If it is God’s Religion I am Looking for, the Sacred Scripture Must be From God .
Already believing in God, therefore, my first parameter for a true religion was that the religion must have God as its original source. No one can know the details about God except God.
He is above and beyond the realm of human experience. More importantly, no one knows how He should be worshipped except Him. No one knows what way of life is pleasing to Him except Him.
Although humans are able to come to many sound conclusions about God, no human could logically claim that he has somehow—independent of revelation from God—discovered the way in which God should be worshipped and the way that is pleasing to God.
Thus, if the ultimate goal in one’s heart is to truly please and worship God as He should be worshipped, then one has no alternative but to turn to Him for guidance and direction.
Based on this first premise, any man-made religion is not a logical alternative.
No matter how hard humans may try, they cannot authoritatively speak about how God is supposed to be worshipped.
There are some religions that may have originated from God but, afterwards, their adherents felt free to rely upon human reasoning to adjust, modify or alter the religion.
In the process, they actually created a new religion, different from that which God had revealed. This, once again, completely defeats the purpose. What God revealed does not need any improvement or change from humankind.
Any such change or alteration means a deviation away from what God revealed. Thus, any change or alteration will only take humankind away from the true and proper way of worshipping God.
Furthermore, God is more than capable of revealing a perfect revelation for any time or circumstance.
If there were any need to alter or change any of God’s laws, the authority for that also rests only with God. In other words, God is free to change some of His laws due to His wisdom and knowledge, for example, out of mercy or as a form of punishment upon His servants.
He may do this by sending a new revelation or even by sending a new prophet. With that, there is no logical problem. But there is a grave problem when humans take it upon themselves to “fix” God’s revelation.
The second parameter is that the teachings from God must be preserved in their original form.
The logic behind this point should be obvious. If the original revelation came from God but was then later tampered and distorted by humans, one now has a mixture of God’s religion and human interpolation. This is no longer God’s pure religion.
Although this may seem like an obvious premise, it is amazing to see many people who have not even considered this point, blindly following scriptures or teachings that cannot be historically authenticated.
the Bible was clearly not God’s word; they would claim that the Biblical writers were “inspired” by God. That is the most that they could claim, although even that they could not prove.
This seemed to me to be blind faith because if you do not know if the details have been preserved, how can you be so certain that the main teachings have truly been preserved. In reality, we do not even know who Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were and why exactly their names were attached to those famous Gospels.
We will note that every Gospel begins with the introduction “According to.....” such as “The Gospel according to Saint Matthew,” “The Gospel according to Saint Luke,” “The Gospel according to Saint Mark,” “The Gospel according to Saint John.” The obvious conclusion for the average man on the street is that these people are known to be the authors of the books attributed to them.
This, however is not the case. Why? Because not one of the vaunted four thousand copies existent carries it’s author’s signature. It has just been assumed that they were the authors. Recent discoveries, however, refute this belief.
The Quran’s Promise that it Shall be Preserved
In any case, it caught my eye that the Quran says about itself:
“We have revealed the reminder and We shall preserve it.” (Quran15:9)
This was interesting to me because within the Quran there is a clear reference as to how the previous peoples fail to preserve completely the message that they received.
Hence, in the light of what the Quran was saying about previous revelations, this was a very bold statement. And, incidentally, it can be considered one of the prophecies of the Quran- coming from a Judeo-Christian perspective, prophecies were somewhat important to me.
If they did not come to pass, they would be very damaging in my eyes while if they did come to pass, I would consider that a very good sign.
Once again, the history of Islam presents a different scenario than that of the earlier revelations. The Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, lived just over 1400 years ago. He is definitely the most “historical” of the various prophets. Thus, the history of the Quran is known and documented.
The Quran was preserved with meticulous care.
The Quran describes itself as both a “reading” (Quran) and a book (kitaab). In fact, it was via both of these means that the Quran was meticulously preserved.
During the life of the Prophet, the Prophet had specific scribes whose job was to record the revelation when the he received it.
The Quran was not revealed all at once. It was revealed and recorded over a period of twenty-three years. During that time, revelation could come to the Prophet at any time.
When it did, it would be recognized by physical signs on the Prophet (a point that led some to claim that he was simply epileptic). He would then call for his scribes and tell them what had been revealed and exactly where the new passage fits vis-à-vis what had already been revealed by God.
The Quran, which is not a large book, was also preserved in memory as well as written form from the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself. Many of the Companions of the Prophet had memorized the entire Quran and, fearing what had happened to earlier religious communities, they took the necessary steps to protect it from any form of adulteration. The Quran continues to be memorized today—another amazing aspect of the Quran. In fact, God says about the Quran:
“And We have indeed made the Quran easy to understand and remember…”
(Quran 54:17)
To this day, millions of Muslims have the Quran memorized. If Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 were to be a reality today and all the books were to be burned to ashes, the Quran would still survive. Muslims would be able to rewrite the entire Quran from memory.
Soon after the death of the Prophet, the Quran was all compiled together and shortly afterwards official copies were sent to the distant lands to ensure that the text was pure. To this day, one can travel to any part of the world and pick up a copy Quran and find that it is the same throughout the world
Even the language of the Quran, which is essential to keeping a true understanding of the text, has been preserved. Such cannot be said for earlier prophets such as Moses and Jesus, whose Hebrew and Aramaic no longer exist .
The Quran was nothing but the words that the Prophet received as revelation and informed his followers that they formed part of the Quran. Hence, the Quran is completely different from the Bible, which includes stories about the prophets, comments on their lives and teachings, letters and writings by non-prophets and so forth. No such human interpolations and additions can be found in the Quran whatsoever.
