The Portable Atheist

IBN WARRAQ The Koran ^{From Why I Am Not a Muslim}

The Koran is written in Arabic and divided into chapters (suras or surahs) and verses (ayah; plural, ayat). There are said to be approximately 80,000 words, and between 6,200 and 6,240 verses, and 114 suras in the Koran. Each sura, except the ninth and the Fatihah (the first sura), begins with the words “In the name of the Merciful, the Compassionate.” Whoever was responsible for the compilation of the Koran put the longer suras first, regardless of their chronology, that is to say, regardless of the order in which they were putatively revealed to Muhammad.

For the average, unphilosophical Muslim of today, the Koran remains the infallible word of God, the immediate word of God sent down, through the intermediary of a “spirit” or “holy spirit” or Gabriel, to Muhammad in perfect pure Arabic; and everything contained therein is eternal and uncreated. The original text is in heaven (the mother of the book, 43.3; a concealed book, 55.77; a well-guarded tablet, 85.22). The angel dictated the revelation to the Prophet who repeated it after him, and then revealed it to the world. Modern Muslims also claim that these revelations have been preserved exactly as revealed to Muhammad, without any change, addition, or loss whatsoever. The Koran is used as a charm on the occasions of birth, death, or marriage. In the words of Guillaume, “It is the holy of holies. It must never rest beneath other books but always on top of them; one must never drink or smoke when it is being read aloud, and it must be listened to in silence. It is a talisman against disease and disaster.” Shaykh Nefzawi, in his erotic classic The Perfumed Garden, even recommends the Koran as an aphrodisiac: “It is said that reading the Koran also predisposes for copulation.”

Both Hurgronje and Guillaume point to the mindless way children are forced to learn either parts of or the entire Koran (some 6,200 odd verses) by hearing at the expense of teaching children critical thought: “[The children] accomplish this prodigious feat at the expense of their reasoning faculty, for often their minds are so stretched by the effort of memory that they are little good for serious thought.”

Hurgronje observed:

Suyuti, the great Muslim philologist and commentator on the Koran, was able to point to five passages whose attribution to God was disputable. Some of the words in these passages were obviously spoken by Muhammad himself and some by Gabriel. Ali Dashti also points to several passages where the speaker cannot have been God.

For example, the opening sura called the Fatihah:

These words are clearly addressed to God, in the form of a prayer. They are Muhammad’s words of praise to God, asking God’s help and guidance. As many have pointed out, one only needs to add the imperative “say” at the beginning of the sura to remove the difficulty. This imperative form of the word “say” occurs some 350 times in the Koran, and it is obvious that this word has, in fact, been inserted by later compilers of the Koran, to remove countless similarly embarrassing difficulties. Ibn Masud, one of the companions of the Prophet and an authority on the Koran, rejected the Fatihah and suras 113 and 114 that contain the words “I take refuge with the Lord,” as not part of the Koran. Again at sura 6.104, the speaker of the line “I am not your keeper” is clearly Muhammad: “Now proofs from your Lord have come to you. He who recognises them will gain much, but he who is blind to them, the loss will be his. I am not your keeper.” Dawood in his translation adds as a footnote that the “I” refers to Muhammad.

In the same sura at verse 114, Muhammad speaks the words, “Should I [Muhammad] seek other judge than God, when it is He who has sent down to you the distinguishing book [Koran]?” Yusuf Ali in his translation adds at the beginning of the sentence the word “say,” which is not there in the original Arabic, and he does so without comment or footnote. Ali Dashti also considers sura 111 as the words of Muhammad on the grounds that these words are unworthy of God: “It ill becomes the Sustainer of the Universe to curse an ignorant Arab and call his wife a firewood carrier.” The short sura refers to Abu Lahab, the Prophet’s uncle, who was one of Muhammad’s bitterest opponents: “The hands of Abu Lahab shall perish, and he shall perish. His riches shall not profit him, neither that which he has gained. He shall go down to be burned into flaming fire, and his wife also, bearing wood having on her neck a cord of twisted fibres of a palm tree.” Either these are Muhammad’s words or God is fond of rather feeble puns, since “Abu Lahab” means “father of flames.” But surely these words are not worthy of a prophet either.

As Goldziher points out, “Devout Mu’tazilites voiced similar opinions [as the Kharijites who impugned the reliability of the text of the Quran] about those parts of the Quran in which the Prophet utters curses against his enemies (such as Abu Lahab). “God could not have called such passages ‘a noble Quran on a well-guarded tablet.’” As we shall see, if we were to apply the same reasoning to all parts of the Koran, there would not be much left as the word of God, since very little of it is worthy of a Merciful and Compassionate, All-Wise God.

Ali Dashti also gives the example of sura 17.1 as an instance of confusion between two speakers. God and Muhammad: “Gloried be He Who carried His servant by night from the Inviolable Place of worship [mosque at Mecca] to the Far Distant Place of Worship [mosque at Jerusalem], the neighborhood whereof We have blessed, that We might show him of our tokens! Lo! He is the Hearer, the Seer.”

Dashti comments:

Again, in the interest of dogma, translators are led to dishonesty when confronted by sura 27, 91, where the speaker is clearly Muhammad: “I have been commanded to serve the Lord of this city.” Dawood and Pickthall both interpolate “say” at the beginning of the sentence, which is lacking in the Arabic. At sura 81.15–29, one presumes it is Muhammad who is swearing: “I swear by the turning planets, and by the stars that rise and set and the close of night, and the breath of morning.” Muhammad, unable to disguise his pagan heritage, swears again at sura 84.16–19, “I swear by the afterglow of sunset, and by the night and all that it enshrouds, and by the moon when she is at the full.” There are other instances where it is possible that it is Muhammad who is speaking, e.g.,112.14–21 and 111.1–10.

Even Bell and Watt, who can hardly be accused of being hostile to Islam, admit that

Although many Muslim philologists recognized that there were numerous words of foreign origin in the Koran, orthodoxy silenced them for a while. One tradition tells us that “anyone who pretends that there is in the Koran anything other than the Arabic tongue has made a serious charge against God: ‘Verily, we have made it an Arabic Koran’” (sura 12.1). Fortunately, philologists like al-Suyuti managed to come up with ingenious arguments to get around the orthodox objections. Al-Tha’alibi argued that there were foreign words in the Koran but “the Arabs made use of them and Arabicized them, so from this point of view they are Arabic.” Although al-Suyuti enumerates 107 foreign words, Arthur Jeffery in his classic work finds about 275 words in the Koran that can be considered foreign: words from Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic, Persian, and Greek. The word “Koran” itself comes from the Syriac, and Muhammad evidently got it from Christian sources.

We need to retrace the history of the Koran text to understand the problem of variant versions and variant readings, whose very existence makes nonsense of Muslim dogma about the Koran. As we shall see, there is no such thing as the Koran; there never has been a definitive text of this holy book. When a Muslim dogmatically asserts that the Koran is the word of God, we need only ask “Which Koran?” to undermine his certainty.

After Muhammad’s death in A.D. 632, there was no collection of his revelations. Consequently, many of his followers tried to gather all the known revelations and write them down in codex form. Soon we had the codices of several scholars such as Ibn Mas’ud, Ubai b. Kab, Ali’, Abu Bakr, al-Ash’ari, al-Aswad, and others. As Islam spread, we eventually had what became known as the Metropolitan Codices in the centers of Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Kuta, and Basra. As we saw earlier, Uthman tried to bring order to this chaotic situation by canonizing the Medinan Codex, copies of which were sent to all the metropolitan centers, with orders to destroy all the other codices.

Uthman’s codex was supposed to standardize the consonantal text; yet we find that many of the variant traditions of this consonantal text survived well into the fourth Islamic century. The problem was aggravated by the fact the consonantal text was unpointed, that is to say, the dots that distinguish, for example, a “b” from a “t” or a “th” were missing. Several other letters (f and q; j, h, and kh; s and d; r and z; s and sh; d and dh; t and z) were indistinguishable. As a result, a great many variant readings were possible according to the way the text was pointed (had dots added). The vowels presented an even worse problem. Originally, the Arabs had no signs for the short vowels—these were only introduced at a later date. The Arabic script is consonantal. Although the short vowels are sometimes omitted, they can be represented by orthographical signs placed above or below the letters—three signs in all, taking the form of a slightly slanting dash or a comma.

After having settled the consonants, Muslims still had to decide what vowels to employ: using different vowels, of course, rendered different readings.

This difficulty inevitably led to the growth of different centers with their own variant traditions of how the texts should be pointed and vowelized. Despite Uthman’s order to destroy all texts other than his own, it is evident that the older codices survived. As Charles Adams says, “It must be emphasized that far from there being a single text passed down inviolate from the time of Uthman’s commission, literally thousands of variant readings of particular verses were known…. These variants affected even the Uthmanic codex, making it difficult to know what its true original form may have been.” Some Muslims preferred codices other than the Uthmanic, for example, those of Ibn Masud, Ubayy ibn Kab, and Abu Musa. Eventually under the influence of the great Koranic scholar Ibn Mujahid (d. A.D. 935), there was a definite canonization of one system of consonants and a limit placed on the variations of vowels used in the text that resulted in acceptance of the systems of the seven:

1. Nafi of Medina (d. A.D. 785)

2. Ibn Kathir of Mecca (d. A.D. 737)

3. Ibn Amir of Damascus (d. A.D. 736)

4. Abu Amr of Basra (d. A.D. 770)

5. Asim of Kufa (d. A.D 744)

6. Hamza of Kufa (d. AD. 772)

7. Al-Kisai of Kufa (d. A.D. 804)

But other scholars accepted ten readings, and still others accepted fourteen readings. Even Ibn Mujahid’s seven provided fourteen possibilities, since each of the seven was traced through two different transmitters, viz.,

1. Nafi of Medina according to Warsh and Qalun

2. Ibn Kathir of Mecca according to al-Bazzi and Qunbul

3. Ibn Amir of Damascus according to Hisham and Ibn Dhakwan

4. Abu Amr of Basra according to al-Duri and al-Susi

5. Asim of Kufa according to Hafs and Abu Bakr

6. Hamza of Kufa according to Khalaf and Khallad

7. Al-Kisai of Kufa according to al-Duri and Abul Harith

In the end three systems prevailed, for some reason—to quote Jeffery—“which has not yet been fully elucidated,” those of Warsh (d. A.D. 812) from Nafi of Medina, Hafs (d. 805) from Asim of Kufa, and al-Duri (d. A.D. 860) from Abu Amr of Basra. At present in modern Islam, two versions seem to be in use: that of Asim of Kufa through Hafs, which was given a kind of official seal of approval by being adopted in the Egyptian edition of the Koran in 1924; and that of Nafi through Warsh, which is used in parts of Africa other than Egypt.

