The Poor Quran!

 

 

                     In case you didn't know the Hadeeths of Islam are recorded rumor about Muhammad (God bless him and save him). They are not the Quran. But everytime some terrorist or some Muslim extremist appears on the TV screen he's always taking it upon himself to mention a bunch of times what he holds most sacred, the Quran of course, and says that the Quran supports him as he commits the type of acts that the Quran itself condemns over and over again. Or just as bad, some extremist or rightist Christian that wants to defame Islam by attacking what it holds most sacred, the Quran of course, quoting the atrocious opinions of terrorist, or extremist "scholars," rogue Islamic governments or just plain old confused individuals who happened to be Muslim and of course want to represent their religion, as wrong as they may be.

 

But why poor Quran? Do you want to know where the punishment for stoning a woman adulturer, killing someone who denounces Islam for another religion, or the belief that women should be covered from head to toe is? It's all in the Hadeeth. Although this may not please the extremist or rightist Christian reader the hadeeth are of the same nature as the biblical books about Jesus (God bless him and keep him). They came about much later than the Quran and Muhammad(God bless him and keep him). They weren't written by him or witnessed by him. All hadeeth and even the most respected ones were extracted from the scores of rumors about Muhammad and his companions and then held up as the supposed gems of truth that were sifted from rumor upon rumor about Muhammad. Do you want to hear talk of the inherent inferiority of the "infidels," killing the Jews, how women are less than men and more likely to go to Hell, and in some cases even on the level of dogs then read the Hadeeth.

 

But don't get me wrong the hadeeth are also full of wonderful things. It says things like seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave, and gives examples that instruct men that if they really feel like they need to beat their wives, they only have the right to do it with a feather.

The real fact is that the hadeeth and not the Quran is the reason for much of the backwardness of the Islamic world and opens the way to extreme views of Islam, like Wahabbism and other extremist groups. Not that there is anything wrong with wearing a turban or other clothes that belong to the world's cultures but do you want to know why cars used to be forbidden in Saudi Arabia or why a lot of Muslims seem to want to proudly live out what life was in the 7th or 8th century A.D.?

It's because the hadeeth and the scholars who have dedicated their lives to them have created a concept of righteousness and religious identity that is tied to being, acting and living like the 7th century prophet lived, creating the image that that time, that era and that people are the closest thing to righteousness that a Muslim can attain. The banner is: Forget his message, just be like him and his companions! 

Though the hadeeth contribute mostly to these ideas, some of these ideas are even independent of the hadeeth and can't even be blamed on the hadeeth. A number of these ideas come from the cultural influences that have been in that area since before Muhammad and the Quran.

 

Persian ideas of leadership were the main cause behind the split between Shias and Sunnis. Jewish ideas of law and all of their ancient sects that were absorbed by Islam have left their imprint on the religion of Islam and the people who practice it. Where do you think Islam got the stoning of adulterers from? Haven't you ever read the Bible? And although most Muslims may not believe that Jesus is God (and not all Christians do either) they still believe in the Anti-Christ, the return of Jesus and even in the immaculate conception.

 

Considering the fact that Islam is such an amalgam of Quranic, Jewish, ancient Arab, Persian and Christian ideas sometimes it's amazing to me how much Western Christians hate and fear the Arab and Muslim world, and in particular the Arab Muslim world. I mean most of these people were Christians or Jews not too long ago and most Arab countries (not Afghanistan and Iran who aren't even Arabs) have Arab Christian and until recently had significant Arab Jewish minorities that generally have no problems in those countries. So it goes without saying, and I know all the smart people have grasped it already, that the hatred isn't religious in nature as much as it is made out to seem that way. Most people of color know what the deal is when it comes to a lot of traditional European and Euro-American biases. Fear of the Moors still runs deep even hundreds of years later. Guilt by association unfortunately has never been ruled out as an unjust way of viewing things. Afterall, you don't see Islamic terrorists attacking Latin America, with all its Christians and its not so equipped national security agencies.

