Comments on MUSLIM: What You Need to Know About the World’s Fastest Growing Religion Kindle Edition (Hanegraaff, Hank)

QUOTE: "Jesus is born of a virgin, called the Word of God, speaks from the cradle, performs miracles as a child, is sinless, and will return at the end of the world. None of this is said of Muhammad, yet Muhammad is held to be the greater prophet, indeed, the “seal of the prophets.”

COMMENT: By implication, Muhammad is more the word of God than Jesus.  This Jesus is not the Jesus of Christian history but Moses's nephew Issa.

QUOTE: Islam [l-is’lāmu] (submission to His Will)” (3:19).10 Thus, when Muhammad instructed devotees to fight “the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Q 9:29),11 he was clearly communicating that submission to Allah meant fighting Christians and Jews to the point of surrender or death. And as Allah makes plain in the very next ayah (verse), waging war against “People of the Book” was not necessitated by self-defense but by what he perceived as the falsity of their Judeo-Christian traditions. Therefore, it is fair to note that Islam is not a religion in the sanitized Western sense. It is an all-encompassing sociopolitical legal matrix that has bred a worldview antagonistic to anything but itself.  Again, there may be millions of peaceful and tolerant Muslims, but that hardly means that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion. To determine whether it is or is not requires an objective, open-minded look at Islamic history. This includes unbiased consideration ...

COMMENT: Good.  Even the fact that Allah could have made such commands but not have them enshrined in a scripture proves that the religion revels in the violence it's God commands.   The book gives us a quote from Allah. “Fighting is prescribed upon you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not” (Q 2:216).  This is clearly saying that necessary evil exists and only God might know that it is necessary and why.

Too many lacklustre religionists don't understand people taking their faith seriously enough to do harm.  That is at the root of the problem and the irrational insane posturing by Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama that Islam is a religion of peace.  They think that if they whitewash religion enough then it will not take itself seriously enough to violate liberal "values."

QUOTE ABOUT CONCEPTION WHEN "considered at all, it was considered quite simple—for all practical purposes, little more than what the Qur’an describes as reproduction via an unsophisticated clot of blood. Moreover, no seventh-century man could have possibly imagined subatomic particles—much less the atomic energy that can be generated by splitting atoms. Indeed, the negotiation of complex treaties to ensure that humanity does not vaporize itself in a nuclear holocaust facilitated by the splitting of atoms would have been considered laughable fourteen centuries ago. In similar fashion an ineffable God who created the universe ex nihilo would have been incomprehensible to Muhammad. It has always been the Christian contention that genuine revelation is the necessary precondition for understanding. Reason alone is simply insufficient. No matter how keen a man’s eyesight, he can see nothing if confined to pitch-black darkness. As light is axiomatic to seeing, so revelation is needed for knowing."

COMMENT: Excellent.  The Islamic God is not the creator God of Christianity who produces all things and does not use anything to produce the universe.  The creation doctrine is cherished for it means that God is not part of nature but being - what nature depends on.  Muhammad's god is an idol.

QUOTE: The fundamentalist Muslim organization Submission.org correctly notes, “The Holy Spirit in the Quran is clearly defined as the angel Gabriel who has been the angel-messenger between The Almighty God and the human beings.” As this web entry goes on to explain, the “Arabic Quran calls him; ‘Ruhhil-Qudus’ (Holy Spirit), ‘Ruuhanaa’ (Our Spirit), ‘Ruuhul-'Amiin’ (The Honest Spirit) and ‘Al-Ruh'’ (The Spirit). Thus, when reading the verses in the Quran, the whole Quran, we see that Gabriel is the Holy and Honest Bearer of Revelations. We learn from 2:97 that these references are indeed talking about Gabriel.”  The Submission Muslims conclude their article with these words: “The ‘Holy Spirit’ in the Quran refers to the angel Gabriel and has nothing to do with Trinity or part of a Trinity. Trinity is denounced in the strongest language in the Quran.”

COMMENT: This is major!  The Spirit is God in Christianity and here he is just an angel.  And since Gabriel did not authorise the Bible or the New Testament or dictate them it follows they cannot be trusted like the Qur'an can.

QUOTE: The Qur’an contends that human beings are “created from an ejected fluid, that issues from between the spine and the ribs” (Q 86:6–7 Majestic). This is plain wrong. Sperm cells originate in the testes. For Muhammad to have gotten this wrong is one thing; for Allah, quite another. Muslim protestations in this regard are at best humorous. Another example involves Alexander the Great. Alexander, who died one month shy of his thirty-third birthday, is rendered an elderly Muslim a thousand years before Islam was even invented (see Q 18:83–98). In like fashion, Pharaoh threatens his magicians with crucifixion long before crucifixion was invented by the Persians and later popularized by the Romans (see Q 7:124). Clearly, factual errors render the Qur’an a thoroughly human concoction.

