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I'm going to pass a book around, sometimes I have trouble getting it back, but I'm going to pass an Arabic Quran around in case you have not had an opportunity to look at an Arabic Quran. This is, I'll just tell you a quick story.
One of my sources that I have studied for a long time, listened to, is Sheikh Yasser Khadi. Yasser Khadi grew up in Houston. If you'd like to hear a Muslim presenting Islam, I would recommend to you his 16 CD set called Light and Guidance.
And once, listening to a lecture by Yasser Khadi where he was speaking to his students, normally he can just simply quote a text from the Quran in the Arabic and then the English just like that, but all of us have those days.
When I was debating in the East London Mosque, I cannot tell you how many times I have quoted John 1 -1 in Greek in my life in debates, it's just an arcane, it's just second nature. But some days that doesn't work, the way my mom used to put it is you get your tongue in front of your eye teeth and you can't see what you're saying.
And I ended up speaking in TBN tongues during this debate. And this sort of happened to Yasser Khadi and he just couldn't get this one verse out. So he stops and he says, well it's in surah, whatever the surah was, on the right page at the top.
Now for you and I, we couldn't do that. I can't say it's on the right page at the top because we all have such completely different translations of the Bible. This is so common amongst Muslims that you can get away with it because that surah was short enough, it was on the right hand page at the top.
So it was actually a valid reference. This is a 1924 Egyptian printing and so I'm going to pass this around and trust that you all will return it to me in one piece. Take a look at it. It is, Arabic of course is a Semitic language so it's written from right to left, not from left to right.
So the beginning of the book is the back of the book, in front of the book is all the rest of that kind of stuff, just as it would be with a Hebrew text of the Old Testament. And so take a look at that and pass it around to the audience if you would be so kind to do that.
On the screen right now is a picture from South Africa. This is my debate with Bashir Varnia. This was the first debate that I did once I got to South Africa in the mosque in Linasia. The room was packed out.
We had people standing outside the room at the windows, looking in through the windows as we debated the issue of can God become man? And Bashir is a very kind gentleman. Two nights later he hosted me and my host, Rudolf Buschhoff, in his home and his wife cooked all sorts of wonderful Indian foods for us and we could only be there a certain amount of time.
It was a shame because we were having such a nice time and conversation with one another. So that is in Linasia, South Africa. That was the first debate we did. And then this was the picture that I told you about before.
This is probably of all of my adult ministry the most amazing picture that I possess right now. That is inside the masjid in Erasmus, South Africa. You can see over here, you can see just a little bit of the Arabic right here.
This is called the Qibla. So we had been there during the prayers beforehand and so the imam was standing where I was standing except he was facing the Qibla and everybody was in lines behind him, bowing down and praying.
The majority, you don't see much of the audience because they're sitting on the carpet. They're not in chairs. I didn't know that I was going to have a table, it turned out to be nice. And yes, I am in stocking feet because shoes are not allowed in the masjid.
So it's definitely the first time I've ever debated in stocking feet. But seated across from me is the moderator right here, that's Yusuf Ismail. Yusuf is with the IPCI in South Africa. He's sort of taken over from probably the most, well still to this day, the best known Islamic speaker in the world, Ahmed Didat, who started the IPCI down there in South Africa.
And you can see just beyond him in the kufi right there, there is Shabir Ali. And we are debating sin and salvation in the masjid. You can see someone up in the ladies area, sort of watching from up here.
But as you can see, it was all recorded and will be available eventually. And that was an incredible, incredible experience to be able to do that on the other side of the planet, quite literally. So at least what you're hearing today is not from the hallowed halls of academia and has never been taken into the field.
You don't get much more in the field than this, debating sin and salvation in the masjid itself. Oh, I warned you, I'm having some problems with my Mac. Just strangely, these pictures of this darling cute little baby just pop up in the middle of things.
I don't know where, but yeah. Oh, am I supposed to be doing something? Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know I was supposed to be doing something right now. Her name is Clementine, and I had nothing to do whatsoever with her middle name, which is James.
J-A-Y-M-E-S. So Clementine James, C .J., or as we call her Ban Kwee Kwee. I don't know, don't even ask. You know, when a mother is sleep deprived, those first few weeks, not getting much sleep, all sorts of funny names suggest themselves.
So Ban Kwee Kwee, I'm Grand Kwee Kwee. You know, it's sort of funny how that all worked together. But that's a little Clementine there. All right, let's get to work, because we have some work to do. My understanding is we're going to have a question and answer period.
Now, ironically, the Q &A period is going to come before the primary theological material, which will come in the third session. But hopefully you'll still have some questions that we can work with at that particular point in time.
Then this afternoon, we'll have the primary theological material between 1 .30 and 2 .30. And then between 3 and 4, it's going to be story time with Uncle Jim. Basically, what I'm going to do is narrate a number of hadith to you.
I'll explain what the hadith are here in a little while. But they are the stories and actions of Muhammad and his companions, which really form the fabric of Islamic theology. Now, obviously, when we saw the little video on Hajj, you may recall that the narrator talked about how Abraham and Ishmael had founded the Kaaba.
In Islamic tradition and lore, the Kaaba was founded by Abraham and Ishmael, not Isaac, for obvious reasons. And, of course, historically, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Abraham ever went as far down as Mecca.
And, in fact, there are real questions as to whether Mecca, as a meaningful location, even existed prior to the time of Christ. But, from the Islamic perspective, that place of worship was originally founded as a place of monotheistic worship.
And then, over time, became corrupted into the polytheistic worship that existed in the days of Muhammad, many, many, many years after the days of Abraham. And so, by tradition, there are like 360 idols in the Kaaba in the days of Muhammad in the beginning of the 7th century.
His prophethood begins in 610 AD. So, we're talking over half a millennium after the time of Christ is when you have the origination of Islam. Now, from the Islamic perspective, that's not the case. From the Islamic perspective, the Islamic religion predates all the rest of us.
They do believe, people always ask, do we all worship the same God? Well, the Quran says that Allah is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But, a well-read Muslim will recognize that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.
