Excellant read:
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
>"There are many reasons Islamic clerics are sensitive about having the Qur’an translated into a contemporary language. The most important are that they don’t want anyone to know what it actually says or how poorly it’s written, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Muslims claim that Arabic was Allah’s original tongue and that translations are simply paraphrases. But that would make Allah younger than man because Arabic is one of man’s most recent dialects. It's written form didn’t emerge until the 7th century. And most every important religious word, concept, and name used in the Qur’an was derived from Syriac, the language of Syrian Christians in the 6th century.
Muslims invest a quarter of their school day learning to recite the Qur’an —not reading it or understanding it. They simply learn to mouth its sounds in the arcane, inadequate, and odd dialect of Religious Arabic. That way they can be fooled into believing that it’s “God’s Book,” and that it’s written intelligently. Ignorant, they can be indoctrinated and thus manipulated by clerics and kings. Even turned into human bombs when it serves Islam’s interests.
If Muslims were to shed their yoke of ignorance, they would discover that the real reason those who indoctrinate them, control them, suppress them, fleece them, and abuse them want them deceived is that the actual message contained in Allah’s Book is horrendous. It is more intolerant, racist, punitive, and violent than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There are one hundred vicious verses for every nice one. The book inspires infinitely more terror than peace.
They would also discover that the Qur’an is poorly written. There are countless meaningless words, foreign words, and missing words which is why translations differ so significantly—everyone is guessing as to what Muhammad thought Allah was trying to say. This is why Gerd Puin, the world’s leading specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Qur’anic paleography, studying the oldest manuscripts, speaks with disdain about the willingness of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to accept Islamic dogma. He says: “The Qur’an claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or clear, but if you just look at it, you will see that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, but the fact is that a fifth of the Qur’an is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Qur’an is not comprehensible, if it can’t even be understood in Arabic, then it’s not translatable into any language. That is why Muslims are afraid.”
By reading the Qur’an in a language they actually understand, Muslims would find that there is no semblance of order in the central book of Islam either. The Qur’an is a jumbled mess without context, chronology, or rational transitions. It is only by rearranging the Qur’an in the order it was revealed and infusing it with the context of the chronological Hadith narratives, that the book begins to make sense. But by so doing, it becomes obvious that the Qur’an was simply a reflection of Muhammad’s demented character and of his misplaced ambition. The more you know, the more you will come to despise the fraud Muhammad perpetrated on his fellow Arabs and they on human kind. To know the Qur’an is to reject Islam."
~ Craig Winn, author of "Prophet Of Doom"
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/quotes
Theocracies are scary in the way they indoctrinate the populace, and undermine any expressions of originality...in this respect, I can agree that Radical Islam is every bit as evil as Communism.
FReegards...MUD
It appears that both you and I, and most others on this thread, are prone to ‘narrow-mindedness,’ according to Ms. Armstrong and her ilk. It makes one wonder how someone who purports to be one of the foremost scholars on Islam can have read the violent, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, tyrannical, oppressive, brutal dictates of the Koran and somehow still claim that Islam is tolerant, peace-loving and misunderstood.
I heard Ms. Armstrong interviewed several years ago. She left quite an impression. As a result, and in an effort to prove my own ‘narrow-mindedness’ (by her definition), I’d like to make some assumptions about this book, without even having read it (I wonder if that’s ‘narrow-minded’ enough for her).
Just from reading the introduction (on amazon.com), and from vivid memories of her previous interview, I suspect the book:
(1) is short on honest scrutiny, and long on personal bias, animus against Jews and Christians, and agenda-driven ‘research’.
(2) somehow blames the ‘vices’ of the west … or Judaism … or Christianity … or a handy combination of the three … for Islam’s (reactive, self-defensive) violence.
I’d much rather read your well-researched links, Les. Thanks for continuing to provide them.
~ joanie