The ninth chapter of god is not Great is especially important because in this one Hitchens raises all the questions that seem to have been begged in his discussion of the Jewish Tanach and the Christian Bible. In those cases he seems to take for granted that inconsistencies and incoherences in the text make the claim to revelation ridiculous. This may, indeed, be true, but there is a prior question here that needs to be asked and answered, and Hitchens does, in fact, raise it now.
The preposterousness of the claim to divine revelation is made very clear in the opening paragraphs where Hitchens details the problems with pretending that the Koran could possibly be of supernatural origin. There is, first of all, the claim that the revelation was given to an illiterate man who then, in turn, spoke the words revealed to him to another who wrote it down. And then, as it happens, these bits and pieces of the supposed “revelation” were stored up in rather haphazard ways, and then compiled at a later date to form the text which is now known as the Koran, and for which so many exorbitant claims are then made. Since the text was “revealed” in Arabic, the assumption is made, as Hitchens says, that the god of the Koran is a monoglot, whose language is Arabic. The consequence is that this privileges not only the Koran but the Arabic language itself, so that no translation can be considered to be the Koran at all. So Arabs and Arabic are privileged above all other Muslims, and people whose original language is not Arabic are taught to recite the Koran even though they may not understand the language, and Arabia itself is also so privileged, so that Muslims everywhere must bow in the direction of Mecca when they pray, being forced, in consequence, to find their identity elsewhere than in their own language and culture. This has the inevitable effect of making all non-Arab Muslims subordinate to Arab Muslims, and their expression of Islam of considerably less importance.
Hitchens’ comment on all this is decisive:
Even if god is or was an Arab (an unsafe assumption), how could he expect to “reveal” himself by way of an illiterate person who in turn could not possibly hope to pass on the unaltered (let alone unalterable) words? [124]
The claim is incoherent. Knowing what we now know about human memory and its abilities, it is quite clear that no one can be trusted to repeat, verbatim, a recitation of words heard at another time. Even oral tradition does not work in this way, and those who recite sagas and epics in oral traditions are known not to repeat the poems or recitations in word-for-word form, but to introduce flourishes, innovations and alterations in the text as the occasion demands. John Dominic Crossan, in his book, The Birth of Christianity, discusses the issue of oral tradition in great detail, and makes it quite clear that the supposed stability of oral traditions is a myth. Every recitation of an epic poem, or saga, is a unique work of creative expression, not a rote repetition of a fixed tradition. The idea that Mohammed or anyone else could repeat verbatim a recitation of an angel that he claimed to have encountered on Mt. Hira is simply implausible — even if we grant the plausibility of Mohammed’s claim to have encountered an angel, something which is in itself simply implausible and fantastic.
The problem is one that the notion of revelation simply cannot overcome. As Hitchens says:
… the idea that the identical text can yield different commandments to different people is quite familiar to me for other reasons. There is no need to overstate the difficulty of understanding Islam’s alleged profundities. If one comprehends the fallacies of any “revealed” religion, one comprehends them all. [126]
This point is also decisive, and it explains why religions are so resistant to the idea of translating their supposedly “revealed” texts into other languages, because translation only compounds the difficulties attached to preserving the ideal of a single and unique revelation. The fact that Christianity, even after having undergone a reformation, as well as having passed through a period of enlightenment, is still resistant to textual criticism of the Bible with its unsettling conclusions for the idea of revelation, is clearly indicative of the fact that it is known how unstable the concept of revelation really is, and how difficult it is to keep the meaning of texts nailed down so as not to subvert the claim to revelation. This is particularly evident in Islam, because Islam has not undergone a reformation, nor has it passed through a period of critical enlightenment, and the text-critical study of the Koran is not even in its infancy. As Ibn Warraq says:
Today, Muslims have yet to learn the science of textual criticism, let alone apply it to the Koran. [loc. 2526, Kindle edition]
But it is clearly evident that the Koran has not only undergone a process of selection and development, but that it is dependent upon Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian sources, a dependence which puts a lie to any claim that it could be an independently “revealed” text.