As long as they recognize that the doctrine of the Trinity is not just something you put on, you know, sort of add on and can take off. Sadly, many of the Christians that Muslims interact with are barely Trinitarian at all.
And, in fact, I would say most evangelicals in Western societies are primarily monotheists, not really Trinitarian. I mean, let's be honest. If we were to give a quiz, if I were to give you a quiz right now, anybody getting nervous?
If I were to give you a quiz right now, if we were to give a quiz to our people Sunday morning after church, how many of them would fall into the errors of modalism, confusing the Father and the Son? How many would be able to explain the relationship of the Father and the Son?
How many would have any knowledge of why the Eastern Orthodox split off in 1054 over a phrase called the Filioque? What does it mean for the Holy Spirit to proceed from both the Father and the Son, or only from the Father?
What did Jesus say, what did Jesus mean when he said, I and the Father, we are one? It's a plural verb in the Greek, by the way. It's not, I and the Father is one. It's, I and the Father, we are one. Basic Trinitarian theology is, unfortunately, something that a lot of evangelicals are very uncomfortable about.
And, as a result, the Trinity is normally not something we talk about. And since it's not, then you can understand why many Muslims are confused on that particular subject, because they very rarely encounter Christians who can give a meaningful answer for the hope that is within them.
And that is a tragedy, and I certainly have encountered that many, many, many times. Well, anyways, that sermon was for free. Now, basically, Mecca exists in a location where it cannot support itself.
It has to be supported by caravan trade up into Christian Syria. You can simply not provide the type of food and sustenance that you would need to maintain even a small-sized city, given the climate and where they are there.
And so there's a tremendous amount of caravan trade up into Christian Syria, and this is where we first encounter Muhammad, according primarily to the Islamic sources. I'm primarily giving you the Islamic perspective here.
Let me just mention briefly there are people that are putting books out. Robert Spencer put out a book recently basically saying Muhammad did not exist. There are a number of scholars, even a Muslim scholar in Germany recently came to the conclusion that Muhammad probably did not exist, etc., etc.
I think he's in hiding now, but that's another issue. But I don't think there's really any reason whatsoever to question the existence of Muhammad as a historical person. I believe the Hadith literature is one of the strongest evidences of that.
There's just simply too many lines of tradition to not believe that there was someone named Muhammad. Now, at the same time, I'm not so naive as to think that the stories of the Hadith are actually all 100 true about the life of Muhammad and all the amazing things that allegedly took place.
In fact, it's fascinating. The Quran never attributes a miracle to Muhammad at all. Some people say, well, there's one verse about the splitting of the moon, and that has something to do with Muhammad.
But the Quran's message is the only miracle that Muhammad presents is the Quran itself. You cannot imitate the Quran. You cannot produce anything like it. It's inimitable. But when you get into the Hadith, all of a sudden there's miracles all over the place.
And interestingly enough, many of them parallel the miracles of Jesus, providing food in a miraculous fashion for his followers and things like that. But since the Hadith are not collected for 200, 300 years after the time of Muhammad, it's something obviously that grows over time.
And so when I say I'm using primarily Islamic sources here, I'm primarily giving you the Islamic perspective. And I'm not getting into the stuff concerning whether Muhammad did or did not exist and some of the liberal scholars that make that.
I think we need to be very careful, by the way. Christians need to be very, very careful. You will find all sorts of books against Islam. Find out who wrote them. Many of them are written by atheists.
And they will be utilizing the very same standards that we reject when they attack our faith. As a result, we cannot use their material in dealing with Islam. One of my biggest concerns is that we must be consistent.
I am constantly telling my Islamic apologetic opponents that Muslims use different standards when they are dealing with my Bible than they do when they're dealing with the Quran. And when you use different standards, that is indication that you are not speaking truthfully.
Well, we need to be careful then. We need to use the same standards in analyzing the Quran and Muhammad that we would utilize in looking at anything else. We cannot utilize naturalistic materialism on one hand and then turn around and say, oh, but you can't do that in looking at the New Testament.
We need to be very, very careful about that. And I'm afraid, unfortunately, a lot of people fall into that trap. So we need to be very discerning. So the first encounter we have with Muhammad, basically, is that he is a young man who is going up on caravan trade into Syria.
He would have encountered Jews and Christians at that particular point in time. And he proved himself to be a rather honest individual. And so he actually, whoops, go back there one. It's not really catching real well there.
I'll skip it. I'll just tell you that he became known as a rather honest young man, honest in his dealings. And so he ended up marrying an older woman, Khadijah, who was fairly wealthy. He had been involved in her caravan trade business workings and so on and so forth.
They married. And he was want to go off into a cave, a cave right outside of Mecca, and to contemplate. And many people would say he never worshipped the idolatrous gods. He was never one who engaged in shirk.
He was not a mushrik. His parents were. His parents died as idolaters. That will come up a little bit later as we talk about that. And so around 610 A .D., he has an experience in the cave. And in that cave, the angel Jibril comes to him.
We would call him Gabriel. And he says to him, recite. And Muhammad says, I can't recite. According to the standard Islamic understanding, Muhammad was illiterate. That's a little bit difficult to believe, that he was involved with all this business stuff, which would have involved some written documents, receipts, things like that.
The idea that he couldn't have any knowledge of written language is a little bit difficult to believe. But that is what they say. And the angel grabs him and squeezes him until he thinks he's going to die.
And then he releases him. And he says, recite. This happens three times. And finally, after the third time, then the angel begins to recite to him the first portions of the Koran. Now, as the Koran is being distributed or passed around the audience here, one of the things that if you had an English Koran that you would note is that there is no chronological order to the Koran.
If you ever decide to read the Koran, the Koran is only about 56 the length of the New Testament. It's about 14 the length of the entire Bible. It's a relatively short work, and hence certainly manageable.
But if you try to read the Koran from beginning to end, it will not make almost any sense to you whatsoever. It is next to impossible to exegete the text of the Koran the way that we exegete the text of the New Testament.
There are entire sections of the Koran where we just simply don't even know what the background is. In other places where we think we know, we know that only because the Hadith tells us so, which can be questionable in and of itself.