To quote Charles Adams:

Guillaume also refers to the variants as “not always trifling in significance.”

Any variant version or reading poses serious problems for orthodox Muslims. Thus it is not surprising that they should conceal any codices that seem to differ from the Uthman text. Arthur Jeffery describes just such an attempt at concealment:

The great scholar Noldeke pointed out the stylistic weaknesses of the Koran long ago:

We have already quoted Ali Dashti’s criticisms of the Prophet’s style (chap. 1). Here, I shall quote some of Ali Dashti’s examples of the grammatical errors contained in the Koran. In verse 162 of sura 4, which begins, “But those among them who are well-grounded in knowledge, the believers,…and the performers of the prayer, and the payers of the alms-tax,” the word for “performers” is in the accusative case; whereas it ought to be in the nominative case, like the words for “well-grounded,” “believers,” and “payers.”

In verse 9 of sura 49, “If two parties of believers have started to fight each other, make peace between them,” the verb meaning “have started to fight” is in the plural, whereas it ought to be in the dual like its subject “two parties.” (In Arabic, as in other languages, verbs can be conjugated not only in the singular and plural, but also in the dual, when the subject is numbered at two).

In verse 63 of sura 20, where Pharaoh’s people say of Moses and his brother Aaron, “These two are magicians,” the word for “these two” (hadhane) is in the nominative case; whereas it ought to be in the accusative case (hadhayne) because it comes after an introductory particle of emphasis.

Ali Dashti concludes this example by saying,

Ali Dashti estimates that there are more than one hundred Koranic aberrations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic.

There is a tradition from Aisha, the Prophet’s wife, that there once existed a “verse of stoning,” where stoning was prescribed as punishment for fornication, a verse that formed a part of the Koran but that is now lost. The early caliphs carried out such a punishment for adulterers, despite the fact that the Koran, as we know it today, only prescribes a hundred lashes. It remains a puzzle—if the story is not true—why Islamic law to this day decrees stoning when the Koran only demands flogging. According to this tradition, over a hundred verses are missing. Shiites, of course, claim that Uthman left out a great many verses favorable to Ali for political reasons.

The Prophet himself may have forgotten some verses, the companions’ memory may have equally failed them, and the copyists may also have mislaid some verses. We also have the case of The Satanic Verses, which clearly show that Muhammad himself suppressed some verses.

The authenticity of many verses has also been called into question not only by modern Western scholars, but even by Muslims themselves. Many Kharijites, who were followers of Ali in the early history of Islam, found the sura recounting the story of Joseph offensive, an erotic tale that did not belong in the Koran. Even before Wansbrough there were a number of Western scholars such as de Sacy, Weil, Hirschfeld, and Casanova who had doubted the authenticity of this or that sura or verse. It is fair to say that so far their arguments have not been generally accepted. Wansbrough’s arguments, however, are finding support among a younger generation of scholars not inhibited in the way their older colleagues were, as described in Chapter 1 (“Trahison des Clercs”).

On the other hand, most scholars do believe that there are interpolations in the Koran; these interpolations can be seen as interpretative glosses on certain rare words in need of explanation. More serious are the interpolations of a dogmatic or political character, such as 42.36–38, which seems to have been added to justify the elevation of Uthman as caliph to the detriment of Ali. Then there are other verses that have been added in the interest of rhyme, or to join together two short passages that on their own lack any connection.

Bell and Watt carefully go through many of the alterations and revisions and point to the unevenness of the Koranic style as evidence for great many alterations in the Koran:

The Christian al-Kindi, writing around A.D. 830, criticized the Koran in similar terms: “The result of all this [process by which the Quran came into being] is patent to you who have read the scriptures and see how, in your book, histories are all jumbled together and intermingled; an evidence that many different hands have been at work therein, and caused discrepancies, adding or cutting out whatever they liked or disliked. Are such, now, the conditions of a revelation sent down from heaven?”

Here, it might be appropriate to give some examples. Verse 15 of sura 20 is totally out of place; the rhyme is different from the rest of the sura. Verses 1–5 of sura 78 have obviously been added on artificially, because both the rhyme and the tone of the rest of the sura changes; in the same sura verses 33 and 34 have been inserted between verses 32 and 35, thus breaking the obvious connection between 32 and 35. In sura 74, verse 31 is again an obvious insertion since it is in a totally different style and of a different length than the rest of the verses in the sura. In sura 50, verses 24–32 have again been artificially fitted into a context in which they do not belong.

To explain certain rare or unusual words or phrases, the formula “What has let you know what…is?” (or “What will teach you what…is?”) is added on to a passage, after which a short explanatory description follows. It is clear that these explanatory glosses—twelve in all—have been added on at a later time, since in many instances the “definitions” do not correspond to the original meaning of the word or phrase. Bell and Watt give the example of sura 101.9–11, which should read: “his mother shall be ‘hawiya.’ And what shall teach you what it is? A blazing fire.” “Hawiya” originally meant “childless” owing to the death or misfortune of her son, but the explanatory note defines it as “Hell.” Thus most translators now render the above sentence as, “shall plunge in the womb of the Pit. And what shall teach you what is the Pit? A blazing fire!” (see also 90.12–16.)

Of course any interpolation, however trivial, is fatal to the Muslim dogma that the Koran is literally the word of God as given to Muhammad at Mecca or Medina. As Regis Blachere in his classic Introduction to the Koran said, on this point, there is no possible way of reconciling the findings of Western philologists and historians with the official dogma of Islam.

We also have the story of Abd Allah b. Sa’d Abi Sarh:

Needless to say, the Prophet had no qualms about ordering his assassination once Mecca was captured, but Uthman obtained Muhammad’s pardon with difficulty.

William Henry Burr, the author of Self-Contradictions of the Bible, would have a field day with the Koran, for the Koran abounds in contradictions. But Burr’s euphoria would be short-lived; for Muslim theologians have a rather convenient doctrine, which, as Hughes puts it, “fell in with that law of expediency which appears to be the salient feature in Muhammad’s prophetical career.” According to this doctrine, certain passages of the Koran are abrogated by verses with a different or contrary meaning revealed afterwards. This was taught by Muhammad at sura 2.105: “Whatever verses we [i.e., God] cancel or cause you to forget, we bring a better or its like.” According to al-Suyuti, the number of abrogated verses has been estimated at from five to five hundred. As Margoliouth remarked,

Al-Suyuti gives the example of sura 2.240 as a verse abrogated (superseded) by verse 234, which is the abrogating verse. How can an earlier verse abrogate a later verse? The answer lies in the fact that the traditional Muslim order of the suras and verses is not chronological, the compilers simply having placed the longer chapters at the beginning. The commentators have to decide the chronological order for doctrinal reasons; Western scholars have also worked out a chronological scheme. Though there are many differences of detail, there seems to be broad agreement about which suras belong to the Meccan (i.e., early) period of Muhammad’s life and which belong to the Medinan (i.e., later) period. It is worth noting how time-bound the “eternal” word of God is.

Muslims have gotten themselves out of one jam only to find themselves in another. Is it fitting that an All-Powerful, Omniscient, and Omnipotent God should revise His commands so many times? Does He need to issue commands that need revising so often? Why can He not get it right the first time, after all, He is all-wise? Why does He not reveal the better verse irst? In the words of Dashti,

The doctrine of abrogation also makes a mockery of the Muslim dogma that the Koran is a faithful and unalterable reproduction of the original scriptures that are preserved in heaven. If God’s words are eternal, uncreated, and of universal significance, then how can we talk of God’s words being superseded or becoming obsolete? Are some words of God to be preferred to other words of God? Apparently yes. According to Muir, some 200 verses have been canceled by later ones. Thus we have the strange situation where the entire Koran is recited as the word of God, and yet there are passages that can be considered not “true”; in other words, 3 percent of the Koran is acknowledged as falsehood.

Let us take an example. Everyone knows that Muslims are not allowed to drink wine in virtue of the prohibition found in the Koran sura 2.219; yet many would no doubt be surprised to read in the Koran at sura 16.67, “And among fruits you have the palm and the vine, from which you get wine and healthful nutriment: in this, truly, are signs for those who reflect” (Rodwell). Dawood has “intoxicants” and Pickthall, “strong drink,” and Sale, with eighteenth-century charm, has “inebriating liquor” in place of “wine.” Yusuf Ali pretends that the Arabic word concerned, “sakar,” means “wholesome drink,” and in a footnote insists that nonalcoholic drinks are being referred to; but then, at the last moment, he concedes that if “sakar must be taken in the sense of fermented wine, it refers to the time before intoxicants were prohibited: this is a Meccan sura and the prohibition came in Medina.”

Now we can see how useful and convenient the doctrine of abrogation is in bailing scholars out of difficulties. Of course, it does pose problems for apologists of Islam, since all the passages preaching tolerance are found in Meccan, i.e., early suras, and all the passages recommending killing, decapitating, and maiming are Medinan, i.e., later: “tolerance” has been abrogated by “intolerance.” For example, the famous verse at sura 9.5, “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” is said to have canceled 124 verses that dictate toleration and patience.

There is no deity but God (“la ilaha illa llahu”). Islam is uncompromisingly monotheistic—it is one of the greatest sins to ascribe partners to God. Polytheism, idolatry, paganism, and ascribing plurality to the deity are all understood under the Arabic term “shirk.” Theological apologists and perhaps nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists have all uncritically assumed that monotheism is somehow a “higher” form of belief than “polytheism.” It seems to me that philosophers have paid little attention to polytheism until very recently. Is it so obvious that monotheism is philosophically or metaphysically “superior” to polytheism? In what way is it superior? If there is a natural evolution from polytheism to monotheism, then is there not a natural development from monotheism to atheism? Is monotheism doomed to be superseded by a higher form of belief, that is, atheism—via agnosticism, perhaps? In this section I wish to argue that:

1. Monotheism is not necessarily philosophically or metaphysically superior to polytheism, given that no proof for the existence of one and only one God is valid.

2. Historically speaking, monotheistic creeds often secretly harbor at the popular level a de facto polytheism, despite the official dogma.

3. Superstitions are not reduced in monotheism but concentrated into the one god or his apostle.

4. Historically speaking, monotheism has often shown itself to be ferociously intolerant, in contrast to polytheism on behalf of which religious wars have never been waged. This intolerance follows logically from monotheistic ideology. Monotheism has a lot to answer for. As Gore Vidal says,

Totalitarianism is the only politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family.