COMMENT: Good!  If it cannot get the past right then it cannot get the future right either.  Interestingly the mention of crucifixion fits how the Qur'an states that Issa - allegedly Jesus - escaped crucifixion despite living in Moses' day!

QUOTE: Qur’an 30. Another prophecy frequently cited in feigned evidence for Qur’anic eloquence is 30:1–5. Not only is this prophecy singularly unspectacular, but the language used by Allah is pedestrian at best: Alif Lam Mim. The Roman Empire has been defeated—in a land close by: But they, (even) after (this) defeat of theirs, will soon be victorious—within a few years. With Allah is the Decision, in the Past and in the Future: On that day shall the Believers rejoice—with the help of Allah. He helps whom He will, and He is Exalted in Might, Most Merciful.

COMMENT: One of the vaguest most useless prophecies ever.  Anybody predicting that way is clearly a fraud. Readers who still believe in the Qur'an after reading that are either unthinking or blind.  Blindness is a marked feature of Islam and Christianity.

QUOTE: Jesus demonstrated omnipotence not only by resurrecting Lazarus (John 11:43) but also by raising himself from the dead (John 2:19); and he alluded to his omnipresence by promising he would be with his disciples “to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

COMMENT: The doctrine that Jesus is God and raised himself from the dead to prove his power over death and eternal life is of huge importance so why is only one gospel teaching it?  This principle matters more than any evidence for the resurrection.  Its absence from the other gospels renders the resurrection tale dubious.

QUOTE: They say: “(Allah) Most Gracious has begotten a son!” Indeed ye have put forth a thing most monstrous! As if the skies are ready to burst, the earth to split asunder, and the mountains to fall down in utter ruin. That they should invoke a son for (Allah) Most Gracious. For it is not consonant with the majesty of (Allah) Most Gracious that He should beget a son. (Q 19:88–92) Allah rejects the notion that God could have a son on the basis that he does not have a consort.

COMMENT: It says nothing about a consort being the main or only reason.  The essential problem is that Allah cannot share his glory with anybody and thus will not tolerate a child.  The Trinity is being attacked as saying God can beget God the Son.

QUOTE REGARDING HOW JOHN 1:14 SAYS JESUS IS GOD'S DIVINE SON:. To the Allah of Islam, this is nothing short of blasphemous. God “begetteth not, nor is He begotten” (Q 112:3). The very notion is offensive. To Allah’s way of thinking, calling God “Father” and Jesus Christ “Son” suggests sexual procreation. “It is not befitting to (the majesty of) Allah that He should beget a son” (Q 19:35). “How can He have a son when He hath no consort?” (Q 6:101). “And exalted is the majesty of our Lord: He has taken neither a wife nor a son” (Q 72:3). What Allah fails to understand, of course, is that the Bible does not use the term begotten with respect to the Father and the Son in the sense of sexual reproduction but rather in the sense of special relationship.

COMMENT: The mention of the consort is only talking about the how.  The book is saying that calling Issa the son of God is mad for God has no wife to get a son. Do not forget that some think that the doctrine of the Christians Muhammad would have known would have been the notion that Jesus is God's son but proceeds from the Father and the Holy Spirit.  This is enough to suggest father and consort. 

 The main point is not the how but that that God is too great to have a wife or son.  The book says OR.  So even if there is no consort there cannot be any right to degrade God by saying anybody is his son.  So Issa is the son of God in no sense - the consort sense or otherwise.

QUOTE: To begin with, in the Qur’anic account, Allah confuses the Tree of Life with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Satan whispered evil to him: he said, “O Adam! Shall I lead thee to the Tree of Eternity and to a kingdom that never decays?” In the result, they both ate of the tree, and so their nakedness appeared to them: they began to sew together, for their covering, leaves from the Garden: thus did Adam disobey his Lord, and allow himself to be seduced. (Q 20:120–121).

Furthermore, in the Islamic account, there is no original sin—just an original act of heedlessness. Thus, while the biblical worldview highlights the severity of sin and its consequences, the Qur’anic worldview reduces the original sin to an original slip—a mere bout of forgetfulness. In short, the fall is reformulated a fall. In the words of Muslim scholars Jane Idleman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, the common Christian conception has been that Adam was expelled from paradise because of his sin, and due to this original act of disobedience the succession of humanity is tainted. While the Qur’an contains the narrative of Adam’s expulsion from the Garden [Q 2:35–39], the expulsion is the result of satanic deception, immediately pardoned, rather than a progenitive act of disobedience with ramifications for the rest of humanity. Finally, according to Islam, every newborn child is born in a state of fitrah—or a state of original Muslim purity.  As Muhammad purportedly put it, “No babe is born but upon Fitra [as a Muslim]. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Polytheist.”

COMMENT: Original sin is a core teaching of Christianity and it is denied here and original righteousness is asserted.  There is no need for a saviour in such a scheme.

Will it be considered Islamophobic one day to say a child is baptised a Catholic?