And so we're on very different ground when we're dealing with the text of the Koran than we are with the New Testament. If you ever do decide to read it, do not read it from beginning to end because it won't make any sense to you at all.
The first surah, Surah al-Fatiha, is a seven-verse opening prayer. Then Surah al-Baqarah, the surah of the cow, is the longest surah. That's surah number two. Surah three is a little bit shorter. Surah four is a little bit shorter.
And it's done on the length of the surahs. So you get up to 114 surahs. Those last few surahs are only a few verses long. And so if you read it from beginning to end, you're bouncing back and forth, back and forth between different major periods in Muhammad's life.
And so even if you have the background information I'm going to be giving you, it's going to be next to impossible to follow that through the Koran. And so in my book, Whatever Christians Need to Know About the Koran, there is a chart.
I forgot which page it's on. But there's a chart that gives you sort of the best guess that we can come up with as to the chronological order of the surahs themselves. It's toward the front of the book.
And if you follow that, at least you'll have a little better chance of making heads or tails. And you'll also sort of be able to follow the development of Muhammad's thought over time. But I should mention, from the Islamic perspective, there is no development in Muhammad's thought in the Koran because there is none of Muhammad's thought in the Koran at all.
The Muslim believes that the Koran was written on tablets in heaven eternally. Sunni Islam, this is not the view of the Shiites, but Sunni Islam eventually developed the orthodox perspective that the Koran is as eternal as God himself.
This raises all sorts of theological questions, actually. But the Koran is uncreated. And since it is uncreated, then there is nothing of Muhammad in it at all. It simply comes down from heaven. It's given to Jabril.
Jabril dictates it to Muhammad. That's it. What Muhammad understood is irrelevant. And so what we do with our Bibles, when our ministers open the word, hopefully good ministers open the word, we talk about the backgrounds of Paul.
We talk about the church at Corinth. We talk about the language that was used, the political situation at the time, what was going on with the Roman Empire, the idolatry that was in the city. We provide all this information as we look at passages like 1 Corinthians 8 and its statement that there is only one true God and the use of the Shema.
We bring all that stuff together. You can't do that with the Koran. It's just not possible to do. And it's a violation of the Islamic view of the Koran to ask questions like, when Muhammad met with the Christians from Najran toward the end of his life, how did that impact the text of the Koran?
Did he grow in his understanding of Christianity? Irrelevant. Not even allowed to be asked within orthodox Islam. Now, those questions are asked in liberal Islam. But I've often wondered, if you're a liberal Muslim, what's it like to embrace religion where you know that if you were to say what you actually believe, in nations where your religion is the legal religion of the land, what's it like to know that they would kill you for that?
What's it like to know that you would minimally be imprisoned, kicked out of the country, or killed for believing the things you believe? I find that to be something that my liberal Muslim friends need to consider just a little bit.
So, anyways, as you look at the Koran, you'll see that it's in that kind of an order. And what that means is, these first words of the Koran are not the words of Surah 1. They're actually the words of Surah 96, Ayahs 1 through 5.
The surahs of the chapters, the ayahs of the verses. Ayat is the plural. 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 powerful.
He who taught the use of the pen taught man that which he knew not. So, these are the first words that come from the angel Gabriel. Now, Muhammad's response is very, very interesting. He goes home and he tells his wife to wrap him up because he thinks he's been attacked by a jinn and he's demon possessed.
And then after that, when the angel doesn't show up again with further revelation, he more than once attempts to throw himself off of a cliff to kill himself. And the angel has to show up and say, you're a prophet of God.
Now, that again is directly from Islamic sources. I'm not making that kind of thing up. I would not do so. It does have importance for me because his reaction to this initial encounter is not the reaction of any of the prophets of the Bible.
And one of the issues that constantly comes up in my debates with Muslims is the assumption on their part that the author of the Quran knows what is in the Bible. I have found no evidence in multiple readings of the Quran and in reading of the Hadith literature that Muhammad had any first or even meaningful second-hand knowledge of the contents of either the Old and the New Testament.
He knew more of the stories of the Old Testament. He knew almost none of the stories of the New Testament at all. And so the Muslim operates on the assumption that the Quran is the final authority. But the reality is the Quran is written by someone who had next to no knowledge whatsoever of the books that came before him even though he claims that his message is consistent with what is found in the Torah and the Injil.
This results in the apologetic issues that we face today. And we'll expand upon those things a little bit more as we get through the material here. Now, I'm going to have to, since I can't see what's coming up, I'm just going to have to click, click, click, and we'll do the best we can from there.
Now, he begins his ministry in 610. Between 610 and 622, he is a minority prophet in Mecca. What do I mean by minority? Well, he's teaching monotheism while everybody else believes in polytheism. And so he is abused, he is persecuted, his few followers are persecuted.
One of the Hadith stories, and let me just mention what the Hadith are because I'm going to be, in the last hour, talking much more about this. But the Hadith, as I've said, are the stories, sayings, and actions of Muhammad and his companions.
They were collected between 200 and 300 years after the time of Muhammad. Some collections began a little bit earlier than that, like the Muwatta of Malik and things like that. But the Sunni have six authoritative Hadith collections.
Some are more authoritative than others. They are called Sahih collections. Sahih means sound. There is an entire realm of Hadith study. I have listened to many lectures on the subject of how to analyze Hadith.
They are, without a doubt, some of the most boring things you'll ever listen to in your life, but I felt it was necessary, I needed to know these things. I've thought of the irony. I live in Phoenix, Arizona.
I do most of my studying on the back of a bicycle. I listen to these things. That's how I combine my passion for cycling and my study. I would not get nearly as much done in study and preparation if I did not ride.
Four-day week this past week, I had 13 hours and 22 minutes on the bike. Listening to books, I get through one and a half to two books a week, aside from debates and things that I'm listening to. Since I live in Phoenix, if you're riding in June, July, August, you're riding at 2, 3 o 'clock in the morning.
That's the only time you can ride. If that big, glowing, bright thing, which you all don't have here, but we have it down there, if that big, glowing, bright thing is in the sky for more than about an hour, you are turned into a crispy critter.