5. Islam did not replace Arabian polytheism because it better met the spiritual needs of the Arabs, but because it offered them material rewards in the here and now. The unjustified assumption of the superiority of monotheism has colored the views of historians in regard to the causes of the adoption of Islam in Arabia.

6. Far from raising the moral standard of the Arabs, Islam seems to have sanctioned all sorts of immoral behavior.

Monotheism does seem to bring some kind of superficial intellectual order into the welter of “primitive” gods, apparently reducing superstition. But this is only apparent, not real. First, as Zwi Werblowsky observed, “When polytheism is superseded by monotheism, the host of deities is either abolished (theoretically) or bedevilled (i.e., turned into demons), or downgraded to the rank of angels and ministering spirits. This means that an officially monotheistic system can harbor a functional de facto polytheism.”

Hume made the same observation:

This is nowhere more real than in Islam where a belief in angels and Jinn is officially recognized by the Koran. Edward Lane divides this species of spiritual beings in Islam into five orders: Jann, Jinn, Shaitans, Ifrits, and Marids. “The last…are the most powerful, and the Jann are transformed Jinn, like as certain apes and swine were transformed men…. The terms Jinn and Jann are generally used indiscriminately as names of the whole species, whether good or bad…. Shaitan is commonly used to signify any evil genius. An Ifrit is a powerful evil genius; a Marid, an evil genius of the most powerful class.” Many evil Jinn are killed by shooting stars, “hurled at them from heaven.” Jinn can propagate their species in conjunction with human beings, in which case the offspring partakes of the nature of both parents. “Among the evil Jinn are distinguished the five sons of their chief, Iblis; namely Tir who brings about calamities, losses, and injuries; al-Awar, who encourages debauchery; Sut, who suggests lies; Dasim, who causes hatred between man and wife; and Zalambur, who presides over places of traffic…. The Jinn are of three kind: one have wings and fly; another are snakes and dogs; and the third move about from place to place like men.”

Enough has been said to show that such a system is as rich and superstitious as any Greek, Roman, or Norse polytheistic mythology.

The veneration of saints in Islam serves the very purpose that Hume so perceptively ascribed to mediators between man and God. Here is how Goldziher puts the point:

The Muslim doctrine of the Devil also comes close at times to ditheism, i.e., the positing of two powerful Beings. The Devil is said to have been named Azazil and was created of fire. When God created Adam from clay, the Devil refused to prostrate before Adam as commanded by God, whereupon he was expelled from Eden. Eventually he will be destroyed by God, since it is only God who is all-powerful. But given the prevalence of evil in the world—wars, famines, disease, the Holocaust—one wonders if the Devil is not more powerful. Why he has not been destroyed already is a puzzle. Also it seems rather inconsistent of God to ask Satan, before his fall, to worship Adam, when God forbids man to worship anyone but God Himself.

Nowhere does the Koran give a real philosophical argument for the existence of God; it merely assumes it. The closest one gets to an argument is perhaps in the Koranic notion of “signs,” whereby various natural phenomena are seen as signs of God’s power and bounty.

In philosophy such an argument is known as the argument from design or the teleological argument, and like all arguments for the existence of God it is found wanting by most philosophers. All the phenomena adduced by Muhammad in the Koran can be explained without assuming the existence of a God or cosmic designer. But in any case, to return to monotheism, why should there be only one cosmic architect or planner? As Hume asks,

One of the great achievements of Muhammad, we are told, was ridding Arabia of polytheism. But this, I have tried to argue, is monotheistic arrogance. There are no compelling arguments in favor of monotheism, as opposed to polytheism. Indeed, as Hume showed, there is nothing inherently absurd in polytheism. And as to the Koranic hi t at the argument from design, Hume showed that all hypotheses regarding the origins of the universe were equally absurd. There is no justification for believing any of the forms of the argument from design: “We have no data to establish any system of cosmogony. Our experience, so imperfect in itself, and so limited both in extent and duration, can afford us no probable conjecture concerning the whole of things. But if we must needs fix on some hypothesis, by what rule, pray, ought we to determine our choice?”

Monotheism has also been recognized as inherently intolerant. We know from the Koran itself the hatred preached at all kinds of belief labeled “idolatry” or “polytheism.” As the Dictionary of Islam says, Muslim writers are “unanimous in asserting that no religious toleration was extended to the idolaters of Arabia in the time of the Prophet. The only choice given them was death or the reception of Islam.” Implicit in all kinds of monotheism is the dogmatic certainty that it alone has access to the true God, it alone has access to truth. Everyone else is not only woefully misguided but doomed to perdition and everlasting hellfire. In the words of Lewis, “Traditional Christianity and Islam differed from Judaism and agreed with each other in that both claimed to possess not only universal but exclusive truths. Each claimed to be the sole custodian of God’s final revelation to mankind. Neither admitted salvation outside its own creed.”

Schopenhauer asks us to reflect on the “cruelties to which religions, especially the Christian and Mohammedan, have given rise” and “the misery they have brought on the world.” Think of the fanaticism, the endless persecutions, then the religious wars that bloody madness of which the ancients had no conception. Think of the Crusades which were a quite inexcusable butchery and lasted for two hundred years, their battle cry being: “It is the will of God.” Christianity is no more spared than Islam in Schopenhauer’s indictment. The object of the Crusades was

Schopenhauer contrasts the peaceable historical record of the Hindus and the Buddhists with the wickedness and cruelty of the monotheists, and then concludes:

Nearly a hundred years earlier than Schopenhauer, Hume with his customary genius saw the same advantages of polytheism:

Professor Watt, in his enormously influential and important two-volume biography of Muhammad, has presented an interpretation of the rise of Muhammad and his message that is still accepted by many despite skepticism of scholars such as Bousquet and, more recently, Crone. Watt’s entire account is permeated, unsurprisingly, with the assumption that the monotheism preached by Muhammad is superior to the polytheism prevalent in Central Arabia. Watt contends that the very success of Muhammad’s message lies in the fact that this message responded to the deep spiritual needs of the people. Mecca, at the time, argues Watt, was beset with a social malaise—nay, even a spiritual crisis—that found no answers in the local cults and gods. The Meccans were sunk in moral degradation and idolatry until Muhammad came along and lifted them up onto a higher moral and spiritual level. Such is Watt’s argument. But as Crone and Bousquet pointed out, there is very little evidence for a social malaise in Mecca. As Crone argues:

But how do we explain the mass conversion of Arabia to Islam? As we saw in Chapter 2, society was organized around the tribe, and each society had its principal deity, which was worshipped in the expectation that it would help the tribe in some practical way, especially with bringing rain, providing fertility, eliminating disease, generally protecting them from the elements. The tribal gods did not embody “ultimate truths regarding the nature and meaning of life,” neither were they “deeply entrenched in everyday life.” Hence it was easy to renounce one god for another since it did not require any change in outlook or behavior. Furthermore, the Muslim god “endorsed and ennobled such fundamental tribal characteristics as militance and ethnic pride.” The Muslim God offered something more than their own idols: He offered “a program of Arab state formation and conquest: the creation of an umma [a people or a nation], the initiation of jihad [holy war against the unbelievers].” “Muhammad’s success evidently had something to do with the fact that he preached both state formation and conquest: without conquest, first in Arabia and next in the Fertile Crescent, the unification of Arabia would not have been achieved.” Of course, as Muhammad proved more and more successful in Medina, his followers increased, realizing that Allah is indeed great, and certainly greater than any of their own deities: the true God is the successful God, the false, the unsuccessful. Scholars such as Becker had argued that the Arabs had been impelled to their conquests by the gradual drying up of Arabia, but as Crone maintains:

To summarize, far from answering the spiritual doubts and questions of the tribes (there were no such doubts or spiritual crises), Muhammad created a people a d offered the Arabs what they had been accustomed to: namely, military conquests with all the attendant material advantages, loot, women, and land. Allah was preferable to the old gods simply because He had not failed them. He had delivered the goods here and now. Allah was certainly not preferable to the gods for some deep metaphysical reason; the Arabs had not suddenly learned the use of Occam’s Razor. “Indeed,” as Crone points out, “in behavioral terms the better part of Arabia was still pagan in the nineteenth century.”

As early as 1909, Dr. Margoliouth had anticipated Watt’s thesis and had found it wanting. What is also important in Margoliouth’s work is that he denies that Islam somehow lifted the newly converted to a higher moral level: “There is no evidence that the Moslems were either in personal or altruistic morality better than the pagans.” In fact the contrary seems to have been the case:

This is not all. Monotheism has been criticized for suppressing human freedom. Many scholars have argued that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism; whereas more and more modern philosophers see polytheism as a possible source of pluralism, creativity, and human freedom. Feminists have also criticized the monotheistic God as a male chauvinist who is unwilling to change, and is insensitive to “femininity.”

The omnipotence of God is asserted everywhere in the Koran; man’s will is totally subordinate to God’s will to the extent that man cannot be said to have a will of his own. Even those who disbelieve in Him, disbelieve because it is God who wills them to disbelieve. This leads to the Muslim doctrine of predestination that prevails over the doctrine of man’s free will, also to be found in the Koran. As Macdonald says, “The contradictory statements of the Koran on free will and predestination show that Muhammad was an opportunist preacher and politician and not a systematic theologian.”

“Taqdir, or the absolute decree of good and evil, is the sixth article of the Muhammadan creed, and the orthodox believe that whatever has, or shall come to pass in this world, whether it be good or bad, proceeds entirely from the Divine Will, and has been irrevocably fixed and recorded on a preserved tablet by the pen of fate.” Some quotes from the Koran illustrate this doctrine:

But there are inevitably some passages from the Koran that seem to give man some kind of free will:

But as Wensinck, in his classic The Muslim Creed, said, in Islam it is predestination that ultimately predominates. There is not a single tradition that advocates free will, and we have the further evidence of John of Damascus, who “flourished in the middle of the eighth century A.D., and who was well acquainted with Islam. According to him the difference regarding predestination and free will is one of the chief points of divergence between Christianity and Islam.”

It is evident that, toward the end of his life, Muhammad’s predestinarian position hardened; and “the earliest conscious Muslim attitude on the subject seems to have been of an uncompromising fatalism.”

