Presenting the Gospel to People of the Muslim Faith, Part 4

Well, good evening. We have a lot of ground to cover. I hope most of you have been with us. If you've not, well, I think you'll still be able to benefit but you'll be a little bit behind on a few things.

This morning, we sort of covered a lot of ground but we're gonna dive back into this particular presentation at this point. Last evening, we talked about the range of expressions that we find amongst Muslims.

Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, and the Need for Fairness

And tonight we need to pick up where I said we would pick up and that is with the subject of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Now, I should mention that I was very appreciative this morning, I needed, I had a technical breakdown and I had not brought some of my gadgets and I was just so appreciative of the fact that the pastor ran up those stairs and ran into his office and got me a laser so I could point at things on my thing.

And I thought that was great. And I appreciate this laser. Now, my pointer also has a little laser on it. See, there's a little green laser, that's nice. But everybody has those lasers. And so I just wanted to show you the laser that I'll be using this evening.

So here's the USC provided laser and here's the ASU provided laser. I can't keep it on too long, it'll burn through the screen. So the pastor is busily writing on a pad of paper in the back, never again.

Anyway, but it is an important topic to address but it's not an easy topic to address because I will be honest with you, I sense, especially amongst Christians who, let's be honest, there's a tremendous amount of persecution of Christian people in the name of Islam in the world.

And I understand why people who have been persecuted by a religion started by a man named Muhammad might not be overly willing to be extremely fair in their analysis of the man. I think we, again, as Christians, need to be very, very careful.

Let me use an illustration that might really connect with you folks because you folks do a lot of evangelism amongst the Mormons. When I wrote Letters to a Mormon Elder, which I understand you're gonna be using as a text or something in preparation for going up the next time, I included certain false prophecies of Joseph Smith.

There were all sorts of other false prophecies of Joseph Smith that I did not include in the book. And the reason is I chose to focus upon the real key central issues because if you start expanding that out and you start presenting less strong arguments against Joseph Smith, what the Mormon will do is they'll grab hold of a defense of those less strong arguments and they'll use that as an excuse to ignore the strong arguments you make at other points.

And so when I talk about Muhammad, I wanna focus upon what is really, really central. One of the reasons I'm bringing this up is that many of you have probably heard people identifying Muhammad as a pedophile, as one who went after little children because of his marriage to Aisha.

Some of the Hadith sources would indicate that he was married to Aisha at age six and that he consummated the marriage at age nine. Some of the other Hadith sources contradict that and say that she was as old as 12.

Now, if you want to really make sure that there's going to be a massive amount of emotion involved and no one's gonna hear any of the, I think, considerably more important criticisms you make of Muhammad, then you wanna start there.

You end up with all sorts of discussions concerning issues relating to the different cultures back then and they like to point out that many scholars think that the Virgin Mary may have been as young as 14 years of age when she had the baby Jesus and things like that and you end up just discussing a bunch of stuff that you don't need to be discussing.

What I'm gonna try to do is to give you a fair and balanced presentation about Muhammad, about the key issues in his life that we need to understand to be able to understand the role that he plays within Islam and just exhort everyone to recognize that just because Muslims tend to be, in my experience, unfair in their argumentation against someone like Paul or against the writers of the New Testament or something like that, we as Christians do not have the right to then turn around and do the same thing in return.

We have to be consistent in the type of argumentation that we present and sometimes that means not using some of the arguments that might get the most traction with certain people. We have to leave that to the spirit of God.

Mecca, the Kaaba, and Muhammad's Early Life

Now, Mecca at the beginning of the seventh century was a place that was primarily dependent upon caravan trade. If you know anything about the area around Mecca, it cannot exactly grow its own food, shall we say, and so it is a place that was dependent upon caravan trade up into Syria and places like that to bring all of its food and things like that in.

It was a center of religious worship. If you recall last evening, we saw some video of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and we saw the Kaaba there. The Kaaba was of a different size and shape at that time, but tradition says there were about 360 idols in the Kaaba and it was a place of religious worship and so the various tribes would come.