I'll be out there at 3 o 'clock in the morning, and I've stopped at a few stoplights a couple times and thought, you know, if I ever get hit by a car out here, they're going to pick up my iPod and start listening, going, call the government.
We've got a problem here. Because I'm listening to lectures on how you determine Hadith studies. But anyways, there are two collections that are the most primarily authoritative amongst Sunni Muslims in the world, and that is Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.
Bukhari is nine volumes, English, Arabic. Muslim is eight volumes, English, Arabic. And yes, I've read all of Bukhari and all of Muslim, and that's the sources I'll be drawing from as I tell you some of those Hadith stories later on in the afternoon.
But those Hadith stories become the background, the history. It becomes the very milieu in which the Quran is interpreted. It comes from the Hadith as well. And so most of the sermons that you will hear, the khutbahs in the mosque, these exhortations are primarily drawn from the Hadith literature.
And so the Muslim is very accustomed to hearing these stories being told within that context. And so one of those stories relates how Muhammad was prostrate in prayer in Mecca during this particular period of time.
And his enemies came along and dropped on his back the entrails of a camel. So the guts of a camel. And so he just stayed in that position until his daughter Fatima came along and pulled the entrails off of him, and then he finished his prayers.
Now what is interesting to note is that every time that that story is told in the Hadith literature, I just happen to notice, these are things that Christians would notice as they're listening to this, I just happen to notice that each of the stories then mentions the specific names of the people who did this and mentions that after Islam arrived, they were all killed.
So you don't have the same concept of the forgiveness of your enemies. You have the retribution that actually comes upon them is what is emphasized at that particular point in time. Now, finally, in AD 622, you have what's called the Hijra.
This is when Muhammad and his followers leave Mecca and they go to a little town called Yathrib, which is renamed Medina, the city of the prophet. And this is the beginning of the Islamic calendar, is AD 622.
Now you can't just make a straight transfer over, by the way, because remember, they're using a lunar calendar, so their years are shorter than ours. So figuring out what year it is in the Islamic calendar really takes a computer, which thankfully we have now.
But 622 is the beginning of the Islamic calendar with the Hijra and the going to Medina. And so now you have a new reality. The new reality is Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, he is, instead of a minority prophet, he is the head of an army.
He is now in charge of the defense of a city. The Meccans come against the city a number of times. You have the Battle of Badr, the Battle of Uhud, the Battle of the Trench, all between 624 and 627. In Badr, the Muslims are victorious at Uhud.
They are not victorious, and at the Trench, it's sort of a stalemate. But the Meccans realized that Muhammad's strength and power was growing. He was unifying many of the desert tribes, the Bedouin tribes, together.
And they knew they had a major problem with this new power that was developing in that area. And so after one of these battles, there were a number of Jewish tribes in Medina. And after one of these battles, the Banu Quraizah, a Jewish tribe, was accused of betraying Muhammad.
And so once the battle was over, they then surrounded the Banu Quraizah. The Banu Quraizah surrendered. Muhammad oversaw the enslavement of the women and children, and then personally was involved with, in one day, the beheading of over 700 people, 700 men, from the Banu Quraizah tribe at this particular point in time.
Again, Muhammad is a warrior. He is a politician. He is a statesman, first and foremost, in a rather violent and difficult area of the world and needs to be analyzed within that context. The problem comes when Islam makes him not only the final prophet of Allah, but the best of all of mankind, so that everything he did related to us in the sunnah of the life of Muhammad becomes the basis for which Muslims take God's revelation.
So, for example, the Hadith literature contains incredible instructions as to how you live your life, down to the most minute elements of things. You never, for example, offer your left hand to a Muslim.
You only offer the right hand to a Muslim. If you don't have a right hand, you don't offer him anything at all. The left hand is the hand you use to clean yourself after you go to the bathroom. That's what you're supposed to do because that's what Muhammad did.
So, you never offer the left hand. You're only supposed to use an odd number of stones when you clean yourself. Thankfully, we don't need to do that anymore. That's what the Hadith says. When you eat figs, you only eat an odd number of figs.
You eat one fig or three figs or five figs, but you never eat four figs because that's not what Muhammad did. It is that elevation of Muhammad to the position of being the final example that really is problematic in certain areas that we could get into, including how he treated the Banu Qurayza.
Finally, in 628, Muhammad marches his army to Mecca. The truce of Hudaybiyyah is worked out at that time. Many of his followers thought they were going to get to go on Hajj, they were going to get to visit the Kaaba.
It didn't happen that year, but Muhammad used this as a victory, and it did eventually lead to the fall of Mecca. When the Islamic armies took over Mecca, there was actually very little bloodshed. In fact, the main people who died were poets.
Muhammad took poetry very seriously, and there were a number of poets that lost their lives because they dared to criticize Muhammad over the years. They take over Mecca in 630. They've now unified most of the Arabian Peninsula at that particular point in time.
He dies back in Medina in 632 AD. His ministry only goes from 610 to 632, for about 22 years as the prophet. Then you have all the big issues about who is to be in charge of Islam. This is where the major division in Islam begins.
That is that the Shiites believe that Ali should have been his immediate successor. Instead, you had Abu Bakr became the first caliph, and then Umar, and then Uthman, and then Ali. But the division between the Sunnis and the Shiites, then under Ali, you have civil war, and the division takes place at that time.
That leads to a lot of things we don't have time to get into today. But he dies in 632, and the Islamic State then, very important in history to remember, that between 632 and 732 is the century of Islamic expansion.
It goes from a religion in Saudi Arabia to going all the way up to the Holy Land, into Iraq, into Pakistan, all the way up toward the Byzantine Empire, all across North Africa, across the Straits of Gibraltar, into Spain, Portugal, and it's only finally stopped by Charles Martel, the Battle of Tours in 732.
So for 100 years, this became one of the most dominant empires in the medieval world. Most of those lands had been at least nominally Christian up until that point in time. So this is where the beginnings of the conflict really take place during that particular century.
Now, some of the key theological events in Muhammad's life. Muhammad and Zaynab bin Josh. Now let me mention something. Let me just ask a question of you. How many of you know, merely by my enunciation of the name, who Aisha was?