Before commenting on the doctrine of predestination, I should like to consider the Koranic hell. Several words are used in the Koran to evoke the place of torment that God seems to take a particular delight in contemplating. The word “Jahannum” occurs at least thirty times and describes the purgatorial hell for all Muslims. According to the Koran, all Muslims will pass through hell: (sura 19.72) “There is not one of you who will not go down to it [hell], that is settled and decided by the Lord.” The word “al-nar,” meaning the fire, appears several times. Other terms for hell or hellfire are

Al-Jahim (the Hot Place) and Hawiyah also occur in sura 2 and 101, respectively. Muhammad really let his otherwise limited imagination go wild when describing, in revolting detail, the torments of hell: boiling water, running sores, peeling skin, burning flesh, dissolving bowels, and crushing of skulls with iron maces. And verse after verse, sura after sura, we are told about the fire, always the scorching fire, the everlasting fire. From sura 9.69 it is clear that unbelievers will roast forever.

What are we to make of such a system of values? As Mill said, there is something truly disgusting and wicked in the thought that God purposefully creates beings to fill hell with, beings who cannot in any way be held responsible for their actions since God Himself chooses to lead them astray: “The recognition, for example, of the object of highest worship in a being who could make a Hell; and who could create countless generations of human beings with the certain foreknowledge that he was creating them for this fate…. Any other of the outrages to the most ordinary justice and humanity involved in the common Christian conception of the moral character of God sinks into insignificance beside this dreadful idealization of wickedness.” Of course, Mill’s words apply, mutatis mutandis, to the Muslim conception also, or to any god of predestination.

We cannot properly call such a system an ethical system at all. Central to any valid system of ethics is the notion of moral responsibility, of a moral person who can legitimately be held responsible for his actions: a person who is capable of rational thought, who is capable of deliberation, who displays intentionality, who is capable of choosing and is, in some way, free to choose. Under the Koranic system of predestination, “men” are no more than automata created by a capricious deity who amuses himself by watching his creations burning in hell. We cannot properly assign blame or approbation in the Koranic system; man is not responsible for his acts, thus it seems doubly absurd to punish him in the sadistic manner described in the various suras quoted earlier.

Bousquet begins his classic work on Islamic views on sex with the blunt sentence: “There is no ethics in Islam.” The Muslim is simply commanded to obey the inscrutable will of Allah; “good” and “bad” are defined as what the Koran, and later, Islamic law considers permissible or forbidden. The question posed by Socrates in the Euthyphro, “Whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?” receives a very definitive answer from an orthodox Muslim: something is good if God wills it, and bad if God forbids it; there is nothing “rationally” or independently good or bad. But as Plato pointed out this is not a satisfactory answer. As Mackie puts it (n.d., Chapter 31): “If moral values were constituted wholly by divine commands, so that goodness consisted in conformity to God’s will, we could make no sense of the theist’s own claims that God is good and that he seeks the good of his creation.” In an earlier work (1977, Chapter 29), Mackie observes that the Muslim view has the consequence:

It is worth emphasizing the logical independence of moral values from any theistic system. Russell formulates this insight in this manner:

We cannot escape our moral responsibility that our independent moral understanding gives us.

Nor can we regard the concept of hell as ethically admirable. All but two suras(i.e., the fatihah and sura 9) tell us that God is merciful and compassionate, but can a truly merciful God consign somebody to hell or everlasting torment for not believing in Him? As Russell put it, “I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.” As Antony Flew remarked, there is an inordinate disparity between finite offenses and infinite punishment. The Koranic doctrine of hell is simply cruelty and barbaric torture and divinely sanctioned sadism. More than that, it means Islam is based on fear, which corrupts true morality. (“There is no God but I, so fear Me” [sura 16.2]). As Gibb said, “Man must live in constant fear and awe of [God], and always be on his guard against Him—such is the idiomatic meaning of the term for ‘fearing God’ which runs through the Koran from cover to cover” (1953, Chapter 5). Instead of acting out of a sense of duty to our fellow human beings, or out of spontaneous generosity or sympathetic feelings, under Islam we act out of fear to avoid divine punishments and, selfishly, to gain rewards from God in this life and the life to come. Mackie (Chapter 31) argues correctly that

We are told that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent; yet He behaves like a petulant tyrant, unable to control his recalcitrant subjects. He is angry, He is proud. He is jealous: all moral deficiencies surprising in a perfect Being. If He is self-sufficient, why does He need mankind? If He is all-powerful, why does He ask the help of humans? Above all, why does He pick an obscure Arabian merchant in some cultural backwater to be His last messenger on earth? Is it consistent with a supremely moral being that He should demand praise and absolute worship from creatures He Himself has created? What can we say of the rather curious psychology of a Being who creates humans—or rather automata—some of whom are preprogrammed to grovel in the dirt five times a day in homage to Himself? This obsessive desire for praise is hardly a moral virtue and is certainly not worthy of a morally supreme Being. Palgrave[Chapter 21] gave this vivid but just description of the Koranic God:

Allah or God chose Muhammad to be a messenger to all mankind. Though Muslim and sympathetic Western commentators deny it, it is clear that Muhammad himself thought that he had seen God Himself in person, as in sura 53.2–18. At other times, Muhammad talked to the angel Gabriel, who periodically revealed God’s message. How did Muhammad himself know that he had seen God or an angel? How did he know that the particular experiences he had were manifestations of God? Even if we grant Muhammad’s sincerity, could he not have been sincerely mistaken? Most people claiming that they had direct access to God would now be seen as mentally ill. How do we know that in Muhammad’s case it really was God or an angel that delivered God’s message? As Paine said (n.d., Chapter 7),

Given the theory of Wansbrough, Crone, and Cook (that Islam emerged later than hitherto thought, under the influence of rabbinic Judaism, and taking Moses as an example of a prophet with a revelation, invented Muhammad as an Arabian prophet with a similar revelation), Paine’s choice and juxtapositioning of the two examples of Moses and Muhammad is rather appropriate.

Moreover, as Paine says, very importantly, the revelations, as later recorded in the Bible or the Koran, do not carry any internal evidence of divinity with them. On the contrary, the Koran contains much—far too much—that is totally unworthy of a deity. In addition, the Bible and the Koran often contradict each other. On which basis should we decide between them? Both sides claim divine authority for their scriptures. In the end, we can only say that no specific revelation has reliable credentials.

It is very odd that when God decides to manifest Himself, He does so to only one individual. Why can He not reveal Himself to the masses in a football stadium during the final of the World Cup, when literally millions of people around the world are watching? But as Patricia Crone said, “It is a peculiar habit of God’s that when he wishes to reveal himself to mankind, he will communicate only with a single person. The rest of mankind must learn the truth from that person and thus purchase their knowledge of the divine at the cost of subordination to another human being, who is eventually replaced by a human institution, so that the divine remains under other people’s control.” [TLS, January 21, 1994, Chapter 3]

According to Muslim tradition, Abraham and Ishmael built the Kaaba, the cubelike structure in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. But outside these traditions there is absolutely no evidence for this claim—whether epigraphic, archaeological, or documentary. Indeed Snouck Hurgronje has shown that Muhammad invented the story to give his religion an Arabian origin and setting; with this brilliant improvisation Muhammad established the independence of his religion, at the same time incorporating into Islam the Kaaba with all its historical and religious associations for the Arabs.

Given the quantity of material in the Koran that comes from the Pentateuch—Moses: 502 verses in 36 suras; Abraham: 245 verses in 25 suras; Noah: 131 verses in 28 suras—it is surprising that higher biblical criticism has had no impact on Koranic studies. The Muslims as much as the Jews and the Christians are committed to the Pentateuch being authored by Moses. In the Koran, the Pentateuch is referred to as the Taurat (word derived from the Hebrew Torah).

Scholars have been casting doubt on the historical veracity of one biblical story after another, and Islam cannot escape the consequences of their discoveries and conclusions. As long ago as the seventeenth century, La Peyrere, Spinoza, and Hobbes were arguing that the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses: “From what has been said, it is thus clearer than the sun at noonday that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but by someone who lived long after Moses,” concludes Spinoza in A Theologico-Political Treatise.

Then, in the nineteenth century, higher critics such as Graf and Wellhausen showed that the Pentateuch (that is, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was a composite work, in which one could discern the hand of four different “writers,” usually referred to by the four letters J, E, D, and P.

Robin Lane Fox takes up our story:

The Torah was not written by, nor “given” to, Moses, and there is no good reason to believe any of the exploits of Abraham and others to be true. Certainly no historian would dream of going to the Muslim sources for the historical verification of any biblical material; the Muslim accounts of Abraham, Moses, and others are, as we saw earlier, taken from rabbinical Jewish scriptures or are nothing more than legends (the building of the Kaaba, etc.) invented several thousand years after the events they purport to describe.

Historians have gone even farther. There seems to be a distinct possibility that Abraham never existed: “The J tradition about the wandering of Abraham is largely unhistorical in character. By means of the theological leitmotif of the wandering obedient servant of Yahweh, it gives a structure to the many independent stories at J’s disposal. It is an editorial device used to unite the many disparate Abraham and Lot traditions” (Thompson 1974). Thompson goes on to say (Chapter 38):

Finally, “the quest for the historical Abraham is a basically fruitless occupation both for the historian and the student of the Bible.”

And Lane Fox observes: “Historians no longer believe the stories of Abraham as if they are history: like Aeneas or Heracles, Abraham is a figure of legend.”

Noah and the Flood

The building of the ark by Noah, the saving of all the animals, the universal deluge are all taken over into the Koran from Genesis. As the manifest absurdities of the tale were pointed out, Christians were no longer prone to take the fable literally; except, of course, the literal minded fundamentalists, many of whom still set out every year to look for the remnants of the lost ark. Muslims, on the other hand, seem immune to rational thought, and refuse to look the evidence in the face. I shall set out the arguments to show the absurdities in the legend, even though it may seem I am belaboring the obvious. I wish more people would belabor the obvious, and more often.

Noah was asked to take into the ark a pair from every species (sura 11.36–41). Some zoologists estimate that there are perhaps ten million living species of insects; would they all fit into the ark? It is true they do not take up much room, so let us concentrate on the larger animals: reptiles, 5,000 species; birds, 9,000 species; and 4,500 species of class Mammalia (Chapter 30). In all, in the phylum Chordata, there are 45,000 species (Chapter 29). What sized ark would hold nearly 45,000 species of animals? A pair from each species makes nearly 90,000 individual animals, from snakes to elephants, from birds to horses, from hippopotamuses to rhinoceroses. How did Noah get them all together so quickly? How long did he wait for the sloth to make his slothful way from the Amazon? How did the kangaroo get out of Australia, which is an island? How did the polar bear know where to find Noah? As Robert Ingersoll asks, “Can absurdities go farther than this?” Either we conclude that this fantastic tale is not to be taken literally, or we have recourse to some rather feeble answer, such as, for God all is possible. Why, in that case, did God go through all this rather complicated, time-consuming (at least for Noah) procedure? Why not save Noah and other righteous people with a rapid miracle rather than a protracted one?

