look the same as calls to a regular software library,
however at some point during the call the execution model changes. The
runtime system implements an execution model different from that of the
language the library is written in terms of. A person reading the code
of a normal library would be able to understand the library's behavior
by just knowing the language the library was written in. However, a
person reading the code of the API that invokes a runtime system would
not be able to understand the behavior of the API call just by knowing
the language the call was written in. At some point, via some
mechanism, the execution model stops being that of the language the call
is written in and switches over to being the execution model
implemented by the runtime system. For example, the trap instruction is
one method of switching execution models. This difference is what
distinguishes an API-invoked execution model, such as Pthreads, from a
usual software library. Both Pthreads calls and software library calls
are invoked via an API, but Pthreads behavior cannot be understood in
terms of the language of the call. Rather, Pthreads calls bring into
play an outside execution model, which is implemented by the Pthreads
runtime system (this runtime system is often the OS kernel).
As an extreme example, the physical CPU itself can be viewed as
an implementation of the runtime system of a specific assembly language.
In this view, the execution model is implemented by the physical CPU
and memory systems. As an analogy, runtime systems for higher-level
languages are themselves implemented using some other languages. This
creates a hierarchy of runtime systems, with the CPU itself—or actually
its logic at the microcode layer or below—acting as the lowest-level runtime system.
Advanced features
Some
compiled or interpreted languages provide an interface that allows
application code to interact directly with the runtime system. An
example is the Thread class in the Java language.
The class allows code (that is animated by one thread) to do things
such as start and stop other threads. Normally, core aspects of a
language's behavior such as task scheduling and resource management are not accessible in this fashion.
Higher-level behaviors implemented by a runtime system may
include tasks such as drawing text on the screen or making an Internet
connection. It is often the case that operating systems provide these kinds of behaviors as well, and when available, the runtime system is implemented as an abstraction layer
that translates the invocation of the runtime system into an invocation
of the operating system. This hides the complexity or variations in the
services offered by different operating systems. This also implies
that the OS kernel can itself be viewed as a runtime system, and that
the set of OS calls that invoke OS behaviors may be viewed as
interactions with a runtime system.
In the limit, the runtime system may provide services such as a P-code machine or virtual machine, that hide even the processor's instruction set. This is the approach followed by many interpreted languages such as AWK, and some languages like Java, which are meant to be compiled into some machine-independent intermediate representation code (such as bytecode).
This arrangement simplifies the task of language implementation and its
adaptation to different machines, and improves efficiency of
sophisticated language features such as reflection.
It also allows the same program to be executed on any machine without
an explicit recompiling step, a feature that has become very important
since the proliferation of the World Wide Web. To speed up execution, some runtime systems feature just-in-time compilation to machine code.
A modern aspect of runtime systems is parallel execution behaviors, such as the behaviors exhibited by mutex constructs in Pthreads and parallel section constructs in OpenMP. A runtime system with such parallel execution behaviors may be modularized according to the proto-runtime approach.
History
Notable early examples of runtime systems are the interpreters for BASIC and Lisp. These environments also included a garbage collector. Forth
is an early example of a language designed to be compiled into
intermediate representation code; its runtime system was a virtual
machine that interpreted that code. Another popular, if theoretical,
example is Donald Knuth's MIX computer.
In C
and later languages that supported dynamic memory allocation, the
runtime system also included a library that managed the program's memory
pool.
In the object-oriented programming languages, the runtime system was often also responsible for dynamic type checking and resolving method references.
In computing and computer programming, exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence of exceptions – anomalous or exceptional conditions requiring special processing – during the execution of a program. In general, an exception breaks the normal flow of execution and executes a pre-registered exception handler; the details of how this is done depend on whether it is a hardware or software exception and how the software exception is implemented.
Exceptions are defined by different layers of a computer system, and the typical layers are CPU-defined interrupts, operating system (OS)-defined signals, programming language-defined
exceptions. Each layer requires different ways of exception handling
although they may be interrelated, e.g. a CPU interrupt could be turned
into an OS signal. Some exceptions, especially hardware ones, may be
handled so gracefully that execution can resume where it was
interrupted.
The definition of an exception is based on the observation that each procedure has a precondition, a set of circumstances for which it will terminate "normally". An exception handling mechanism allows the procedure to raise an exception if this precondition is violated, for example if the procedure has been called on an abnormal set of arguments. The exception handling mechanism then handles the exception.
The precondition, and the definition of exception, is subjective.
The set of "normal" circumstances is defined entirely by the
programmer, e.g. the programmer may deem division by zero to be
undefined, hence an exception, or devise some behavior such as returning
zero or a special "ZERO DIVIDE" value (circumventing the need for
exceptions). Common exceptions include an invalid argument (e.g. value is outside of the domain of a function), an unavailable resource (like a missing file, a network drive error, or out-of-memory errors), or that the routine has detected a normal condition that requires special handling, e.g., attention, end of file.
Social pressure is a major influence on the scope of exceptions and use
of exception-handling mechanisms, i.e. "examples of use, typically
found in core libraries, and code examples in technical books, magazine
articles, and online discussion forums, and in an organization’s code
standards".
Exception handling solves the semipredicate problem,
in that the mechanism distinguishes normal return values from erroneous
ones. In languages without built-in exception handling such as C,
routines would need to signal the error in some other way, such as the
common return code and errno pattern. Taking a broad view, errors can be considered to be a proper subset of exceptions, and explicit error mechanisms such as errno can be considered (verbose) forms of exception handling.
The term "exception" is preferred to "error" because it does not imply
that anything is wrong - a condition viewed as an error by one procedure
or programmer may not be viewed that way by another.
The term "exception" may be misleading because its connotation of
"anomaly" indicates that raising an exception is abnormal or unusual, when in fact raising the exception may be a normal and usual situation in the program. For example, suppose a lookup function for an associative array
throws an exception if the key has no value associated. Depending on
context, this "key absent" exception may occur much more often than a
successful lookup.
The first hardware exception handling was found in the UNIVAC I from 1951.
Arithmetic overflow executed two instructions at address 0 which could transfer control or fix up the result.
Software exception handling developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Exception
handling was subsequently widely adopted by many programming languages
from the 1980s onward.
There is no clear consensus as to the exact meaning of an exception with respect to hardware. From the implementation point of view, it is handled identically to an interrupt: the processor halts execution of the current program, looks up the interrupt handler in the interrupt vector table for that exception or interrupt condition, saves state, and switches control.
Exception handling in the IEEE 754floating-point
standard refers in general to exceptional conditions and defines an
exception as "an event that occurs when an operation on some particular
operands has no outcome suitable for every reasonable application. That
operation might signal one or more exceptions by invoking the default
or, if explicitly requested, a language-defined alternate handling."
By default, an IEEE 754 exception is resumable and is handled by
substituting a predefined value for different exceptions, e.g. infinity
for a divide by zero exception, and providing status flags for later checking of whether the exception occurred (see C99 programming language
for a typical example of handling of IEEE 754 exceptions). An
exception-handling style enabled by the use of status flags involves:
first computing an expression using a fast, direct implementation;
checking whether it failed by testing status flags; and then, if
necessary, calling a slower, more numerically robust, implementation.
The IEEE 754 standard uses the term "trapping" to refer to the
calling of a user-supplied exception-handling routine on exceptional
conditions, and is an optional feature of the standard. The standard
recommends several usage scenarios for this, including the
implementation of non-default pre-substitution of a value followed by
resumption, to concisely handle removable singularities.
The default IEEE 754 exception handling behaviour of resumption
following pre-substitution of a default value avoids the risks inherent
in changing flow of program control on numerical exceptions. For
example, the 1996 Cluster spacecraft launch ended in a catastrophic explosion due in part to the Ada exception handling policy of aborting computation on arithmetic error. William Kahan claims the default IEEE 754 exception handling behavior would have prevented this.
In programming languages
In computer programming, several language mechanisms exist for exception handling. The term exception
is typically used to denote a data structure storing information about
an exceptional condition. One mechanism to transfer control, or raise an exception, is known as a throw; the exception is said to be thrown. Execution is transferred to a catch.
In user interfaces
Front-end web development frameworks, such as React and Vue, have introduced error handling mechanisms where errors propagate up the user interface (UI) component hierarchy, in a way that is analogous to how errors propagate up the call stack in executing code.
Here the error boundary mechanism serves as an analogue to the typical
try-catch mechanism. Thus a component can ensure that errors from its
child components are caught and handled, and not propagated up to parent
components.
For example, in Vue, a component would catch errors by implementing errorCaptured
The Quran
is viewed to be the scriptural foundation of Islam and is believed by
Muslims to have been sent down by Allah (God) and revealed to Muhammad by the angel Jabreel (Gabriel). The Quran has been subject to criticism
both in the sense of being the subject of an interdisciplinary field of
study where secular, (mostly) Western scholars set aside doctrines of
its divinity, perfection, unchangeability, etc. accepted by Muslim
Islamic scholars; but also in the sense of being found fault with
by those — including Christian missionaries and other skeptics hoping
to convert Muslims — who argue it is not divine, not perfect, and/or not
particularly morally elevated.
In "critical-historical study" scholars (such as John Wansbrough, Joseph Schacht, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook) seek to investigate and verify the Quran's origin, text, composition, history, examining questions, puzzles, difficult text, etc. as they would non-sacred ancient texts.
The most common criticisms concern various pre-existing sources that
Quran relies upon, internal consistency, clarity and ethical teachings.
According to Toby Lester, many Muslims find not only the religious
fault-finding but also Western scholarly investigation of textual
evidence "disturbing and offensive".
According
to Islamic tradition, which criticism may question or contradict, the
Quran followed a passage from heaven down to the angel Gabriel (Jabreel) who revealed it in the seventh century CE over 23 years to an Hejazi Arab trader, Muhammad, who became the Prophet of Islam.
Muhammad shared these revelations -- which brought uncompromising monotheism to humanity -- with his companions who wrote them down and/or memorized them. From these memories and scraps, a standard edition was carefully complied and edited under the supervision of Caliph Uthman not long after Muhammad's death.
Copies of this codex or "Mus'haf"
were sent to the major centers of what was by this time a rapidly
expanding empire, and all other incomplete or "imperfect" variants of
the Quranic revelation were ordered by Uthman to be destroyed.
