If the Quran was indeed written by Mohammed then how could a simple trader create such a masterpiece in literacy...

If the Quran was indeed written by Mohammed then how could a simple trader create such a masterpiece in literacy unmatched to this very day in arabic literature?

Checkmate atheists

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The "Muhammad was illiterate" meme was invented to deny the fact that he clearly copied the bible.

Your pic is beautiful btw whats the style called ?

I rank Mohammad as a very charismatic cult leader and effective warlord. The fact he started off as a trader is neither here nor there.

Mohammed didn't write the Quran though. It was compiled and edited by later Caliphs

Because he was really fucking clever? The guy clearly knew all about Christianity and Judaism as well as politics, being a statesman, diplomacy or war. Love him or hate him, he was a great man of history who united a people and forged an empire.

The illiterate trader thing really is a meme to down play him to make it seem more miraculous.

So they say. I believe it to have been written by him.

Compiling and editing is not writing. Virtually every famous writer ever has had an editor and no one gives credit to the editor as being the author.

I didn't say he was illiterate, I said he was a simple trader unfamiliar with the art of literature and yet wrote such an amazing piece of literature
Its Sufi islamic art, Pic related is another nice one
That doesn't explain how he wrote the Quran
Proofs?

well that's not even the official story even Muslims accept

>That doesn't explain how he wrote the Quran

The only thing you asked that needed an explanation is how could a simple trader write it. My response suitably addressed that question.

The official story is that it was verbally transmitted by Mohammad and written down on various scrolls during his lifetime and the scrolls were compiled into one volume shortly after his death.

Compiling scrolls does not make the compilers the writers.

>how could a simple trader write a masterpiece of literature
>he was a warlord and charismatic

This is not an explanation

The official Islamic story isn't necessarily right, it's propaganda.

Do you really think a 20 year merchant, statesman and diplomat couldn't read? The guy spent lots of time in the Byzantine empire too.

so it was dictated by him rather than actually written

exactly, this is not the same as Muhammad writing the Quran. He told it to several people in shorter chunks. I don't see why it would be hard for him to give out these smaller chunks in a poetic format that makes it easier for his readers to remember

*listeners

Why not?

I am saying calling him a simple trader is a fallacious description, just because he started life as a simple trader. No one would describe me as a McDonalds worker just because I worked there during my lifetime.

Yes. he was illiterate.

> I said he was a simple trader unfamiliar with the art of literature and yet wrote such an amazing piece of literature
JK Rowling was a waitress and she became a billionaire after writing one of the most popular fiction series of all time.
Someone doesn't have to be formally educated in a craft to be good at it.

A chapter of the Quran is devoted to Muhammad's desire that he uncle die and his uncles wife be hung with a rope. The reason he hated his uncles wife was that she repeatedly threw rubbishy into his garden.
You call that great literature?

The reason the Quran is the greatest piece of Arabic writing is because the Arabs have written absolutely nothing of note in their entire history.

>Yes. he was illiterate.
No he wasn't and there's no evidence for this.

Harry Potter is simple language with no rythmes or use of stylistic devices. The Quran makes use of many stylistic devices, and can both be sung and read normally.

>Do you really think a 20 year merchant, statesman and diplomat couldn't read?
I made no such claim. I just don't think there is a reason to think he wrote the Quran. This isn't accepted by secular scholars or muslims. and why would it be propaganda that he didn't actually write it but told it in smaller parts to many people who then compiled it after his death? it immediately being compiled I could see being propaganda, but not that he didn't do the writing. I bet he was do busy preaching and fighting to write down the whole Quran anyways

>A chapter of the Quran is devoted to Muhammad's desire that he uncle die and his uncles wife be hung with a rope. The reason he hated his uncles wife was that she repeatedly threw rubbishy into his garden.
that doesn't exist, you made that up or read it from someone who made it up

The sources about him say he was illiterate. There is no evidence to the contrary.

>chapter

Source?

You do need to know that during Arabia at this time oral poetry was a big part of their culture and held in very high esteem. There were regular poetry competitions going on at the time, and it was the main method of recording history.
There are no sources that say he was illiterate other than some written centuries after his death

A chapter is an appropriate word for a formal subdivision of a text of the size of a surrah. Don't be a pedant.

I highly advise you to read the Quran before you make such claims. It's surah 111

That's not it. The Quran doesn't copy the Bible in style or content. Most likely it was an attempt at expressing the 'seal of the prophets' concept through metaphor, making Muhammad symbolize the turning point of Arabic as an oral tradition into a written one.

