IS THE KORAN ACCURATE?

The Koran presents itself as a book dictated by God through an angel from Heaven to Muhammad.  Islam and the book teach a near-fatalism where God plans all things so if there is a sufficient case to be made that the book is not preserved correctly or tampered with it cannot be truly God's word.

Islam is built on the lie that the Koran is so good that no man can imitate any chapter in it.  It is a masterpiece that can only be explained by divine inspiration. Iranian scholar, Ali Dashti wrote that it, "contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries...illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects."  So much for the eloquence and masterpiece!  A religion based on a lie, a big one, and one that succeeds in a lie that anybody can see through, is the ultimate ideology.  It obviously makes its people afraid to see the reality and to challenge the lie.  The power and danger of religion is clear from the fact that even Muslims who complain about the religion and who live in cultures that give them freedom of expression will rarely say anything about the mangled mess they have for a holy book.

The book was complied from bits of text written on just about everything including palm leaves. Many of those who knew what the prophet revealed were dead soon after him and Zaid who was the secretary of Muhammad had to set about getting the records and testimonies together to create the Koran. This haphazard way of preserving the word of God is an admission of failure. God would not be so careless. How do we know that a word was not changed or a sentence expanded here and there and wasn’t the so-called final version intended to silence anybody who said that this was a variant or a corruption? Read page 15 of An Introduction to Asian Religions. God went to the trouble of writing the book on a tablet in Heaven to show its permanence and yet he had the earthly version put together so haphazardly. And yet this book contains much clumsy repetition which betrays a human origin and that there was indeed much confusion about the text.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience we read that Muhammad sometimes heard ringing like a bell which caused something to come over him, other times he talked to the angel face to face – though nobody saw the angel but him and the angel often changed itself to look like it was somebody else, other times he had dreams in which things were revealed to him and other times he saw God in disguise (page 461). This bears the hallmarks of credulity and mental disorder. “Perhaps he mistook things for God in disguise like Abraham did when he saw God in the form of three men. It is possible for a man to give reasonably intelligent revelations and be gullible about the visions that verify his thoughts,” we are told. But if you think a man talking to you is an apparition of God then how could your revelations be reliable? The whole point of revelations is having them come from a reliable source.

The Koran warns against letting error thrive and seeks to eradicate error and yet in Sura 4:88 the Muslim is forbidden to try and guide a person who Allah has led astray. God is said to addala in many Koranic verses. This is translated as lead astray or draw into evil but some say it means let one be drawn into evil (page 177, The Light Shineth in Darkness). They say that God cuts the light of truth and his grace from the person who does not want to know. But how is the person supposed to change when he does that? The person is abandoned because he wants to abandon God. But if the person wants to abandon God the person needs grace and light to rebel against and get up God’s nose.

The Koran indulges in a spot of apologetics in Jonah or Sura 10. There God inspires the argument that he must exist for the change of day to night and night to day is a sign of the existence of God. One would need a better sign than that though it says that everything in heaven and earth is a sign but we are taking issue with the book on this one. Something could change from dark to light without a God. The prophet says in the Sura that if he invented the Koran himself why can’t anybody come along with a Sura they have written themselves that is as good as his. But if you read the book you can see that anybody can meet this challenge. The Koran says in this chapter that it explains the Jewish and Christian scriptures and confirms them. That is dishonest when it maintains that they have been altered.

A man with Muhammad’s guile would never have challenged anybody to write a Sura as good as one of his especially when a Sura can just be a few lines. Faked miracles and crafty prophecies that he ensured were fulfilled would have been a cleverer option if he wanted to make a the best impact he could. False revelations some of which Muhammad never made but which were falsely attributed to him have been woven into the Koran.

No fulfilled prophecies or evidence is given that the Koran is the word of God apart from the testimony and visions of Muhammad. All the early sources say that Muhammad was the only witness. And the Koran reportedly came from Gabriel an angel - even if it was Gabriel was he still a faithful angel to God? Didn't Satan fall away from God after being an angel of God? It is really the word of an angel you are taking that the book is from God. What use is that?
 
