Arizona,
That’s mystical mumbo-jumbo. Name one “eternal truth” that the Koran embodies that science can’t comment upon and that Muhammed didn’t plagiarize from Judaism or Christianity. Strip away the factual errors and the plagiarism and the Koran is about as deep as the Sopranos’ family dialogue in the back room of the Bada Bing. Even when it tries to be deep, its own self-delusions and vanity prevent it from being anything but self-interested.
As for the “great power” of the Koran, sure, if you are a little kid and someone tells you a bunch of stories from the Koran, it will seem powerful. Coming to the Koran as an adult, like I did, after reading a heavy helping of Western philosophy, like I also did, leaves one scratching one’s head that such a book ever convinced anyone of anything, much less that I had learned something profound about the cosmos. As someone wittier than I once wrote, “Reading the Koran is like reading a truck driving instruction manual”. Are you going to tell me that truck driving instruction manuals can also be “from God”?
In any case, the Koran sets itself up to be disclosed as a fraud by proclaiming a special place amongst world literature with its assertion that it was dictated by Gabriel. Philological science can prove that it wasn’t, so on its own terms, the Koran is a fiction. If the Koran didn’t make that claim, the historical factuality of the claim wouldn’t be an issue. It’s the same thing with the Resurrection. If it could be shown historically that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, the entirety of Christianity could be justifiably called a fiction in the same way Hirsan Ali is calling Islam a fiction. We don’t have historical proof against one of these claims (it is very difficult to find the bones that would prove Jesus never rose from the dead, after all), but we do have historical proof against the other, as any competent historical linguist could show. And, as you can probably guess, I don’t really care if that is an insult to Muslims. They need to put on the big boy pants and realize they are not special just because a warlord who need to motivate recruits to enrich himself continually told those recruits they were the anointed people on this earth. I can’t even believe we have to have this discussion at this point in human evolution.