In the next few centuries, the religion and empire of Islam solidified,
and an enormous body of religious literature and laws were developed,
including commentaries/exegeses (Tafsir) to explain the Quran.
Thus, according to Islamic teaching, it was insured that the
wording of the Quranic text available today corresponds exactly to the
literal, infallible, "perfect, timeless", "absolute" unadulterated word of God revealed to Muhammad. That revelation in turn is identical to an eternal “mother of the book” the archetype/prototype of the Quran. This was not created/written by God, but an attribute of Him, co-eternal and kept with Him in heaven.
Muslim views of criticism
For
Muslims the contents of the Quran have been "a source of doctrine, law,
poetic and spiritual inspiration, solace, zeal, knowledge, and mystical
experience." "Millions and millions" of whom "refer to the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations", and in recent years many consider it the source of scientific knowledge. Revered by pious Muslims as "the holy of holies", whose sound moves some to "tears and esctasy", it is the physical symbol of the faith, the text often used as a charm
on occasions of birth, death, marriage. The traditional Muslim
understanding of the Quran is not that it is simply divinely inspired,
but the literal word of God; the last and complete message from God, from his final messenger (Muhammad) superseding the Old and New Testament and purified of "accretions of Judaism and Christianity".
Muslims have developed their own Quranic studies or "Quranic sciences" (‘ulum al Qur’an) over the centuries, following the Quranic encouragement "Will they not contemplate the Quran?"(4:82). There are two types of exegesis to explain and interpret the Quran: tafsir (literal interpretation) and ta’wil (allegorical interpretation). Other issues studied are kalimat dakhila (the investigation of the foreign origin of some Quranic terms); naskh (studying contradictory verses
to determine which should be abrogated in favor of the other), study of
"occasions of revelation" (connecting Quranic verses with "episodes of
Muhammad's career based on hadith and biographies of him -- which are
known as sira), chronology of revelation, the division of quranic chapters (surahs) into "Meccan surah" (those believed to have been revealed in Mecca before the hijra) and "Medinan surah (revealed afterward in the city of Medina). According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, these traditional religious sciences
"provide
all the answers to questions posed by modern western orientalists about
the structure and text of the Koran, except, of course, those questions
that issue from the rejection of the Divine Origin of the Koran and its
reduction to a work by the prophet. Once the revealed nature of the
Koran is rejected, then problems arise. But these are problems of
orientalist that arise not from scholarship but from a certain
theological and philosophical position that is usually hidden under the
guise of rationality and objective scholarship. For Muslims there has
never been the need to address these 'problems' ..."
In contrast, many of the original non-Muslim scholars of the Quran
worked "in the context of an openly declared hostility" between
Christianity and Islam, with an eye to debunking Islam or proselytizing
against it. The nineteenth-century orientalist and colonial administrator William Muir,
wrote that the Quran was one of "the most stubborn enemies of
Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known."
In the twentieth century, scholars of the early Soviet Union working in the context of dialectical materialism and fighting the "opium of the people"
went on about how Muhammad and the first Caliphs were "mythical
figures" and that "the motive force" of early Islam was "the mercantile
bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina" and "slave-owning" Arab society.
At least in part in reaction, some Muslim opposition to "The Orientalist enterprise of Qur'anic studies" has been intense. In 1987 Muslim critic S. Parvez Manzoor, denounced it as conceived in "the polemical marshes of medieval Christianity".
At the greatest hour of his worldly-triumph, the Western
man, coordinating the powers of the State, Church and Academia, launched
his most determined assault on the citadel of Muslim faith. All the
aberrant streaks of his arrogant personality—its reckless rationalism,
its world-domineering phantasy and its sectarian fanaticism—joined in an
unholy conspiracy to dislodge the Muslim Scripture from its firmly
entrenched position as the epitome of historic authenticity and moral
unassailability.
In recent twenty first century, some Muslim Islamic scholars have
warned against lending "legitimacy to non-Muslim scholars’ understanding
about Islam" by engaging with them, and that even a rigorously
scholarly academic work on Islam such as the BrillEncyclopedia of Islam "is filled with insults and disparaging remarks about the Qur’an".
Textual criticism of the Quran, the structure and style of the surahs, has been opposed on grounds that it questions the divine origin of the Quran. Seyyed Hossein Nasr has denounced the “rationalist and agnostic methods of higher criticism” as similar to dissecting and subjecting Jesus to “modern medical techniques” to determine whether he was born miraculously or was the son of Joseph, In his influential Orientalism, Edward Said declared Western study of the Middle East — including the religion of Islam — inextricably tied to Western Imperialism, making the study inherently political and servile to power.
These complaints have been compared to those of other religious
conservatives (Christian) against textual historical criticism of their
own sacred text (the Bible).
Non-Muslim scholar Patricia Crone
acknowledges the call for humility towards the scared of other cultures
— "who are you to tamper with their legacy?" — but defends challenging
of orthodox views of Islamic history, saying "we Islamicists are not
trying to destroy anyone's faith."
Not all Muslims oppose criticism; Roslan Abdul-Rahim writes that
critical study of the Quran "will not hurt the Muslims; it will only
help them" because "no amount of criticism can change that fact" that
the "Quran is truly a divine piece of work as the Muslim theology
stipulates and as the Muslims have so strongly defended".
Some scholars have suffered for attempting to apply literary or
philological techniques to the Quran, such as Egyptian "Dean of Arabic
Literature" Taha Husain, who lost his post at Cairo University in 1931, Egyptian professor Mohammad Ahmad Khalafallah, whose dissertation was rejected, a non-Muslim German professor Günter Lüling (dismissed), and Egyptian professor Nasr Abu Zaid, who was forced to seek exile in Europe after being declared an apostate and threatened with death for violating a "right of God".
Non-Muslim views
Not
all non-Muslim scholars of Islam are interested in critical
examination/analysis. Patricia Crone and Ibn Rawandi argue that Western
scholarship lost its critical attitude to the sources of the origins of
Islam around the time of the First World War." Andrew Rippin has
expressed surprise that
students acquainted with approaches such as source criticism, oral-formulaic composition, literary analysis and structuralism,
all quite commonly employed in the study of Judaism and Christianity,
such naive historical study seems to suggest that Islam is being
approached with less than academic candor.
Scholars have complained about "'dogmatic Islamophilia' of most Arabists" (Karl Binswanger);
that in one western country (France as of 1983) "it is no longer
acceptable to criticize Islam or the Arab countries" (Jacque Ellul); that among some historians ("like Norman Daniel") understanding of Islam "has given way to apologetics pure and simple" (Maxime Rodinson).
However, in the 1970s, what has been described as a "wave of
skeptical scholars" challenged a great deal of the received wisdom in
Islamic studies.
They argued that the Islamic historical tradition had been greatly
corrupted in transmission. That there was a lack of supporting evidence
consistent with the traditional narrative, such as the lack of
archaeological evidence, and discrepancies with non-Muslim literary
sources.They
tried to correct or reconstruct the early history of Islam from other,
presumably more reliable, sources such as coins, inscriptions, and
non-Islamic sources.
Uniform Quran
Although there is some disagreement,
the collection of verses for the compilation of a written Quran is said to have begun under Caliph Abu Bakr.
The last recensions to make an official and uniform Quran in a single dialect were effected under Caliph Uthman
(644–656) starting some twelve years after the Prophet's death and
finishing twenty-four years after the effort began, with all other
existing personal and individual copies and dialects of the Quran being
burned:
When they had copied the sheets,
Uthman sent a copy to each of the main centres of the empire with the
command that all other Qur'an materials, whether in single sheet form,
or in whole volumes, were to be burned.
It is traditionally believed the earliest writings had the advantage
of being checked by people who already knew the text by heart, for they
had learned it at the time of the revelation itself and had subsequently
recited it constantly. Since the official compilation was completed two
decades after Muhammad's death, the Uthman text has been scrupulously
preserved. Bucaille believed that this did not give rise to any problems
of this Quran's authenticity.
Despite caliphUthman's
reported work to standardized the Quran, and the belief by many Muslims
that it "exists exactly as it had been revealed to the Prophet; not a word - nay, not a dot of it - has been changed" (Abul A'la Maududi), there are not one but ten different recognized versions of the Quran, known as qiraʼat (meaning 'recitations or readings').
These exist because the Quran was originally spread and passed down
orally, and though there was a written text, it did not include most
vowels or distinguish between many consonants. Consequently, although the differences between the Qira'at are slight and only one version of the ten is in wide use, the differences between the "readings" go beyond pronunciation into consonants and meaning.
In addition to the Qira'at there are also Ahruf—both being readings of the Quran with "unbroken chain(s) of transmission going back to the Prophet", but all but one ahruf allegedly being forgotten after Uthman standardized the Quran. There are multiple views on the nature of the ahruf and how they relate to the qira'at, the general view being that caliphUthman eliminated all of the ahruf except one during the 7th century CE. The ten qira'at were canonized by Islamic scholars in early centuries of Islam.
Prior to this period, there is evidence that the unpointed text could be read in different ways, with different meanings.
Even after centuries of Islamic scholarship, the variants of the Qira'at have been said to continue "to astound and puzzle" Islamic scholars (Ammar Khatib and Nazir Khan), and make up "the most difficult topics" in Quranic studies (according to Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi). While in theory Qira'at include differences in consonantal diacritics (i‘jām), vowel marks (ḥarakāt), but not the consonantal skeleton (rasm) which should be uniform in all Qira'at, there are differences in (rasm). resulting in materially different readings (see examples).
Examples of differences between two Qira'at:
Ḥafs ʿan ʿĀṣim and Warš ʿan Nāfiʿ for eight verses
رواية ورش عن نافع
رواية حفص عن عاصم
Ḥafs
Warsh
verse
يَعْمَلُونَ
تَعْمَلُونَ
you do
they do
Al-Baqara 2:85
مَا تَنَزَّلُ
مَا نُنَزِّلُ
We do not send down...
they do not come down...
Al-Ḥijr 15:8
لِيَهَبَ
لِأَهَبَ
that I may bestow
that He may bestow
Maryam 19:19
قُل
قَالَ
he said
Say!