Anyone know who Aisha was? Put your hands up because it's dark out there to me. How many of you do not know who Aisha was? How many of you did not bother to raise your hand at all? Okay. I always appreciate the folks who just sit there and go, no, I'm not.
I don't care if you ask me. Someone might see. Why? I'm just asking. Anyway, Aisha was the child bride of Muhammad. Aisha was the favorite bride of Muhammad. Khadijah died, and Muhammad then married a number of women.
Even though the Quran had limited the number of women that a man could marry to four, he was given a special dispensation to where he could marry more than four women. And Aisha was Abu Bakr's daughter.
Abu Bakr was his closest friend and confidant. He became the first caliph. Aisha was six years old when the marriage was arranged and nine years old when it was consummated. And Muhammad was 54 at the time of that particular marriage.
Now, as a result, there are a lot of people who run around calling Muhammad a pedophile and everything else. The fact of the matter is that if we're fair, the reality is the Quran shows not the slightest bit of embarrassment about Aisha.
And none of the early sources do. It was a commonplace thing. In fact, if anything, Aisha is seen as even more important because of that, because she's the only virgin that Muhammad married. And so the Quran shows no hesitation and no embarrassment whatsoever about the situation with Aisha.
I think the Aisha story is a non-starter for Christian apologists, personally. There's a far more important story, actually, that the Quran does show great embarrassment about, that the vast majority of Christians, Christian apologists, and unfortunately Muslims know nothing about, and that is Muhammad and Zaynab bin Josh.
Zaynab bin Josh was Muhammad's first cousin. And he had married her, he had given her in marriage to his adopted son, Zayd. Now Zayd was a freed slave, and Muhammad had adopted him, and there was a close relationship between them.
To make a very long story short, Muhammad once visited Zayd's home. Zayd was not home. Zaynab was there, and somehow Muhammad saw Zaynab in some state of semi-dress. And was absolutely smitten with her beauty.
I guess she was just knock-out, knock-down, drag-out gorgeous. And word got out very quickly, there was already divisions, there was already trouble in this marriage. And word came to Zayd that the Prophet likes your wife, and he offered to divorce her immediately.
Muhammad said, no, keep your wife. Entire sections of the Quran end up coming down on this issue. In fact, skip over the deposition from Najran, that's going to be in a second. Listen to what the Quran 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. 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. And then it says, then when Zayd had dissolved his marriage with her, with the necessary formality, we joined her in marriage to thee, in order that in the future there may be no difficulty with the believers in the matter of marriage with the wives of their adopted sons, when the latter have dissolved with the necessary formality of their marriage with them, and Allah's command must be fulfilled, Surah 33, 37.
So here you have written on heavenly tablets in eternity past, a concern about marrying the divorced wives of your adopted sons. Yeah, that was a real big problem, wasn't it? I mean, I'm so glad that in eternity past this was dealt with.
The fact of the matter was that from the concept of that day, this was incest. It was completely irregular. It was not allowable. And so what the Quran does is you have not only this material, but the Quran to help make this happen does away with adoption.
There's no adoption in Islamic land. Now, adoption's a beautiful thing. Adoption's a beautiful thing in the New Testament. Think of Romans chapter 8. But adoption is a beautiful thing in a culture where you can adopt someone and bring them into your family, and it's a beautiful, godly thing.
But it doesn't exist in Islam because Muhammad wanted to marry the divorced wife of his adopted son. And so first he had to unadopt Zayd. And he was no longer called Zayd, the son of Muhammad. He was called Zayd, the son of whoever his original father had been.
I think it was Hiratha or something like that. And so adoption's destroyed. And then he is allowed to be married to Zaynab. And of course when Zaynab comes into the quote-unquote family here, the harem, she is, you know, I mean, Aisha is jealous because Zaynab is very beautiful.
And Zaynab would say, I'm the only one who was married to Muhammad by Allah himself in the Quran. And this causes all sorts of problems within the wives of Muhammad as well. And so I think this is much more of a serious issue as to demonstrating the real human nature of the Quran than the Aisha story could ever be.
And yet most people have no idea. They don't know anything about it at all. Now one of the things I skipped past there, which I just need to fix, I need to remember to fix, is the deputation from Najran.
Toward the end of Muhammad's life, Christians from Najran came to Medina to talk to Muhammad and to ask him questions about his theology. And they had themselves a little discussion. Now my Muslim apologist friends will point out how kind Muhammad was to them.
He allowed them to say their prayers, Christian prayers in the mosque. Even when they rejected what Muhammad said, he allowed them to leave in peace. All of which is true given the fact that the only thing we know about this comes from Islamic sources.
There are no Christian sources that verify this particular encounter at all. And I should point out that the second caliph, Umar, drove all the Christians out of Najran. So they were not allowed to keep their homes.
And they were eventually turned into refugees having to flee the Islamic state. But allegedly there is a conversation between the Christians and Muhammad. And some of this ends up being reflected in the pages of the Quran itself, particularly in Surah 3.
Notice what it says. Indeed the example of Jesus to Allah is like that of Adam. He created him 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.
Now, you need to understand what's being said is, well, once God has revealed his truth, then you all get together and you call God's curse down upon whoever is lying in this particular situation between Christians and Jews in regards to this particular subject.
Indeed, this is the true narration. And there is no deity except Allah. So what is the Quran saying? Well, the Quran is saying that Jesus is but a messenger of Allah. He is a creation of Allah. This is the true narration.
There is only one deity, and it's Allah. The Christians are wrong. And indeed, Allah is the exalted in might, the wise. But if they turn away, then indeed, Allah is knowing of the corruptors. So who are the corruptors?
Well, Christians are. Say, O people of the scripture, Allah al-kitab, the people of the book, that's us, people of 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 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. Islam means submission. In Italian, it means peace. That's only a secondary meaning. Honest Muslims will admit Islam means submission, submission to the will of Allah, and that you have peace with God once you submit to him.
But its primary meaning in Arabic is submission. It's certainly related to the term for peace, but that peace only comes through submission. So it's fascinating that just a few years ago, some liberal Christians and liberal Muslims got together, and they wrote up an article called A Common Word.