It seems to me apt to quote Hitchens at some length in relation to the fact of the Koran’s dependence on other, pre-existing sources, because it is often forgotten that Islam came to a rather troubled birth in a context in which a number of forms of Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and animist polytheism were all part of the cultural mix of Arabia when Islam came to birth. Despite the idea that the early conquests of a nascent Islam may have indicated to the conquerors that it was backed by a divine will, it is important to note, as Hitchens says, that
Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being “born in the clear light of history,” as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or “surrender” as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption. [129]
This becomes especially problematic when we consider how the traditions about Mohammed and the collection of the various sayings that make up the Koran were brought together. As Hitchens points out, it was a full 120 years before anyone wrote an account of Mohammed’s life, and even this text was lost, and is only known through reworked texts from a much later time. (129) Nor is there any agreement about how the sayings in the Koran came to be gathered together, and how they related to the original sayings of the supposed prophet.
Indeed, the compilation of the Koran is an alarmingly disjointed affair. Hitchens points out that, at a certain time, it became obvious to some Muslims under the first caliphate that the number of those who still remembered the sayings of the prophet had come to the point where they might be lost, so it was decided to gather them together, along with
“pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs and pieces of leather” on which sayings had been scribbled, and given them to Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet’s former secretaries, for an authoritative collation. [130]
Needless to say, the reliability of such a process leaves a great deal to be desired, quite aside from the crucial question as to the relationship of any of these sayings, supposing that some reliably reported actual sayings of Mohammed were included, to any divine source. And even then, Hitchens points out, the story itself and its date are neither of them reliable.
But even if, as Hitchens says, we grant the correctness of some such version of events, still the possibility of variant readings of the texts remains. Since the Arabic script was not standardised until sometime in the ninth century, by which time “the undotted and oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it still does,” (131) the supposition that we have anything that can be considered a divine voice is simply wildly implausible. And, Hitchens adds, whereas
This might not matter in the case of the Iliad, … we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable (and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty with which it is advanced. [131]
This is a vital point, and it becomes even more important when we consider the weight given to remembered sayings of the prophet, the hadith, a collection so vast that Bukhari, who flourished over 200 years after Mohammed, was able immediately to rule out 200,000 of them as valueless, and that further reflection excluded even more.
Further exclusion [Hitchens writes] of dubious traditions and questionable isnads [or chains of transmission of sayings] reduced this grand total to ten thousand hadith. [132]
Upon which Hitchens’ justifiably sceptical comment is:
You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries [after the prophet], managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination. [132]
But when it is remembered that even so the hadiths contain obvious borrowings from Christianity and Judaism, gospel verses, and rabbinic sayings, bits of Greek philosophy, Persian maxims, and, as Hitchens points out, “an almost word-for-word reproduction of the Lord’s Prayer,” (132) it is simply a nonsense to claim that these hadith should in any sense be considered authoritative for anybody. The basic problem, of course, is that there is no way to tie this mélange of sayings to a creditable divine source. It is not only the internal contradictions and disagreements, nor the heterogeneous sources from which the various sayings are plagiarised, and not even the so-called “satanic verses” (in which Mohammed tries to conciliate the polytheists), that leads to this conclusion, but simply the fact that there is no clear way in which it could be shown that this complex of texts comes to rest in a supposedly divine source.
