I prefer Richard Dawkins, the JWST and Christopher Hitchens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCHHfBeu0QE

The Koran was written over several centuries in several different varieties of Arabic. You can say this in Chicago, but not in Al Azhar, Cairo, if you want to avoid a blasphemy trial. So the question is, which Koran? Hitchens answers:

"The Koran Is Borrowed 131 from different provinces were fighting over

discrepant accounts of the Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit

to bring together the various texts, unify them, and have them transcribed

into one. When this task was complete, Uthman ordered standard

copies to be sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with

a master copy retained in Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role

that had been taken, in the standardization and purging and censorship

of the Christian Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius

of Alexandria. The roll was called, and some texts were declared sacred

and inerrant while others became “apocryphal.” Outdoing Athanasius,

Uthman ordered that all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.

Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would

mean that no chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even

dispute what really happened in Muhammad’s time, Uthman’s attempt to abolish disagreement

was a vain one. The written Arabic language has two features that make it difficult

for an outsider to learn: it uses dots to distinguish consonants

like “b” and “t,” and in its original form it had no sign or symbol for

short vowels, which could be rendered by various dashes or comma-type

marks. Vastly different readings even of Uthman’s version were enabled

by these variations. Arabic script itself was not standardized

until the later part of the ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted

and oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly different explanations

of itself, as it still does. This might not matter in the case of

the Iliad, but remember that we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable

(and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between

the sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical

certainty with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can hardly

be called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of

the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that

appears in the Koran. The situation is even more shaky and deplorable

when we come to the hadith, or that vast orally generated

secondary literature which supposedly conveys the sayings and actions

of Muhammad, the tale

132 G O D I S N OT G R E AT of the Koran’s compilation, and the sayings

of “the companions of the Prophet.” Each hadith, in order to be

considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain,

of supposedly reliable witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday life to be

determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for example,

on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so. (My own

favorite tale goes the other way: the Prophet is said to have cut off the

long sleeve of his garment rather than disturb a cat that was slumbering on it. Cats in Muslim

lands have been generally spared the awful treatment visited on them by Christians, who

have often regarded them as satanic familiars of witches.)

As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith,

which pile hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long

spool of isnads (“A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D”),

were put together centuries after the events they purport to describe.

One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years

after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable

and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in

that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a

lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of

them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of

dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to

ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out

of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the

pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only

the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination.

Some of these candidates for authenticity might have been easier

to sift out than others. The Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher, to

quote a recent study by Reza Aslan, was among the first to show that

many of the hadith were no more than “verses from the Torah and

the Gospels, bits of Rabbinic sayings, ancient Persian maxims, passages of Greek philosophy,

Indian proverbs, and even an almost wordfor-word reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer.” Great

chunks of more or

The Koran Is Borrowed 133 less straight biblical quotation can be found

in the hadith, including the parable of the workers hired at the last

moment, and the injunction “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth,”

the last example meaning that this piece of pointless

pseudoprofundity has a place in two sets of revealed scripture. Aslan

notes that by the time of the ninth century, when Muslim legal scholars

were attempting to formulate and codify Islamic law through

the process known as ijtihad, they were obliged to separate many

hadith into the following categories: “lies told for material gain and lies told for ideological

advantage.” Quite rightly, Islam effectively disowns the idea that it is

a new faith, let alone a cancellation of the earlier ones, and it uses the

prophecies of the Old Testament and the Gospels of the New like a

perpetual crutch or fund, to be leaned on or drawn upon. In return

for this derivative modesty, all it asks is to be accepted as the absolute

and final revelation. As might be expected, it contains many internal

contradictions. It is often cited as saying that “there is

no compulsion in religion,” and as making reassuring noises about those of

other faiths being peoples “of the book” or “followers of an earlier

revelation.” The idea of being “tolerated” by a Muslim is as repulsive

to me as the other condescensions whereby Catholic and Protestant Christians agreed

to “tolerate” one another, or extend “toleration” to

Jews. The Christian world was so awful in this respect, and for so long,

that many Jews preferred to live under Ottoman rule and submit to special

taxes and other such distinctions. However, the actual Koranic

reference to Islam’s benign tolerance is qualified, because some of these

same “peoples” and “followers” may be “such of them as are bent on evil-doing.”

And it takes only a short acquaintance with the Koran and

the hadith to discover other imperatives, such as the following:

Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah (in the hereafter)

would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the

whole world and whatever is in it, except the martyr who, on

134 G O D I S N OT G R E AT seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would

like to come back to the world and be killed again.

Or: God will not forgive those who serve other

gods beside Him; but he will forgive whom He will for other sins.

He that serves other gods besides God is guilty of a heinous sin.

I chose the first of these two violent excerpts (from a whole thesaurus of unsavory possible

ones) because it so perfectly negates what Socrates is reported to have said in Plato’s

Apology (to which I am coming). And I chose the second because it

is such a patent and abject borrowing from the “Ten Commandments.”