There were certain holy months that you would come and in fact, there were months that were haram. That is, there were months where fighting was not allowed so that pilgrimages could be made and numerous tribes controlled the area.

The Quraish tribe, of which Muhammad was a member, controlled the Kaaba and therefore was very powerful in that particular area at that time. Now, from what we have been told from various sources in Islam, Muhammad, we know, and again, a lot of these are traditional.

There's a lot of study that still needs to be done. There's, unfortunately, some of the sources that we have, we can't really necessarily trust how historical they are, but the sources that we have indicate that he was orphaned at a young age, that he was taken care of by his uncle, that he would go on caravan up into the area around Syria.

This may have been when he encountered some Christian beliefs, some Jewish beliefs, certainly going on caravan, you would be exposed to people in different areas. According to Islamic sources, he was known as an honest young man.

He eventually was actually asked to marry by an older woman by the name of Khadijah, and it is interesting that up until his call to prophethood, he was monogamous, similar to Joseph Smith. There's some amazing parallels between Muhammad and Joseph Smith that are very, very interesting to watch how they play out.

But he was monogamous and married to Khadijah, a wealthy woman that gave him an opportunity of engaging in more trade, so on and so forth. But then, somewhere around 610 AD, he was known for going into, he was for leaving Mecca and for doing spiritual contemplation, going into the cave and getting away from it all and contemplating spiritual things and the nature of life.

And during one of these events, an angel came to Muhammad and told him to, and the word can be proclaim, read, recite, there's various ways in which it's understood. And Muhammad said, I cannot, I'm an unlettered man.

And the angel squeezed him so tightly that he thought he was going to die. And then he let him go and he said, recite. And he says, I can't, I'm an unlettered man. He squeezes him again even harder. And so finally, after the third time, then the angel begins to give to him the revelation of the Quran.

The Cave Encounter, the Quran, and Muhammad's Early Revelation

Now, as I mentioned briefly this morning, in Islamic theology, the whole of the Quran came down on Laylat al-Qadr, the night of power during the month of Ramadan at that time. But only a portion of it was given to Muhammad and then it was given to him piecemeal over a period of time after that from 610 to 632.

So a period of 22 years during which the Quran is revealed to Muhammad. And what is interesting is that portions of this would come down to him in response to questions that were being asked of people.

People would come to him once he became known as a prophet. They would come and ask him questions. Now, what's interesting is after this experience in the cave, Muhammad comes home to Khadijah. And this is one of the major differences between Muhammad's experience in someone like an Isaiah or a Jeremiah or someone in a biblical prophet mode.

And that is he was convinced that he had been attacked by or inhabited by a jinn. That he interpreted this as something that would happen to those who were attacked by spiritual forces, dark spiritual forces.

And Khadijah is the one that has to convince him that no, this is actually from God. And a period of time ensues where no further revelations come. The revelation that came, by the way, most believe, oh, there we go, was found here in Surah 96.

Oh, and by the way, I need to get this passed around because we were talking about it this evening. You don't have to rush through it. But I do want to pass around this evening. I brought it with me. My Arabic Quran.

Now, we have someone who I won't name watching very carefully as to where this goes. So if anyone tries to run off with it, you will be zapped by a hidden electronic device. But anyway, this is the Quran.

Please realize that Arabic is written from right to left, not left to right as we would. It's a Semitic language, just like Hebrew. This is the standard 1924 printing. It is so standard that I have listened to Islamic scholars such as Shaykh Yasir Qadhi lecturing on the Quran.

And at one point, he normally just quote the Arabic just off the top of his head. But at one point, he forgot what the reference was. And it just couldn't come to mind. That happens to all of us. And he said, remember, it's in that Surah.

It's on the right-hand page up at the top. Now, when you can say it's the right-hand page up at the top, what you're assuming is everyone who's listening to you has the exact same Quran you do. That's the only way it could make any sense.

I mean, if I said, well, it's on the left-page second column in your Bible, I'm assuming we're all carrying the same Bible, right? Well, that's pretty much the case here. From the Islamic perspective, this is the only Quran.