What would such a proof look like? The beauty or sonorousness of the language — which is reputed to turn some devout Muslims to tears — simply won’t do the trick. The supposition that the society blueprinted by the texts would be an ideal society won’t do it either, quite aside from the fact that any society that could be based on the texts themselves, given their outworking in existing Islamic societies or those proposed by interpreters such as Sayyid Qutb or Osama bin Laden, would be societies of the most excruciating oppressiveness. Besides, as Plato said, the goodness even of a purported god’s commands must be assessed independently of those commands themselves. This is the irremediable problem at the heart of all religions. The claims made are simply inconsistent with any credible foundation upon which the claims can be conceivably based. Thus, as Hitchens points out:
… the fact remains that Islam’s core claim — to be unimprovable and final — is at once absurd and unalterable. [136]
Islam is, in other words, largely inaccessible to critical consideration,
The fact, as Hitchens points out, that “even the most tentative efforts [to bring critical intelligence to bear on the discrepancies between the various editions and manuscripts of the Koran] have been met with almost Inquisitorial rage,” (137) suggests that the intolerance of Islam to critical discussion makes it very unlikely that there will be an early or peaceful resolution of the incompatibility of Islam with the democratic polities of the West, and their traditions of free inquiry and freedom of expression. The trouble is that this is becoming clear at the same time that there seems to be, as Hitchens says,
a “soft” consensus among almost all the religions that, because of the supposed duty of respect that we owe the faithful, this is the very time to allow Islam to assert its claims at their own face value. [137]
This dangerous assumption is increasingly seen to govern the official response by governments and by the judicatories of the various religions to such things as the contract put out by the head of state of Iran on the life of Salman Rushdie for the publication of a novel. The recent outrage by a Muslim terrorist at Queen Mary College, University of London, is another example where officialdom has failed to respond in an immediate and robust way to a terrorist threat made to those gathered to hear a lecture on Sharia law, just as the cartoon controversy over the publication by Jyllands-Posten in Denmark of a number of cartoons of the Mohammed — intended to break the cycle of self-censorship which fear of Islam had aroused so widely in Europe and elsewhere — initiated police inquiries and interrogations of those at the centre of it, rather than of those who chose to respond to it with religious indignation, outrage, and violence. Accusations of Islamophobia abound, but very little critical attention is paid to the religion of Islam itself, for that would simply arouse the same kind of outrage and violence as the original cartoons.
In other words, critical attention to Islam is automatically excluded from consideration at a time when Islam is making increasingly strident claims for itself, fully justifying Hitchens’ concluding claim that “[o]nce again, faith is helping to choke free inquiry and the emancipating consequences that it might bring.” (137) Of course, it is doing more than that. Faith is making it impossible to bring critical intelligence to bear on ideas that have the demonstrated capacity to subordinate freedom to the unsupported claims of faith. We can see this clearly at work in India. In the light of these trends, Ibn Warraq’s new book, Why the West is Best, is particularly important, because it addresses itself directly to the contrast between the lack of critical awareness in Islam generally and the rich diversity and freedom that the West enjoys precisely through its intellectual tradition of free critical inquiry.
typo..that [it] could be an independently revealed text?
..and their traditions [of] free inquiry and freedom of expression.
sorry Eric…in proof reading mode…it’s Sunday, so looking for proof
very excellent piece Eric. “the goodness even of a purported god’s commands must be assessed independently of those commands themselves.” – where did Plato say that?
Thanks for the proof reading Clod. Done. Plato said that in the Euthyphro, where he deals with piety. Euthyphro is off to charge his father with murder over the death of a slave — the pious (right) thing to do. Socrates wonders whether Eythyphro knows what piety means, and whether something is good (pious) because god commands it or whether god commands it because it is good. Could god make something we believe intuitively to be bad good by commanding it? And so on.
As an atheist, I read Hitchens’ _god is not Great_ not for what Hitchens says but to see how convincingly he says it. Among atheists, “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” that the Jewish Tanach, the Christian Bible, and the Koran could not be of supernatural origin.
However, since I read _god is not Great_ when it first came out, I appreciate your posts as assessments, summaries and discussion of the book. Thank you, now I don’t have to reread it myself.
Funny…I read Euthypro a long time ago…..just don’t remember that bit leaping off the page at me. Maybe I was not alert to its significance back then.
I miss Hitch a lot. I miss his voice and the delightful suspense of not knowing what he’d come out with next. I’ve got Letters to a Contrarian read by him on audiobook and it’s delightful.
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Hello, a muslim here. I enjoyed your article and wanted to make a few comments, hope that is ok. I’ve quoted the specific bits of your article I’m talking about.
“Every recitation of an epic poem, or saga, is a unique work of creative expression, not a rote repetition of a fixed tradition. The idea that Mohammed or anyone else could repeat verbatim a recitation of an angel that he claimed to have encountered on Mt. Hira is simply implausible”
At present there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have completely memorised the Quran, and can perfectly recite it. The revelation to Mohammed didn’t happen all at once but in small portions over the course of 22 years. As demonstrated by the many thousands of Quran memorisers today, it is easily possible to memorise the Quran perfectly in such a timespan. It is likely that if you go to your local mosque you can meet someone who can do what you claim is impossible!