Al-Anbiyā' 21:4
كَثِيرًا
كَبِيرًا
mighty
multitudinous
Al-Aḥzāb 33:68
بِمَا
فَبِمَا
then it is what
it is what
Al-Shura 42:30
نُدْخِلْهُ
يُدْخِلْهُ
He makes him enter
We make him enter
Al-Fatḥ 48:17
عِندَ
عِبَٰدُ
who are the slaves of the Beneficent
who are with the Beneficent
al-Zukhruf 43:19
While the change of voice or pronouns in these verse may seem confusing, it is very common in the Quran and found even in the same verse. (It is known as iltifāt.)
Q.2:85 the "you" in Hafs refers to the actions of more than one
person and the "They" in Warsh is also referring to the actions of more
than one person.
Q.15:8 "We" refers to God in Hafs and the "They" in Warsh refers to what is not being sent down by God (The Angels).
Q.19:19 (li-ʾahaba v. li-yahaba) is a well known difference, both
for the theological interest in the alternative pronouns said to have
been uttered by the angel, and for requiring unusual orthography.
Q.48:17, the "He" in Hafs is referring to God and the "We" in Warsh
is also referring to God, this is due to the fact that God refers to
Himself in both the singular form and plural form by using the royal
"We".
Q.43:19 shows an example of a consonantal dotting difference that gives a different root word, in this case ʿibādu v. ʿinda.
The second set of examples below compares the other canonical
readings with that of Ḥafs ʿan ʿĀṣim. These are not nearly as widely
read today, though all are available in print and studied for
recitation.
There is a hadith related by Tabarī minimizing confusion over Qira'at or Ahruf. Tabarī
prefaces his early commentary on the Quran illustrating that the
precise way to read the verses of the sacred text was not fixed even in
the day of the Prophet. Two men disputing a verse in the text asked Ubay ibn Ka'b
to mediate, and he disagreed with them, coming up with a third reading.
To resolve the question, the three went to Muhammad. He asked first
one-man to read out the verse, and announced it was correct. He made the
same response when the second alternative reading was delivered. He
then asked Ubay to provide his own recital, and, on hearing the third
version, Muhammad also pronounced it 'Correct!'. Noting Ubay's
perplexity and inner thoughts, Muhammad then told him, 'Pray to God for
protection from the accursed Satan.'
In 1972, a cache of 12,000 ancient Quranic parchment fragments was discovered in a mosque in Sana'a, Yemen – commonly known as the Sana'a manuscripts.
Of the fragments, all except 1500–2000 were assigned to 926 distinct Quranic manuscripts as of 1997.
The manuscript is a palimpsest and comprises two layers of text, both of which are written in the Hijazi script. The upper text largely conforms to the standard 'Uthmanic' Quran in text and in the standard order of chapters (suwar, singular sūrah),
whereas the lower text (the original text that was erased and written
over by the upper text, but can still be read with the help of
ultraviolet light and computer processing) contains many variations from
the standard Uthmani text, and the sequence of its chapters corresponds
to no known Quranic order.
For example, in sura 2, verse 87, the lower text has wa-qaffaynā 'alā āthārihi whereas the standard text has wa-qaffaynā min ba'dihi. The Sana'a manuscript has exactly the same verses and the same order of verses as the standard Quran. The order of the suras in the Sana'a codex is different from the order in the standard Quran. Such variants are similar to the ones reported for the Quran codices of Companions such as Ibn Masud and Ubay ibn Ka'b.
However, variants occur much more frequently in the Sana'a codex, which
contains "by a rough estimate perhaps twenty-five times as many [as Ibn
Mas'ud's reported variants]".
On the basis of studies of the trove of Quranic manuscripts discovered in Sana'a, Gerd R. Puin
concluded that the Quran as we have it is a 'cocktail of texts', some
perhaps preceding Muhammad's day, and that the text as we have it
evolved. However, other scholars, such as Asma Hilali presumed that the San'aa palimpsest seems to be written down by a learning scribe as a form of "exercise"
in the context of a "school exercise", which explains a potential
reason of variations in this text from the standard Quran Mushafs
available today. Another way to explain these variations is that San'aa manuscript may have been part of a surviving copy of QuranicMus'haf which escapedc x the 3rd caliph Uthman's attempt to destroy all the dialects (Ahruf) of Quran except the Quraishi one (in order to unite the Muslims of that time).
The early Arabic script transcribed 28 consonants, of which only 6
can be readily distinguished, the remaining 22 having formal
similarities which means that what specific consonant is intended can
only be determined by context. It was only with the introduction of Arabic diacritics
some centuries later, that an authorized vocalization of the text, and
how it was to be read, was established and became canonical.
In 2015, the University of Birmingham disclosed that scientific tests may show a Quran manuscript in its collection
as one of the oldest known and believe it was written close to the time
of Muhammad. The findings in 2015 of the Birmingham Manuscripts lead
Joseph E. B. Lumbard, Assistant Professor of Classical Islam, Brandeis
University, to comment:
These recent empirical findings are
of fundamental importance. They establish that as regards the broad
outlines of the history of the compilation and codification of the
Quranic text, the classical Islamic sources are far more reliable than
had hitherto been assumed. Such findings thus render the vast majority
of Western revisionist theories regarding the historical origins of the
Quran untenable.
Tests by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit indicated with a
probability of more than 94 percent that the parchment dated from 568 to
645. Dr Saud al-Sarhan, Director of Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, questions whether the parchment might have been reused as a palimpsest, and also noted that the writing had chapter separators and dotted verse endings – features in Arabic scripts which are believed not to have been introduced to the Quran until later.
Al-Sarhan's criticisms was affirmed by several Saudi-based experts in
Quranic history, who strongly rebut any speculation that the
Birmingham/Paris Quran could have been written during the lifetime of
the Prophet Muhammad. They emphasize that while Muhammad was alive,
Quranic texts were written without chapter decoration, marked verse
endings or use of coloured inks; and did not follow any standard
sequence of surahs. They maintain that those features were introduced
into Quranic practice in the time of the Caliph Uthman, and so the
Birmingham leaves could have been written later, but not earlier.
Professor Süleyman Berk of the faculty of Islamic studies at Yalova University has noted the strong similarity between the script of the Birmingham leaves and those of a number of Hijazi Qurans in the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, which were brought to Istanbul from the Great Mosque of Damascus
following a fire in 1893. Professor Berk recalls that these manuscripts
had been intensively researched in association with an exhibition on
the history of the Quran, The Quran in its 1,400th Year held in Istanbul in 2010, and the findings published by François Déroche as Qur'ans of the Umayyads in 2013. In that study, the Paris Quran, BnF Arabe 328(c),
is compared with Qurans in Istanbul, and concluded as having been
written "around the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the
eighth century."
In December 2015 Professor François Déroche of the Collège de France
confirmed the identification of the two Birmingham leaves with those of
the Paris Qur'an BnF Arabe 328(c), as had been proposed by Dr Alba
Fedeli. Prof. Deroche expressed reservations about the reliability of
the radiocarbon dates proposed for the Birmingham leaves, noting
instances elsewhere in which radiocarbon dating had proved inaccurate in
testing Qurans with an explicit endowment date; and also that none of
the counterpart Paris leaves had yet been carbon-dated. Jamal bin Huwaireb,
managing director of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, has
proposed that, were the radiocarbon dates to be confirmed, the
Birmingham/Paris Qur'an might be identified with the text known to have
been assembled by the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, between 632 and 634 CE.
Further research and findings
Critical
research of historic events and timeliness of eyewitness accounts
reveal the effort of later traditionalists to consciously promote, for
nationalistic purposes, the centrist concept of Mecca and prophetic
descent from Ismail, in order to grant a Hijazi orientation to the emerging religious identity of Islam:
For, our attempt to date the relevant traditional material confirms on the whole the conclusions which Schacht arrived at from another field, specifically the tendency of isnads to grow backwards.
In their book 1977 Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, written before more recent discoveries of early Quranic material, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook
challenge the traditional account of how the Quran was compiled,
writing that "there is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran
in any form before the last decade of the seventh century." Crone, Wansbrough, and Nevo argued, that all the primary sources which
exist are from 150 to 300 years after the events which they describe,
and thus are chronologically far removed from those events.
It is generally acknowledged that the work of Crone and Cook was a fresh approach in its reconstruction of early Islamic history, but the theory has been almost universally rejected.
Van Ess has dismissed it stating that "a refutation is perhaps
unnecessary since the authors make no effort to prove it in detail ...
Where they are only giving a new interpretation of well-known facts,
this is not decisive. But where the accepted facts are consciously put
upside down, their approach is disastrous."
R. B. Serjeant states that "[Crone and Cook's thesis]... is not only
bitterly anti-Islamic in tone, but anti-Arabian. Its superficial fancies
are so ridiculous that at first one wonders if it is just a 'leg pull',
pure 'spoof'." Francis Edward Peters
states that "Few have failed to be convinced that what is in our copy
of the Quran is, in fact, what Muhammad taught, and is expressed in his
own words".
In 2006, legal scholar Liaquat Ali Khan claimed that Crone and Cook later explicitly disavowed their earlier book.
Patricia Crone in an article published in 2006 provided an update on
the evolution of her conceptions since the printing of the thesis in
1976. In the article she acknowledges that Muhammad existed as a
historical figure and that the Quran represents "utterances" of his that
he believed to be revelations. However she states that the Quran may
not be the complete record of the revelations. She also accepts that
oral histories and Muslim historical accounts cannot be totally
discounted, but remains skeptical about the traditional account of the Hijrah and the standard view that Muhammad and his tribe were based in Mecca. She describes the difficulty in the handling of the hadith
because of their "amorphous nature" and purpose as documentary evidence
for deriving religious law rather than as historical narratives.
The author of the Apology of al-Kindy Abd al-Masih ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (not the famed philosopher al-Kindi)
claimed that the narratives in the Quran were "all jumbled together and
intermingled" and that this was "an evidence that many different hands
have been at work therein, and caused discrepancies, adding or cutting
out whatever they liked or disliked".
Bell and Watt suggested that the variation in writing style throughout
the Quran, which sometimes involves the use of rhyming, may have
indicated revisions to the text during its compilation. They claimed
that there were "abrupt changes in the length of verses; sudden changes
of the dramatic situation, with changes of pronoun from singular to
plural, from second to third person, and so on".