There is no other Quran. I mean, this actually, I mean, actually, the Quran's in heaven. But if you read an English translation, remember I asked how many of you have ever read the Quran. I think one person put their hand up.

Unless you read it in Arabic, you've never read the Quran. From the Islamic perspective, this is the only Quran there is. You cannot translate the Quran into another language. You can approximate its meanings, but you cannot translate it.

So I'll pass this around. And hopefully, we'll somehow make it through the various sections if you'd like to see what the Arabic Quran looks like. But one of the reasons I mention this is if you ever do choose to read the Quran, do not read it straight through.

If you start at the beginning and go to the end, you're going to be bouncing back and forth, back and forth between different periods in Muhammad's life. Even within the same surah, sometimes you're bouncing.

So for example, the first section is from surah 96. There's 114 surahs in the Quran. So you can see that the order is not 1 through 114. But proclaim, or read, in the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, who created man out of a mere clot of congealed blood.

Proclaim, and thy Lord is most bountiful, he who taught the use of the pen taught man that which he knew not. So most Muslims feel that this is the first section of the Quran that was revealed to Muhammad.

And it took place there in the cave. And when he comes back and tells Khadijah about it, she tells him he actually is a prophet of God, but a period of time ensues, where according to the Islamic sources, no further revelation comes and Muhammad thinks he's lost it.

And more than once goes to the top of the mountain to throw himself off. Tries to commit suicide, but the angel stops him each time and assures him you are a prophet of God. Now it's very interesting to me that this initial encounter would cause this kind of a reaction on the part of Muhammad.

But slowly, further revelation begins to come to him so that from 610 to 622, this is very important, from 610 to 622, he is a minority prophet in Mecca. What do I mean by that? Well, the majority of people there are polytheists.

They believe in multiple gods. And so here comes a member of the Quraysh tribe. And what do the Quraysh make their money primarily off of? But the trade in the Kaaba, the trade of people coming to worship the various idols in the Kaaba.

And so here's a member of their tribe coming along and saying, all these idols don't exist. There's only one true God, Allah. And so he is attacked. And obviously, if it were not for the fact that there was a connection in the tribe and the tribes were to protect each other and to protect the members of their tribes, he would have been in really deep trouble.

As it was, he was abused, he was mocked. He had a small number of followers and they were frequently abused and beaten. For 12 years, this is how things were in Mecca. But then finally in AD 622, Muhammad and his followers moved to Yathrib and it's renamed eventually Medina, the city of the prophet.

And the movement out of Mecca to Medina becomes the beginning of the Islamic calendar. This is year zero in the Islamic calendar. This is where they determine what the date today is. But remember, they use a lunar calendar.

And so we look back at this and we might figure it on a solar calendar, but it's a larger number for them. Because again, their year is shorter than the solar calendar that we use. And so the Hijra is the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

The Hijra, Battles, and the Rise of the Islamic State

Now things change because when Muhammad arrives in Medina, there are a number of Jewish clans there, there are other Arab clans there, there's division amongst people, and he's looked at as a person who can bring unity and draw this city together, which he does.

But now, instead of being a minority prophet, in a very short period of time because of some battles with the Quraish, now he is the prophet who is the head of an army and a growing city-state. And that begins to change the nature of the revelations that we see in the Quran.

Again, from the Islamic perspective, that's not true. Why? Because nothing in the Quran actually represents anything about Muhammad in the sense that it doesn't come from Muhammad's experience, doesn't have anything to do with who Muhammad is or anything like that.

The Quran has eternally existed. And so, unlike when we study the New Testament, we ask questions like, well, what was Paul's experience in Corinth? How did that impact what we find in 1st and 2nd Corinthians and things like that?

None of that is relevant in the study of the Quran, from the Islamic perspective, anyways, because the Quran is merely the words of God himself. So now we have a new reality. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, over the next decade, as their power grows, especially after defeating Mecca in a few battles, that position of his continues to grow and it very much impacts things like that.