“But it is clearly evident that the Koran has not only undergone a process of selection and development, but that it is dependent upon Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian sources, a dependence which puts a lie to any claim that it could be an independently “revealed” text.”
You mention how the Quran, Gospel and Torah are similar in many places. This is true, but you neglect to consider the explanation that they are so similar because they come from the same source. This is what is affirmed in the Quran (3:3).
And some minor points, or misunderstandings:
“This becomes especially problematic when we consider how the traditions about Mohammed and the collection of the various sayings that make up the Koran were brought together. “
The Quran does not contain the traditions and sayings of Mohammed – that is the Hadith. The Quran contains only the revelation of God to Mohammed.
“Since the text was “revealed” in Arabic, the assumption is made, as Hitchens says, that the god of the Koran is a monoglot, whose language is Arabic.”
Hitchens here unfortunately shows his lack of familiarity with Islam (to put it mildly!) Muslims believe God has made revelations to all people through hundreds of thousands of prophets, including Jesus, Moses, Abraham, David, Adam and many others. All of these prophets have been sent with the message in their own language.
Quran 14:4 We sent not an apostle except to teach in the language of his own people, in order to make things clear to them.
As for privileging Arabic, well if you wanted to do serious literary discussion of Shakespeare, would you reach for the French translation?
Thanks for the good article. I found Hitchen’s chapter on Islam quite poor to be honest, with many factual mistakes like some of those I mentioned above, as well as rather simplistic misunderstandings. I had hoped for more from him.
Thank you Rahman for your comment. A few things, however, that need to be made clear. So far as oral traditions go, they are usually precisely recitations which are changeable over time. I assume that Muhammad was no different in this respect. The ability to memorise a text is very different from the idea of oral traditions, and though the Hadith are certainly oral traditions, so is the Qu’ran to a great extent. The very fact that it gets biblical stories wrong is an clear indication of oral transmission. Besides, you must remember that when the Qu’ran was brought together, there were collections of various writings, on pottery, pieces of paper, etc. that were copied down to make up the whole. The Qu’ran never was a single recitation by a single person, notwithstanding its own claims. As for being a monoglot, it is clear that, in its view that the Qu’ran is written in God’s own language, he is a monoglot. There is no sign that the Qu’ran thinks the revelations to others were anything but subordinate and subsidiary works. As to the literary reading of Shakespeare, of course English is to be preferred, though I am sure there is plenty of literary interpretation of Shakespeare based on language that is not English, so it’s a bit of a tossup there. As for the syncretistic nature of the Qu’ran. The most reasonable interpretation is that it is borrowed from those sources. The idea that it is similar because all of these are in some sort revelations of a god is about as stretched as it is possible to get. So, all in all, I do not find your comment compelling. It depends almost entirely on Islam’s claims regarding the Qu’ran, not on plausible historical interpretations of its formation. One of the problems with Islam is its unwillingness to do serious critical work on its central text. The claim that it is a revelation, like all claims to revelation, is so much braggadocio. It has no reasonably historical foundations, and must be believed despite the evidence, evidence of which you show awareness, but an unwillingness to investigate. That is the problem with all religious faith.
Hello Eric, thanks for replying!
There is one thing you say which I must correct: Yous say “As for being a monoglot, it is clear that, in its view that the Qu’ran is written in God’s own language, he is a monoglot. There is no sign that the Qu’ran thinks the revelations to others were anything but subordinate and subsidiary works.”
The Quran never says it is written in ‘God’s own language’ – in fact such a concept doesn’t exist in Islam. I already quoted you a verse (14:4) explaining how each prophet was given a revelation in their own language. So Jesus was given a revelation in Aramaic and David in Hebrew and so on. The claim that God is a monoglot isn’t tenable. Your second point that other revelations are subordinate to the Quran is absolutely not true. Quran 3:84 says:
“Say, “We have believed in Allah and in what was revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Descendants, and in what was given to Moses and Jesus and to the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we are Muslims [submitting] to Him.”
Islam is the continuation and conclusion of the previous religions. It is not superior as all true religions are the same and all from God. Quran 2:62 says
“Those who believe (in the Qur’an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.”