At the same time, however, they noted that "[i]f any great changes by
way of addition, suppression or alteration had been made, controversy
would almost certainly have arisen; but of that there is little trace."
They also note that "Modern study of the Quran has not in fact raised
any serious question of its authenticity. The style varies, but is
almost unmistakable."
The Quran itself states that its revelations are themselves "miraculous 'signs'"—inimitable (I'jaz) in their eloquence and perfection
and proof of the authenticity of Muhammad's prophethood. (For example 2:2, 17:88-89, 29:47, 28:49)
Several verses remark on how the verses of the book set clear or make things clear, and are in "pure and clear" Arabic language.
At the same time, (most Muslims believe) some verses of the Quran have been abrogated (naskh)
by others and these and other verses have sometimes been revealed in
response or answer to questions by followers or opponents.
Not all early Muslims agreed with this consensus. Muslim-turned-skeptic Ibn al-Rawandi (d.911) dismissed the Quran as "not the speech of someone with wisdom, contain[ing] contradictions, errors and absurdities".
In response to claims that the Quran is a miracle, 10th-century physician and polymath Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi wrote (according to his opponent Abu Hatim Ahmad ibn Hamdan al-Razi),
You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and
available, namely, the Koran. You say: "Whoever denies it, let him
produce a similar one." Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar,
from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets,
which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more
succinctly. They convey the meaning better and their rhymed prose is in
better meter. ... By God what you say astonishes us! You are talking
about a work which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is
full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or
explanation. Then you say: "Produce something like it"?!
Early Western scholars also often attacked the literary merit of the Quran.
Orientalist Thomas Carlyle,
called the Quran "toilsome reading and a wearisome confused jumble,
crude, incondite" with "endless iterations, long-windedness,
entanglement" and "insupportable stupidity". Salomon Reinach wrote that this book warrants "little merit ... from a literary point of view".
More specifically, "peculiarities" in the text have been alleged.
Iranian rationalist and scholar Ali Dashti
points out that before its perfection became an issue of Islamic
doctrine, early Muslim scholar Ibrahim an-Nazzam "openly acknowledged
that the arrangement and syntax" of the Quran was less than
"miraculous".
Ali Dashti states that "more than one hundred" aberrations from
"the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted" in the Quran.
sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible
without the aid or commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic
words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and
verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and
number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes
have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often
remote from the subjects.
Scholar Gerd R. Puin puts the number of unclear verses much higher:
The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or
'clear,' but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth
sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims—and
Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a
fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has
caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is
not comprehensible—if it can't even be understood in Arabic—then it's
not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims
repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic
will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.
Scholar of the Semitic languages Theodor Noldeke collected a large
quantity of morphological and syntactic grammatical forms in the Quran that "do not enter into the general linguistic system of Arabic".
Alan Dundes points out the Quran itself denies that there can be errors
within it, "If it were from other than Allah, they would surely have
found in it many contradictions". (Q.4:82)
Obscure words and phrases
The
Quran "sometimes makes dramatic shifts in style, voice, and subject
matter from verse to verse, and it assumes a familiarity with language,
stories, and events that seem to have been lost even to the earliest of
Muslim exegetes", according to journalist and scholar Toby Lester.
The Quran is known to contain a number of words the meaning of
which is not clear and for which Muslim commentators (and Western
scholars) have created "a welter of competing guesses".
qaḍb (8:28) possible meaning "green herbs" of some kind.
an yadin (9:29) usually translated as "out of hand" as a means of payment, but what this means has not been agreed upon.
ar-raqim (18:9)
quesses by exegetes include "books", "inscription", "tablet", "rock",
"numbers", or "building", or a proper name for "a village, or a valley, a
mountain, or even a dog".
Michael Cook argues that there may be more obscure words than has been recognized.
Quran106:1–2: "For the accustomed security of the Quraysh - Their accustomed security [in] the caravan of winter and summer",
Contains the word ilaf—interpreted to mean arrangements with local tribes for protection ("accustomed security"); and the word rihla—thought
to mean the caravan journey. According to hadith, the foundation of
Mecca's trade were two annual commercial caravans by the Quraysh tribe
from Mecca to Yemen and back in the winter and another to Syria in the
summer. But the Arabic word rihla simply means journey, not
commercial travel or caravan; and there was uncertainty among
commentators as to how to read the vowels in ilaf or how the term was defined. Consequently Cook wonders if Quran106:1–2
is brief mention of Mecca's basic commerce or if the hadith about the
two caravans (many hadith being known to be fabricated) was made up to
explain Quranic passages whose meaning was otherwise unclear.
Explanations include that God is "making the point that He knows something we don't" (for example qāriʿah in Q:101), or that in some cases the words are used to rhyme a verse.("The use of many rare words and new forms may be traced to the same cause (comp. especially Q.9:8-9, 11, 16)."
Arabic words
Several verse—Q.16:103, 12:2, and 42:7 -- state the Quran is revealed in Arabic, pure and clear.
However the scholar al-Suyuti (1445–1505 C.E.) enumerated 107 foreign words in the Quran, and Arthur Jeffery found about 275 words that of Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic, Perisan, and Greek origin according to Ibn Warraq. Andrew Rippin states that not only Orientalists but medieval Arabs admitted the Quran contained foreign words. Al-Jawālīqī (Abu Mansur Mauhub al-Jawaliqi),
a 12-century Arab grammarian, spoke of "'foreign words found in the
speech of the ancient Arabs and employed in the Quran' without any
cautious restrictions."
Defending against these charges, Ansar Al 'Adl of "call to monotheism"
states that "pure arabic" actually really refers to the "clarity and
eloquence" of the arabic language in the Quran, and that the foreign
words "had actually been naturalized and become regular Arabic words
before they came to be used in the Qur'an"
"Mystery letters"
Another
mystery is why about one quarter of surahs of the Quran begin with a
group of between one and four letters that do not form words. These are
known as Muqattaʿat ('disconnected letters'):
Alif Lam Ra – Q. 10, 11, 12, 14, 15.
Alif Lam Mim – Q. 2, 3, 29, 30, 31, 32.
Alif Lam Mim Ra – Q. 13.
Alif Lam Mim Sad – Q. 7.
Ha Mim – Q. 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46.
Ha Mim ‘Ain Sin Qaf – Q. 42.
Sad – Q. 38.
Ta Sin – Q. 27.
Ta Sin Mim – Q. 26, 28.
Ta Ha – Q. 20.
Qaf – Q. 50.
Ka Ha Ya 'Ain Sad – Q. 19.
Nun – Q. 68.
Ya Sin – Q. 36.
According to the Muslim translator and expositor Muhammad Asad:
"The significance of these letter-symbols has perplexed
the commentators from the earliest times. There is no evidence of the
Prophet's having ever referred to them in any of his recorded
utterances, nor any of his Companions
having ever asked him for an explanation. None the less, it is
established beyond any possibility of doubt that all the Companions -
obviously following the example of the Prophet - regarded the muqatta'at
as integral parts of the suras to which they are prefixed, and used to
recite them accordingly: a fact which disposes effectively of the
suggestion advanced by some Western orientalists that these letters may
be no more than the initials of the scribes who wrote down the
individual revelations at the Prophet's dictation, or of the Companions
who recorded them at the time of the final codification of the Qur'an
during the reign of the first three Caliphs.
"Some of the Companions as well as some of their immediate
successors and later Qur'anic commentators were convinced that these
letters are abbreviations of certain words or even phrases relating to
God and His attributes, and tried to 'reconstruct' them with much
ingenuity; but since the possible combinations are practically
unlimited, all such interpretations are highly arbitrary and, therefore,
devoid of any real usefulness …"
Asad quotes Abu Bakr
as saying : ‘In every divine writ (kitab) there is [an element of]
mystery - and the mystery of the Qur'an is [indicated] in the openings
of [some of] the suras.’"
Mystery religion
The Quran mentions the "Jews, Christians, and Ṣābiʼūn" three times (2:62, 5:69, 22:17).
But while the identity of the first two religions is/was widely known
among Muslims and non-Muslims, the Ṣābiʼūn (usually Romanized as
Sabians) was not even among the earliest Quranic commentators of the 7th and 8th century.
Narrative voice: Mohammed or God as speakers
Since the Quran is God's revelation to humanity, critics have wondered why in many verses, God is being addressed by humans, instead of Him addressing human beings. Or as scholars Richard Bell and W. Montgomery Watt
point out, it is not unheard of for someone (especially someone very
powerful) to speak of himself in the third person, "the extent to which
we find the Prophet apparently being addressed and told about God as a
third person, is unusual", as is where "God is made to swear by
himself".)
Folklorist Alan Dundes notes how one "formula" or phrase ("...
acquit thou/you/them/him of us/your/their/his evil deeds") is repeated
with a variety of voices both divine and human, singular and plural:
`Our Lord, forgive Thou our sins and acquit us of our evil deeds` 3:193;
The point-of-view of God changes from third person ("He" and "His" in Exalted is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to al-Masjid al- Aqsa), to first person ("We" and "Our" in We have blessed, to show him of Our signs), and back again to third ("He" in Indeed, He is the Hearing)
all in the same verse. (In Arabic there is no capitalization to
indicate divinity.) Q.33:37 also starts by referring to God in the
third person, is followed by a sentence with God speaking in first
person (we gave her in marriage ...) before returning to third person (and God's commandment must be performed). Again in 48:148:2 God is both first (We) and third person (God, His) within one sentence.
The Jewish Encyclopedia,
for example, writes: "For example, critics note that a sentence in
which something is said concerning Allah is sometimes followed
immediately by another in which Allah is the speaker (examples of this
are Q.16.81, 27:61, 31:9, 43:10) Many peculiarities in the positions of
words are due to the necessities of rhyme (lxix. 31, lxxiv. 3)." The verse 6:114 starts out with Muhammad talking in first person (I) and switches to third (you).
6:114Shall
I seek other than Allah for judge, when He it is Who hath revealed unto
you (this) Scripture, fully explained? Those unto whom We gave the
Scripture (aforetime) know that it is revealed from thy Lord in truth.
So be not thou (O Muhammad) of the waverers.
