Mission to Baghdad (and the Rest of Islam). Scores of millions of people all around the Moslem world are reacting with disgust to the violent madness that fills their headlines — bombings, beheadings, shootings, all committed in the name of Islam. Tho they want to disown such behavior as "not Islamic" but a "perversion of Islam", every attack, every senseless killing makes it more difficult — nay, impossible — to defend Islam as an innocent victim of misinterpretation. What kind of muddy moral teaching could allow of such "misinterpretation"?
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If the Koran merely prescribes forms of worshiping God, without teaching anything about morality, it is unworthy of heed.
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If there are moral teachings in the Koran, but they are so vague and lacking in prominence that Islamists miss them, then Islam cannot claim moral majesty.
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How can decent people reconcile these grievous defects with the notion that Islam is the final revelation of the will of God as revealed to God's true messenger, Muhammed?
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That is surprisingly easy: Muhammed was misquoted. The Koran was not written by Muhammed, who was illiterate (as was almost everyone else in those days), nor even by people of his own time, who might then read back to him what they had written down and ask if that correctly reflected his teachings.
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There were no mass communications in those days, nor even a publishing industry. The Koran was plainly not written from an outline of any sort, since the suras (chapters, or major divisions) have no thematic or stylistic unity internally and the book overall has no logical structure. The suras are arranged in haphazard order, mainly longest toward the beginning and shortest toward the end, not chronologically nor by type of text: e.g., passages dealing with the nature of God and man's obligations to God; passages dealing with morality; passages dealing with ritual.
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The teachings of Muhammed that became the Koran were originally written down in fragmented form by many different people, as they remembered them after the fact. Altho the oral tradition in pre-literate societies has sometimes preserved remarkably consistent stories and very long literary works in good order, that is only true of specific works entrusted to people specially trained to memorize and recite those texts. Those are not the people who heard Muhammed speak. There have been amusing experiments in which a short text is told secretly to one person (say, a third-grader), who is then told to whisper it into the ear of the next person, and on and on around the room, until the last person (of 20 or 30) says aloud for everyone what it is s/he heard. Rarely is the text remotely intact but has been changed massively, often beyond recognition. A pre-literate society of "the oral tradition" might not mangle a text as badly, but it is inconceivable that the version as reported by the 10th person would be identical to the version recited by the 1st.
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Most of the teachings of Muhammed were given orally in front of groups of ordinary people who later tried to remember exactly what he said. But they had no special training in memorization, and almost none were themselves able to write. Even if they could write, the script ordinarily employed showed only consonants, not vowels. In English, if we were to write D*N, where * represents any vowel, how would we know which of these 10 words was intended: Dan, den, din, don, dun, deign, dean, dine, Doane, dune? That's one written word's uncertainties. Multiply that by all the possible alternative words in every sentence written like that, and you can see that the possibilities for error are incalculably huge.
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Isolated individuals or groups would write down as much as they remembered, on palm leaves, stone, scraps of papyrus, parchment, or whatever else might serve. (Paper had not yet been brought to the Middle East from its original home, China; that was to come only after the Caliphate expanded to touch China, a century after Muhammed's death.)
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Some of those writings were then collected after the Prophet's death, and the religious scribes of the day tried to put them into some order, conform differences, and create a unified text from many scattered remnants.
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Some scholars believe that some of the writings gathered to create the Koran did not even relate to what Muhammed said but predate him by a century!
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So even if Muhammed had given those around him a divinely inspired revelation, he did not himself write it down nor dictate it to a battery of scribes waiting on his every word.
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Moreover, writing was poorly established in Arabia at the time, there being very few surviving inscriptions from before the time of the Koran. And Arabic, like any other language, has changed enormously over the centuries. A reader of modern Arabic may completely misunderstand passages of Koranic Arabic because the words today (some 1,300 years later) have radically different meanings than they had then.
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Further, anyone who sees the many mistakes that get past highly qualified proofreaders and copy editors at major publishing houses and broadcasters today, a time of universal education in the world's major countries, should recognize that it is essentially impossible that simple, uneducated tribesmen in a backward country almost 1,400 years ago could have produced an accurate and authentic transcription of Muhammed's teachings.
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If you've ever read a transcript of almost anything and compared it to the original oral presentation on videotape or film, you will have seen that all kinds of errors can be made, from mishearing plain words to guessing wrong at muffled or soft passages, to writing the wrong one of homonyms, misplacing punctuation, etc. Each such mistake reduces the reliability of the message. Multiply such mistakes by many different people writing down snippets of what they recalled and passing them down decades later, and you can end up with a hideous mishmash that bears little resemblance to what Muhammed actually said. Some German researchers have concluded that about a fifth of the Koran makes no sense at all!