As for the reliability of oral transmission, we will have to agree to disagree. I think the evidence of thousands of people who have memorised the Quran perfectly is ample to show it is possible. Remember that unlike other oral traditions, like epic poems and the like, it was known from the beginning that the Quran was God’s literal dictation and that it must be transmitted faithfully, without change. Of course, like nay historical event, it is impossible to prove beyond doubt that the Quran didn’t change from revelation to inscription. But there is no evidence it did, and sufficient to show it was t least physically possible.
With best wishes.
Sorry Rahman, none of this is in the slightest compelling. Take your point about oral transmission. There is a world of difference between memorising a text and transmitting a tradition orally. You can always check and make sure that you have memorised a text correctly. You cannot check and make sure that you have transmitted an oral tradition correctly. Memory is simply not like that. You can’t check a memory against a memory. So memorising the Qu’ran is not evidence for the reliability of the tradition. The fact that so many people waste their time memorising the Qu’ran, when they might be doing something to more purpose, is a sad commentary Islam itself, it seems to me.
To say that “Islam is the continuation and conclusion of the previous religions” just is to say that it is superior and the others subordinate. Even if you allow that Christianity and Judaism are “true”, their truth is limited by the supposedly final revelation, which questions many of their traditions. Besides, there are very unkind things said about Christians and Jews in the Qu’ran, especially the Jews, and that just strengthens the subordination. And if you are trying to tell me that the Qu’ran is obviously the acme of revelations, just reading a few pages — and I have read the whole thing, to my cost — is enough to convince the thoughtful person that it is not. It is, for the most part, a vile and violent collection of texts. The repetition of ‘Allah, the most merciful, the most beneficent …’ and so on is not only boring but is constantly undermined by the text itself.
The Qu’ran may never say that it is written in God’s own language, but the fact that the Qu’ran is only the Qu’ran if it is in Arabic shows clearly that this is a basic assumption of Islam. The implicit claim is that the words of the Qu’ran are, in fact, divine words, regardless of the claims made by the Qu’ran itself. Of course, the claims of a book on its own behalf are involved in paradoxes of self-reference. But the most important thing, that no religious person who believes in revealed texts seems to notice, is that the possibility of interpretation means that no text, as such, can be a revelation. The text means what we interpret it to mean, so the actual meaning of the text is conferred on the text by its human interpreters. It is, of course, human, through and through, but the fact of hermeneutic elasticity ensures that it is so.
Hello Eric, and thanks for your reply.
If you have a passing interest in Islamic theology, and I assume you do from the content of your blog posts, then you have to realise that the the Quran is the ultimate theological authority in Islam. When you (following Hitchens) suggested that in Islam God can speak only one language, I showed you where it says in the Quran that this isn’t true. When you said that Islam claims to be superior to the other revelations I showed you in the Quran where it says exactly to opposite.
I’m not trying to convince you that the Quran is true, or that God is real. All I’m doing is pointing out where you (and Hitchens) have slightly the wrong idea about Islam. I realise you don’t believe the Quran is divine revelation, but if you want to discuss Islamic theology then you can’t just ignore it, and claim that you know better than the Quran what Islam is. Maybe you’ve seen muslims acting like Arabic is the only language God can speak or saying that other prophets are merely subsidiary to Islam , but as I showed you the Quran says the opposite and it is the Quran that defines what Islam is not the behaviour of muslims, as a maths textbook defines what mathemetics is rather than the error-strewn homework of the children in maths class.
With best wishes.
Again, Rahman, you miss my point. You say that the Qu’ran says that Islam is not superior to either Judaism or Christianity. Yet you also say that Islam is the continuation and conclusion to those religions, which effectively makes it superior in authority to them. So it is not I, but you, who seem to misunderstand. But it is quite clear, nonetheless, that, historically, the Qu’ran misunderstands the tradition in which it claims to stand. Of course, by claiming that it is revelation, Islam skirts around the historical issue. That, of course, I do not ignore, but find risible. Fundamentalist Christians try the same tactic, and it doesn’t work any better in Christianity than it does in Islam.