Muhammad likely had contact and training in North Arabian liturgical tradition of a still developing Abrahamic Arab movement.

Why would that make it a bad piece of literature?

There's simply no coherent argument in saying "the Quran has bad stories in it that I don't like" to the claim it is not good literature.

You can write great literature about incredibly petty or nasty things.

Muhammed didn't write it. He 'had siezures' then said it and his followers memorized it and wrote it down many years later.

>the quran isn't from God Mohammed wrote it
>Mohammed didn't write it it was his followers
>His followers didn't write it it was the caliphs
>actually Mohammed wrote it down but not all of it


?????????

>The guy clearly knew all about Christianity and Judaism
Oh wow.
>literary masterpiece
When will this meme end

Muhammad proclaimed it, his followers wrote it down, all the scraps were compiled just after he died or perhaps when he was dying.
This doesn't mean he was illiterate though, he wasn't.

Because the Quran isn't prose, it's poetry, and oral poetry predates writing in many, many societies.

It was a mistake to force people to forever live under the same moral compass. Otherwise,if you're of healthy mind the Qu'Ran is like a manlier standalone version of the Bible.

>It was a mistake to force people to forever live under the same moral compass.

This, for me, is the most solid criticism of Islam.

In truth the ethical code dictated by Islam is probably pretty good when you look at it for the relevant time period.

It taught a humane way of slaughtering animals.

It accepted and endorsed slavery but encouraged slaves to be freed in a place and time when slavery was a rampant pre-existing institution.

I could give other examples, but you get the point.

Fast forward several hundred years and it is endorsing slavery when slavery has long since been discarded by the civilised world. It is encouraging inhumane animal slaughter because we have tech that can make it much more humane.

That's what happens when you have a religious belief that a Medieval warlord was inspired by God and is the most perfect human that ever lived.

>a masterpiece in literacy
I think you mean a tour de force.

This. This is why i say that Muhammad was a liberal reformer and a good guy but it always gets laughed away. He proposed such things as the radical notion of women being allowed to divorce, or having rights, or not killing baby girls on birth.

If the same man was born today he'd grow up into some triggerfest tumblr homo.

>Implying a simple trader would be able to manage all of this math

submission.org/App1.html

This is a much more realistic western response to Islam than "they r the terries."

It does miss a fundamental point though: God's rule of man is not subjected to the petty and temporally conditioned opinions of man. Believing Muslims could not care less if you feel their religion isn't quite consonant enough with your liberal humanism. In the last analysis, their vision is grounded in the only ultimate entity, conveyed by prophecy, the only thing that can ever serve as some grounds of truth. Yours is tidewater.

I agree and acknowledge with what you are saying, but I think there are plenty of believing Muslims who are not fundamentalists who want their faith to move towards a more modern code of ethics, whether you want to term that 'liberal humanism' or not.

The key, I think, is to attack the idea that Muhammad is the most perfect example of a human being, or more subtly suggest he was the most perfect example of a human being for his time period but if he were alive today he might do things a tad differently, like not fuck a nine year old, for example.

Mohammed was illiterate. Some of his followers who were educated wrote down what he supposedly said after he died.

does it have anything to do with the talmud???
answer this!!

I'm not remotely making an argument you are wrong but If you are making comparisons with the Talmud you should be explaining specifically what you are talking about instead of making a vague statement and saying "answer this!!".

does it?

I think attacking Muhammad is mostly slanderous and not likely to lead to a situation characterized by tolerance, respect, dialogue etc.

It is one of many things that fans the flames. The equivalent tactic among Muslims is to attack the West's sacred cows (Freedom Go to Hell!).

first of all, 'literacy'? Durr.

>masterpiece
lel. I've actually read several large chunks of the Koran. It is not particularly good literature, even (granted) in its English translation. It's contradictory nonsense, over-written, violent and a bad message.

>good at the craft
Harry Potter was popular, sure, but it's not well written. Plots are obvious as fuck, corny and cliché, liberal use of spelling shit backwards, a half-remembered knowledge of high-school Latin gives a lot of things away, and the ending really sucks.

Good for her and everything, but it's pretty terrible literature. That should give hope for the rest of us with a piece of shitty literature in our minds waiting to be written.

Dude? There's a problem here, and it's really very simple. The deity in question doesn't actually exist and the morals of muhammed while quite nice for their time are frankly outdated. Muslims can say all they like about how we're just tidewater or whatever, but if it comes right down to it the modern west is more then capable of destroying the entirety of islamic civilization if it so chooses.

I have my own issues with the values of the modern world, but I'm not going to pretend that my own problems are shared by some hypothetical omnipotent entity.

