It
seems to me, when commentary about religion occurs on these forums it is mostly
about Christianity. There has been very little critical analysis of Islam. As a
religion with over 1, 5 billion subscribers, most of what I read about it is
sorely lacking. In the interests of fairness and the understanding of Islam --
and its impact on the world -- here is a very brief primer on the basics of
Islam, its founders, its history, its documents and its politics.
WHAT
IS ISLAM?
Islam is
a set of instructions for the propagation an aggressively expansionistic
theocracy. It is founded on a collection of dictations spoken by a
warrior-priest named Abu al-Qasim Muhammed ibn ?Abd Allah ibn ?Abd al-Mutalib
ibn Hashim -- more commonly known as Muhammed.
Muhammed
was an illiterate seventh century trader who, at the age of forty, changed
careers to become a prophet and later a warlord. By claiming these verses were
allegedly revealed to him by a supernatural agency, Muhammed declared he was
authorised to start his new religious career and this is what he did.
About
twenty years after his death these proclamations were assembled from numerous
sources, some written down but most often from memorised oral stories, into a
single gospel called the Koran. Koran means recitation.
THE
KORAN
It is
also important to know that these sources of these verses came in a variety of
dialects of Aramaic, Persian and early, pre-formalised Arabic, with bits and
pieces of most of the languages spoken around the Gulf States – like Hebrew and
Greek by one of the late prophet’s scribes, Zayd ibn Thabit. Ibn Thabit was
ordered to compile this Koran by the caliph of the time and it is referred to
as the Uthman Koran after the caliph.
Once Zayd
ibn Thabit had completed his task, copies were made of this authorised and
accepted Koran were sent out to different cities with instructions that all
earlier conflicting Korans were to be burnt. It should be said that not all
Muslims of the time like this version of the Koran – each had their own
favourite. This is true to this day.
Ibn
Thabit’s Koran is divided into 114 sura or chapters, chapters are divided up
into aya or verses.
The
famous Sana’a Koran – the Muslim equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in
1972 – shows that these early palimpsest Korans did indeed have discrepancies
were dated to around 19 years after Muhammed’s death. Most modern Korans are
based around the version standardised in 1918, in Cairo – known as the Hafs
Koran.
DIFFERENT
KORANS
It is
written in the Hadith that the first compilations of the Koran had different
suras and ayas (chapters and verses)¬ and some of these people were sad that
many of Muhammed’s teachings and saying had been lost (One of Muhammed’s
wives, Aisha, lamented that a goat ate two sura as they lay drying on the night
Muhammed died).
In spite
of Zayd ibn Thabit’s authorised Koran – with orders to destroy by burning the
earlier versions –regional Arabic, Aramaic and other linguistic dialects meant
that there were many other versions of the Koran based on different interpretations
of the original pre-formalised Arabic.
Originally,
scholars said there were seven basic texts but these have now grown into twenty
variants all of the Middle East. Most of Muslims use the Hafs Koran but others,
like the Warsh and Qalun, are popular in northern Africa.
ARABIC
ORTHOGRAPHY
By the
9th century, the spread of Islam had made Arabic a widely spoken language but
because of its informal nature regional dialects were diverging at such an
alarming rate that the clergy formalised Arabic to make it match the various
linguistic structures of the original Uthmanic Koran.
It is
important to note that Ibn Thabit’s Arabic was a collection of roughly
corresponding pidgin Aramaic dialects that had no vowels, missing consonants
and no punctuation. The original Arabic of the Uthman Koran Arabic had words
and grammar and syntax of dozens of other languages, some related, some wildly
foreign.
By adding
diacritics – the little dots, curls and slashes that added in missing vowels,
consonants and Punctuation – early Arabic was formalised. Modern Arabic,
however, has very little in common with Ibn Thabit’s Arabic.
KORAN
The Koran
is what Ibn Thabit collected, a dense collection of speeches and sayings and
explanations allegedly spoken by Muhammed. It is highly repetitive and dense
and somewhat confusing. The work is not broken down into thematic portions but
rather clusters of different themes repeat continuously through the text like
vignettes.
The text
is arranged, after the introduction, from the chapter with the biggest in front
trailing to the smallest. There are guides which explain Ibn Thabit’s presumed
chronology of the chapters for those interested.
HADITH
While the
Koran is most important to Muslims, the collections of the Hadith are a very
close second to most (although there are minority groups of Muslims who only
accept Koran as a sacred text but not the Hadith).
The
numerous eye witness accounts of Muhammed’s life were assembled in the 9th
century into collections of biographies (sira), and legal and religious
instructions (Sunna) called the Hadith. This happened around the same time
Arabic was formalised and the diacritics were added. Without the diacritical
marks for much needed consonants and vowels, the original Arabic made about 20%
of the Koran unintelligible – roughly one sentence in five – and sometimes a
word had up to thirty different meanings without the diacritics.
To
understand the importance of the Hadith is that the Five Pillars of Islam, the
basic core instructions to subscribe to the faith – Sahadah: submit to Allah
and accept Muhammed as the prophet of Islam; Salat: Prayer; Zakat: Obligatory
charity; Sawn: The fast during the lunar month of Ramadan; and Hajj: the
obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca - are taken from different Hadith.
ISLAM
POLITIC
Both the
Koran and Hadith command the formation of a caliphate, a collected Islamic
nation (umma) governed by a caliph using Islamic law (shari’a). Islam, by its
nature is a political religion or theocracy.
OTHER
TEXTS
The
nature of the Koran and Hadith mean that much of these texts are densely
obscured by colloquialisms and idioms known to the Arabs living in the area
surrounding and including Mecca and Medina. To help Muslims understand the
Koran and Hadith, Islamic scholars have written many exegetic and apologetic
texts explaining these colloquialisms and idioms. These exegeses are called
tafsir. There are also biographies of Muhammed, extracted from the Koran and
Hadith and other sources, called sira.