While some (Muhammad Abdel Haleem) have argued that "such grammatical
shifts are a traditional aspect of Arabic rhetorical style", Ali Dashti (also quoted by critic Ibn Warraq) notes that in many verses "the speaker cannot have been God". The opening surah Al-Fatiha which contains such lines as
Praise to God, the Lord of the Worlds, ... You (alone) we worship and from You (alone) we seek help. ...
is "clearly addressed to God, in the form of a prayer."
Other verses (the beginning of 27:91, "I have been commanded to serve the Lord of this city ..."; 19:64, "We come not down save by commandment of thy Lord") also makes no sense as a statement of an all-powerful God.
Many (in fact 350) verses in the Quran where God is addressed in the third person are preceded by the imperative "say/recite!" (qul) -- but it does not occur in Al-Fatiha and many other similar verses. Sometimes the problem is resolved in translations of the Quran by the translators adding "Say!" in front of the verse (Marmaduke Pickthall and N. J. Dawood for Q.27.91, Abdullah Yusuf Ali for Q.6:114).
Dashti notes that in at least one verse
17:1 -- Exalted
is He who took His Servant by night from al-Masjid al-Haram to
al-Masjid al-Aqsa, whose surroundings We have blessed, to show him of
Our signs. Indeed, He is the Hearing, the Seeing.
This feature did not escape the notice of some early Muslims.
Ibn Masud
— one of the companions of Muhammad who served as a scribe for divine
revelations received by Muhammad and is considered a reliable
transmitter of ahadith — did not believe that Surah Fatihah (or two
other surah — 113 and 114 — that contained the phrase "I take refuge in
the Lord") to be a genuine part of the Quran.[145] He was not alone, other companions of Muhammad disagreed over which surahs were part of the Quran and which not. A verse of the Quran itself (15:87) seems to distinguish between Fatihah and the Quran:
15:87 -- And
we have given you seven often repeated verses [referring to the seven
verses of Surah Fatihah] and the great Quran. (Al-Quran 15:87)
Al-Suyuti,
the noted medieval philologist and commentator of the Quran thought
five verses had questionable "attribution to God" and were likely spoken
by either Muhammad or Gabriel.
Cases where the speaker is swearing an oath by God, such as surahs 75:1–2 and 90:1, have been made a point of criticism. But according to Richard Bell, this was probably a traditional formula, and Montgomery Watt compared such verses to Hebrews 6:13.
It is also widely acknowledged that the first-person plural pronoun in
Surah 19:64 refers to angels, describing their being sent by God down to
Earth. Bell and Watt suggest that this attribution to angels can be
extended to interpret certain verses where the speaker is not clear.
Spelling, syntax and grammar
In 2020, a Saudi news website published an article
claiming that while most Muslims believe the text established by third
caliph 'Uthman bin 'Affan "is sacred and must not be amended", there
are some 2500 "errors of spelling, syntax and grammar" within it. The
author (Ahmad Hashem) argues that while the recitation of the Quran is
divine, the Quranic script established by Uthman's "is a human
invention" subject to error and correction. Examples of some of the
errors he gives are:
Surah 68, verse 6, [the word] بِأَيِّيكُمُ ["which of you"] appears, instead of بأيكم. In other words, an extra ي was added.
Surah 25, verse 4, [the word] جَآءُو ["they committed"] appears,
instead of جَاءُوا or جاؤوا. In other words, the alif in the plural
masculine suffix وا is missing.
Surah 28, verse 9, the word امرأت ["wife"] appears, instead of امرأة.
Phrases, sentences or verse that seem out of place and were likely to have been transposed.
An example of an out-of-place verse fragment is found in Surah 24
where the beginning of a verse — (Q.24:61) "There is not upon the blind
[any] constraint nor upon the lame constraint nor upon the ill
constraint ..." — is located in the midst of a section describing proper
behavior for visiting relations and modesty for women and children
("when you eat from your [own] houses or the houses of your fathers or
the houses of your mothers or the houses of your brothers or the houses
of your sisters or ..."). While it makes little sense here, the exact
same phrases appears in another surah section (Q.48:11-17) where it does
fit in as list of those exempt from blame and hellfire if they do not
fight in a jihad military campaign.
Theodor Nöldeke
complains that "many sentences begin with a 'when' or 'on the day when'
which seems to hover in the air, so that commentators are driven to
supply a 'think of this' or some such ellipsis."
Similarly, describing a "rough edge" of the Quran, Michael Cook notes
that verse Q.33:37 starts out with a "long and quite complicated
subordinate clause" ("when thou wast saying to him ..."), "but we never
learn what the clause is subordinate to."
Grammar
Examples of lapses in grammar include 4:160 where the word "performers" should be in the nominative case but instead is in the accusative; 20:66
where "these two" of "These two are sorcerers" is in the nominative
case (hādhāne) instead of the accusative case (hādhayne); and 49:9 where "have started to fight" is in the plural form instead of the dual like the subject of the sentence.
Dashti laments that Islamic scholars have traditionally replied to
these problems saying "our task is not to make the readings conform to
Arabic grammar, but to take the whole of the Quran as it is and make
Arabic grammar conform to the Quran."
Reply
A common
reply to questions about difficulties or obscurities in the Quran is
verse 3:7 which unlike other verses that simply state that the Quran is
clear (mubeen) states that some verses are clear but others are "ambiguous" (mutashabihat).
3:7It
is He who sent down upon thee the Book, wherein are verses clear that
are the Essence of the Book, and others ambiguous. As for those in whose
hearts is swerving, they follow the ambiguous part, desiring
dissension, and desiring its interpretation; and none knows its
interpretation, save only God. And those firmly rooted in knowledge say,
'We believe in it; all is from our Lord'; yet none remembers, but men
possessed of minds.
In regards to questions about the narrative voice, Al-Zarkashi
asserts that "moving from one style to another serves to make speech
flow more smoothly", but also that by mixing up pronouns the Quran
prevents the "boredom" that a more logical, straight forward narrative
induces; it keeps the reader on their toes, helping "the listener to
focus, renew[ing] his interest", providing "freshness and variety". "Muslim specialists" refer to the practice as iltifāt, ("literally 'conversion', or 'turning one's face to'").
Western scholar Neal Robinson provides a more detailed reasons as to
why these are not "imperfections", but instead should be "prized":
changing the voice from "they" to "we" provides a "shock effect", third
person ("Him") makes God "seem distant and transcendent", first person
plural ("we") "emphasizes His majesty and power", first person singular
("I") "introduces a note of intimacy or immediacy", and so on.
(Critics like Hassan Radwan suggest these explanations are rationalizations.)
Legends, parables or pieces of folklore that appear in the Quran, with similar motifs to Jewish traditions include Cain and Abel, Abraham destroying idols, Solomon conversing with a talking ant. Christian traditions include the Seven Sleepers, the naming of Mary, mother of Jesus, the selection of Mary's guardian by lottery, how a palm tree obeyed the commands of the child Jesus.
The Quran and Bible differ on a number of narrative and theological issues. There is no original sin in the Quran; it specifically and repeatedly denies the Christian Trinity
of three persons in one God, and denies that Jesus is the son of God
(9:30) was crucified (4:157) and died, or rose from the dead. It holds
that the Holy Spirit is actually the angel Gabriel (2:97; 16:102). The
Devil, Satan (Shaitan), is regarded as a jinn not a fallen angel, in most contemporary scholarship (2:34; 7:12; 15:27; 55:15).
Muslims believe the Quran refers to figures, prophets, and events in Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament
because these books are predecessors of the Quran, also revealed by the
one true omnipotent God. The differences between two books and the
Quran can be explained (Muslims believed) by the flawed processes of
transmission and interpretation of the Bible and New Testament,
distorting revelation that the Quran provides free from any distortions
and corruptions.
Non-Muslim historians -- secular but also Jewish and Christian -- in keeping with Occam's razor, have looked for simpler, non-divine/non-supernatural explanations for the connection (In Islamic language, dealing only with shahada, i.e. what can be perceived, described, and studied; and not with the unseen al-Ghaib,
made known only by divine revelation). Many stories of the Muhammad
hearing about Christianity from Christians and Judaism from Jews come
from Muslim sources.
In the 19th century, Abraham Geiger argued for Jewish influence on the formation of the Quran, as did C. C. Torrey even more forcefully in the early 20th Century. Micheal Cook believes Muhammad "owed more to Judiasm than to Christianity",
and mentions a "fusion" of Jewish-based "monotheism with Arab identity"
in Palestine prior to Islam. According to a fifth-century Christian
writer -- Sozomen -- some "Saracen" (Arab) tribes rediscovered their "Ishmaelite descent" after coming into contact with Jews and had adopted Jewish laws and customs. Although there is no evidence to show "a direct link" between these Arabs and Muhammad, it is a milieu where Quranic material could "have come into existence" before Muhammad.
Several narratives rely on Jewish Midrash Tanhuma legends, like the narrative of Cain learning to bury the body of Abel in Surah 5:31. Critics, like Norman Geisler argue that the dependence of the Quran on preexisting sources is one evidence of a purely human origin.
In their book Hagarism,
Michael Cook and Patricia Crone postulate that a number of features of
Islam may have been borrowed from the Jewish breakaway sect of Samaritanism: "the idea of a scripture limited to the Pentateuch, a prophet like Moses (i.e. Muhammad), a holy book revealed like the Torah (the Quran), a sacred city (Mecca) with a nearby mountain (Jabal an-Nour -- the Samaratan mountain being Mount Gerizim) and shrine (the Kaaba) of an appropriate patriarch (Abraham), plus a caliphate modeled on an Aaronid priesthood."
Ibn Warraq compares the similarities of Muhammad of Islam and Moses of
the Jews. Both bearers of revelation (Pentateuch v. Quran), both
receiving revelation on a mountain (Mount Sinai v. Mt. Hira), leading
their people to escape persecution (Exodus vs. Hijra).
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, "The dependence of
Mohammed upon his Jewish teachers or upon what he heard of the Jewish
Haggadah and Jewish practices is now generally conceded."
Early jurists and theologians of Islam mentioned some Jewish influence
but they also say where it is seen and recognized as such, it is
perceived as a debasement or a dilution of the authentic message. Bernard Lewis describes this as "something like what in Christian history was called a Judaizing heresy."