You have some important battles, the Battle of Badr in 624, Uhud in 625, and the Battle of the Trench in 627. It's fascinating to listen to Muslims narrate the stories of these battles, because here is their prophet.

And their prophet won these, well, Uhud, not so much, but the Battles of Badr and the Trench, the Muslims are normally greatly outnumbered, and yet they are victorious. The Battle of Uhud is sort of a draw, in essence, but, and these battles form some of the background of some of the sections of the Quran, but even the Muslims aren't fully 100 certain exactly which sections of the Quran are about specifically which battles.

One of the difficulties in interpreting the Quran is that you're not really certain, necessarily, what a section is about. You depend upon later tradition to talk about those things. Now, after one of these battles, we have the destruction of the Banu Qurayza.

This was a Jewish tribe that, in the period of the battle, turned on Muhammad. And when the battle was over and Medina had been saved, Muhammad and the Muslims laid siege to the Banu Qurayza. And when they gave up, they brought all the men out of their settlement, about 800 of them, and Muhammad participated in the one-day beheading of all 800 men.

And the Muslims look at this as simply politics and warfare. You need to understand, one of the first things I said to you last evening is that Islam is a religio-political system or a political-religious system depending upon the percentage in the population.

And so, from the Islamic perspective, there's no problem with this. This was war. These people had betrayed him. This is what need to be done for the promulgation of the Islamic State. As a Christian, you just sit back and go, it's really hard for me to think of Jesus standing out in the field all day long with a bloody sword, lopping people's heads off.

It's hard to make that kind of a connection in our perspective. Because there were other times when Muhammad did not do that and he could have, at least in the traditions of the Arabs of that day, but he didn't.

And this becomes important because the view of Allah found within Islam, to me, very much reflects Muhammad's own personality. And sometimes he could be very lenient or gracious and sometimes he could be very, very stern.

And this, I think, we will see coming out as we talk about salvation in Islam probably tomorrow evening as we gather together at that particular point in time. Finally, Muhammad tells the people that they are going to go to Mecca and they are going to engage in the Hajj celebration where you go to Mecca and you circumambulate.

Remember, you saw all the people walking around the Kaaba. That's seven times you circumambulate the Kaaba, that they were going to go on Hajj. And so this large Muslim army, in essence, comes to Mecca and the Meccans come out and say, I don't think so.

And they come to the truce of Hudaybiyyah in 628, which at the time, the Muslims were very disappointed about. Their prophet had said they were gonna go do this and they didn't. It was a shrewd political move.

It was only a short period of time after that that Muhammad had become so strong that finally, only two years later, when he arrives in Mecca, there basically is no resistance to him at all. There are just a small number of people who are killed at Muhammad's command.

Many of the people who had opposed him for years, he simply forgave them if they would just become Muslims. There would be no problem at all. He wanted to heal the divisions and bring all of the Arab tribes together at this period in time.

But it's interesting, the people he had killed, some of them, the people that, there were a number of times that Muhammad specifically gave orders for the assassination of individuals. And the people he really wanted to get rid of were poets.

Poets. Because poetry was considered a massive weapon in that day. And especially when he had been a minority prophet, many of these people had mocked him and had identified the Quran as having other sources and things like that.

And a number of those people did lose their lives even when Mecca was subjected to Muhammad at that particular point in time. And so he dies in Medina in 632 A .D. And this begins the century of Islamic expansion.

Between 632 and 732, the Islamic armies simply could not be stopped. And Muslims look back at this period of time as the great time of Islamic, Allah was blessing the Muslims because they were united.

And they expanded all across the Arabian Peninsula, up through the Holands, across North Africa, up toward Constantinople, off into Iraq and places like that. And eventually crossed into Spain, Portugal, and it was not until 732 at the Battle of Tours in France that Charles Martel stopped the Islamic advance there and began to beat them back at that particular point in time.