>It is not particularly good literature, even (granted) in its English translation.

I'd amend that to especially in translation. Literature, especially one written in poetic language, suffers in translation even in the best case.

I don't mean to simply post shitty drawings of him or something. I mean to make a coherent argument that believing in Mohammad as a prophet does not mean trying to live your life like a Medieval Arabian.

Not him but this line of thought goes under the assumption of western morals are superior to islamic ones for example,ofcourse it would seem so in your point of view but in theirs they also consider their morals superior,for example you might go ''western morals are superior because they gave women more sexual freedom and gave rights to homosexuals'' but their line of thought would be ''it's inferior because it enables degenracy and and moral decay'',another thing is they believe that their deity indeed exists.

>The key, I think, is to attack the idea that Muhammad is the most perfect example of a human being, or more subtly suggest he was the most perfect example of a human being for his time period but if he were alive today he might do things a tad differently, like not fuck a nine year old, for example.
This is easy, the Quran itself says Muhammad is not perfect, and had faults and sinned. Sunni Muslims are heretics who won't accept this, they put the word of men above the word of the Quran, the apparent word of God.

The reform for Islam is Quran alone, Quranism.

I think what Mohammed ultimately tried to achieve was to bring people to live their lives as good, peace-loving people united under one community. For his time, Mohammed was extremely peaceful, and I think today muslims should ultimately try to be peaceful and loving. They should put this as their number one priority, instead of the traditions they've been upholding from the times back then.

>>under the assumption of western morals are superior to islamic ones
That's because they are, largely. Modern western morals are also superior to the christian morals that we had in the past too.

As far as the islamic world is concerned, what they do is of little relevance, because global events over the next 50 to 100 years will likely lead to a dramatic reduction in the world's muslim population.

is it really unmatched or is that just a cliche people spout to sound pious?

imagine a christian world where the bible represented the acme of literature. that would blow.

>inb4 christians/godposters say it is to be contrarian or pious

Modern western morals are superiror because they fit better into our time. They are not superior because they're more humanist or give the human more rights, because there is no such thing as superior model. When the times change our modern day morals will be outdated and replaced by a moral better fitting to the current Zeitgeist

It's Arabic calligraphy.

>global events over the next 50 to 100 years will likely lead to a dramatic reduction in the world's muslim population.
the muslim population is projected to grow dramatically in the next 50 to 100 years, faster than any other religion

>As far as the islamic world is concerned, what they do is of little relevance, because global events over the next 50 to 100 years will likely lead to a dramatic reduction in the world's muslim population.

Predicting the future is always a silly business but this, based on demographics, seems unlikely, in fact pretty much the opposite is true.

Great point.

>They should put this as their number one priority, instead of the traditions they've been upholding from the times back then.

The thing is, it isn't even a case of the traditions they have always been holding, this extreme Wahhabism that is causing all the problems is primarily being funded by Saudi Arabians.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism

>imagine a christian world where the bible represented the acme of literature. that would blow.

You mean the USA.

The art of islamic caligraphy gets different names and forms depending on the culture/country. In this case it's ottoman and it represents a turkish sufi. It's kind of famous, as a tourist you'll see it everywhere if you travel to the country.

>The thing is, it isn't even a case of the traditions they have always been holding, this extreme Wahhabism that is causing all the problems is primarily being funded by Saudi Arabians.

Agreed,people keep saying islam needs to be reformed to solve it's main issues,what they don't realise is that it WAS already reformed (Wahabism) which caused all of it's current violent problems since wahabis have such big boner for hadiths which encourage a lot of awful shit,biggest crime offender is the bukhari.

>>he doesn't know about global climate change and it's likely effects on much of the muslim world
lol.

The morals most muslims abide by fit with the middle ages, and it isn't the middle ages any longer.

You mean the global climate change that is likely to force mass migration to the West?

Yes, I am thoroughly aware of this thank you.

>he doesn't know about global climate change and it's likely effects on much of the muslim world
you think they are just going to sit there and drown?

We seem to agree on too much to even have a decent Veeky Forums argument!!

The Islamic Reformation has already happened and it is Wahhabism, which has significant parallels with Calvinism in particular and Lutheranism to a lesser extent. It is that very 'reformation' that is causing all of these problems.

I don't know why people try to just copy/paste Western history onto other cultures.

Nobody denies that the dude was smart.
>The reform for Islam is Quran alone, Quranism.
Oh great, muslim evangelicals. Just what we needed.