No geological evidence indicates a universal flood. There is indeed evidence of local floods but not one that covered the entire world, not even the entire Middle East. We now know that the biblical accounts of the Flood, on which the Koranic account is based, are derived from Mesopotamian legends: “There is no reason to trace the Mesopotamia and Hebrew stories back to any one flood in particular; the Hebrew fiction is most likely to have developed from the Mesopotamians’ legends. The stories are fictions, not history.”

David and the Psalms

The Koran also commits Muslims to the belief that David “received” the Psalms in the way Moses received the Torah (sura 4.163–65). But once again biblical scholars doubt that David wrote many, if any, of them. David probably lived around 1000 B.C., but we know that the Psalms were put together much later in the post-exilic period, that is, after 539 B.C.:

The Koran gives a contradictory account of the creation, posing great problems for the commentators:

Two days for the earth, four days for the nourishment, and two days for the seven heavens make eight days (sura 41), whereas in sura 50 we are told the creation took six days. It is not beyond the commentators to apply some kind of hocus-pocus to resolve this contradiction.

The heavens and the earth and the living creatures that are in them are proof of God and His power (Levy 1957, p. 2, 4); they and man in particular were not created frivolously (sura 21.16). Men and Jinn have been assigned the special duty of worshipping God, and though the privilege of obedience to God’s law was first offered to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, it was man who received it after their refusal (sura 33.72) (Levy 1957, p. 2, 4).

What are we to make of this strange doctrine? The heavens, the earth, and the mountains are seen as persons, and furthermore as persons who had the temerity to disobey God! An omnipotent God creates the cosmos, and then asks it if it would accept the “trust” or the “faith,” and His own creation declines to accept this burden.

Earth was created first, then the heavens. The moon was given its own light (sura 10.5), and for it, stations were “decreed so that it changes like an old and curved palm-branch, for man to know the number of the years and the reckoning” (Levy 1957, p. 2, 5).

As for Adam, “We have created man from an extract of clay; then we made him a clot in a sure depository; then we created the clot congealed blood, and we created the congealed blood a morsel; then we created the morsel bone, and we clothed the bone with flesh; then we produced it another creation; and blessed be God, the best of creators!” (sura 23.12).

Another account tells us that man was created from sperm (an unworthy fluid) (sura 77.22), and yet another version has it that all living things were created out of the same primeval water as the rest of the universe (sura 21.31, 25.56, 24.44). Animals have been created especially for the sake of mankind; men are the masters of these animals: “We have created for them the beasts of which they are masters. We have subjected these to them, that they may ride on some and eat the flesh of others; they drink their milk and put them to other uses” (sura 36.71).

The Jinn were created out of fire, be ore the creation of man out of clay. They live on earth with men.

While Muslim commentators have no problems in reconciling the apparent contradictions, a modern, scientifically literate reader will not even bother to look for scientific truths in the above vague and confused accounts of creation. Indeed, it is that very vagueness that enables one to find whatever one wants to find in these myths, legends, and superstitions. So, many Muslims believe that the whole of knowledge is contained in the Koran or the traditions. As Ibn Hazm said, “Any fact whatsoever which can be proved by reasoning is in the Koran or in the words of the Prophet, clearly set out.” Every time there is a new scientific discovery in, say, physics, chemistry, or biology, the Muslim apologists rush to the Koran to prove that the discovery in question was anticipated there; everything from electricity to the theory of relativity (Ascha 1989, Chapter 3). These Muslims point to the Koranic notion of the aquatic origin of living things (sura 21.31), and the current idea in biology that life began, to quote Darwin, in “a warm little pond.” Other putative scientific discoveries anticipated in the Koran include the fertilization of plants by wind (sura 15.22) and the mode of life of bees (sura 16.69). No doubt when they hear of the Glasgow chemist A. G. Cairns-Smith’s suggestion that the answer to the riddle of the origins of life may lie in ordinary clay, these Muslim apologists will leap up and down with triumph and point to the Koranic doctrine that Adam was created from clay (Dawkins, pp. 148–165).

Since Muslims still take the Koranic account literally, I am duty bound to point out how it does not accord with modern scientific opinion on the origins of the universe and life on earth. Even on its own terms the Koranic account is inconsistent and full of absurdities. We have already noted the contradictions in the number of days for the creation. Allah merely has to say “Be,” and His will is accomplished, and yet it takes the Almighty six days to create the heavens. Also, how could there have been “days” before the creation of the earth and the sun, since a “day” is merely the time the earth takes to make a revolution on its axis? We are also told that before the creation God’s throne floated above the “waters.” Where did this “water” come from before the creation? The whole notion of God having a throne is hopelessly anthropomorphic but is taken literally by the orthodox. Then we have several accounts of the creation of Adam. According to the Koran, Allah created the moon and its phases for man to know the number of the years (sura 10.5). Again, a rather primitive Arabian notion, since all the advanced civilizations of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Chinese, and Greeks used the solar year for the purpose of time reckoning.

Let us turn to the modern account of the origins of the universe.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble published his discovery that remote galaxies are rushing away from the earth with speeds proportional to their distances from the earth. The Hubble law states that the recessional velocity, v, of a galaxy is related to its distance, r, from the earth by the equation v = Hor, where Ho is the Hubble constant. In other words, the Hubble law is telling us that the universe is expanding. As Kaufmann says: “The universe has been expanding for billions of years, so there must have been a time in the ancient past when all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a state of infinite density. Presumably, some sort of colossal explosion must have occurred to start the expansion of the universe. This explosion, commonly called the big bang, marks the creation of the universe.” The age of the universe has been calculated to be between fifteen and twenty billion ears.

Before what is called the Planck time (approximately ten seconds after the projected time of the big bang), the universe was so dense that the known laws of physics are inadequate to describe the behavior of space, time, and matter. During the first million years, matter and energy formed an opaque plasma (called the primordial fireball), consisting of high-energy photons colliding with protons and electrons. About one million years after the big bang, protons and electrons could combine to form hydrogen atoms. We had to wait ten billion years before our solar system came into existence. “Our solar system is formed of matter created in stars that disappeared billions of years ago. The Sun is a fairly young star, only five billion years old. All of the elements other than hydrogen and helium in our solar system were created and cast off by ancient stars during the first ten billion years of our galaxy’s existence. We are literally made of star dust.” (Kaufmann, Chapter 12) The solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust, called the solar nebula, which can be described as a “rotating disk of snowflakes and ice-coated dust particles.” The inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, formed through the accretion of dust particles into planetesimals and then into larger protoplanets. The outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, formed through the break up of the outer nebula into rings of gas and ice-coated dust that coalesced into huge protoplanets. The Sun was formed by accretion at the center of the nebula. After about 100 million years, temperatures at the protosun’s center were high enough to ignite thermonuclear reactions (Kaufmann, Chapter 14).

The preceding account is hopelessly at variance with the account given in the Koran. The earth was not, as the Koran claims (sura 41.12), created before the heavens; we have already noted that the sun and the solar system formed millions of years after the big bang, millions of other stars had already formed before our sun. Furthermore, the term “heavens” is hopelessly vague; does it mean our solar system? Our galaxy? The universe? No amount of juggling will make sense of the Koranic or biblical story of the creation of the “heavens” in six, eight, or two days. The light of the moon is, of course, not its own light (pace, sura 10.5) but the reflected light of the sun. The earth orbits the sun, not vice versa.

Those who are tempted to see in the Koran various anticipations of the big bang should realize that modern cosmology and physics in general is based on mathematics. Without the developments in mathematics, especially those in the seventeenth century (the calculus, for example), progress and understanding would not have been possible. In contrast to the vagueness of the Koran, the big bang in its modern cosmological formulation is stated with precision using advanced mathematics; indeed it is not possible to state these ideas in ordinary language without the loss of precision.

The earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and perhaps less than one billion years later, life appeared on it for the first time after a period of chemical evolution. The Russian biochemist, Oparin, argued in The Origin of Life (1938) that the primitive earth contained chemical elements that reacted to the radiation from outer space as well as terrestrial sources of energy. “As a result of prolonged photochemical activity, these inorganic mixtures give rise to organic compounds [including amino acids that are the building blocks from which the protein molecules are constructed]. Through time and chemical selection, these…organic systems increased in complexity and stability, becoming the immediate precursors of living things” (Birx, n.d., pp. 417–4 8). Since Oparin’s time, many scientists (Miller, Fox, Ponnamperuma) have succeeded in producing organic compounds from inorganic ones in the laboratory.

In 1859, Darwin published his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In the Introduction of his great work, Darwin wrote:

Darwin’s answer to his own question of “the How of Evolution” is, of course, natural selection. Species were a result of the long process of natural selection acting on “constantly appearing, random, heritable variations.” Darwin put the matter himself in this way:

The implications of the theory of evolution for man’s place in nature were obvious. Darwin himself noted that “the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form is not in any degree new. Lamarck long ago came to this conclusion, which has lately been maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers; for instance, by Wallace, Huxley, Lyell, Vogt, Lubbock, Buchner, Rolle, &c., and especially Haeckel.”

In the eighteenth century, de Lamettrie had classified man as an animal in L ‘Homme Machine (1748). Linnaeus (1707–1778) had classified man with the manlike apes as Anthropomorpha. T. H. Huxley in his famous “Man’s Relations to Lower Animals,” begins his account by looking at the development of a dog’s egg, and then concludes that

The evidence for evolution comes from an impressive range of scientific disciplines: systematics, geopaleontology, biogeography, comparative studies in biochemistry, serology, immunology, genetics, embryology, parasitology, morphology (anatomy and physiology), psychology, and ethology.

This evidence points in the same direction, namely, that man, like all living things, is the result of evolution, and was descended from some apelike ancestor, and certainly was not the product of special creation. In this context, to talk of Adam and Eve as both the Bible and Koran do is meaningless. Man is, at present, classified under the order primates, along with tree shrews, lemurs, lorises, monkeys, and apes. Thus, not only apes and monkeys, but lemurs and tree shrews must be considered our distant cousins. As J. Z. Young states, “It is harder still to realize that our ancestry goes on back in a direct and continuous father-and-son line to a shrew, and from there to some sort of newt, to a fish, and perhaps to a kind of sea-lily.”