And so Muslims look to that period of time as a time when they were all united and literally were unstoppable as far as their military is concerned. Now Muhammad dies. It's interesting, there are different theories depending on what kind of a Muslim you are as to why Muhammad died.

Some of the Hadith sources indicate that Muhammad had been poisoned a few years earlier by a Jewish woman and that Muhammad himself had identified that poison as having damaged him in such a way that it eventually led to his death.

Obviously there was no autopsy and things like that. There's no way to know. It is interesting to note that most Muslims believe that prophets do not decay when they die. So if you open up the tomb of a prophet, you will find that he looks just like he did the day that he died.

And so most Muslims believe that if you were to open Muhammad's tomb today, there would be Muhammad looking just like Muhammad did the day that he died. But he died in Aisha's arms, in Aisha's room, and in fact is buried in the mosques.

Now mosques are not supposed to be in graveyards, but they've made an exception in regards to Muhammad and his tomb there in Medina, which you cannot go visit because you're not a Muslim. You don't get to do that.

Zaynab bint Josh and the Revelation That Reworked Adoption

Now some of the key theological events in Muhammad's life that to me I think are important, and that is one of them is related to Muhammad and Zaynab bint Josh. Muhammad and Zaynab bint Josh. And then the second one is the deposition from Najran.

And these two are the only two that I'm gonna mention to you, but I think they will illustrate some of the key issues in regards to Muhammad. The first one regards to Muhammad and Zaynab bint Josh. Zaynab was married to Muhammad's adopted son.

He had an adopted son. He was even called Ibn Muhammad, son of Muhammad. And he was married to this woman named Zaynab, who was the daughter of Josh. And according to numerous sources, one day Muhammad came calling on his adopted son's home.

And when Zaynab answered the door, Zaynab was not exactly in full hijab, shall we say. And evidently, Zaynab was a knockout. I mean, just a head-turner, just a beautiful, beautiful woman, and Muhammad was smitten.

He was like, wow. And word got around that Muhammad liked Zaynab. So his adopted son comes to him and says, do you want me to divorce her so you can have her? And Muhammad says, no, no, no, no, no, you, no, it was not proper amongst the Arabs at that time for a man to marry the divorced wife of his adopted son.

And so that would have been a bad thing. And so he says, no, no, no, no, no. But now Zaynab knows, and to be the wife of the prophet is a real step up, shall we say. I mean, you've got some real pull in the community at that point.

And so now there's some real problems in the marriage. And so all of a sudden, a revelation comes down. Now remember, this is supposed to have been written on a tablet in heaven for all of eternity. A revelation comes down to Muhammad, and it says, behold, thou didst say to one who had received the grace of Allah in thy favor, retain thou and wedlock thy wife and fear Allah.

In other words, that's what Muhammad said to his adopted son. But thou didst hide in thy heart that which Allah was about to make manifest, thou didst fear the people, but it is more fitting that thou shouldst fear Allah.

Then when Zayd had dissolved his marriage with her with the necessary formality, we joined her in marriage to thee in order that in future there be no difficulty to believers in the matter of marriage with the wives of their adopted sons when the latter have dissolved with the necessary formality their marriage with them and Allah's command must be fulfilled.

So all of a sudden, a revelation comes down from heaven that undoes the tradition that you can't marry the divorced wives of your adopted sons. But the problem is it also comes in Surah 33 with the prohibition of actually calling an adopted son your son.

In other words, adoption was destroyed by Muhammad's desire to have Zaynab bin Josh. And so you don't have adoption in Islamic lands. There had been adoption just like the Romans. I mean, Roman adoption, I mean, if you were adopted, you had the full rights of any child.

Isn't that one of the most beautiful pictures used in the New Testament of our relationship to God through faith in Jesus Christ is adoption. We are adopted into his family. Well, because of the relationship between Muhammad and Zaynab bin Josh, now there's no adoption.

And you have coming down from heaven a revelation which is allegedly eternal in nature. And I'll be honest with you, of all the things I've read in the Quran, and I've read the Quran a number of times, this line right here, in order that in the future there may be no difficulty to the believers in the matter of marriage with the wives of their adopted sons just strikes me as absolutely an amazing statement.

