Islam Lecture: Baldwin, NY

Now what do I want you to understand this evening? Here is, in my opinion, one of the most important surahs in the

Qur 'an. As I mentioned, the Qur 'an is the revelations of Muhammad.

He begins receiving them around 610. He dies in 632. And here

I have, for example, the standard Arabic Qur 'an today. Muslims around the world pretty much read the same text.

There are a few small variations in various printings. This is the most popular one from 1924 in Egypt. And there are 114 surahs.

In fact, what I'll do is I'll pass this around if you'd like to see what the Qur 'an looks like in Arabic. There are 114 surahs.

A surah, in essence, is similar to a chapter. They are then divided into what are called ayah, or what we would call verses.

And one of the problems when you try to read the Qur 'an is that if you go down to the

Barnes and Noble or something like that and just buy the thing and start reading with surah Al -Fatiha, the opening, and then start reading straight through, number two, number three, number four, it's extremely confusing.

And there's a reason for that. The Qur 'an is organized in such a way that while surah

Al -Fatiha, the first one, is very short. Starting with surah Al -Baqarah, the second surah, that's the longest surah.

Then the third is the next longest, and then the next longest, and the next longest until you get to the shortest. So it's organized by the length of the surahs.

What that means is you're jumping as you're reading straight through, you're jumping back and forth between two very distinct periods in Muhammad's life.

In the first part of Muhammad's life, he is a minority prophet in Mecca, being persecuted because he's calling for people to worship only one god, over against the many gods being worshipped at the center of worship there in Mecca.

And when you're a minority prophet, what are you going to be talking about? You're going to be asking people to give you freedom, to disagree with the majority.

So that's where people today quote the sections, there's no compulsion in religion, comes from that period, that mindset of Muhammad's.

That's where you're going to find the kinder surahs, shall we say. And then the second half of his life is when he now has gone to Yathrib, which now becomes what's called

Medina, and the city of the prophet. And in Medina, he now is the head of an army, of a government.

And now you have the surahs on the shihad and the necessity of obeying the prophet and things like that.

But if you just start reading from beginning to end, you don't see that. And it becomes very, very difficult to follow any of it.

It's very difficult to follow anyway, because unlike the New Testament, when Paul writes the Corinthians, for example, we can go back, we can look at Corinth, we can get some background, we can know who

Paul was, we can look at the languages, we know something about that. There are entire sections of the Quran. We have no idea what the background is.

We have no idea what's being addressed. It's extremely difficult to follow at times. And in fact, many of you can't figure it out at all without the traditions, the hadith.

But the hadith were not collected for another two centuries after Muhammad. And so it's not an easy thing to engage in what might be called

Quranic studies, to try to really understand that particular book. You can certainly pray for me, because starting last

September, I started learning that language that you're staring at there. And when you're 45 years old, learning your seventh language is a pain.

But I learned a long time ago the only way to really interact in ancient documents is to be able to read it in its original languages and so on.

That's something that I'm continuing to work on. So, here on the screen, we have the 112.

So this is 112 out of 114. There were some early Qurans, this was the last of the

Surahs, there were some early Qurans that did not have Surahs 113 and 114 in them. And many people feel this is as close as the

Quran gets to any kind of creedal statement. You have the Shahada, there's only one true God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.

And then you have Surah Ali -Khlas, which means the purity, the sincerity. And many

Muslims feel this is about as close as you're going to get to what we might call the Apostles' Creed or something that we might recite as Christians.

It only has four ayahs, four verses. In Arabic, and there is none like unto him.

That's the entire Surah. And you have here the fact there is only one true

God, Allah, the one and only. Ahad, the same term that is used in, for example, if you're familiar with what's called the

Shema in Deuteronomy 6 .4, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Elohim, Yahweh Ahad. See that last word,

Ahad. Ahad is the same Arabic root as the Hebrew for one.

And so Allah is the one and only. There is no other God. He is the eternal, absolute, sahma.

He is the source of all things. And up to this point, we can certainly agree because this is nothing more than what

Yahweh says about himself in Isaiah 43 .10 or 44 .6 through 8 or other texts in the

Bible. But that's not, of course, how Muslims interpret this. They interpret this as a

Unitarian idea precluding any concept of the doctrine of the Trinity. But then notice the third ayah.

You hear the term Yalad, Y -L -D. That's the very same root in Hebrew that's found in Isaiah chapter 9 that says, a child will be born to us,

Yalad. And here it is being said, he begetteth not nor is he begotten.

Now remember, this is written down, actually written down after Muhammad's death sometime according to Muslim sources around 653 to 655.

That may be a little bit early from some of the studies we're doing. But anyway, you're still talking over half a millennium after the time of Christ.

What is being referred to here? Why in Rabban would you have anything about he begetteth not nor is he begotten?

Well, clearly the background is our own faith. Some of you may, certainly the internet allows you to do this, some of you may have noticed an article about four or five months ago now where the

Muslims in a particular Indonesian country, by the way I hope you all realize, what percentage do you think of Muslims in the world are

Arabic? Less than 20%. You know where the most

Muslims in the world are? Indonesia, Indonesia. Asian Muslims are by far the majority.

And again most Christians, mindset, Muslim, Arabic. In Indonesia, one of these imams was complaining we could get along peacefully with the

Christians if they would just stop saying Jesus is the son of God. So what are they saying?

We can get along with the Christians if they just cease being Christians. That's what he was saying. But he's saying that because of this, he begetteth not nor is he begotten.

And so there can be, now what did Muhammad understand that to mean? Let's hold off on that, we're going to look at some other sections, we might be able to figure that out.

But it's important to know, there is none like unto him. Out of four idols, 25 % of this creedal statement, which

Muhammad himself said was one of the most important surahs in the Quran, 25 % of it is a denial of what you and I believe.

You see what I mean when I say Islam in its own sacred documents? From the Islamic perspective, Muhammad did not say this.

You understand that? Their understanding of inspiration is very different from our understanding of inspiration.

From their perspective, all Muhammad does is the angel Gabriel comes down and he recites this to Muhammad and Muhammad memorizes it and then repeats it to others.

That's it. None of this is a word of Muhammad according to the orthodox

Islamic understanding. In fact, the very term for revelation or to reveal something in Arabic is natsal.

It means to literally, to send down. If there was somebody up in that upper portion there and they were to bring something down to someone down below, same word, to send down.

It's just, it's been sent down from God. God wrote the Quran in Arabic in eternity past and just sent it down.

Final revelation to man. And so when you point out that, wow, it seems like some of these really seem to represent the possibly errant understandings of someone living somewhere around 630 or so, the

Muslim says it can't be. It's not possible. This is just simply the word of Allah. And it's always been this way and this was written before eternity itself began.

But 25 % of this important surah denies the