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Updated: June 5, 2025
The dislike that Voltaire had conceived for the Qoran from a superficial acquaintance with it, "ce livre inintelligible qui fait fremir le sens commun a chaque page," probably increased his unfavourable opinion, but the principal motive of his choice of a representative must have been that the general public still regarded Mohammed as the incarnation of fanaticism and priestcraft.
Arabic grammar and style, prosody, logic, and other preparatory branches, the sacred trivium; canonic law, dogmatics, and mysticism, and, for the more advanced, exegesis of Qoran and Tradition and some other branches of supererogation, are taught here in the mediaeval way from mediaeval text-books or from more modern compilations reproducing their contents and completing them more or less by treating modern questions according to the same methods.
He began the Qoran tells us expressly by regarding the Arabs, or at all events his Arabs, as heretofore destitute of divine message : "to whom We have sent no warner before you." Moses and Jesus not to mention any others had not been sent for the Arabs; and as Allah would not leave any section of mankind without a revelation, their prophet must still be to come.
Finally, the third question, "Was the Qoran, the word of God, created or not?" is an obvious counterpart of the Logos problem, of the struggle to secure recognition of the Logos as eternal and uncreated together with God. Islam solved the question by distinguishing the eternal and uncreated Qoran from the revealed and created.
He was content only when the heathens perceived that further resistance to Allah's hosts was useless; their understanding of his "clear Arabic Qoran" was no longer the principal object of his striving. Such an Islam could equally well be forced upon non-Arabian heathens.
But orthodoxy controls the divergent elements: it opposes any open avowal of the logical conclusion, which would identify "God" and the "ego," but in practice this group of ideas, pantheistic in all but name, has been received and given a place side by side with the strict monotheism of the Qoran and with the dogmatic theology.
In the Qoran, God says, "Hast thou, Jesus, said to men, Regard me and my mother as Gods by the side of God?" Jesus replies, "I will say nothing but the truth.
Similar objections may be found in Muhammedan tradition; we may regard these as further developments of commands given in the Qoran, but it is also likely that Muhammed's apocryphal statements upon the point were dictated by Christian religious theory. They often appear in connection with warnings against frequenting the public baths, which fact is strong evidence of their Christian origin.
But did Mohammed himself come to these conclusions in the last part of his life? Are the words in which Allah spoke to him: "We have sent thee to men in general," and a few expressions of the same sort, to be taken in that sense, or does "humanity" here, as in many other places in the Qoran, mean those with whom Mohammed had especially to do?
This is true for different individuals as well as for one religious community as compared to another. There are Christians attached only to the spirit of the Gospel, Mohammedans attached only to the spirit of the Qoran.
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