According to Professor Moshe Sharon, specialist in Arabic epigraphy, the legends about Muhammad having ten Jewish teachers developed in the 10th century CE:
"In most versions of the
legends, ten Jewish wise men or dignitaries appear, who joined Muhammad
and converted to Islam for different reasons. In reading all the Jewish
texts one senses the danger of extinction of the Jewish people; and it
was this ominous threat that induced these Sages to convert..."
Christian
Tor Andræ, saw Christian "Nestorians of Yemen, monophysites of Ethiopia and especially ... Syrian pietism" influencing Islam". Richard Carrier regards the reliance on pre-Islamic Christian sources as evidence that Islam derived from a heretical sect of Christianity.
Scholar Oddbjørn Leirvik states "The Qur'an and Hadith have been
clearly influenced by the non-canonical ('heretical') Christianity that
prevailed in the Arab peninsula and further in Abyssinia" prior to
Islam.
H.A.R. Gibb states that many of the details in the description of
Judgement Day, Heaven, and Hell and some vocabulary "are closely
paralleled in the writings of the Syriac Christian fathers and monks."
Tom Holland thinks it notable that some doctrines that the Quran
mentions in association with Christianity -- that Jesus did not died on
the cross (which came from the Gospel of Basilides and is accepted by
virtually no Christians) that he was a mortal man and not divine (held by the heretical Ebionites), that the mother of Jesus is divine (which came from the Nazorean Gospel denounced by Saint Jerome
and is also supported by virtually no Christians) -- come not only from
Christian heresies, but ones that had not been heard from in the
heartland of Christianity for some time by the 7th century CE when the
Quran was revealed.
The Quran maintains that Jesus was not actually crucified and did not
die on the cross. The general Islamic view supporting the denial of
crucifixion may have been influenced by Manichaeism (Docetism), which holds that someone else was crucified instead of Jesus, while concluding that Jesus will return during the end-times.
However the general consensus is that Manichaeism was not prevalent in
Mecca in the 6th- & 7th centuries, when Islam developed.
That they said (in boast), "We killed Christ Jesus the son of Mary, the Messenger of Allah";-
but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to
appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no
(certain) knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety
they killed him not:- Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself; and Allah is Exalted in Power, Wise;-
Despite these views and no eyewitness accounts, most modern scholars have maintained that the Crucifixion of Jesus is indisputable.
The view that Jesus only appeared to be crucified and did not
actually die predates Islam, and is found in several apocryphal gospels.
Irenaeus in his book Against Heresies describes Gnostic beliefs that bear remarkable resemblance with the Islamic view:
He did not himself suffer death,
but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in
his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might
be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error,
while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by,
laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous
(mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and
thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he
could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all.-
I was not afflicted at all, yet I did not die in solid reality but in what appears, in order that I not be put to shame by them
and also:
Another, their father, was the
one who drank the gall and the vinegar; it was not I. Another was the
one who lifted up the cross on his shoulder, who was Simon. Another was
the one on whom they put the crown of thorns. But I was rejoicing in the
height over all the riches of the archons and the offspring of their
error and their conceit, and I was laughing at their ignorance
I saw him (Jesus) seemingly being
seized by them. And I said 'What do I see, O Lord? That it is you
yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or who is this
one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and
hands they are striking?' The Savior said to me, 'He whom you saw on
the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into
whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshly part, which is
the substitute being put to shame, the one who came into being in his
likeness. But look at him and me.' But I, when I had looked, said 'Lord,
no one is looking at you. Let us flee this place.' But he said to me,
'I have told you, 'Leave the blind alone!'. And you, see how they do not
know what they are saying. For the son of their glory instead of my
servant, they have put to shame.' And I saw someone about to approach us
resembling him, even him who was laughing on the tree. And he was with a
Holy Spirit, and he is the Savior. And there was a great, ineffable
light around them, and the multitude of ineffable and invisible angels
blessing them. And when I looked at him, the one who gives praise was
revealed.
The Collyridians, early Christian heretical sect in pre-Islamic Arabia, whose adherents apparently worshipped the Mary, mother of Jesus, as a goddess, have become of interest in some recent Christian–Muslim religious discussions in reference to the Islamic concept of the Christian Trinity. The debate hinges on some verses in the Qur'an, primarily 5:73, 5:75, and 5:116 in the suraAl-Ma'ida,
which have been taken to imply that Muhammad believed that Christians
considered Mary to be part of the Trinity. That idea has never been part
of mainstream Christian doctrine and is not clearly and unambiguously
attested among any ancient Christian group, including the Collyridians.
Contradictions and abrogation
The Quran contains divine commands or policies that are ignored in Islamic law (sharia), including Q24:2, which prescribes a penalty of "100 lashes" for zina (sex outside of marriage), while sharia law—based on hadith of Muhammad—orders adulterers to be stoned to death, not lashed.
This seeming disregard of the founding work of revelation of Islam has been explained by the concept of abrogation (naskh), whereby God sometimes abrogates one (sometimes more) revelation(s) with another—not only in the Quran but also among hadith. Naskh also holds that are Islamic laws based on verses once part of the Quran but no longer found in present-day Mus'haf (written copies of the Quran), which is the case with the stoning penalty for adultery.
A number of verses mention the issue of abrogation, the central one being:
Quran2:106:
"We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except that We
bring forth [one] better than it or similar to it. Do you not know that
Allah is over all things competent?"
Besides 24:2, some other examples of naskh cited by scholars are:
2:219, which allows but discourages Muslims from drinking alcohol; 4:43, which forbids Muslims from praying while drunk, and 5:90
which commands Muslims not to drink alcohol. These seeming
contradictory commands are explained by the first verse being abrogated
by the second, and the second by the last, as part of a gradual process
of weaning early Muslims from alcohol consumption.
The revelation of a verse criticizing Muslim slackers in the waging
of jihad, prompted a blind Muslim ('Abd Allah ibn Umm Maktum) to protest
that his lack of vision prevented him from fighting. "Almost
instantaneously" a revelation (4:95) was sent down partially abrogating the earlier one by adding the qualifier "except the disabled".
8:65
tells Muslim warriors, "If there be of you twenty patient believers,
they will overcome two hundred" enemy. It is thought to be abrogated by 8:66
which lowers the number of enemies each Muslim warrior is expected to
overcome in battle from ten to only two: "Now God has alleviated your
burden, knowing that there is weakness in you. If there should be of you
one hundred, they will overcome two hundred;.
Verses such as 43:89 urging followers to "turn away" from mocking unbelievers "and say, 'Peace'", when Muslims were few in number, were replaced with the "Sword verse" 9:29 commanding "Fight those who (do) not believe in Allah and not in the Day the Last ... ", as Muhammad's followers grew stronger.
Among the criticisms made of the concept of abrogation is that it was
developed to "remove" contradictions found in the Quran, which "abounds
in repetitions and contradictions, which are not removed by the
convenient theory of abrogation" (Philip Schaff); that it "poses a difficult theological problem" because it seems to suggest God was changing His mind,
or has realized something He was unaware of when revealing the original
verse, which is logically absurd for an eternally all-knowing deity
(David S. Powers and John Burton);
and that it is suspiciously similar to the human process of "revising
... past decisions or plans" after "learning from experience and
recognising mistakes" (Ali Dashti).
Muslim scholars such as Muhammad Husayn Tabatabaei
argue abrogation in Quranic verses is not an indication of
contradiction but of addition and supplementation. An example of the
mention of impermanent commands in the Quran is Q.2:109
where — according to Tabatabaei — it clearly states the forgiveness is
not permanent and soon there will be another command (through another
verse) on this subject that completes the matter. Verse Q.4:15 also indicates its temporariness.
The question of why a perfect and unchangeable divine revelation
would need to be abrogated, however, has led other scholars to interpret
verse Q.2:106 differently than the mainstream. Ghulam Ahmed Parwez in his Exposition of the Quran writes that the abrogation Q.2:106 refers to is of the Bible/Torah, not the Quran:
The Ahl-ul-Kitab (People of the
Book) also question the need for a new revelation (Qur'an) when previous
revelations from Allah exist. They further ask why the Qur'an contains
injunctions contrary to the earlier Revelation (the Torah) if it is from
Allah? Tell them that Our way of sending Revelation to successive
anbiya (prophets) is that: Injunctions given in earlier revelations,
which were meant only for a particular time, are replaced by other
injunctions, and injunctions which were to remain in force permanently
but were abandoned, forgotten or adulterated by the followers of
previous anbiya are given again in their original form (22:52). And all
this happens in accordance with Our laid down standards, over which We
have complete control. Now this last code of life which contains the
truth of all previous revelations (5:48), is complete in every respect
(6:116), and will always be preserved (15:9), has been given [to
mankind].
Some criticism of the Quran has revolved around two verses known as the "Satanic Verses". Some early Islamic histories recount that as Muhammad was reciting Sūra Al-Najm (Q.53), as revealed to him by the angel Gabriel, Satan deceived him to utter the following lines after verses 19 and 20: "Have you thought of Al-lāt and al-'Uzzā and Manāt the third, the other; These are the exalted Gharaniq,
whose intercession is hoped for." The Allāt, al-'Uzzā and Manāt were
three goddesses worshiped by the Meccans. These histories then say that
these 'Satanic Verses' were repudiated shortly afterward by Muhammad at
the behest of Gabriel.
There are numerous accounts reporting the alleged incident, which
differ in the construction and detail of the narrative, but they may be
broadly collated to produce a basic account.
The different versions of the story are all traceable to one
single narrator Muhammad ibn Ka'b, who was two generations removed from
biographer Ibn Ishaq. In its essential form, the story reports that Muhammad longed to convert his kinsmen and neighbors of Mecca to Islam. As he was reciting Sūra an-Najm, considered a revelation by the angel Gabriel, Satan tempted him to utter the following lines after verses 19 and 20:
Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-'Uzzá and Manāt, the third, the other? These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for.
Allāt, al-'Uzzā and Manāt were three goddesses worshipped by the Meccans. Discerning the meaning of "gharāniq" is difficult, as it is a hapax legomenon (i.e. used only once in the text). Commentators wrote that it meant the cranes. The Arabic word does generally mean a "crane" – appearing in the singular as ghirnīq, ghurnūq, ghirnawq and ghurnayq, and the word has cousin forms in other words for birds, including "raven, crow" and "eagle".