The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric is “inerrant,” let alone “final,”

is conclusively disproved not just by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies

but by the famous episode of the Koran’s alleged “satanic verses,”

out of which Salman Rushdie was later to make a literary project. On this

much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading

Meccan polytheists and in due course experienced a “revelation” that allowed them

after all to continue worshipping some of the older local deities. It

struck him later that this could not be right and that he must have

inadvertently been “channeled” by the devil, who for some reason had

briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their

own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil

himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was noticed

even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of having a

“revelation” that happened to suit his short-term needs, and he was

sometimes teased about it. We are further told—on no authority that

need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public he

would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in

his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest

The Koran Is Borrowed 135 of days. Some heartless Christian critics

have suggested that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the

same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus),

but there is no need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough

to rephrase David Hume’s unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that

a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some

already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and

believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so? As for

the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat, one can only regret

the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not an experience of calm, beauty,

and lucidity. The physical existence of Muhammad, however

poorly attested by the hadith, is a source of both strength and

weakness for Islam. It appears to put it squarely in the world, and

provides us with plausible physical descriptions of the man himself, but it also makes the

whole story earthy, material, and gross. We may flinch a little at this

mammal’s betrothal to a nine-year-old girl, and at the keen interest he

took in the pleasures of the dining table and the division of the spoils

after his many battles and numerous massacres. Above all—and here

is a trap that Christianity has mostly avoided by awarding its prophet

a human body but a nonhuman nature—he was blessed with numerous descendants and thus

placed his religious posterity in a position where it was hostage to his physical one.

Nothing is more human and fallible than the dynastic or hereditary principle,

and Islam has been racked from its birth by squabbles between

princelings and pretenders, all claiming the relevant drop of original blood. If the total

of those claiming descent from the founder was added

up, it would probably exceed the number of holy nails and splinters

that went to make up the thousand-foot cross on which, judging

by the number of splintershaped relics, Jesus was evidently martyred. As with the lineage

of the isnads, a direct kinship line with the Prophet

can be established if one happens to know, and be able to pay, the right

local imam. In the same way, Muslims still make a certain

obeisance to those

136 G O D I S N OT G R E AT same “satanic verses,” and tread the pagan

polytheistic path that was laid out long before their Prophet was born.

Every year at the hajj, or annual pilgrimage, one can see them circling

the cuboid Kaaba shrine in the center of Mecca, taking care

to do so seven times (“following the direction of the sun around the earth,” as Karen Armstrong

weirdly and no doubt multiculturally puts it) before kissing the

black stone set in the Kaaba’s wall. This probable meteorite, which no

doubt impressed the yokels when it first fell to earth (“the gods must

be crazy: no, make that god must be crazy”), is a stop on the way to

other ancient pre-Islamic propitiations, during which pebbles must be

hurled defiantly at a rock that represents the Evil One. Animal sacrifices complete the

picture. Like many but not all of Islam’s principal

sites, Mecca is closed to unbelievers, which somewhat contradicts its

claim to universality. It is often said that Islam differs from other

monotheisms in not having had a “reformation.” This is both

correct and incorrect. There are versions of Islam—most notably the Sufi,

much detested by the devout—which are principally spiritual rather

than literal and which have taken on some accretions from other faiths.

And, since Islam has avoided the mistake of having an absolute

papacy capable of uttering binding edicts (hence the proliferation of conflicting fatwas

from conflicting authorities) its adherents cannot

be told to cease believing what they once held as dogma. This might be

to the good, but the fact remains that Islam’s core claim—to be

unimprovable and final—is at once absurd and unalterable. Its many warring

and discrepant sects, from Ismaili to Ahmadi, all agree on this

indissoluble claim. “Reformation” has meant, for Jews and

Christians, a minimal willingness to reconsider holy writ as if

it were (as Salman Rushdie so daringly proposed in his turn) something that

can be subjected to literary and textual scrutiny. The number of possible “Bibles” is now

admitted to be immense, and we know for example that the portentous

Christian term “Jehovah” is a mistranslation of the unuttered spaces

between the letters of the Hebrew “Yahweh.” Yet no comparable

The Koran Is Borrowed 137 project has ever been undertaken in Koranic

scholarship. No serious attempt has been made to catalog the discrepancies

between its various editions and manuscripts, and even the most tentative efforts to

do so have been met with almost Inquisitional rage. A critical case in

point is the work of Christoph Luxenburg, The Syriac-Aramaic Version

of the Koran, published in Berlin in the year 2000. Luxenburg coolly

proposes that, far from being a monoglot screed, the Koran is far better understood once it

is conceded that many of its words are SyriacAramaic rather than Arabic. (His most celebrated example

concerns the rewards of a “martyr” in paradise:

when retranslated and redacted the heavenly offering consists of sweet white

raisins rather than virgins.) This is the same language, and the same region, from which

much of Judaism and Christianity emerged: there can be no doubt

that unfettered research would result in the dispelling of much obscurantism. But, at the

very point when Islam ought to be joining its

predecessors in subjecting itself to rereadings, there is a “soft” consensus among almost

all the religious that, because of the supposed duty

of respect that we owe the faithful, this is the very time to allow Islam

to assert its claims at their own face value. Once again, faith is helping to choke free

inquiry and the emancipating consequences that it

might bring."

This Muslim, Lucy Ahrysh, is certainly a goddess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LIcd7wHlCE&t=168s

So is Stanford MBA, Sophia Khalifa, daughter of an illiterate single Bedouin mother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_MfnpuafBg&t=1s