Yeah, that was a big problem. I mean, just the whole community was just really struggling with this. Man, we just have so many father-in-laws that want to marry the divorced wives of their sons, adopted sons.

That wasn't even a problem, it wasn't even an issue. And yet, so that there'd be no problem, here comes this revelation. Strikes me as being extremely relevant to Muhammad as an individual and says to me that we're not dealing with some eternal revelation that has been existent on tablets in eternity.

The Najran Delegation and the Quran's Response to Christian Claims About Jesus

Then you have the deputation from Najran. This is toward the end of Muhammad's life. And what happens, and again, the only version of this we have comes from Islamic sources. We don't have any Christian sources.

But there is a deputation of Christians that come from the city of Najran. And they want to understand what the prophet is teaching. And in essence, you have a mini-debate that develops with the prophet of Islam himself.

And this is really important to me because of what it reveals about how the early Christians saw Islam and how the early Muslims, especially Muhammad himself, understood what the Christians believed. Very, very important.

So in reality, what happens after Muhammad's death, by the way, is that Muhammad had said all unbelievers should be removed from the Arabian Peninsula. And the Christians at Najran were driven out. They had to go elsewhere.

They were not allowed to stay there. But a dialogue takes place. And interestingly enough, once this discussion takes place, revelation comes down from heaven that is found in the Quran that is in relationship to the conversation that takes place between the Christians and Muhammad.

And here's what is said. Indeed, the example of Jesus to Allah is like that of Adam. He created him from dust. So Allah created Jesus from dust. Then he said to him, be, and he was. The truth is from your Lord, so do not be among the doubters.

Then whoever argues with you about it after this knowledge has come to you, say, come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves, then supplicate earnestly together and invoke the curse of Allah upon the liars among us.

So here you have basically Muhammad saying, here's the truth, Jesus was just a created human being. And if you're gonna disagree, then let's get together and call down the curse of God upon whoever's lying.

That's what he says, and it continues on. Indeed, this is the true narration and there is no deity except Allah. So whenever you see, and we're gonna see this a number of times tomorrow evening, whenever you see the Quran saying there is no deity except Allah, normally that is the positive statement after some type of negative statement about Christianity and the idea of polytheism and the idea that we believe in multiple gods.

So the true narration is Jesus isn't God, he's just a created being, and there is no deity except Allah. And indeed, Allah is exalted in might, the wise. But if they turn away, so to be a Christian means you're turning away from the truth.

If they turn away, then indeed Allah is knowing of the corruptors. So we are corruptors of the truth. Say, oh people of the scripture, that's al-kitab, that's the people of the book, come to a word that is equitable between us and you.

Now it's interesting, a couple years ago, a bunch of liberal Muslims got together with a bunch of liberal Christians and wrote up a document of agreement, and they used this very phrase, come to a word that is equitable between us and you.

Not seemingly realizing that if you actually read the Quran in context, it's actually condemning the Christians in this and saying that they're corruptors of the truth, which I found rather ironic that so many people signed on to that particular thing.

Anyway, so people of the scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you, that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with him. Now what's the sin of association? Say it louder.

Shirk, very good. Some of you were awake this morning and taking good notes, or did we mention that last evening? Anyways, we've mentioned it somewhere over the past couple days. We will not worship except Allah, and we will not commit shirk, we will not associate anything with him, and not take one another as lords instead of Allah.

But if they turn away, then say, bear witness that we are Muslims submitting to him. And so here is, in the Quran, the result of this encounter between the Christians and Muhammad, and Muhammad's result of talking to the Christians is basically to reaffirm monotheism.

And in my studies, as I have read about the early encounters between Christians and Muslims over and over and over again, it's the same thing. The Muslims are insisting that we are polytheists, and that happens to this very day.

To this very day, they will insist upon that. Now, there are some Western Muslims, like Hamza Yusuf, a well-known Muslim scholar. He recognizes that we deny polytheism, that we believe in monotheism.