The subtext to the event is that Muhammad was backing away from his otherwise uncompromising monotheism
by saying that these goddesses were real and their intercession
effective. The Meccans were overjoyed to hear this and joined Muhammad
in ritual prostration at the end of the sūrah. The Meccan
refugees who had fled to Abyssinia heard of the end of persecution and
started to return home. Islamic tradition holds that Gabriel chastised
Muhammad for adulterating the revelation, at which point [Quran22:52] is revealed to comfort him,
Never sent We a messenger or a
prophet before thee but when He recited (the message) Satan proposed
(opposition) in respect of that which he recited thereof. But Allah
abolisheth that which Satan proposeth. Then Allah establisheth His
revelations. Allah is Knower, Wise.
Muhammad took back his words and the persecution of the Meccans resumed. Verses 53:21-23 were given, in which the goddesses are belittled. The passage in question, from 53:19, reads:
Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-'Uzza
And Manat, the third, the other?
Are yours the males and His the females?
That indeed were an unfair division!
They are but names which ye have named, ye and your fathers, for
which Allah hath revealed no warrant. They follow but a guess and that
which (they) themselves desire. And now the guidance from their Lord
hath come unto them.
The incident of the Satanic Verses is put forward by some critics as
evidence of the Quran's origins as a human work of Muhammad. Maxime Rodinson
describes this as a conscious attempt to achieve a consensus with pagan
Arabs, which was then consciously rejected as incompatible with
Muhammad's attempts to answer the criticism of contemporary Arab Jews
and Christians, linking it with the moment at which Muhammad felt able to adopt a "hostile attitude" towards the pagan Arabs.
Rodinson writes that the story of the Satanic Verses is unlikely to be
false because it was "one incident, in fact, which may be reasonably
accepted as true because the makers of Muslim tradition would not have
invented a story with such damaging implications for the revelation as a
whole".
In a caveat to his acceptance of the incident, William Montgomery Watt,
states: "Thus it was not for any worldly motive that Muhammad
eventually turned down the offer of the Meccans, but for a genuinely
religious reason; not for example, because he could not trust these men
nor because any personal ambition would remain unsatisfied, but because
acknowledgment of the goddesses would lead to the failure of the cause,
of the mission he had been given by God." Academic scholars such as William Montgomery Watt and Alfred Guillaume
argued for its authenticity based upon the implausibility of Muslims
fabricating a story so unflattering to their prophet. Watt says that
"the story is so strange that it must be true in essentials." On the other hand, John Burton rejected the tradition.
In an inverted culmination of Watt's approach, Burton argued the
narrative of the "satanic verses" was forged, based upon a demonstration
of its actual utility to certain elements of the Muslim community –
namely, those elite sections of society seeking an "occasion of revelation" for eradicatory modes of abrogation.
Burton's argument is that such stories served the vested interests of
the status-quo, allowing them to dilute the radical messages of the
Quran. The rulers used such narratives to build their own set of laws
which contradicted the Quran, and justified it by arguing that not all
of the Quran is binding on Muslims. Burton also sides with Leone Caetani, who wrote that the story of the "satanic verses" should be rejected not only on the basis of isnad,
but because "had these hadiths even a degree of historical basis,
Muhammad's reported conduct on this occasion would have given the lie to
the whole of his previous prophetic activity."
Eerik Dickinson also pointed out that the Quran's challenge to its
opponents to prove any inconsistency in its content was pronounced in a
hostile environment, also indicating that such an incident did not occur
or it would have greatly damaged the Muslims.
Intended audience
Some
verses of the Quran are assumed to be directed towards all of
Muhammad's followers while other verses are directed more specifically
towards Muhammad and his wives, yet others are directed towards the
whole of humanity.
(33:28, 33:50, 49:2, 58:1, 58:966:3).
Other scholars argue that variances in the Quran's explicit
intended audiences are irrelevant to claims of divine origin – and for
example that Muhammad's wives "specific divine guidance, occasioned by
their proximity to the Prophet (Muhammad)" where "Numerous divine
reprimands addressed to Muhammad's wives in the Quran establish their
special responsibility to overcome their human frailties and ensure
their individual worthiness", or argue that the Quran must be interpreted on more than one level.
Muhammadan [Islamic] law did not
derive directly from the Koran but developed... out of popular and
administrative practice under the Umaiyads, and this practice often
diverged from the intentions and even the explicit wording of the
Koran... Norms derived from the Koran were introduced into Muhammadan
law almost invariably at a secondary stage.
Schacht further states that every legal tradition from the Prophet
must be taken as an inauthentic and fictitious expression of a legal
doctrine formulated at a later date:
... We shall not meet any legal tradition from the Prophet which can positively be considered authentic.
What is evident regarding the compilation of the Quran is the disagreement between the companions of Muhammad
(earliest supporters of Muhammad), as evidenced with their several
disagreements regarding interpretation and particular versions of the
Quran and their interpretative Hadith and Sunna, namely the mutawatir mushaf having come into present form after Muhammad's death. John Burton's work The Collection of the Quran further explores how certain Quranic texts were altered to adjust interpretation, in regards to controversy between fiqh (human understanding of Sharia) and madhahib.
Some scientists among Muslim commentators, notably al-Biruni,
assigned to the Quran a separate and autonomous realm of its own and
held that the Quran "does not interfere in the business of science nor
does it infringe on the realm of science." These medieval scholars argued for the possibility of multiple scientific explanations of the natural phenomena, and refused to subordinate the Quran to an ever-changing science. However, there are factual contradictions between the Quran and contemporary science as shown below.
Miracles
Muslims and non-Muslims have disputed the presence of scientific miracles in the Quran. According to author Ziauddin Sardar, "popular literature known as ijaz"
(miracle) has created a "global craze in Muslim societies", starting
the 1970s and 1980s and now found in Muslim bookstores, spread by
websites and television preachers.
An example is the verse: "So verily I swear by the stars that run and hide ..." (Q81:15–16), which proponents claim demonstrates the Quran's knowledge of the existence of black holes; or: "[I swear by] the Moon in her fullness that ye shall journey on from stage to stage" (Q84:18–19) refers, according to proponents, to human flight into outer space.
Critics argue that verses which allegedly explain modern scientific facts about subjects such as biology, the history of Earth, and evolution of human life, contain fallacies and are unscientific.
Astronomy
Ijaz
literature tends to follow a pattern of finding some possible agreement
between a scientific result and a verse in the Quran. "So verily I
swear by the stars that run and hide ..." (Q.81:15-16) or "And I swear
by the stars' positions-and that is a mighty oath if you only knew".
(Quran, 56:75-76)
is declared to refer to black holes; "[I swear by] the Moon in her
fullness; that ye shall journey on from stage to stage" (Q.84:18-19)
refers to space travel, and thus evidence the Quran has miraculously predicted this phenomenon centuries before scientists.
While it is generally agreed the Quran contains many verses
proclaiming the wonders of nature — "Travel throughout the earth and see
how He brings life into being" (Q.29:20) "Behold in the creation of the
heavens and the earth, and the alternation of night and day, there are
indeed signs for men of understanding ..." (Q.3:190) — it is strongly
doubted by Sardar and others that "everything, from relativity, quantum
mechanics, Big Bang theory, black holes and pulsars, genetics,
embryology, modern geology, thermodynamics, even the laser and hydrogen
fuel cells, have been 'found' in the Quran".
Like the Bible, the Quran talks about God creating the universe in six days and like the Bible many modern believers have argued for a non-literal
interpretation (for example The Holy Quran: Arabic Text and English
translation by Maulvi Sher Ali).
Quranic verses related to the origin of mankind created from dust or mud are not logically compatible with modern evolutionary theory.Although some Muslims try to reconcile evolution with the Quran by the argument from intelligent design, the Quran (and the hadiths) can be interpreted to support the idea of creationism. This led to a contribution by Muslims to the creation vs. evolution debate, (Some with some high profile Muslim preachers (Zakir Naik, Adnan Oktar, Yasir Qadhi) advocating creationism and/or maintaining that the idea that humans evolved is against the Quran.
According to opinion polls, most Muslims do not accept the theory of
evolution, the percentage varying among countries (from <10%
acceptance in Egypt to about 40% in Kazakhstan). Some Muslims point to a verse Q.71:14 -- “when He truly created you in stages ˹of development˺?” -- as evidence for Evolution.
Some critics claim that the morality of the Quran appears to be a
moral regression, by the standards of the moral traditions of Judaism
and Christianity it says that it builds upon. The Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, states that "the ethics of Islam are far inferior to those of Judaism
and even more inferior to those of the New Testament" and "that in the
ethics of Islam there is a great deal to admire and to approve, is
beyond dispute; but of originality or superiority, there is none."
William Montgomery Watt however finds Muhammad's changes an improvement
for his time and place: "In his day and generation Muhammad was a
social reformer, indeed a reformer even in the sphere of morals. He
created a new system of social security
and a new family structure, both of which were a vast improvement on
what went before. By taking what was best in the morality of the nomad
and adapting it for settled communities, he established a religious and
social framework for the life of many races of men."
[9:5] Then, when the sacred months
have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them
(captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if
they repent and establish worship and pay the zakat, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.[Quran9:5–5 (Translated by Pickthall)]
According to the E. J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913–1936, Volume 4,
the term first applied in the Quran to unbelieving Meccans, who
endeavoured "to refute and revile the Prophet". A waiting attitude
towards the kafir
was recommended at first for Muslims; later, Muslims were ordered to
keep apart from unbelievers and defend themselves against their attacks
and even take the offensive. Most passages in the Quran referring to unbelievers in general talk about their fate on the day of judgement and destination in hell.
"Lo! those who disbelieve (Kafir), among the People of the
Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the
worst of created beings."[Quran98:6]
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), a French political thinker and historian, observed:
I studied the Quran a great deal. I
came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there
have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of
Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the
decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd
than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in
my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of
decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism.