One concept that many of the non-Muslim writers were claiming was that the Prophet Muhammad simply stole most of his teachings from the Jews and Christians. Take, for example, the title of Bell’s book, The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment—which, by the way, if you tell any Arab that Islam developed in a Christian environment, it would be a real shock to them!
I recognized that there were two possibilities:
(1) the Prophet Muhammad did steal his material or
(2) the revelation he received was from the same God who sent Moses, Jesus and the earlier prophets, as the Prophet Muhammad himself claimed. If it were the latter, it would explain why there would be much overlap in the teachings and message. The same God sent the earlier prophets and is simply recounting their stories again in the new revelation.
However, I immediately started to notice some glaring differences between the Quran and the Bible, even with respect to the teachings about God. If the Prophet Muhammad was “editing” what he was hearing from the Bible—and by the way, at that time, there was no Bible available in Arabic—then he was doing an excellent job.
I found that the strange teachings about God that one finds throughout the Bible are completely and unequivocally missing from the Quran.
For the sake of brevity, only a few examples illustrating this point shall be given.
The New International Version of Genesis 3:8-11, reads,
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
Here, God is pictured as walking in the garden in the cool of the day.
What is even more astonishing is that Adam and Eve were able to hide from God and he had to ask, “Where are you?” If a human is able to hide from Him in the garden, how is it that this Lord is going to have knowledge of the sins that people commit? It would be difficult for any human to gender in his heart the kind of love and fear of God that he should have when he believes that his God is so faulty and weak that an event like this could occur to him.
In Genesis 32:24-28, there is the story and literal description of Jacob wrestling with and defeating God.
In verse 28, it says, “You [Jacob] have wrestled with God and with men, and you have won.” In other words, the creator of the universe whom mankind is expected to worship and submit to was defeated by a mere mortal in a wrestling match.
The Old Testament even pictures God as one who intended to do evil but then repented. Exodus 32:14 states,
“And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people” (King James Version).
It would not be surprising for anyone to turn away from God and not consider Him worthy of worship if He himself has to repent from His own evi
even when describing the Prophets, many important, yet rather despicable, stories that are prominent in the Bible have been completely ignored in the Quran.
For example, Exodus 32:1-6 has the story of Aaron, the brother of Moses and one of the religious leaders of the tribe of Israel, making a golden calf as an idol for worship.
In 2 Samuel, chapter 11, verses 1-17, the leader of the Jewish people David, whom the Muslims consider a prophet, is shamelessly pictured as committing adultery, doing his best to conceal it and then doing his best to have the woman’s husband killed. Solomon is also accused of committing idolatry simply out of love for his many wives.
In addition, the Bible also claims the following : Jacob committed deceitful tricks towards his father Isaac. The drunken Prophet Lot committed incest with his daughters.
Judas committed incest with his daughter in law. Pharez and Zarah who were the result of that incest are honored as the great grandfathers and great grandmothers of Jesus.
Jesus is reported to have rebuffed his own mother when he said, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”
All of these stories are not found in the Quran and a Muslim does not believe such ignoble accusations concerning the noble prophets selected by God to guide humanity.
The Christian conception of God and God having a son is, of course, completely blasphemous from an Islamic perspective. I often wondered how there could have been a semi-human son of God or how Jesus in particular could be the son of God.
As Jesus is pictured in the New Testament, besides performing some miracles that earlier prophets performed, there is nothing special about him. He lived like a human being, eating and drinking. He suffered like a human and even prayed out to God.
The Romans and Jews defeated God’s supposed son and he could not save himself, even crying out to his father. Beyond that, there are also of the difficult questions encountered by Christians : was he partially divine and partially human, was he completely divine, he was completely human, was he divine since birth, was he divine at a time and then that divinity left him and so on.
In the Islamic conception of God, there is nothing of this nature whatsoever. In fact, the Quran even denies the crucifixion—surely if the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, were simply copying from the Bible, he would have included that story.
In the Quran, on the other hand, God is depicted in such a way that one realizes that He is deserving of worship. One feels gratitude to Him and hope in Him. God truly becomes beloved to the individual as He understands more about Him via the Quran. Some passages in the Quran describing God are noteworthy:
“God is He, other than Whom there is no other god; Who knows (all things) both secret and open; He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. God is He, other than Whom there is no other god; the Sovereign, the Holy One, the Source of Peace (and Perfection), the Guardian of Faith, the Preserver of Safety, the Exalted in Might, the Irresistible, the Supreme: Glory to God! (High is He) above the partners they attribute to Him. He is God, the Creator, the Evolver, the Bestower of Forms. To Him belong the Most Beautiful Names: whatever is in the heavens and on earth, doth declare His Praises and Glory; and He is the Exalted in Might, the Wise.”
(Quran 59:22-24)
“God! None has the right to be worshipped but He, the Ever Living, the One Who sustains and protects all that exists. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on earth. Who is he that can intercede with Him except with His Permission? He knows what happens to them (His creatures) in this world, and what will happen to them in the Hereafter. And they will never compass anything of His Knowledge except that which He wills. His Footstool extends over the heavens and the earth, and He feels no fatigue in guarding and preserving them. And He is the Most High, the Most Great”
(Quran2:255).
“Say [to them, O Muhammad], ‘He is God, (the) One. God, The Self-Sufficient Master, Whom all creatures need. He begets not, nor was He begotten; And there is none co-equal or comparable unto Him”
(Quran 112:1-4).