And it's from this very section, come to a word that is equitable between us and you, common word in other translations. And yet, if you actually read what Surah 3 is talking about, it's talking about bringing a curse upon the Christians for rejecting the revelation of Allah.
So I sometimes wonder about liberal Christians and their reading of texts. Then again, you look at how they deal with the Bible, and you can understand how they came up with this, too. So you do have some indication of that encounter, at least Muhammad's understanding of it, in the text of the Quran itself.
Man, this thing is really getting bad. I don't know. I'm just gonna have to fix this. I don't know how it's happening at all, but so cute. Anyway. Now, where is the Quran right now? Has it gone over to this side?
Okay, so it's gonna need to pop over to this side. Okay, we're about halfway through, so it's working about right. Let's talk about the Quran a little bit now. As I said, 114 surahs, or what we might call chapters.
Normally, they are named after some event in the chapter. It doesn't even have to be the main thing. I mean, Surah al-Baqarah is so huge that it's circulated as a book unto itself, according to John of Damascus.
And yet, it's called the Kal. That's not the major issue in Surah 2, but that's the name that's been associated with it. Some surahs do not actually, the name does not come from that. One of the most important is Surah 112, Surat al-Iklas, which we'll look at in the next section, which is about as close as you can get to a creedal statement in the Quran.
Al-Iklas means the purity or the sincerity, and that word does not appear in it. But there's 114 surahs in the current Quran, as we'll discover here in a moment. There were people in the ancient world, well, in the early years of Islam, had different numbers of surahs in their Quran.
Organized by size, not chronology or topic, as I've mentioned, and very difficult to follow context and background. It's dependent upon Hadith sources, as I mentioned to you as well. This is, from the Islamic perspective, the direct words of God.
It is not the words of men. Therefore, a very different kind of exegesis is utilized upon the text. Most Muslims do not exegete the text the way we do. Most Muslims treat the text of the Quran more as a magic talisman than it is a text to be read and applied in life.
That's a little bit different in Western countries, but the majority experience of most Muslims is along that line. Many books, Kitabim, were sent down by Allah. As I've mentioned, the Quran itself says, the Torah and the Injil were Natsal.
They were sent down by God. They contain light and guidance, the very words that are used of the Quran itself. I would argue that a consistent reading of the Quran, the author of the Quran did not believe that the Bible was corrupted in its words, but the vast majority of Muslims today do believe that the Bible was corrupted in its very words.
The Quran, according to Surah 5, acts as a muhaiman, a guard over the preceding books, and that's understood by most Muslims today. As allowing them to look through the text of the Quran backwards at our books, and hence to correct our books in light of the Quran.
So it's an anachronistic perspective. As you remember, Shabir Ali in Biola said, well, if it agrees with the Quran, it's inspired, and if it doesn't agree with the Quran, it's not inspired. That's sort of how that works.
From our perspective, it would seem to be rather backwards, but that's the way that Muslims think about it, because the Quran is the final revelation from Allah, as Muhammad is the final prophet as well.
Now, it's very important to realize that the Quran had a government-controlled textual transmission. Unlike the New Testament, where you have the government trying to destroy the New Testament, the Roman Empire, for the first 260 years of its history, the Quran is controlled by the government itself.
That results in a generally unified textual history. I don't have much of a doubt that the Quran that is now in the back row there is primarily the same type of Quran that Uthman produced around 650 AD, about 20 years after Muhammad's death.
But that's exactly what you'd expect when you have a particular text that is protected by the government and promoted by the government. That's going to result in a generally unified textual history. The 1924 Egyptian edition, viewed by most as the official version in Arabic, is the one that you all are examining at this particular point in time.
Now, there is a major difference between a centralized governmental control of the collation and transmission of the Quranic text and the non-centralized, non-controlled transmission of the New Testament.
I have now done four debates on this subject, two with Adnan Rashid in London and two with Yusuf Ismail at the old University of Pachastrum, now Northwest University in Pachastrum, South Africa. And we did the exact same subject, both of those.
We would do one debate, has the New Testament been accurately transmitted? Then, has the Quran been accurately transmitted? We did two debates and one night for both of them. The one with Adnan is on YouTube.
We don't yet have the ones from South Africa, but they will be. And you will see that they were very, very interesting conversations and discussions at that time. Now, looking at the Hadith itself, listen to what the Hadith says about the history of the Quran.
Abu Bakr then said to me, Umar has come to me and said, casualties were heavy among the Qurra of the Quran, i .e. those who knew the Quran by heart, on the day of the battle of Yalmama. I just stop when I say Yalmama because normally someone starts chuckling.
The battle of Yalmama? Yeah, the battle of Yalmama. Now, down the states they go, Yalmama? My mama? I just stop, just wait. Let's get it over with. Okay, we can move on. Now, on the day of the battle of Yalmama, and I am afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the Qurra on other battlefields.
So, there were these people who had memorized the Quran. Many of them died in this battle. And notice, the fear is that this may happen again, whereby a large part of the Quran may be lost. What's the only way to understand those words?
That the Quran had not been collected at the time of Muhammad. Now, there will be people who will say, oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it was. But here's Sahih al-Bukhari. This is the most trustworthy set of Hadith saying, no, actually it wasn't.
That's the only way you can understand these words. Where a very large part of the Quran may be lost, therefore I suggest you, Abu Bakr, order that the Quran be collected. And so a process took place.
So I started looking for the Quran and collecting it from what was written on palm stalks, thin white stones, and also from the men who knew it by heart. So notice the different sources there. Until I found the last verse of Surah al-Tawbah, Surah 9, Surah Repentance, with Abu Kazim al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him.
Notice that. Here's a verse, that this is Zayd bin Thabit, I think it's Zayd bin Thabit that's talking here. This is a verse that was found with one person and only in their memory. It wasn't written down anywhere.
Now what about those other Quran that died? Might there have been other verses there? Don't know, can't say. Interesting question. Then the complete manuscripts, copy of the Quran, remained with Abu Bakr until he died, then with Umar until the end of his life, and then with Hafsah, the daughter of Umar.