The very same verses that I have to pound away on over and over and over again, in Salt Lake City, witnessing to the Mormons, the Muslims will quote to us, why don't you believe this? And we go, we do believe this.

We believe there is only one true God. And if you're gonna be waiting tonight and tomorrow night for the in-depth discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity and the power of the Quran, it's not there.

The Quran's Structure, Inspiration, and the Problem of Chronology

There simply isn't any reason to believe the author of the Quran understood what the doctrine of the Trinity actually was, and we'll be looking much more closely at that as we continue on. Now, speaking of the Quran, I'm gonna go ahead and get a running start at this, and then we'll take a break at seven o 'clock, and there's some goodies.

I noticed there's nuts and no nuts. There's a lot of nuts and no nuts signs over in the goody table. So that means that some of you go on one side and some of you go on the other side, depending on who's a little loopy, I guess.

I don't know. But I already nailed one of the brownies, and they're really good. I will probably not even get a chance to get one of them because you're all gonna go rushing over there and eat all of them, but I'll try to fight you to get there and have some myself.

But anyways, we'll get a running start here, and since the Quran is circling around, see, there they go. Look at that. Just could not wait, could ya? They've got brownies, there's chocolate? I'm not listening to this guy anymore.

I'm outta here. There they go. See, they're running now. There they go, see? It's amazing. It's just shameless. Look at that. I might as well stop right now. I mean, it's just like, we ain't waiting. Oh no, uh-uh.

If he's gonna get over there, we want our brownies now. Okay, all right. The Quran is divided into 114 surahs. A surah is roughly equivalent to a chapter in the Bible, but not completely. The reason being that you have some surahs that are well over 200 verses long, and then you have some surahs that are only three or four verses long.

But there are 114 surahs. As I said, they are not in chronological order. They're not in thematic order. They're not in topical order. If you want to read through the Quran, like I said, go to my blog, search on the word chronological in the search box, and it'll bring up a table that gives us sort of the best guess that we have as to the actual chronological order in which the surahs were written.

At least that way, when you're reading it, you're somewhat following some meaningful order. Remember after 9 -11, all the reporters were running out to Barnes Noble and buying Qurans, and they're sitting there trying to find something to put into their report, and they can't make heads or tails out of this book.

And most of us can't, because unlike the New Testament and the Old Testament, where there's so much rooting in history, if you read Romans, how much background information can we provide to the book of Romans?

We know what the city was like and the language and its history and what was going on and the timeframe in which these things were written. It's all there. And that's vital to our exegesis of the text.

But for most of the Quran, we don't know. And even when Muslims say they know, it's because somebody 100 years later said, well, this was written at such and such a time. The reality is we just don't know what the background of a lot of the Quran is, and therefore it is extremely difficult to interpret at times, especially for the non-Muslim.

And so how is it organized? Well, Surah Al-Fatiha, the first surah, you heard in the prayer. Remember when I showed you the video last night, you heard the man reciting Surah Al-Fatiha. That's the one where, you know, don't let us be Jews or Christians.

That's the first surah. It's very short. Then Surah Al-Baqarah, the Qal, is the longest. And then Surah 3 is a little bit shorter, and Surah 4 is a little bit shorter. It doesn't follow exactly. There are a couple times where it sort of inches back up and it's a little bit different, but it's basically organized on the basis of the size of each of the chapters.

So as you get farther and farther into the book, the shorter and shorter they become, all right? And so you have 114 surahs, and then a verse is called an ayah. An ayah means a sign. And so the ayahs come from that.

Organized by size, not chronology or topic. Very difficult to follow the context depending upon Hadith sources at that point. As I've said, these are supposed to be the direct words of God. In fact, Muslims, why do you think Muslims, how do you think Muslims would argue that the New Testament contains words that are not from God?

How do you think they might argue? Well, one of them, one of their favorite texts to go to is when Paul writes to Timothy and says, "'Bring the parchments and the cloak,' "'cause he's cold.'". And they say, that can't be from God.