Nowhere in the foregoing account of the origins of the universe and the origin of life and the theory of evolution did I have recourse to “divine intervention” as an explanation. Indeed, to explain everything in terms of God is precisely not to explain anything—it is to cut all inquiry dead, to stifle any intellectual curiosity, to kill any scientific progress. To explain the wonderful and awesome variety and complexity of living organisms as “miracles” is not to give a very helpful, least of all a scientific, explanation. To quote Dawkins, “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there,’ or ‘Life was always there,’ and be done with it.”

Darwin made the same point about his own theory in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, the famous geologist: “If I were convinced that I required such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish…. I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.” Quoting the above letter, Dawkins comments: “This is no petty matter. In Darwin’s view, the whole point of the theory of evolution by natural selection was that it provided a non-miraculous account of the existence of complex adaptations. For what it is worth, it is also the whole point of this book [The Blind Watchmaker]. For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was not evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.”

As for the big bang and modern cosmology, Stephen Hawking makes the same point. Trying to make amends for their treatment of Galileo, the Vatican organized a conference to which eminent cosmologists were invited.

Elsewhere in his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking observes that

A little later. Hawking asks, “What place, then, for a creator?”

Einstein observed that “the man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events…. He has no use for the religion of fear.”

Similarly, more recently, Peter Atkins argues, “That the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations.”

Theories that explain the big bang by reference to God answer no scientific questions. They push questions of ultimate origin back one step, prompting questions about God’s origins. As Feuerbach said, “The world is nothing to religion; the world, which is in truth the sum of all reality, is revealed in its glory only by theory. The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life; but religion knows nothing of the joys of the thinker, of the investigator of Nature, of the artist. The idea of the universe is wanting to it, the consciousness of the really infinite, the consciousness of the species.”

It is only the scientist with a sense of wonder who feels that life’s awesome complexity needs explaining, who will propose refutable and testable scientific hypotheses, who will try to unravel the so-called mysteries of the universe. The religious man will content himself with the uninteresting and untestable remark that “it” was all created by God.

It is rather unfortunate that the Koran gives the example of the elements as signs of God’s munificence since they are as much a cause of misery as happiness. Rain, we are told in sura 7.56, is a harbinger of God’s mercy. Yet floods claim the lives of thousands of people in, ironically, a Muslim country, namely, Bangladesh. The cyclone of 1991, with winds of 200 kilometers per hour, resulted in floods that left 100,000 dead and 10,000,000 without shelter. Despite the omnipresence of water, Bangladesh goes through a period of drought from October to April. Thus, the wretched population, among the poorest in the world, is submitted to both periodic floods and drought. All the work of God, as sura 57.22 tells us: “No disaster occurs on earth or accident in yourselves which was not already recorded in the Book before we created them.”

Indeed, all natural catastrophes from earthquakes to tornadoes seem hard to reconcile with a benevolent God, especially as they seem to be visited on particularly poor, and often Muslim, countries. During the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 literally thousands of people died, many in churches as they prayed, and these deaths had a profound effect on the eighteenth century, particularly on writers like Voltaire. Why were so many innocent people killed? Why were the brothels spared, while pious churchgoers were punished?

Eighteenth-century deists, as we saw earlier, exaggerated Islam’s rationality, pointing to the fact that Muhammad did not perform any miracles. It is true: throughout the Koran Muhammad says he is a mere mortal unable to perform miracles, he is only God’s messenger (suras 29.49, 13.27–30, 17.92–97). Despite these disclaimers, there are at least four places in the Koran that Muslims believe refer to miracles:

1. The clefting of the moon: “The hour has approached, and the moon has been cleft. But if the unbelievers see a sign, they turn aside and say, ‘Magic! that shall pass away!’” (sura 54.1, 2).

2. The assistance given to the Muslims at the battle of Badr: “When you said to the faithful: ‘Is it not enough for you that your Lord helps you with three thousand angels sent down from high?’ No: if you are steadfast and fear God, and the enemy come upon you in hot pursuit, your Lord will help you with five thousand angels with their distinguishing marks” (sura 3.120, 121).

3. The night journey: “We declare the glory of Him who transports his servant by night from Masjidu ‘l-Haram to the Masjidul-Aqsa [i.e., Mecca to Jerusalem]” (sura 17.1).

4. The Koran itself, for Muslims, remains the great miracle of Islam (sura 29.48).

The traditions are full of Muhammad’s miracles, curing the ill, feeding a thousand people on one kid, etc.

As our knowledge of nature has increased, there has been a corresponding decline in the belief in miracles. We are no longer prone to think that God intervenes arbitrarily in human affairs by suspending or altering the normal workings of the laws of nature. As our confidence in our discoveries of the laws of nature has increased, our belief in miracles has receded.

David Hume argued in the following manner:

And in every putative miracle, it is more reasonable and in accordance with our experience to deny that the “miracle” ever happened. People are duped and deluded, are apt to exaggerate, and have this strong need to believe; or as Feuerbach put it, a miracle is “the sorcery of the imagination, which satisfies without contradiction all the wishes of the heart.” Koranic miracles occurred a long time ago, and we are no longer in a position to verify them.

Perhaps one of the most important arguments against miracles, an argument often overlooked, is that, to quote Hospers:

The Koran tells us that Jesus was miraculously born of the Virgin Mary. The Annunciation of the Virgin is recounted at sura 19.16–21 and sura 3.45–48:

Although it remains a tenet of orthodox Christian theology, liberal Christian theologians and many Christians now, and even the Bishop of Durham (England), no longer accept the story as literally true, preferring to interpret “virgin” as “pure” or morally without reproach, in other words, symbolically. Martin Luther (1483–1546), writing in the sixteenth century, conceded that “We Christians seem fools to the world for believing that Mary was the true mother of this child, and nevertheless a pure virgin. For this is not only against all reason, but also against the creation of God, who said to Adam and Eve, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’”

The treatment of the Virgin Birth by Christian biblical scholars is a good example of how Muslims cannot hide from their conclusions, for these conclusions have a direct bearing on the veracity or at least the literal truth of the Koran. Charles Guignebert (1867–1939) has made a detailed examination of the legend of the Virgin birth. Guignebert points out the striking parallels to the Virgin birth legend in the Greco-Roman world:

Some scholars, such as Adolf Hamack (1851–1930), believe the Virgin birth legend arose from the interpretation of a prophetic passage in the Old Testament, namely, Isa. 7.14, according to the Greek text of the Septuagint, a translation made in 132 B.C. On this occasion, Ahaz, King of Judah, fears a new attack by the allied kings of Syria and Israel, who have just failed to take Jerusalem. The prophet reassures Ahaz and says:

The Christians, while searching for all the prophetic sayings concerning the Messiah, discovered this passage from Isaiah and, taking it out of context, gave it a messianic meaning. Most important of all, the Hebrew original does not contain the word “virgin” (“bethulah”) but the word “young woman” (“haalmah”); in Greek, “parthenos” and “neanis,” respectively. As Guignebert says,

Guignebert himself does not accept this theory of the origin of the Virgin birth legend put forward by Harnack. Instead, Guignebert offers his own hypothesis [Chapter 31]:

The account of the birth of Jesus in sura 19.22–34 shows remarkable similarity not only to, as was pointed out by Sale, the story of Leto, but also to something which I have not seen remarked on anywhere, the birth of the historical Buddha. Let us look at the Koran first, sura 19.22f.:

Leto—or in Latin, Latona—was a Titaness, a daughter of Coeus and Phoebe. According to the Homeric hymn to the Delian Apollo, Leto gave birth to Apollo while grasping the sacred palm tree. Apollo is also said to have spoken from Leto’s womb. Callimachus (ca. 305–240 B.C.) in his “Hymn in Delum” recounts a similar story.

According to the legends of the birth of the Buddha, Queen Maya Devi dreamed that a white elephant entered her right side. Many Brahmins reassured the king and the queen that their child would one day be a great monarch or a Buddha. The miraculous pregnancy lasted ten months. On her way to her own parents towards the end of her pregnancy, Maya Devi entered the Lumbini garden where, as she grasped the branch of the Shala tree, the child emerged from her right side. As soon as he was born, the future Buddha stood up and took seven steps toward the north, and then toward the other cardinal points of the earth to announce his possession of the universe, and proclaimed that this was his last birth. We have already remarked on the probable direct source of the Koranic story of the birth of Jesus, viz., the apocryphal book called The History of the Nativity of Mary and the Saviour’s Infancy.

It may come as a surprise to Muslims that there were, and are still, scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus, to whose existence Muslims are totally committed. Bruno Bauer (1809–1882), J. M. Robertson (1856–1933), Arthur Drews (1865–1935), van den Bergh van Eysinga, Albert Kalthoff, and in recent years, Guy Fau (Le Fable dc Jesus Christ, Paris, 1967), Prosper Alfaric (Ongines Sociales du Christianisme, Paris, 1959), W. B. Smith (The Birth of the Gospel, New York, 1957), and Professor G. A. Wells of Birkbeck College, University of London, have all developed the “Christ-Myth” theory. Professor Joseph Hoffmann sums up the situation in this manner:

I intend to discuss the not-so-negligible evidence for the view that Jesus did not exist for several reasons:

1. First, very generally, the debates, discussions, and arguments on the Jesus myth are as much the concern of Muslims as Christians; or rather, they should be. I suspect that no book written on Islam has ever discussed the views of Bauer or those of the Radical Dutch school on the historicity of Jesus. It should be the deep concern of all educated people who are interested in our intellectual and spiritual heritage and origins. The early history of Christianity is one of the most important chapters in the history of civilization. For Muslims, Jesus was one of God’s prophets and a historical figure who performed various miracles, and who would come again at the last day and kill the Antichrist. If it can be shown that Jesus did not exist, it will have obvious consequences for all Muslims, for such a revelation will automatically throw the veracity of the Koran into question.

However, it is not simply a question of the historicity of Jesus, but what we do and can know about him. Again these questions should be of the utmost importance for all, including Muslims. Muslims believe Jesus existed, therefore, what nearly two hundred years of dedicated and selfless research by some of the greatest historians and intellectuals has revealed about this man should be of passionate interest. Muslims as much as Christians should be concerned with the truth of the matter. Even the Christian theologians who accept Jesus’s existence concede a number of problems concerning his life have not been resolved. Most of the stories in the New Testament concerning his life are now accepted, even by conservative Christian theologians, to be legends with no basis in history. The New Testament scholar Ernst Kasemann concluded: “Over few subjects has there been such a bitter battle among the New Testament scholars of the last two centuries as over the miracle-stories of the Gospels…. We may say that today the battle is over, not perhaps as yet in the arena of church life, but certainly in the ield of theological science. It has ended in the defeat of the concept of miracle which has been tradition in the church.”

