I am convinced that Islam's holy book, the Quran, is the best resource that Catholics have when evangelizing Muslims. A few years ago I wrote a series of brief reflections on using the Quran to the advantage of Christianity, but I never got around to posting it because I kept waiting to polish it up more. I finally decided to just post it as is so below I present a 16 page PDF for you to view and give your thoughts on:
7 comments:
I also have a 50 page Word document of many other obvious Christian teachings within the Quran.
Strange, my comment disapeared, it seems. I believe my question was somethinf like this:
Nick, how wouls you respond to a Kazari style argument to the traditional origin of Islam? It seems to me that Mohammed did exist and did said to people he had revelations from a angel, not to mention the part with the battles and conquests. Can't see how you could make all up.
I believe that the Quran was writed after Mohammed death, so this would not directly mess with your hypothesis, i guess.
Hi Talmid,
I checked the spam comments folder and don't see anything, so it must not have gone through.
That's a good question, it is possible that the "Historical Mohammed" was just a secular warloard, or series of emperors, and later on the "Prophet" part was added on to invent a story. But from what I can tell, there isn't a lot of (reliable) information the first 2 centuries after he lived for us to really have an idea. Most Western scholars have been too afraid/naive to study Islam critically, which is why most of us have not really heard much about it.
But the Quran has way too much Christian information that doesn't fit with Islam, so I don't think it affects the idea the Quran was originally a Catholic book.
Yea, you are right that there is not much information about that time and that there is a lot of Christian(not to mention, apocryphal) stuff in the Quran. The part about it only being compiled, like, two years after Mohammed death(i think) also does not help.
My preocupation was more with the secular stuff, Arabia seemed to be pretty diverse back them, so the traditional view where Mohammed and his boys united all the tribes in one faith by the sword do not seems like just a invention.
But i don't know much about the history of this place, so who knows.
I think at this point in secular studies of Islam's origins, I don't know if we can say there was a diverse group of tribes in Arabia. Even if there was, were any of these tribes really that big that they couldn't easily be conquered? Is there really any good evidence of Christians and Jews in the Mecca & Medina areas? I don't think there was.
In fact, I think scholars are *unanimous* that Mecca never was a major trade hub prior to the 600s, if it was even a city at all. Geographically, it is at least 100 miles away from the water, in the desert, with no reason for Trade to go through there. What this means is that if Mecca was never a thriving trade metro area, then there was no reason for God to send the world a new prophet to clean up the idols in a place of no significance and no trade. But if you're inventing a new religion to compete with Jerusalem, then you need there to be a new capital city, especially one that wasn't easily accessible for early skeptics to visit.
I did take a brief look at the history of the city and you are right, it does not seems Mecca was a important place back them. Man, is interesting that i had never heard that before, it seems that is a pretty reasonable opinion to hold that this city only got truly mentioned after Mohammed death!
This would weaken the Kazari argument, since it would be easier to make the islamic version of the events get popular if you don't have to unite a lot of people.
Now you see how BIG evangelization can become when people see these major problems with the origins of Islam. Why is nobody talking about how Mecca was never a major city prior to the 600s?
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