Central to the faith of Islam is the claim that the Koran was written by God in heaven and was sent down to earth to be recited by Muhammad. Arthur Jeffrey explains the orthodox Muslim claim:
“The orthodox Muslim theory can be stated quite simply. Before the creation of the world Allah created the Tablet and the Pen, and at His command the Pen wrote on the Tablet all that was to be. As each successive Prophet appeared the angel Gabriel revealed to him from the Tablet the message there from that he was to deliver. When the Prophet Muhammad came, and it was time for his ministry to commence, the angel Gabriel came to him also, and from time to time over some twenty years revealed to him those passages from the Tablet that he was to proclaim as the Word of Allah.”
-Arthur Jeffrey, The Textual History of the Qur’an
http://www.answeringislam.org/Books/Jeffery/thq.htm
According
to the Bible, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures were written by men under the inspiration of God. So, while the Bible is totally
inerrant and “God-breathed” (2 Timothy
Unlike
the Christian Scriptures, however, Islam believes that its holy book, the Koran, was actually written by God in heaven in perfect
Arabic. Furthermore, because the Koran was written by God in heaven, we would expect it to be grammatically correct, chronologically
ordered, not too repetitious, etc. Likewise, because the Koran claims that God, in His supreme sovereignty, will preserve His
Word perfectly (Surahs 6:115, 10:64), we would expect that the Koran that we have today would be the exact same Koran that Muhammad
preached in the 7th century A.D. with no additions or subtractions.
However, when we look at the evidence, we find that none of these
claims are true. This article will deal with the structure and the history of transmission of the Koran.
The Koran’s
Structure
Grammatically Incorrect
In fact, the Koran
is not written in perfect Arabic. It has grammatical mistakes such as confusing noun-verb agreement and the use of Arabic slang. Some examples of this can be found in Surahs 2:177, 192, 3:59, 4:162, 5:69, 7:160, 13:28, 20:66, 63:10, etc. Even the Muslim
scholar, Ali Dashti, recognizes this:
“The Qor’an contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without
the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjective 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.
To sum up, more than one hundred Qor’anic
aberrations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted.”
-Ali Dashti, 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career
of Mohammed (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p.50.
For numerous examples of this, go here: http://debate.domini.org/newton/grammar.html
Extremely
Disordered
When the Koran was put together, instead of ordering
the Suras (i.e. chapters) in chronological order, it was ordered according to size! Thus, at one time, the reader of the Koran
may be reading a Meccan Sura, then flip the page to a Medinan Sura, and then read further on to another Meccan Sura! McClintock
and Strong’s comment:
“The matter of the Koran is exceedingly incoherent and sententious, the book evidently being without any
logical order of thought either as a whole or in its parts. This agrees with the desultory and incidental manner in which it
is said to have been delivered.”
-John McClintock and James Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981 reprint), V:151.
Even some Muslims have had to admit the incoherence of the Koran:
“Unfortunately
the Qor’an was badly edited and its contents are very obtusely arranged. All students of the Qor’an wonder why the editors did
not use the natural and logical method of ordering by date of revelation, as in ‘Ali b. Abi Taleb’s lost copy of the text.”
-Ali Dashti, 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammed (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p.28.
Repetition Ad Nauseum
When
one flips through the Koran, one is struck by the number of times the same story is told. It is likely that Muhammad repeated
the same story over and over again to make it easier for his hearers to memorize. However, this puts a serious damper onto the
belief that God was its author rather than Muhammad himself! Thomas Carlyle put it rightly:
“It is a toilsome reading
as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite. Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through
the Koran.”
-Thomas Carlyle, quoted by Prof. H.A. Gibb in Mohammedanism, An Historical Survey, p.37.
Mediocre Medieval Literature
The Koran itself challenges unbelievers to produce a piece of literature that surpasses it (Sura
“Men can produce
its like in eloquence and arrangement. A man, named Nadir ibn Haritha, was bold enough to accept the challenge, and arranged
some stories of the Persian kings in chapters and Suras and recited them.”
-Canon Sell, Studies in Islam (London: Diocesan Press, 1928), p.208.
“Hamzah ben-Ahed wrote a book against the Koran with at
least equal elegance, and Maslema another, which surpassed it, and occasioned a defection of great number of Mussulmans.”
-John McClintock and James Strong, Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981 reprint), V:152.
Even the Muslim, Ali Dashti, admits:
"Among the Muslim scholars of the early period, before bigotry and hyperbole
prevailed, were some such as Ebrahim on-Nazzim who openly acknowledged that the arrangement and syntax of the Qur'an are not miraculous
and that work of equal or greater value could be produced by other God-fearing persons…Neither the Qur'an's eloquence, nor it's moral
precepts are miraculous."
-Ali Dashti, 23 Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammed (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985),
pp.48, 57.
Of course, the Islamic claim is a completely personal and subjective argument. The Muslim could always say that
the Koran surpasses any literature read to him in literary eloquence, and a non-Muslim could always say that the Koran is not very
eloquent at all. I personally would say that the poetic Gospel of John surpasses any story in the Koran.
Lacking ‘Completeness’
When one reads the Bible, he sees that it starts with the beginning, tells of the history of the people of God, records the coming
of the Messiah, and ends with how the world will end. However, in the Koran, you have none of this:
“You are, as it were,
left hanging after each Sura because there is no logical connection from one to the other. For example, one Sura will deal with
some pedestrian matter such as Allah wanting Muhammad’s wives to stop arguing and bickering in his presence while the next Sura attacks
the idols of the Arabians. Thus, you are left with a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction that you are not getting
the whole story.”
- Robert Morey, The Islamic Invasion (Las Vegas, NV: Christian Scholars Press, 1992), p.114.
Conclusion
As
Salmon Reinach said:
“From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility,
a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think
that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time in
absorbing it.”
-Salmon Reinach, Orpheus: A History of Religion (New York: Livecraft, Inc., 1932), p.176.
The Structure and
Transmission
of the
Koran
(Part 1)