That's Sahih al-Bukhari 6509. We go on with 6510, which says, Hudayfa was afraid of there, the people of Sham and Iraq's differences in the recitation of the Quran. So he said to Uthman, now Uthman is the third caliph, so we've gone from right after Muhammad's death until about 650 now.
O chief of the believers, save this nation before they differ about the book, the Quran, as Jews and Christians did before. Hmm. We want one edition. We don't want all this, we don't want any questions.
So Uthman sent a message to Hafsah saying, send us the manuscripts of the Quran so that we may compile the Quranic manuscripts in perfect copies and return the manuscripts to you. Hafsah sent it to Uthman.
Uthman then ordered Zayd bin Thabit, Abdullah bin Az-Zubair, Zayd bin Alas, and Abdur-Rahman bin Harith bin Hashim to write the manuscripts in perfect copies. Uthman said to the three Quraishi men, in case you disagree with Zayd bin Thabit on any of the Quran, then write it in the dialect of the Quraish.
The Quran was revealed in their tongue. Now, clearly, what Uthman is doing is more than just simply taking that one manuscript that had been made before and recopying it. There is an entire revision going on here.
It's called the Uthmanic revision. There's an entire revision going on. They're comparing things, they're writing new manuscripts, and this is very, very important because it's happening after the days of Muhammad and there are no prophets after Muhammad.
So these are not prophetic men. They did so, and when they had written many copies, Uthman returned the original manuscripts to Hafsah. Uthman sent to every Muslim province one copy of what they had copied in order that all the other Quranic materials, whether written in fragmentary manuscripts or whole copies, be burnt.
Now, that's extremely important. Muslims will say, well, that's showing respect. That's how you deal with material. You don't just throw it out. You burn it, etc., etc. But the fact of the matter is, the only reason Uthman did this is he was trying to enforce a standardized text, and we know from history that there are others who disagreed with him, specifically a man by the name of Abdullah ibn Masud, who Muhammad himself in the Quran said he is the one to go to to find out what the Quran says.
And he had different readings in the Quran than Uthman did. And Ubay ibn Ka 'b had a different number of surahs than Uthman did. So these are things to be kept in mind. Then notice, Zay bin Thabit added, a verse from Surah Az-Zab was missed by me when we copied the Quran, and I used to hear Allah's Apostle reciting it, so we searched for it and found it with Qusaymi bin Thabit al-Ansari.
The verse was, among the believers are men who have been true in their covenant with Allah, Surah 33, 23. That's Sahih al-Bukhari 6, 5, 10. So even at this final stage, there is the discovery material that was not in the original for those first 20 years, that manuscript that had been given to Hafsa.
So here you have, in the Islamic sources, the story of the Uthmanic revision of the Quran. Now this is extremely important because if you have a revision in the history of an ancient document, and you don't have access to anything earlier than that, you have to trust the people who did the revision got it exactly right.
This is extremely important. There were no Uthmans in Christian history. There were no Uthmans in the New Testament. No one ever had a chance to do what Uthman did with the Quran. That's a very important thing to remember.
Now, in other Islamic sources, Ibn Abi Dawud, in his book, Kitab al-Masahif, page 23, notes many of the passages of the Quran that were sent down were known by those who died on the day of Yamama. But they were not known by those who survived them.
Nor were they written down, nor had Abu Bakr, Umar, or Uthman, by that time, collected the Quran, nor were they found with even one person after them. So here you have an early source saying parts of the Quran were lost.
We don't have them. They weren't there. A Christian by the name of al-Kindi. This is one of the earliest Christian sources. Fascinating story, the story of al-Kindi. Listen to what he says. Now, Kindi is writing this before Bakari.
So this is a Christian who has access to these stories before Bakari actually collects his collection. This is very primitive material. This is around 810, 820 A .D. But they did not interfere with that which was in the hands of Ali, or of those who follow his reading.
Ubaid was dead by this time, as for Ibn Masud. They demanded his exemplar, but he refused to give it up. And the hadith confirmed this. Ibn Masud said to his followers, do not give up your manuscripts.
Do not read the manuscript according to Uthman. So there was clearly a division at this point. Is reported from Ismail, okay, now I'm going under another source. This is another source, you can see the reference at the bottom.
Is reported from Ismail ibn Ibrahim, from Ayyub, from Nafi, from Ibn Umar, who said, let none of you say I have acquired the whole of the Quran. How does he know what all of it is when much of the Quran has disappeared?
Rather, let him say I have acquired what has survived. Again, the issues are very important as to the early history of the Quran. Now, we're supposed to be in the Q &A section here, but I need to finish this up.
I think it's important that you see this. I am going to show you textual evidence that 99 .99998 of all Muslims in the world have never seen. Never seen. I've shown some of this material in debates, and the silence in the room from the Muslims was deafening.
Most Muslims believe that that Quran that's going around, wherever it is right now, somewhere right there, that that Quran is exactly what Uthman produced, that it has no textual history at all. This is simply not the case.
Instead, the fact is that there are textual variants in the early copies of the Quran and evidence of an early editing process seeking to remove Ibn Masud and Ubaid bin Kab's influence upon the text of the Quran.
Let me give you an example. In Surah 222, here is a graphic that I produced, and if you find it to be great, you can go, oh, neat. One of the, now, there is no, who has the Quran right now, right here?
There is no critical edition of that Quran. Have any of you noticed that there are no notes at the bottom of the page? No little fine print? Nothing like that. There's no numbers with a note down at the bottom.
There are no critical editions of the Quran as yet. They're working on one that is called the Corpus Chronicum Project that's undergoing. It's primarily being done by Western scholars, but they're working on a critical edition of the Quran.
We, of course, have numerous critical editions of the New Testament available to us. What that means is that there's great confusion as to the sources of the Quran. There is something called the Fogg's Palimpsest Manuscript.
Well, now, what is a palimpsest? A palimpsest is when you have parchment, you can wash the ink off of parchment and reuse the parchment, but when you've used something like a quill or something like that to write it, you've already scarred the surface of the parchment, so using a proper kind of light, you can still read what was originally written, which is now underneath the new thing that was written on top of it.