The Quran's teachings on matters of war and peace are topics that are widely debated. On the one hand, some critics, such as Sam Harris,
interpret that certain verses of the Quran sanction military action
against unbelievers as a whole both during the lifetime of Muhammad and
after. Harris argues that Muslim extremism is simply a consequence of
taking the Quran literally, and is skeptical about significant reform
toward a "moderate Islam" in the future. On the other hand, other scholars argue that such verses of the Quran are interpreted out of context, and Muslims of the Ahmadiyya movement argue that when the verses are read in context it clearly appears that the Quran prohibits aggression, and allows fighting only in self-defense.
The author Syed Kamran Mirza has argued that a concept of 'Jihad',
defined as 'struggle', has been introduced by the Quran. He wrote that
while Muhammad was in Mecca, he "did not have many supporters and was
very weak compared to the Pagans", and "it was at this time he added
some 'soft', peaceful verses", whereas "almost all the hateful, coercive
and intimidating verses later in the Quran were made with respect to
Jihad" when Muhammad was in Medina .
Micheline R. Ishay
has argued that "the Quran justifies wars for self-defense to protect
Islamic communities against internal or external aggression by
non-Islamic populations, and wars waged against those who 'violate their
oaths' by breaking a treaty". MuftiM. Mukarram Ahmed
has also argued that the Quran encourages people to fight in
self-defense. He has also argued that the Quran has been used to direct
Muslims to make all possible preparations to defend themselves against
enemies.
Shin Chiba and Thomas J. Schoenbaum
argue that Islam "does not allow Muslims to fight against those who
disagree with them regardless of belief system", but instead "urges its
followers to treat such people kindly".
Yohanan Friedmann has argued that the Quran does not promote fighting
for the purposes of religious coercion, although the war as described is
"religious" in the sense that the enemies of the Muslims are described
as "enemies of God".
Rodrigue Tremblay
has argued that the Quran commands that non-Muslims under a Muslim
regime, should "feel themselves subdued" in "a political state of
subservience" . He also argues that the Quran may assert freedom within
religion.
Nisrine Abiad has argued that the Quran incorporates the offence (and
due punishment) of "rebellion" into the offence of "highway or armed
robbery".
George W. Braswell has argued that the Quran asserts an idea of Jihad to deal with "a sphere of disobedience, ignorance and war".
Michael David Bonner
has argued that the "deal between God and those who fight is portrayed
as a commercial transaction, either as a loan with interest, or else as a
profitable sale of the life of this world in return for the life of the
next", where "how much one gains depends on what happens during the
transaction", either "paradise if slain in battle, or victory if one
survives".
Critics have argued that the Quran "glorified Jihad in many of the
Medinese suras" and "criticized those who fail(ed) to participate in
it".
Ali Ünal
has claimed that the Quran praises the companions of Muhammad, for
being stern and implacable against the said unbelievers, where in that
"period of ignorance and savagery, triumphing over these people was
possible by being strong and unyielding."
Solomon Nigosian concludes that the "Quranic statement is clear"
on the issue of fighting in defense of Islam as "a duty that is to be
carried out at all costs", where "God grants security to those Muslims
who fight in order to halt or repel aggression".
Shaikh M. Ghazanfar
argues that the Quran has been used to teach its followers that "the
path to human salvation does not require withdrawal from the world but
rather encourages moderation in worldly affairs", including fighting. Shabbir Akhtar has argued that the Quran asserts that if a people "fear Muhammad more than they fear God, 'they are a people lacking in sense'" rather than a fear being imposed upon them by God directly.
Various calls to arms were identified in the Quran by Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar,
all of which were cited as "most relevant to my actions on March 3,
2006," after he committed a terrorist attack that injured 9 people.
Verse 4:34 of the Quran as translated by Ali Quli Qara'i reads:
Men are the managers of women,
because of the advantage Allah has granted some of them over others, and
by virtue of their spending out of their wealth. So righteous women are
obedient, care-taking in the absence [of their husbands] of what Allah
has enjoined [them] to guard. As for those [wives] whose misconduct you
fear, [first] advise them, and [if ineffective] keep away from them in
the bed, and [as the last resort] beat them. Then if they obey you, do
not seek any course [of action] against them. Indeed, Allah is
all-exalted, all-great.
Many translations do not necessarily imply a chronological sequence, for example, Marmaduke Pickthall's, Muhammad Muhsin Khan's, or Arthur John Arberry's. Arberry's translation reads "admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them."
The Dutch film Submission, which rose to fame outside the Netherlands after the assassination of its director Theo van Gogh by Muslim extremist Mohammed Bouyeri, critiqued this and similar verses of the Quran by displaying them painted on the bodies of abused Muslim women. Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
the film's writer, said "it is written in the Koran a woman may be
slapped if she is disobedient. This is one of the evils I wish to point
out in the film".
Scholars of Islam have a variety of responses to these criticisms. (See An-Nisa, 34
for a fuller exegesis on the meaning of the text.) Some Muslim scholars
say that the "beating" allowed is limited to no more than a light touch
by siwak, or toothbrush.
Some Muslims argue that beating is only appropriate if a woman has done
"an unrighteous, wicked and rebellious act" beyond mere disobedience.
In many modern interpretations of the Quran, the actions prescribed in
4:34 are to be taken in sequence, and beating is only to be used as a
last resort.
Many Islamic scholars and commentators have emphasized that beatings, where permitted, are not to be harsh or even that they should be "more or less symbolic." According to Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Ibn Kathir, the consensus of Islamic scholars is that the above verse describes a light beating.
Some jurists argue that even when beating is acceptable under the Quran, it is still discountenanced.
Shabbir Akhtar has argued that the Quran introduced prohibitions against "the pre-Islamic practice of female infanticide" (16:58, 17:31, 81:8).
Max I. Dimont interprets that the houris described in the Quran are specifically dedicated to "male pleasure". Alternatively, Annemarie Schimmel
says that the Quranic description of the houris should be viewed in a
context of love; "every pious man who lives according to God's order
will enter Paradise where rivers of milk and honey flow in cool,
fragrant gardens and virgin beloveds await home..."
Under the Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Quran by Christoph Luxenberg,
the words translating to "Houris" or "Virgins of Paradise" are instead
interpreted as "Fruits (grapes)" and "high climbing (wine) bowers...
made into first fruits."
Luxenberg offers alternate interpretations of these Quranic verses,
including the idea that the Houris should be seen as having a
specifically spiritual nature rather than a human nature; "these are all
very sensual ideas; but there are also others of a different kind...
what can be the object of cohabitation in Paradise as there can be no
question of its purpose in the world, the preservation of the race. The
solution of this difficulty is found by saying that, although heavenly
food, women etc.., have the name in common with their earthly
equivalents, it is only by way of metaphorical indication and comparison
without actual identity... authors have spiritualized the Houris."
Jane Gerber
claims that the Quran ascribes negative traits to Jews, such as
cowardice, greed, and chicanery. She also alleges that the Quran
associates Jews with interconfessional strife and rivalry (Quran 2:113), the Jewish belief that they alone are beloved of God (Quran5:18), and that only they will achieve salvation (Quran 2:111). According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, the Quran contains many attacks on Jews and Christians for their refusal to recognize Muhammad as a prophet. In the Muslim view, the crucifixion of Jesus was an illusion, and thus the Jewish plots against him ended in failure. In numerous verses the Quran accuses Jews of altering the Scripture. Karen Armstrong claims that there are "far more numerous passages in the Quran" which speak positively of the Jews and their great prophets, than those which were against the "rebellious Jewish tribes of Medina" (during Muhammad's time). Sayyid Abul Ala
believes the punishments were not meant for all Jews, and that they
were only meant for the Jewish inhabitants that were sinning at the
time. According to historian John Tolan, the Quran contains a verse which criticizes the Christian worship of Jesus Christ
as God, and also criticizes other practices and doctrines of both
Judaism and Christianity. Despite this, the Quran has high praise for
these religions, regarding them as the other two parts of the Abrahamic
trinity.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity
states that God is a single being who exists, simultaneously and
eternally, as a communion of three distinct persons, the Father, the Son
and the Holy Spirit. In Islam, such plurality in God is a denial of monotheism and thus a sin of shirk, which is considered to be a major 'al-Kaba'ir' sin.
In the Quran, polytheism is considered the eternal sin of shirk,
meaning that Jews and Christians, which the Quran calls polytheists
(see below), will not be pardoned by God if they do not repent of shirk.
The Quran states that Jews are polytheists for exalting Ezra as a son of God and for taking their rabbis as "their lords in derogation of God",(Quran9:30) and should believe in Islam lest a punishment befalls them that turns them into “apes and pigs”.(Quran5:60)(Quran7:166)
Hindu criticism
Hindu Swami Dayanand Saraswati gave a brief analysis of the Quran in the 14th chapter of his 19th-century book Satyarth Prakash. He calls the concept of Islam highly offensive, and doubted that there is any connection of Islam with God:
Had the God of the Quran been the
Lord of all creatures, and been Merciful and kind to all, he would never
have commanded the Muhammedans to slaughter men of other faiths, and
animals, etc. If he (God) is Merciful, won't he show mercy even to the
sinners? If the answer be given in the affirmative, it (the Quran)
cannot be true, because further on it is said in the Quran "Put infidels
to sword," in other words, he that does not believe in the Quran, and
the Prophet Mohammad is an infidel (he should, therefore, be put to
death). Since the Quran sanctions such cruelty to non-Muhammedans and
innocent creatures such as cows it can never be the Word of God.
On the other hand, Mahatma Gandhi,
the moral leader of the 20th-century Indian independence movement,
found the Quran to be peaceful, but the history of Muslims to be
aggressive, which is criticized by Muslims themselves based on Quranic
consultative concept of Shura, while he claimed that Hindus have passed that stage of societal evolution:
Though, in my opinion, non-violence
has a predominant place in the Quran, the thirteen hundred years of
imperialistic expansion has made the Muslims fighters as a body. They
are therefore aggressive. Bullying is the natural excrescence of an
aggressive spirit. The Hindu has an ages old civilization. He is
essentially non violent. His civilization has passed through the
experiences that the two recent ones are still passing through. If
Hinduism was ever imperialistic in the modern sense of the term, it has
outlived its imperialism and has either deliberately or as a matter of
course given it up. Predominance of the non-violent spirit has
restricted the use of arms to a small minority which must always be
subordinate to a civil power, highly spiritual, learned, and selfless.