You say that “if you want to discuss Islamic theology then you can’t just ignore it.” But I don’t want to discuss Islamic theology on its own terms, nor did Hitchens, for theology in any terms is merely human imagination in overdrive. What Hitchens and I want to do is to show by reasonable argument that the claims made by the religions cannot be true, that the whole idea of revelation is itself incoherent. In the light of this incoherence, the remainder of this comment is effectively pointless, but here goes.
Take, for examples, your claim that the Qu’ran ascribes a kind of equivalence to Islam, Judaism and Christianity. This, you must realise, is counter by other verses in the Qu’ran which do not acknowledge any such equivalence. Indeed, the Qu’ran makes it very clear that both Jews and Christians are mistaken in many of their beliefs. Besides, the errors in the Qu’ran are not always corrections of what Christians (to take but one example) believe, but often mistakes about Christian or Jewish beliefs. See Qu’ran 5.116. “And when Allah saith: O Jesus, son of Mary! Didst thou say unto mankind: Take me and my mother for two gods besides Allah?” This shows a lack of knowledge of Christian beliefs. It may allude to beliefs held by local Christians not represented in classical Christianity. It certainly does not reflect Christian theology, although much later Mariology seems to make Mary almost into a god. But the Christian belief in the Trinity is not a belief that Jesus and Mary are gods in addition to God (Allah), as this suggests. This makes it very clear that the Qu’ran is a human creation, not a revelation at all.
In addition, what about Qu’ran 5.12-16, where we are told that Allah made a covenant with Israel and with Christians, but that they forgot a good part of the message that was given to them, and because of that Christians and Jews will be at enmity with each other until the day of judgement? This clearly places Christianity and Judaism a poor second, although it clearly does not acknowledge the deep anti-Judaism in Islam itself.
Of course, the response to this kind of criticism often is that an English translation (Pickthall) is being used, and not the original Arabic, and therefore not the Qu’ran at all, not the actual revealed words, which must therefore have been in Arabic.
But really, the point is that this sort of argument can go on and on, and is simply silly squabbling. It works in exactly the same way with any other text claimed to be holy. In every case we have human texts with hermeneutic elasticity. There can never be a text with a single determinate meaning, other than, say, mathematics and logic, where meanings are clearly assigned to the symbols used, like possible moves of the pieces in chess.
Hi Eric,
You say you want to show that the claims of various religions (Islam in this case) cannot be true. In order to do this you need to understand what those claims actually are. Therefore you need to understand Islamic theology. If you don’t understand what Islam claims, how can you refute it? You end up, like Hitchens, refuting your own idea of what Islam is rather than what it actually is, which I’m sure you’ll agree is rather pointless. This is a special problem with Islam as there is so much misinformation about the religion at present (a lot of which is due to muslims themselves…..)
With Islam it is a simple matter, there is one dominant authority and it is the Quran. If the Quran says something then that is Islamic theology. If the Quran says God can give revelation in multiple languages (14:4) then it is false to say he is a monoglot. Simple as that – this is one example where Hitchens is plain wrong and unfortunately others believe him without checking for themselves. The mistake is more revealing as it shows that Hitchens didn’t relaise, or at least fully understand, that other prophets (Jesus, Moses, Abraham etc) were Islamic prophets too, and spoken to by God (or if he did he thought they all spoke Arabic for some reason…). Such major deficiency in understanding the most basic points of Islamic theology shouldn’t fill anyone with confidence on his critique and conclusions on the same.
The arguments about inconsistencies in the Quran are well rehearsed online and the refutations are easily available – besides I never wanted to draw you in to a full on debate on the truth or otherwise of Islam, just point out some specific areas where Hitchens had led you astray on the facts. I hope at last you can see where I’m coming from.
Best wishes
Rahman, I think it is pointless to carry on this particular discussion. Even though it says in Sura 14.4 that Allah sends revelations to people in their own language, this does not imply that the revelation to Muhammad is not a direct transcription of Allah’s words. This seems to be the claim that the Qu’ran makes for itself, or at least that Muhammad made on its behalf. This is the point that you seem to be missing. Allah may reveal himself to others in their own language, but he spoke directly to Muhammad through the intermediary of an angel, not through a human intermediary, so the language in which Muhammad is asked to recite is the very language of Allah. As it says on the website Muslim Voices (http://muslimvoices.org/arabic-language/):
Could it be that you actually misunderstand Islam yourself?