A man mentioned in one obscure Hadith or tradition met a man with Muhammad who Muhammad said was Gabriel the angel. But still there is only Muhammad’s word for it that it was Gabriel. We still have only one witness to the apparitions. Three people who testified that they had dreams and visions and brought out a new and more reasonable version of the Koran would be more credible. This man expects his followers to kill and maim over one man’s doctrines - his. The evidence for the Jesus story which Islam rejects and has a different story is better than that for Islam. Muhammad was not the apostle of God in succession to Jesus that he said he was. The Koran attributes miracles to Jesus such as raising the dead. Muhammad was his superior and worked none. How bizarre!
 
Muhammad met this entity claiming to be the angel Gabriel. He was at times doubtful if the entity was really an angel and thought it might be a jinn - a jinn is a naughty spirit at best or outright evil at worst.

The Hadith which is used to verify the Koran is full of absurd doctrines and admits that Muhammad was a sinner and generally proves that he was a false prophet. So it fails to verify that he was a true Prophet.

It is a fact that long ago Uthman got all the different versions of the Koran he could grab.  All were burnt and one was kept and is the basis of the modern Koran. A book called The Collection of the Qur’an by John Burton gives proof that the Koran was corrupted according to the traditions in the Hadith and shows how Islamic tradition has severe conflicts regarding how the Koran came to be. Most of the people who knew Muhammad opposed Uthman and what he did indicating that the present book is corrupted. The book was corrupt the from the first time it was written down because it mixed up stories from the Old Testament. For example, it says Israel got the Ark back when Allah chose Saul as king though the Bible says they had it back long before that. Corrupted memories led to the corruption. Muslims accuse the Jews of having falsified parts of the Old Testament and used that excuse to justify believing the Koran and not the Bible but what reason would the Jews have had for doing that? None.

In 1972 in a grave in Yemen fragments of what may be the oldest Koran we have were found. They were found to have put verses in different orders and textual variants suggesting that the Koran did not come cut and dried from Muhammad but was gradually formed after his death. The Muslims then should not pay too much attention to the verses that call for the killing of unbelievers for they might be in the wrong context.

A friend of Muhammad’s once said he knew a Sura or chapter of the Koran that he had been forgotten and even he could only remember a line out of it. His name was Abu Musa al-Ash’ari and he was an authority on the Holy Book.

The Koran says that God sometimes does away with verses to replace them with better ones. Muslims say it means the Old and New Testaments though the book explicitly says it confirms these works (Sura 3:3). And wouldn't describe them as verses! The Koran was always concerned very much about the verses format. It bothers the Muslims that God would write the Koran and cancel verses in it and change them. The Koran would have trouble confirming books that it declares to be falsified! How could the book mean them when the context shows it is probably referring to its own deleted verses? Cancelling verses suggests that the book has a human origin. A scripture should have an origin that is different from any other book. In that, the Mormons were right with regard to the Book of Mormon which allegedly came from a miraculous source.

There are many web sites that how the Hadith or tradition states that verses have been dropped from the Koran.

The Koran claims that there is no way that anybody can produce such a masterpiece as it.   "If mankind and the jinn gathered in order to produce the like of this Qur'an, they could not produce the like of it, even if they were to each other assistants." Surah 17:88.  This is nonsense for the book is disorganised and unclear.  It implies that the book is perfect for God dictated it.  Is it any wonder verses could be missing?

Peter Townsend, "When one takes a closer look at the passages that appear on the folios, a rather startling fact emerges: the folios contain material that is quite obviously derived from earlier sources. The Birmingham Folios contain surahs 18:17-31 and 19:91-20:40. The verses from chapter 18 tell a story about some youths who fell asleep in a cave because they were being persecuted for their faith. They are preserved by God and wake up after many years to changed circumstances. This is a straight plagiarization of the Orthodox folk tale known as the ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’. Chapter 19:98 is strongly related to the Proto-Evangelium of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. The section from Sura 20 is a retelling of the Biblical story of Moses. As Joseph Hoffman says: “These are some of the most obviously derivative sections of the entire Qur’an – stories which the Qur’an cannibalizes without attribution, increasing the likelihood that what we may have is not the Qur’an at all but fragments of stories that were eventually incorporated into the Qur’an at a later period.”

Wesley Huff says that the Birmingham Qur'an challenges the statements of the book that it is indeed perfect and unchanged.  The text proves that in a period of time there was never a completely preserved text of the original.

The problems with the transmission of the Qur'an, its current text being absurd and plus how Muhammad himself was not to be relied on with it show that it is idolatry to say that whatever the book asserts God asserts.