 

But to reiterate Islam has taken on alot of Christian and Jewish ideologies. One of them has been the art of scriptural interpretation. Although the Muslim methodology for scriptural interpretation has been more conservative than the way Christians and Jews have done this; as it concerns pulling passages, sentences and phrases out of context to make scriptural prophecies out of passages that sometimes don't even hint at speaking of the future, Islamic scholars have followed in the footsteps of their Jewish and Christian forefathers by constantly pulling Quranic passages out of context to justify their beliefs or actions. Have you ever heard of a Muslim being able to marry more than one wife? Well, that is a perfect example of where the Quran is talking about marrying more than one woman in the case of a social epidemic where children and women are abandoned without means of support and the only means of helping them in such dire conditions, and of course avoiding the accusing tongues of people who aren't so well intentioned, is marrying the mothers of those children or the marriable women involved. While laying out these conditions the Quran states ". . .marry two or three or four .  . ." and conveniently this is the only phrase that even Muslims scholars (of all people!) quote to justify their being able to mary up to 4 wives. And it is this same type of selective quoting that Muslim extremists, Christian extremists, anti-religion extremists or just anti-Islamic extremists use to try to undermine Islam, but more unfortunately the Quran.

 

When the Quran talks about fighting it always talks about it in the sense of self-defense. No, the Quran is not a pacifist book, that says turn the other cheek or go live in a monestary or don't kill animals for food, or "make love, not war" nor does it humor to the modern concept that violence in all cases is bad, an idea which by the way separates citizen and soldier too much, and which creates a dichotomy between violence and peace which in my view is not healthy and spurs excessiveness bordering on insanity and savageness when these people are found in violent situations, and where their only recourse is fear and their reflections are full of self-hatred and blame for having used violence.

 

However, to come back to my point, the Quran plainly says defend yourself and defend the abused, but also repeatedly says do not be excessive, and that is where the terrorists are wrong. The terrorist are not defending themselves and they are not defending the abused. They are fighting out of jealousy, envy, hatred and fear. They attack people who have no intention on subjugating anyone and who go to work to feed their families. They say "attack all Americans" (and they don't disclude American Musims) because we are guilty by association but the Quran does not promote "killing the infidels" or killing anyone because of their nationality or race. That is nothing but pure discrimination. Did God drown all of Egypt or just Pharoah and his helpers?  So even if they viewed the leaders of the United States or the West as tyrants they are just mounting up their sins and proving their disobedience to God by killing innocent individuals. And they will pay for that in the end.

  

The Quran and the Hadeeth are only brothers because they are both associated with Islam. Islam is in truth a representation of the plentiful and various contents of the Hadeeth. Scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah who advocated the use of bells to distinguish between Muslims, Christians and Jews, (fighting hard to try to distinguish Islam from the forms of Judaism and Christianity that it came to mix with) was the predecessor to movements like Wahhabism and other extremist ideologies that tyrannical and oppressive theocracies put into place in order to keep power and give the impression of righteousness.

 

Morevoer, these scholars even use the hadeeths to interpret the Quran! The Hadeeths should never be used to interpret the Koran! Which is more reliable?-the actual book that Muhammad recieved and preached or the supposedly authenticated rumor that was spread about him 100-300 years later? I think the answer is obvious.

 

But in the end the Hadeeth is like the evil little brother of the Quran that Islam can't shake. Everything that the Hadeeth causes, the Quran gets blamed for. Poor Quran! The worse of all is that the Quran has gotten blamed for a religion that it didn't even preach. Islam with all its beauty and its ugliness like every religion is not even a product of the Quran. Let's just say that we can thank the ancient pre-Islamic families like the Ummayyads and the Abbasids for coining the term Islam, for usurping the Quran and encouraging the hadeeth, and for using Islam to unite the Arabs tribes like the Lakhmids and the Ghassanids who had been making their way into ancient Persian and Roman territorries for hundreds of years. The first Arab conquerors treated Islam as if it were an Arab religion, but the Persians and other peoples recognized the Quran and the basis of their religion as being more far reaching than that. Too bad they did nothing but help to pile on more barriers that make the Quran and the religion that it preaches less accessable to the people. The people of those days who are rumored to have just followed the Quran like the Kharijites and the Mu'tazilites were just called apostates or non-muslims, damned and justified as "killable" and used as practice targets for the blades of the rulers in power. Whereas the countless Arab Christians, Jewish Arabs and Persians continued to graciously contribute to Islam from their religious demoninations leading to the formation of what is now Islam.