The second point is more important. You say: “With Islam it is a simple matter, there is one dominant authority and it is the Quran. If the Quran says something then that is Islamic theology.” But the problem of hermeneutic elasticity is still there. No text can be, in the required sense, a single dominant authority, for it can be and is in fact interpreted in various ways. And when you say that “The arguments about inconsistencies in the Quran are well rehearsed online and the refutations are easily available,” you must understand that supposed refutations are no more than hermeneutical opinion. The point is — and this is the point that Hitchens is trying to make — is that the idea of a revealed religion is incoherent. And for this you do not need familiarity with the Qu’ran or any other text. The incoherence is written into the idea of a textual revelation itself.
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All revelation is the direct words of God, not just the one to Mohammed.So when God gave the revelation to Moses it was directly His (God’s) words (Quran 19:51). And those words weren’t in Arabic (14:4). So God isn’t a monoglot, so Hitchens was wrong.
Sadly, I see discussions of this sort usually degenerate in very particular ways. Eric even acknowledges the futility of it a few responses in, and he is quite right. This exchange seems to be no exception.
The whole problem of revelation is that it is forever beyond verification, forever indistinguishable in its claim to truth from all works of imaginative fiction. All reasonable people eventually come to this crossroads with revelation based claims, and those who feel they must defend revelation always avoid this critical issue. So it seems to have gone in this conversation as well. If we are to give away a license for limitless magic power at the onset of the theological discussion, then of course all the contradictions can be resolved. The contradictions are not the main problem, even if they do tend to be an indicator of a narrative devoid of factual basis. The problem is making the revelation more related to historical and verifiable fact than Harry Potter books or The Odyssey. This is why revelation based truth claims are incoherent, and as such a thorough understanding of any such theology is not required to dismiss revelation based claims.
Hi John,
You make some good points there, especially about the nature of these discussions. I’ve had some of those points in mind as I wrote my replies, and have tried to keep to specific, provable points on Islamic theology and not expand the debate to a general atheism vs religion one.
But I wonder why, given that there is a distaste for as you say “give away a license for limitless magic power at the onset of the theological discussion” Hitchens and his fellow thinkers even bother do delve into a theological debate – after all this magical power as you call it is an axiom of any such debate. It’s like having a discussion on mathematics where one party refuses to accept that 1+1=2 as it can’t be proven. OK fine, but then don’t try to have a discussion about mathematics.
Most of Hitchen’s book is about theology, so given that isn’t it right to assess it in the terms of the theology he is critiquing? It’s fairly clear he has made a factual error in his interpretation of Islamic theology in this case (God is a monoglot), isn’t it?
I’m all for the non-religious to completely dismiss religion as magic etc, no problem. But if you want to critique the beliefs of Islam, and in fact write a whole book chapter doing so, isn’t it important that you actually know what the beliefs are?
Rahman, again you misunderstand. In your reply to John you ask:
Hitchens was not talking theology, and even if he made a few mistakes regarding some Muslim beliefs, the points that he made still largely stand. In any event, as you can find out from a brief search of the web, there are Muslims who disagree with you about the language of god. That’s the whole point of saying that the idea of revelation is incoherent, not only because, as John says, it gives a license to say practically anything at all, but, because of this license, practically anything will be encompassed with a particular religion’s beliefs system somewhere. Thus, the Christians with whom Muhammad was acquainted clearly thought that the Christian Trinity included Jesus, his mother, and God. This is not the orthodox Christian view, but it may have been the view of those Muhammad knew, and from whom he received his information, a bit of misinformation that shows the Qu’ran to be of human origin. The point is that the hermeneutical elasticity of texts makes it certain that there will be no consistent belief system amongst Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, etc. So actually knowing what the beliefs are is not possible, the diversity of belief and interpretation is simply too wide. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make from the start. It’s pointless to say that the Qu’ran is the sole authority in Islam, because the interpretive license that is possible in reading the Qu’ran or any other religious text is too broad. Hitchens tells his story as he heard it, just as Muhammad did. It gets us no nearer the truth either of what is true about god or what is true about Islam, for there is always room to disagree. Certainly, you can resolve all the contradictions, but someone can do it in an entirely different way, so how are we advanced from where we started out? It is, in fact, a futile undertaking. That’s what makes religions so dangerous, because they can so easily slip away like quicksilver, and shape-shift in ways that meet the circumstances of any believer or group of believers. Pointless exercise. So, no, we don’t need to know what the beliefs actually are, because the possibility of belief is endless, there being nothing to anchor beliefs in a completely determinate way.