We have palimpsest manuscripts of the New Testament, for example, that are very important. Well, we have palimpsest manuscripts of the Quran, and unlike the New Testament, where you can go to websites and find out exactly which manuscript is which and when it was found and where it's stored, that doesn't exist.
It's possible that we actually have two palimpsest manuscripts of this, but I'm not sure, to be perfectly honest with you, because of the confusion that exists, even among scholars who study these things, but at least the Fogg's palimpsest manuscript.
Here is Surah 2, 222, and you will notice that there are complete examples of editing in the text of this text. Not only do you have different grammatical terminations, you have words put in different orders, put in different places in the sentence.
That's not textual, that's not a scribe misspelling something. That is a scribe rewriting something. That's the only way you can move words from one place in the sentence to another part in the sentence and change their grammatical terminations and so on and so forth.
So, here you have the difference between the earlier and the lower, the top, and what's in this Quran, illustrated for you. Then, let me show you another example, and this is a very, very important example, and that is, is there evidence of direct purposive editing of the Quranic text in BNF 328A?
BNF is simply the National Library of France in Paris, manuscript 328A. I'm very blessed over the past number of years. God's people have been very kind to me. I have two museum-quality facsimiles of not only BNF 328A from Paris, but also the Quran from London and the British Library there, and these sit, if they were wide open, they'd be as wide as this pulpit and taller than this pulpit.
They're $1 ,400 a piece, and you have a picture from one of them right there. You can see very clearly the fact that this word right here, there is, clearly, it has been written over top of something else.
You can notice that the lameds, notice the angle of all the lameds here, but the angle of the lameds here, completely different, completely different handwriting. This is clearly a textual variant. Here, you can see it in a fuller.
Here's the variant right here. Here's the rest of the page. Now, this particular word resulted in all sorts of confusion amongst the early Muslims as to what it meant. It had to do with the issue of the passing on of authority within the Islamic community, and what happens is you have this variant here, and because that variant is there, there had to be another verse inserted later in the manuscript that gave the proper commentary to make this make sense, but how do you do that if it's already been written?
Well, check this out. Here is, there is a stub between folios 19b and 20a and BNF 328a. This, see right here, this is the remnant of a page, and why would you even leave a stub? Well, because if you cut it all the way down the spine, since you know how pages are folded, if you cut all the way down the spine, the other page that it's connected to is gonna fall out, so the stub was left in place, and then what you have when this works right, there we go, here is the next page, and look at the difference in the spacing between the lines here and the spacing in the size of the letters of the lines up here.
You see, since you're having to, what the author was trying to do was to insert this and insert a whole new verse and still have it end at the very same letter so it can go on to the next page without showing any evidence of it, but if you have to now cram in an entire extra verse, you've got to write smaller and cram stuff together to make it fit, and so here you have clear evidence of the editing of the text after, and the insertion of material that has theological significance to the early community, and remember, Uthman, Uthman, he's living right at the time where the split between the Shiites and the Sunnis takes place, and he's murdered, and so at the very same time he's creating his version of the Quran, we have versions of the Quran showing people editing stuff and putting stuff in that's directly relevant to what's going on politically at the time.
Now, again, 99 .99998 of the Muslims in the world have never seen what you just saw, never seen it, and would probably doubt your veracity if you told them about it, and there aren't very many books that have this kind of information in it.
If you want to read an incredibly in-depth discussion of it, see Muhammad is not the father of any of your men by David S. Powers. If you want to see the whole discussion of it, but there is information, it's there in front of us.
This is why Sufyan al-Thawri's relatively short tafsir, tafsir means commentary on the Quran, for instance, can list 67 variant readings, 24 of which are attributed to Ibn Masud. The existence of these textual issues has been well-known to Muslim scholars for centuries, but has fallen out of general Islamic recognition, especially in our lifetimes.
Most Muslims do not know about it, and here, for example, very quickly, and then we're gonna take questions, is a chart, this is one of about four or five pages of charts in the Topkapi manuscript that was published in 2007 from Turkey, showing variant readings between the major mushaf, or manuscripts, of the Quran.
And this is an Islamic production. I have this in my library. I have the cheapy version, my $250 version, versus the $5 ,000 version, which I do not have. But this is produced by Muslims, showing some of the variant readings between the major mushaf of the Quran, produced by Muslims themselves, okay?
So it does have a textual, aww. You know, my blood pressure just goes down whenever I see that smiling little face who's now a month older than that, and is about ready to start walking, but anyways. Okay, with that in mind, we need to have some time for questions.
We haven't gotten to the theology yet, but you've now got a foundation, and I hope you can understand why you need the foundation. I mean, honestly, it would be easier for me just to sort of throw some theological stuff out at you and just go from there.
But what I'm trying to do is, let's put it this way. Let's put the shoe on the other foot. I'm not gonna, has anyone actually had the opportunity in this room to have read my book on the Quran yet? Okay, we've got one gentleman down here.
It's not light reading, is it? It's not light reading. I'll warn you ahead of time. In fact, if you do not read my end notes, you are cheated on the price of the book. Trust me, I put the best stuff in end notes, mainly because my publisher doesn't want it in the main text.
Read the end notes, they're very, very important. But it's not easy reading. Put your, and I've been criticized for that. I've had people say, well, it's mistitled. It's not what every Christian should know about the Quran.
It's what really, really serious people who want to witness to Muslims should know about the Quran. Well, I think that should be all Christians, to be very honest with you. But put the shoe on the other foot.
What if you encountered a Muslim who had just read a book called What Every Muslim Should Know About the Bible? Would you hope, would you pray that that book was accurate? That it would actually show some honest integrity in analyzing the Bible, and it would use consistent standards, even when it disagreed with the Bible?
That's what I've tried to do with that book. And that's what I'm trying to do for you, is to at least give you a start, give you an introduction that is consistent, and actually gives you the foundations that you need to have.
Because if you just do the surface level thing, I'm not doing you any favors. Because you're gonna get into a conversation with a Muslim, and if you don't have the foundations there, the communication just isn't gonna happen.