Gerd-r Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. "The Koran claims for itself that it is 'mubeen,' or 'clear,'" he says. "But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims — and Orientalists — will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible — if it can't even be understood in Arabic — then it's not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not — as even speakers of Arabic will tell you — there is a contradiction. [And since the exact word of God cannot contain a contradiction,] Something else must be going on."

When you don't have a videotape or audio recording to refer to, you may never know what was really said.
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Most Moslems cannot read Arabic, so chant by rote texts they can understand only from translations. But Islam recognizes only the Arabic original as authentic. No translation is regarded as "the real Koran" but only as an interpretation.
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Anyone who knows anything about languages knows that if you take any passage of size in one language and translate it into another language, then have different people translate the resulting passage back into the first language, you end up with a text that differs significantly, and sometimes wildly, from the original. So there is always a loss in translation.
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Some of the Korans that large numbers of people read in various languages are not even direct translations from Arabic but only translations of translations!
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All these complications are real, so can, entirely legitimately, be used by wavering Moslems to justify abandoning a corrupted message as inauthentic, not the original divine revelation given to Muhammed, at all.
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Christianity has a great opportunity today, to spread the message of the "Prince of Peace" to Moslems in war zones who are hungering for peace.
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Christian missionaries (by any name) should approach Moslems by pointing out (1) that Muhammed never claimed to be God himself, but only the Messenger of God; and (2) that the words we read today are not the words Muhammed spoke, but only a mangled misrepresentation of his message; but (3) Jesus is Himself God, and His message, on key points of morality, is clear in any language because it speaks to the heart.
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Christians can argue that if a person looks into him- or herself and lets conscience guide, s/he is hearing God's words in his or her own internal voice. That voice requires peace from and justice to all people. Violence begets violence; peace begets peace. And there is no glory, only shame, in killing the innocent. No Paradise awaits so great a sinner. Paradise is reserved for the just and the generous, the peacemaker who resorts to war only to protect others, not to dictate private conscience. Because conscience is the Lord speaking to you thru your heart, and thus more reliable than any words written or spoken by men. That is why Jesus could tell people to look within themselves, not to the priests (imams) or political leaders, to know right from wrong. Because when you think before acting to 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you', you are hearing God speak and making your choice of how to act in accord with His advice.
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I think there are a great many millions of Moslems ready to accept that Islam is self-destructing. Who see that all of the world's greatest, richest, and most advanced countries save only Japan are Christian. And who are willing to accept Christianity as the means to achieve peace among men, and to progress toward material comfort and technological advancement without any moral loss.
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The churches of the West should be pouring forth a great effort all across the Moslem world to win present Moslems to Jesus by honoring Muhammed's intent but suggesting that his message has been so badly mangled that the best way to recapture his meaning is to heed the higher authority of Jesus. After all, Muhammed was trying only to tell us to love and heed God, which is exactly what Jesus was put on Earth to do, and Jesus knew God's mind because Jesus is part of the godhead.
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To people who recoil in horror at the thought of a direct theological challenge by Christianity to Islam in its own homeland, I would ask, "How much worse could things get?"
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Islam honors Jesus, and Christian missionaries can point that out. In honoring Jesus, then, Arabs and others in predominantly Moslem countries would be doing what Muhammed told them to do. That part of Muhammed's message is plain, even if other parts are muddled.
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If Islamists are violent because they feel that adherence to Islam is threatened by modernism, nothing is going to reassure them, because modernity is coming to all the world, and there's nothing they can do to stop it. Western civilization, the dominant and irresistible global modernizer, is Christian. Whereas some Christian conservatives see modernization as threatening Christianity, in producing hordes of only-nominal Christians whose beliefs border on agnosticism and atheism, Arab and other societies can see a shift to Christianity as an integral part of modernism that retains piety in aspiring to live up to God's teachings thru his Son, who came to Earth to experience what it is to be human, the better to relate to people and motivate them.
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I am not persuaded that Islam can modernize. Christianity is infinitely adaptable. Islam is rigid. Increasingly, Islam is becoming a problem for all the world. Tho the ultimate solution to the problem of religious fanaticism is rejection of all religion, that is a step too far for most people even to consider. But moving from piety in Islam to piety in Christianity? That is a little step of great potential.
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Bringing the "good news" (gospel) of Jesus Christ to others is supposed to be a fundamental obligation of Christians. They should thus devoutly resolve to do everything in their power to win the Arab world, and all the rest of the Moslem world, to Christianity.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,775. Only one more to 1776.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:57 AM