Where does this leave the Koran? None of the stories of Jesus in the Koran is accepted as true; most of them contain gross superstitions and “miracles” that only the most credulous would deem worthy of attention. It is worth remarking that if the Koran is absolutely true and the literal word of God, why is it that no Christian theologian adduces it as proof of Jesus’s existence? No historian has ever looked at the Koran for historical enlightenment, for the simple reason that no historian will look at a document, which he will presume to be of human origin, written some six hundred years after the events it purports to describe when there are documents written some fifty or sixty years after the same events. We also know the source of the Koran stories, namely, heretical Gnostic gospels such as the Gospel of St. Thomas, which in turn have been dismissed as unhistorical.

Even if we do not accept the thesis that Jesus never existed, the conclusions of the New Testament historians throw a very illuminating light on the growth of religions and religious mythology; furthermore, they point to the striking similarities to the recent theories put forward by Islamicist scholars on the rise of Islam and the Muhammad legend of the Muslim traditions.

2. Many of the criticisms of Christianity to be found in the works to be discussed apply, mutatis mutandis, to all religions, including Islam.

3. The discussions of the historicity of Jesus have been conducted in Europe and the United States for over a hundred and fifty years now, without any of the scholars who denied Jesus’s historicity being threatened by assassination. It is true Bauer was dismissed from his university post in theology at Bonn in 1842, but he continued to publish until the end of his life. Professor Wells is alive (1994) and well and taught at the University of London until 1971, while still vigorously denying that Jesus ever existed. In all this, there is surely a lesson for the Islamic world.

4. Blind dogmatism has shut Muslims off from the intellectually challenging and exhilarating research, debate, and discussion of the last century and a half. In the words of Joseph Hoffmann: “It is through such discussion, however, that we avoid the dogmatism of the past and learn to respect uncertainty as a mark of enlightenment.”

5. There is also a deeper methodological moral to be learned from the following discussions. The virtue of disinterested historical inquiry is undermined if we bring into it the Muslim or Christian faith. Historical research only leads to an approximation of the objective truth, after a process of conjectures and refutations, critical thought, rational arguments, presentation of evidence, and so on. However, if we bring subjective religious faith, with its dogmatic certainties, into the “historical approximation process, it inevitably undermines what R. G. Collingwood argued was the fundamental attribute of the critical historian, skepticism regarding testimony about the past.”

Strauss

In his Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), David Strauss pointed out that we could not take the gospels as historical biographies; that was not their primary function. The early Christians wanted to win converts to their cause “through the propagation of a synthetic religious myth.”

Strauss’s main thesis is that the stories in the New Testament were the result of the messianic expectations of the Jewish people.

Bauer

Bauer went a step further and contended that the early Christians fashioned Jesus Christ from the portraits of the prophets found in the Old Testament. Jesus never existed, and Christianity arose in the middle of the first century from a fusion of Judaic and Greco-Roman ideas. Bauer argues, for example, that the Christian use of the Greek term “Logos” ultimately derives from Philo, the Stoics, and Heraclitus. For Philo, the Logos was the creative power that orders the world and the intermediary through whom men knew God. Of course, in St. John’s Gospel, the Logos is equated with God, who becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ.

As for other classical influences on Christianity, as early as the fourth century, anti-Christian writers were pointing out the striking resemblances of the life of Jesus to the life of Apollonius of Tyana, a neo-Pythagorean teacher who was born just before the Christian era. He led a wandering and ascetic life, claimed miraculous powers, and was in constant danger of his life during the reigns of Roman emperors Nero and Domitian. His followers referred to him as the son of God; they also claimed he was resurrected before their very eyes and that he ascended into heaven.

The mystery cult of Mithras was first established in the Roman world in the first half of the first century B.C. This cult developed secret rites and rituals and stages of initiation through which the god’s devotees had to pass. Mithraic mysteries also showed striking similarities to the Christian Baptism and the Eucharist.

The early Christians attribute words and sayings to Jesus that in reality only reflect the experience, convictions, and hopes of the Christian community. For example, Mark 1.14–15: “Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God. And saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.” Christ never spoke these words,

Wrede

Acknowledging his debt to Bauer, Wilhelm Wrede, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, showed that Mark’s gospel “was saturated with the theological beliefs of the early Christian community. Rather than a biography, the gospel was a reading back into Jesus’s life, the faith and hope of the early Church that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of God.”

Kalthoff

Albert Kalthoff, also writing at the beginning of this century, argued that we could explain the origins of Christianity without having to posit a historical founder. Christianity arose by spontaneous combustion when “the inflammable materials, religious and social, that had collected together in the Roman empire, came into contact with Jewish messianic expectations.” “From the socio-religious standpoint the figure of the Christ was the sublimated religious expression for the sum of the social and ethical forces that were at work in a certain period.”

Non-Christian Evidence

Despite the fact that there were approximately sixty historians active during the first century in the Roman world, there is remarkably little corroboration of the Christian story of Jesus outside the Christian traditions. What there is, is very inconclusive and unhelpful—Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, the Younger Pliny.

The Gospels

It is now recognized that the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were not written by the disciples of Jesus. They are not eyewitness accounts, and they were written by unknown authors some forty to eighty years after the supposed crucifixion of Christ. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are usually called the synoptic Gospels because of the common subject matter and similarity of phrasing to be found in them. Mark is considered the earliest of the three and was probably used by the other two as their source. It now seems highly unlikely that any of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were ever spoken by a historical figure. As Hoffmann concludes,

The Sanhedrin trial, the trial before Pilate, and the main factors in the Passion story all pose serious problems, and we cannot take them as historical events; rather they were “created” by the early Christians’ own theological convictions. As Nineham says, much of what we find in Mark may well be “deduction from Old Testament prophecy about what ‘must have’ happened when the Messiah came.”

The Epistles of Paul

The letters of Paul were written before Mark’s Gospel, and yet rather surprisingly they do not mention many of the details of Jesus’s life that we find in the Gospels: no allusions to Jesus’s parents, or to the Virgin Birth, or to Jesus’s place of birth; there is no mention of John the Baptist, Judas, nor of Peter’s denial of his master. As G. A. Wells points out, “they give no indication of the time or place of Jesus’s earthly existence. They never refer to his trial before a Roman official nor to Jerusalem as the place of his execution. They mention none of the miracles he is supposed to have worked.” Even when certain doctrines attributed to Jesus in the Gospels would have been of obvious use to Paul in his doctrinal disputes, there is no mention of them.

The early post-Pauline letters, written before A.D. 90, also fail to give any convincing historical details. It is only with the later post-Pauline letters, written between A.D. 90 and 110, do we get those details from the Gospels with which we are familiar. Consequently, Wells concludes:

The Dale of Mark’s Gospel

When and why did the biography of Jesus with which we are familiar first develop? The details of Jesus’s life first appear in Mark, which is considered the earliest gospel and most New Testament scholars date it ca. A.D. 70. But G. A. Wells insists that it was written ca. A.D. 90, when “Palestinian Christianity had been overwhelmed by the Jewish War with Rome, and the gentile Christians who then first linked Jesus with Pilate, and first gave his life altogether a real historical setting, could have had only very imperfect knowledge of what had really happened in Palestine c. A.D. 30.” The Christian apologists invented the historical setting and details of the life of Jesus in order to meet the challenge of Docetism that denied the humanity of Jesus, to serve as an antidote to the proliferation of myths in Christian circles, to establish the reality of the resurrection, and generally to answer the questions raised by the early contacts of the Christians with a hostile, skeptical world.

In Chapter 3 we saw the theories on the rise of Islam of a new generation of Islamic scholars. We are now in position to appreciate the resemblance of these theories to the theories presented above on the origins of Christianity. We noted earlier how Goldziher dismissed a vast amount of the hadith or traditions about the life of the Prophet as spurious. Goldziher considered by far the greater part of the hadith as the result of the religious, historical, and social development of Islam during the first two centuries. The hadith was useless as a basis for any scientific history and could only serve as a reflection of the tendencies of the early Muslim community. In the foregoing sections, we noted how the early Christians attributed words and sayings to Jesus that in reality only reflected the experience, convictions, and hopes of the Christian community.

Just as we find that the early Christians fabricated details of the life of Jesus in order to answer doctrinal points, so we find that Arab storytellers invented biographical material about Muhammad in order to explain difficult passages in the Koran.

Let us compare Schacht’s comments on the traditions in the legal context and what we said of Wrede’s judgment on Mark’s Gospel. Traditions were formulated polemically in order to rebut a contrary doctrine or practice; doctrines in this polemical atmosphere were frequently projected back to higher authorities: “Traditions from Successors [to the Prophet] become traditions from Companions [of the Prophet], and Traditions from Companions become Traditions from the Prophet.” Details from the life of the Prophet were invented to support legal doctrines.

As discussed earlier, Wrede showed that Mark’s Gospel was full of the early Christian community’s beliefs and hopes rather than being the actual story of Jesus.

Both religions in their early days, as they came into contact and conflict with a hostile community with a religious tradition of its own, developed and defended their doctrinal positions by inventing biographical details of their founders that they then projected back onto an invented Arabian or Palestinian point of origin. Where Christianity arose from a fusion of Judaic and Greco-Roman ideas, Islam arose from Talmudic Judaic, Syriac Christian, and indirectly, Greco-Roman ideas.

As Morton Smith put it “the first-century [Christian] churches had no fixed body of gospels, let alone a New Testament.” Similarly, it is now clear that the definitive text of the Koran still had not been achieved as late as the ninth century.

Central to the Islamic creed is the doctrine of the Last Day. Several terms are used in the Koran to indicate this most awesome of days: Day of Standing Up, Day of Separation, Day of Reckoning, Day of Awakening, Day of Judgment, the Encompassing Day, or simply and ominously the hour. The ultimate source of Muhammad’s notions of the Last Day was Syriac Christianity. These accounts obviously gripped his imagination, for the Koran is full of graphic descriptions of this day: this event will be marked by the sounding of the trumpet, the splitting asunder of the heavens, the reduction of the mountains to dust, the darkening of the sky, the boiling over of the seas, the opening of the graves when men and Jinn will be called to account. These beings will then have their deeds weighed in the Balance, will be judged by God, and then either assigned to everlasting bliss in Paradise, or consigned to everlasting torment and torture in Hell. The terrors of the Last Day are emphasized over and over again, especially in the later Meccan passages. Men and women will be restored to life, that is, there will be an actual resurrection of the physical body.

