Islamist Doublespeak Part II: Misrepresenting the Divine Word Itself

we’ve already seen in my last piece how islamists manage to pervert the Quran’s open-minded approach to the other abrahamic religions:

the only true followers of Moses [pbuh], are the Muslims, for it is part of moses religion [and the religion of all other prophets] to accept the latest Messenger and revelation; that is why Muslims are considered to be the followers of all the Prophets.

it also appears that the last piece upset some of our local islamist trolls.

good.

anyway, what i’m going to take a look at now is the assumption i noted in the previous piece, namely that “the jews” possess a “corrupt” verion of the Torah and that, as a result, we have drifted away from the “original religion” of every prophet from adam to abraham – which was, of course, “islam”. there are four components to this idea, namely:

1. that the jews changed the actual Text of the Revelation from G!D (whatever that was)
2. that the *original* Text would of course have confirmed that muhammad would ultimately be along with the Qur’an as the final Revelation and, incidentally, that jesus was the messiah.
3. that the jews “permitted what was forbidden and forbade what was permitted”
4. that the jews thereby ended up committing “shirk” by putting our rabbis on a par with G!D.

there are several sorts of evidence adduced for this putative corruption, namely:

1. accusations made in the Qur’an itself and therefore, by definition, true.
2. accusations of perfidy amongst the jewish people made in the Torah and other jewish texts themselves, including prophetic writings foreseeing “unfaithfulness” and sin anticipated at a future date.
4. the conclusions of biblical scholarship, which assumes of course that the Torah is a [composite] human document in all particulars and therefore, by definition, corrupt.
5. polemics made by jewish converts to islam and therefore, by definition, people who are familiar with every detail of the lies but have now embraced the Truth.

in this way, we are shown to be condemned out of our own mouth, by independent, scientifically impartial scholars and, most damning of all, by G!D. it’s an open-and-shut case, really.

except, of course, it isn’t.

in dealing with the first sort of evidence, the first thing that has to be understood is terminological. when jews speak of “Torah” we may mean any number of things. *the* Torah is, of course, the text of the pentateuch itself. this is not the same as “the bible”, a fact which is lost on most of the adherents of this particular line of reasoning. the “hebrew bible” is known as the TaNa”Kh, an acrostic comprising the Torah, the nebi’im (“prophets”) and qetubim (“writings”) – for more about the structure of Tanakh, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh

however, the important thing here is that when jews refer to “torah”, it may be the general word for “teaching”. the salient point here is that “torah” may involve multiple interpretations, contradictions and opinions, whereas THE Torah itself as a text is fixed. the relevant verses in the Qur’an do not appear (not being any kind of expert in Qur’an, and i apologise in advance for any shortcomings in quotes i obtained from islamicity.com ) to make it clear what precisely is being referred to:

And unto thee have We revealed the Scripture with the truth, confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it. So judge between them by that which Allah hath revealed, and follow not their desires away from the truth which hath come unto thee.

- Qur’an 5:48 (Pickthall)

this “them”, apparently, is taken to refer to the recipients of the former Revelations, namely jews and christians. as you can see, there is rather a lot of wiggle-room for interpretation there, the “consensus of the scholars” notwithstanding. and every verse i’ve been shown purporting to show the corruption of the Torah from the Qur’an has a similar amount of wiggle-room. here’s a particular favourite:

They have taken as lords beside Allah their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One G!D. There is no god save Him. Be He glorified from all that they ascribe as partner (unto Him)!

- Qur’an 9:31 (Pickthall)

this is then supported by the hadith:

“…and I said to him: “We don’t worship them”. He [the Messenger [sm]] said: “Do they not forbid what Allah has permitted you and do you not then forbid it [to yourselves]?, and do they not make permissable for you what Allah has forbidden and do you not then make it permissable [to yourselves]“?, I replied “certainly!”. He [sm] said: “That is worshipping them” [Narrated by At-Tirmidhi who graded it as well-authentic [hasan]]

now, obviously we would be extremely horrified if it were to be suggested that we were in any way “worshipping” rabbis – this would be just as great “shirk” to us as it would be to muslims. what i would like to believe is that muhammad knew better than these scholars and was referring strictly to a certain group of jews he knew locally, NOT to jews IN GENERAL. from the way the Qur’an and muslim sources describes how these local arabian jews behaved, they were either very ignorant or just plain wrong and the fact that they are described as jews may have little or nothing to do with what normative mainstream judaism actually says. in other words, these words should not be taken as applying to all jews.

there are, therefore, the following possibilities:

1. the Qur’an is not referring to all jews at this point
2. there is some difference in the way jews and muslims treat scholarly interpretation
3. this is incorrect reporting of what muhammad said
4. this is incorrect reporting of what jews actually do
5. this is slander

in respect of point 2, however, there is an extremely important talmudic story known as the “oven of achnai” (BT bava metzia 59b) which describes how the principle of authority for human interpretation occurred, over a trivial argument about whether the aforementioned oven was kosher or not. the vote was unanimous save for one rabbi who dissented. the majority quoted the Torah verse that “after the majority shall you incline” to try and get him to concede the point, at one point appealing to a Divine Voice (“bat qol”) which supports them. however, the dissenting rabbi refuted them all by appealing to the verse in the Torah which states “it is not in Heaven”, (deut. 30:11) which was taken to mean that we can’t wait for G!D to provide answers in every situation, but must do our own interpretation in the here and now. it was subsequently reported by another rabbi who had had mystical communication with the prophet elijah (khidr) that G!D had been extremely pleased that “My children have defeated Me” – kind of like when you’re pleased when your kid makes a logical argument for the first time in order to get his own way. however the authority for this is couched, it remains pretty clear that no matter how multifarious and intertextual a sacred text like the Torah is, you still need human interpretation in an every-day situation, whether one’s own or that of experts and scholars.

so, what we have here is quite the conundrum. apparently, it’s all right for *muslim* scholars to make what is very clearly an interpretation and to pass this down as correct but, apparently, when rabbis do it they are “forbidding what G!D has permitted and permitting what G!D has forbidden”. i would suggest that for muslims to suggest that the experts and scholars of other faiths are thereby introducing “manmade” laws and causing themselves to be worshipped, whilst of course their own are “rightly-guided” and infallible, stretches credibility to the point where one would surely be forgiven for considering that such a position makes them look like a bunch of hypocritical beardy bigots. we lied about abraham, did we? deary me. and, what’s more, we left the evidence for our own guilt right there in the text! look at deuteronomy 12:32 and 4:2! perhaps if islamists could supply the undistorted past scriptures that they are talking about here:

Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands and then say, “This is from Allah,” that they may purchase a small gain therewith. Woe unto them for that their hands have written, and woe unto them for that they earn thereby.

- Qur’an 2:79 (Pickthall)

this would look like a bit less of a fit-up. the verse of Tanakh (it’s in Nevi’im rather than Torah itself) most commonly adduced in support of this is the famous one about the “lying pen of the scribes” in jeremiah 8:8. but can one be certain that the “lying pen” referred to by jeremiah in means only that there was a text and it was altered by “the scribes”? how can one know for sure that this doesn’t refer to incorrect decisions in practical circumstances? there are *many* ways that this verse could be interpreted. furthermore, reading the text one realises that the prophets are pretty darn ticked off at the behaviour of the people for precisely this reason. it is not unreasonable in these circumstances to conclude that it was the prophets themselves who preserved the originally revealed Torah, which was why they were “on-message”, so to speak, as opposed to the ‘lying pen of the scribes’, which might imply, for the sake of argument, that the prophets were aware that there were people circulating miscopied, altered or falsified texts – which could very well be the very texts that academics have discovered and have used to support the conclusion that the text was an unstable or composite document as per the “documentary hypothesis”.

it becomes clear, in conclusion, that it is not hugely difficult to find an interpretation of that text which actually provides support for the *opposite* PoV – and that is ignoring the point i made above about the lying scribes being so inefficient as to leave the sentence about their guilt in the final text!

the final point i want to make here is really about logic. if the Torah has been changed/deleted/added, as suggested, it isn’t the Revelation any more, so you are respecting a changed/deleted/added text, not the Divine Word. one cannot have it both ways. either the Torah is as it was at Revelation/Sinai and one must respect it as the Divine Word, or it has been changed/deleted/added and is no longer the Divine Word that one must respect at the risk of committing shirk.

this doctrine represents an attack on jewish identity which cannot be tolerated. the suggestion is that we are in error and that our errors can only be rectified by embracing the “final revelation” and the “truth”. as readers of this blog will no doubt be aware that many cultures, not least christianity and islam, have our conversion a priority over the last few millennia, but we’re still here, just as we were thousands of years ago, the only surviving culture of the ancient world. you can say what you want about us, but it don’t make it true. this doctrine is underpinned by nothing but “because we say so” writ large. one remains of course at liberty to believe what one wishes – there is, as it says, “no compulsion in religion” – but if islam expects to coexist with the rest of the planet, this supercessionist triumphalism will have to go.

b’shalom

bananabrain