Hello Rahman.
I personally, make it a point not to argue specifics until the initial major problems are ironed out. So as you say, I don’t really get very deep into the specifics of theological debate for the very reasons you mention.
You are still missing the meat of the criticism. There is no way to verify a purely oral tradition. Even if we are to grant that a god can reveal itself in different languages, it makes little difference. You might also claim supernatural power for the verses themselves, making them especially memorable and unchanging in the minds of believers. It is an easy game to play. We can make up whatever we want, but there is no good reason to posit any of it as actually true, because none of it is verifiable.
Does it really give you no pause that there were roughly 200,000 remembered sayings of the prophet that were ruled out without mentioning any type of methodology for doing so? Does it mean nothing that there is no way to ferret out those who might lie or be mistaken?
This is a major problem for all revealed religions. To leave it unchecked relegates all revealed stories equal in truth to the ramblings of very small children or the malicious narratives of con men. You cannot really cite the Quran verses in isolation as a defense when the validity of the narrative is being questioned without being circular. Your assertions that other Muslims have got it wrong while you have it right even defy the idea that the Quran as it is today could be the true and correct revelation from god.
Finally, we are not even trying to discuss the theology on its own merits, like your mathematics example implies, we are trying to asses if there is any reason to take the stories as true.
Hello both,
Apparently “Hitchens was not talking theology”, well, sorry he was. According to the OED theology is “the study of the nature of God and religious belief”. If you make statements of the kind “The Islamic God has the following properties…(e.g. is a monoglot).” then you are discussing theology, because you are discussing the nature of God.
Your posts here are discussing theology too. Your admission that you “don’t need to know what the beliefs actually are” is rather disappointing, and leaves me puzzled a to why you would write long blog posts about a subject you have no interest in. I mean, I know nothing about medieval german literature, so wouldn’t it be strange for me to write a blog about the subject then when challenged with evidence that I’d got some facts wrong simply say, “well, I don’t need to know anything about medieval german literature to write this blog”.
Anyway, let’s leave that there, as I’m sure you can at least understand my point by now even if you don’t agree with it.
As for oral transmission of the Quran, as I said before there is no way to verify (in the scientific sense) virtually any historical event. It must be assessed on balance of probabilities. Sure, we can’t prove the Battle of Waterloo actually happened, but there is strong evidence to suggest it did, and little or no evidence to say it didn’t. As we go back it history, evidence even for true events naturally becomes more scarce: there is less evidence for Caesar than Napoleon, but most reasonable people would still think both existed. In a scientific sense, there is no experiment we can do to prove either existed though, so both are, in that sense, non-verifiable.
The fact that the Quran is memorised by thousands, maybe millions today, shows that it is possible for a human to remember it. And the oral transmission of the Quran perhaps only lasted 100 odd years until the first copies were written down (that is from non-religious historical evidence, most muslims think the Quran was written down almost immediately after the prophet’s death). Are you saying it was impossible to transmit accurately a document of the Quran’s length over one or two generations, given that at the time of the Prophet’s death hundreds or thousands of people had memorised it?
I am a master of “baa baa black sheep”. When I recite that nursery rhyme, I literally NEVER get a word wrong. EVER. I am quite proud of that fact. My son is training to be a master of baa baa black sheep under my tuition. This is pure oral transmission, I know that because as yet my son cannot read. I think in a few months he too will be a master of baa baa black sheep, and I am confident even if he goes his whole life without ever seeing baa baa black sheep written down, years hence he could accurately transmit to his children. Do you disagree? If not, then what length is the text that becomes impossible for this to occur? Is it longer or shorter than the Quran, and how do you know?
Oh, and John, the 200,000 sayings you mention are the hadith, not the Quran. And there is methodology for ruling them out, transmission must be documented and must pass through only reliable transmitters. You may not agree with the methodology, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any.