Category Archives: Hermeneutics

This is a guest post by J J Muhammed

Last Sunday, the BBC hosted an edition of The Big Questions that examined arguments for and against the existence of God. Being an agnostic myself, I found the arguments presented by the ‘for’ side extremely weak and self-contradictory. Even more off-putting was the arrogant and smug manner in which certain individuals presented their arguments, especially the Middle Eastern sounding Muslim chap and Adam Deen. Both of these individuals touched upon the oft-repeated fallacy that the Quran must be the word of God since it contains no errors.

This is a very popular argument used by Muslim preachers who generally rely on audience’s ignorance of the Quran to win the argument. They also have a natural advantage in that people are fearful of criticising Islam and are therefore often reluctant to enter into the debate. It is also an argument that I often made when I was a young Muslim and am therefore very familiar with it.

This video discusses the inaccuracies of cosmology found in the Qur’an which have been derived and passed on from similar misconceptions found in the Torah, the Bible and the works of Aristotle. In the Islamic tradition these errors have been compounded and corroborated in the various tafsir (interpretations of the Qur’an) of Ibn Abbas (7th century), Ibn Kathir (14th century) and Al Jalalayn (16th century).

Muslims have always been told that the Qur’an has been perfectly preserved right down to the last letter and that the evidence proves this. But according to Muslim sources, after the death of the Prophet Muhammed, entire chapters and large sections of the Qur’an had been lost, as have individual verses. In the end, Uthman put together the bits of the Qur’an that he could and put out his own official version of the Qur’an and burnt all of the evidence of “non-official” versions.

Umar was once looking for the text of a specific verse of the Qur’an he vaguely remembered. To his deep sorrow, he discovered that the only person who had any record of that verse had been killed in the battle of Yamama and that the verse was consequently lost.
~Ibn Abi Daud, Kitab al-Masahif

Much has been said of religious interpretations and essentialist readings of scripture. Whether it is reading texts demanding the burning of books, killing of infidels, or being a ‘Jewish Muslim’ or ‘Muslim Jew’. Some will argue that as scripture is human in origin it is not surprising that humans interpret it according to their influences, environment, culture, time and place. Religious people themselves will often see religious interpretations as being precisely that – a human effort to understanding the scripture, the ‘mind’ of God, or the intent of the text. The teacher of Imam al-Ghazali described the intent and effort as being significant in striving to find God’s injunctions, not the end product or rule.