We know that this notion of the resurrection of the body was alien to Arabian thought, for many Meccan pagans scoffed at this manifestly absurd idea. The pagan philosophers in their polemics against the Christians also asked pertinent questions: “How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? What was rotten cannot become fresh again, nor scattered limbs be reunited, nor what was consumed be restored…. Men swallowed by the sea, men torn and devoured by wild beasts, cannot be given back by the earth.”

All doctrines of personal survival, personal immortality, and personal resurrection confront the obvious observation that all men and women die, are buried or cremated, and even if buried their bodies eventually decompose—what is rotten cannot become fresh again.

The Muslim doctrine is committed to the physical survival of the body: “That is their reward for that they disbelieved in our signs, and said, ‘What! when we are bones and rubbish, shall we then be raised up a new creation?’ Could they not see that God who created the heavens and the earth is able to create the like of them, and to set for them an appointed time; there is no doubt therein, yet the wrong-doers refuse to accept it, save ungratefully!” (sura 17.100).

But there is one objection to such an account that Antony Flew has formulated:

The Muslim account is further dogged by contradictions. We are told all mankind will have to face their Maker (and Remaker) on the Judgment Day, and yet sura 2.159 and sura 3.169 tell us that those holy warriors who died fighting in God’s cause are alive and in His presence now. God has evidently raised them from the dead before the Last Day. Similarly, without waiting for the Last Day, God will send the enemies of Islam straight to hell. Interesting questions arise in this age of organ transplants. If a holy warrior dies fighting for the propagation of Islam, and at the very moment of his death has one of his organs, let us say his heart, transplanted into someone else lying in a hospital waiting for the surgical operation and the organ to save his life, how will the holy warrior be reconstituted? In this case, the same body will not have been refashioned; indeed, it will only be a replica with a different heart.

To answer “all is possible for God” is simply to admit the essential irrationality of the doctrine of reconstitution. In general, despite centuries of seances, table rapping, mediums, magicians, and all kinds of mumbo jumbo, no one has ever come up with a convincing proof of an afterlife. Apart from personal vanity, it is clearly fear of death that causes the persistent belief in a future life, despite all indications to the contrary.

Apart from the empirical and logical objections to the doctrine of resurrection of the body, there are some powerful moral objections to the whole Islamic notion of the afterlife. Nietzsche has argued in the Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-christ that to talk of an afterlife is to do dirt on, to denigrate and besmirch this life. Far from making this life meaningful, the doctrine of an afterlife makes this life meaningless.

Furthermore, the beyond is a way for the self-proclaimed prophets and priests to retain control, to terrorize the people with the tortures of hell, and equally to seduce them with the licentious pleasures of paradise. “The concepts ‘beyond,’ ‘last judgment,’ ‘immortality of the soul’ and ‘soul’ itself are instruments of torture, systems of cruelties by virtue of which the priest became master, remained master.

Muhammad was able to develop one of the worst legacies of the teachings of the Koran, the notion of a Holy War (discussed in Chapter 10), with the help of the idea of rewards in paradise for the holy martyrs who died fighting for Islam. As Russell put it, “at a certain stage of development, as the Mohammedans first proved, belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity.”

Those prepared to die for the faith have been used frighteningly throughout Islamic history, “martyrs” were used for political assassinations long before the assassins of the eleventh and twelfth century. Modern Middle Eastern terrorists or Mujahheddin are considered martyrs and have been manipulated for political reasons, with considerable effect. Most of them have been immunized against fear, to quote Dawkins, “since many of them honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the neutron bomb.”

The contingency of this life should make man aware of its beauty and preciousness. The harsh truth that this is the only life we have should make us try and improve it for as many people as possible.

We have already referred to the fact that the Koranic ethical system is based entirely on fear. Muhammad uses God’s wrath-to-come as a weapon with which to threaten his opponents, and to terrorize his own followers into pious acts and total obedience to himself. As Sir Hamilton Gibb put it, “That God is the omnipotent master and man His creature who is ever in danger of incurring His wrath—this is the basis of all Muslim theology and ethics.”

The notion of everlasting punishment is also incompatible with and unworthy of a benevolent, merciful God; and even more incomprehensible when we conjoin it with the Koranic doctrine of predestination. God especially creates creatures to consign to hell.

Finally, fear corrupts all true morality—under its yoke humans act out of prudent self-interest, to avoid the tortures of hell, which are no less real to the believers than the delights of the cosmic bordello that goes by the name of paradise.

The Koran decrees punishments that can only be described as barbaric. The relativist who defends the inhuman customs prescribed in the Koran by claiming that these were normal practices at the time finds himself stumped by the gruesome revival of most of them in the putatively more enlightened twentieth century. The Koran is the word of God—true for always.

Amputation

Sura 5.38 sets the tone: “As to the thief, male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example from God, for their crime: and God is exalted in power.” According to Muslim law, “the right hand of the thief is to be cut off at the joint of the wrist and the stump afterwards cauterized, and for the second theft the left foot, and for any theft beyond that he must suffer imprisonment.”

Crucifixion

The same sura tells us: “The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter.”

Women to be Immured

As for the offence of “zina,” an Arabic term that includes both adultery and fornication, the Koran says nothing about lapidation as a punishment for adultery. Originally, women found guilty of adultery and fornication were punished by being literally immured: sura 4.15: “If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, take the evidence of four witnesses from amongst you, and if these bear witness, then keep the women in houses until death release them, or God shall make for them a way.”

Flogging

However, sura 24.2–4 prescribes one hundred lashes for fornication: “The woman and man guilty of fornication, flog each of them with a hundred stripes; let not pity move you in their case.”

Lapidation was instituted at a later stage. As noted earlier a lapidation verse may have formed a part of the Koran, but this is disputed by some scholars.

Apologists of Islam often argue the compatibility of Islamic law and human rights. Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Are amputating a limb, flogging, and lapidation inhuman or not?

At sura 40.38, the Koran mistakenly identifies Haman, who in reality was the minister of the Persian King Ahasuerus (mentioned in the book of Esther), as the minister of the Pharoah at the time of Moses.

We have already noted the confusion of Mary, the mother of Jesus, with the Mary who was the sister of Moses and Aaron. At sura 2.249, 250 there is obviously a confusion between the story of Saul as told therein, and the account of Gideon in Judg. 7.5.

The account of Alexander the Great in the Koran (18.82) is hopelessly confused historically; we are certain it was based on the Romance of Alexander. At any rate, the Macedonian was not a Muslim and did not live to an old age, nor was he a contemporary of Abraham, as Muslims contend.

The Koran contains a host of other rules and regulations for the proper functioning of the new community. We shall be looking at the position of women, marriage, and divorce in Chapter 14, the institution of slavery and the doctrine of the Holy War in Chapters 8 and 9, and the taboos concerning food and drink in Chapter 15. Other social prescriptions concern legal alms or the poor tax, usury, inheritance, prayers, pilgrimage, and fasts. Some of these are treated in a perfunctory and confused manner. The Koran also enjoins many moral precepts with which, though hardly original or profound, no one would disagree: kindness and respect toward elders and parents, generosity towards the poor, forgiveness instead of revenge. It also contains passages of beauty and grandeur. But on balance, the effects of the teachings of the Koran have been a disaster for human reason and social, intellectual, and moral progress. Far from being the word of God, it contains many barbaric principles unworthy of a merciful God. Enough evidence has been provided to show that the Koran bears the fingerprints of Muhammad, whose moral values were imbued with the seventh-century world view, a view that can no longer be accepted as valid.

There is not sufficient reason to believe that any religion is true. Indeed, most of them make claims that can be shown to be false or highly improbable. Nonetheless, some eminent philosophers argue that, though false, these religions are necessary for moral guidance, moral restraint, and social stability. The philosopher Quine said, “There remains a burning question of the social value of the restraints and ideals imposed by some religions, however false to facts those religions be. If this value is as great as I suspect it may be, it poses a melancholy dilemma between promoting scientific enlightenment and promoting wholesome delusion.”

Such a view is both empirically false and morally repulsive. Let us look at the evidence, first, as Russell argued,

We are all familiar with the wars perpetrated by Christianity, but less familiar are the ones waged by Muslims. I discuss the intolerance and cruelty of Islam in Chapter 9. I shall only point to some of the atrocities committed in the name of Allah in the twentieth century. For the past few years, the self-righteous and sanctimonious leaders of various Islamic groups in Afghanistan have been waging a bitter civil war to gain total power. In between their five prayers to the most compassionate and merciful God, they have managed to kill hundreds of innocent civilians. Many thousands of these civilians have fled to neighboring Pakistan, where they have expressed a distinct nostalgia for the halcyon days of the godless Communists. According to a report in the International Herald Tribune (26 April 1994), the civil war, now entering its third year, has claimed more than ten thousand lives. In Kabul alone, fifteen hundred people were killed between January and April 1994.

At the moment of writing (June 1994), genocide is in progress in Sudan where Islamic law was imposed by the then-dictator General Numeiri in 1983, even though almost one-third of the population is not Muslim, but Christian or Animist. The Islamic North of Sudan has been waging a pitiless war on the Christians and Animists of the South. Since 1983, more than half a million people have been killed. An equal number of people have been forcibly displaced from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, to campsites in the desert where the temperatures can reach 120 degrees F., and where there are no health facilities, water, food, or sanitation. As an article in the Economist (9 April 1994) pointedly titled “The Blessings of Religion” said, “Financed by Iran, the Government has equipped its troops with modern Chinese-made weapons. In recent months the war has taken on a still cruder air of jihad, as the ranks of the army have been swelled by large numbers of young Sudanese mujahideen, ready to die for Islam.”

The details of the massacre of somewhere between 250,000 and 600,000 Indonesians in 1965 are only now beginning to emerge. After a failed coup d’etat in 1965, the Indonesian army (with at least tacit approval from the United States) took its revenge on the Communists. The army encouraged nationalist and Muslim youth to settle old scores; gangs of Muslim youths massacred Chinese peasants in the most horrific manner. “‘No-one went out after 6 p.m.,’ recalls a Chinese whose family fled East Java. ‘They cut off women’s breasts; they threw so many bodies in the sea that people were afraid to eat fish. My brother still had to serve in the shop. In the morning young Muslims would come in swaggering, with necklaces of human ears’” (Guardian Weekly, September 23, 1990). In Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, at least two hundred thousand civilians were killed.

I emphasize these atrocities as a counter to the sentimental nonsense about the “spiritual East,” which, we are constantly told, is so much superior to the decadent and atheistic West; and as counterexamples to the belief that religion somehow makes men more virtuous. Europeans and Asians, Christians and Muslims have all been guilty of the most appalling cruelty; whereas there have been thousands of atheists who have not only led blameless lives but have worked selflessly for the good of their fellow humans.