The worst part is when people claim Wahabism is fundamental Islam, that it is original core Islam. It couldn't be further from it. Wahabism is like Catholicism with all its canons and rules and laws, it's all inane pointless bullshit traditions topped off with a hate
>The morals most muslims abide by fit with the middle ages, and it isn't the middle ages any longer.
Uh no, most muslims are normal people with jobs and families who watch tv in the evening.

>Oh great, muslim evangelicals. Just what we needed.
You obviously don't know anything about quranism

> arabic
> literature
I can't name even one other arabic book. Probably there are literally zero challengers.

Enlighten me, then.
How is Quran alone any different from Sola Scriptura?

Are these Arabic letters that make up these drawings? If so what do they spell? I find this ingenious on the part of the artists... "You said I could not draw, so I just formated the words in a very special way...". It's fascinating how incredibly beautiful art is able to arise under very strict rules, yet today artists have absolute freedom but all they do is trash.

It's not, but you implied it was evangelical, it isn't.
Check this out for the differences between quran only and sunni Islam.
It has to be an old version of the page, for some reason they stripped out the differences section in the latest page.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quranism&oldid=669609185

What does this tiger say?

> all they do is trash.
Maybe you shouldn't look only for trash artists.

moo?

Wait a minute, as a trader he would have to do math.

Lol kikes and christards do the same thing with the bible. You can play this game with the LOTR or an encyclopedia if you wanted.

>math
This isn't math it's numerology.

on the level of one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish

Yes and bear in mind in Arabia at the time numbers were written in Arabic letters, they didn't have dedicated number symbols. So you'd at least know 10 of the Arabic letters.

ok, maybe not evangelist, but protestant.
Interesting.
What do quranists believe about predestination, btw?

No. But most other nations are not going to accept hundreds of millions of migrants from the third world either. Especially not Europe or the US. Combine that with all the infighting and starvation(the real killer with climate change, btw) and the world is going to be minus a large number of muslims.

And what makes you think that they are going to be allowed in? They aren't, they're going to get shot dead at any land border they arrive at and will either be allowed to drown crossing the seas or have their boats deliberately sunk at various ocean crossings.

Don't making comparisons to Christianity, you don't need to.

>What do quranists believe about predestination, btw?
There is no stance on it, humans do have control over their own actions though.

While the possibility is not completely impossible,although certainly not on the same scale,this is still a prediction and not a fact.

By the time climate change will impact the world to such an extent, Europe will already be part of Islamic civilization and the Arabs will be welcomed with open arms as part of the Ummah.

>inb4 muh pagan revival
>inb4 muh christian revival
>inb4 muh secular society

Civilization will always triumph, whether under the sign of the cross or of the crescent.

I know. Totally different history, so comparisons are retarded. But your calls for reform are exactly the same as sola scriptura, theologically speaking.

True, it is a prediction, but it is a prediction based on both current events, the german government coming to an arrangement with turkey to take some of the syrian refugees out of germany for example, plus the utter and complete unwillingness for most other european states to take in anything more then a trivial number of said refugees.

Keep dreaming abdul, Us vs Them is fundamental to all human thinking, and nobody is going to welcome obvious outsiders with open arms.

Same in practice but it has very different consequences for Islam.

>And what makes you think that they are going to be allowed in? They aren't, they're going to get shot dead at any land border they arrive at and will either be allowed to drown crossing the seas or have their boats deliberately sunk at various ocean crossings.

Pure fantasy.

Hardly. Hundreds of millions of muslims taking refuge in the europe would destroy european society and that will not be allowed.

How well is that working for you nowadays? Your society has no values and it imports Muslims that do not assimilate and have a higher birth rate. They will civilize you in due time, don't worry
>Us vs Them
The 'us' of secular western humanism will be replaced by the 'us' of sacral islamic humanism. Or do you think you're on the brink of a new 1848? The era of the nation state is no more.

Take this fanfiction somewhere else.

Ahahah all this delusion, you have no idea how fucked the muslim world is long term. Not european either btw.

>>muh birthrates
Not enough I'm afraid. Too few of you guys in europe for this to matter by the time this goes down.

I'm Eastern European and nihilist, you fag; but I don't have delusions of grandeur of national revival.

Western civilization is dead and those '''few''' Muslims in Europe will plant the seed of Islamic civilization. The barbarism of today cannot perpetuate itself ad infinitum.

Nah, europe is more then civilized, this idea that people doing lots of weird sex stuff or whatever makes them barbaric is a stupid /pol/ meme.

>>those '''few''' Muslims in Europe will plant the seed of Islamic civilization
Ahahah, yeah right, a tiny number of muslims most of whom are hardly interested in being warriors of jihad aren't going to do shit.