Authenticity of the Qur'aan

[فداء الرسول]

The Death of Death
Abu Hurayra reported that Allah’s Messenger said: “After the people of Paradise enter Paradise and the People of the Fire enter Hell, Death will be brought foreword in the form of a spotted ram. It will be on the wall which separates the people of Paradise from the people of the Fire. Then it will be said: ‘O people of Paradise!’ Thereupon they will raise their heads and stare apprehensively. Then it will be said: ‘O people of the Fire!’ Whereupon its inhabitants will raise their heads in hope of intercession. After this the people of Paradise and the inhabitants of the Fire will be addressed thus: ‘Do you know what this is?’ They will all reply: ‘We know it; it is Death, which assigned to us.’ Thereupon Death will be placed on its side and slaughtered on the wall. Finally it will be said: ‘O people of Paradise, only eternity and no more death. O people of the Fire, only eternity and more death.’”
Footnotes
‘Allah’ is in fact the proper name for God. It means ‘the one who alone deserves to be worshipped.’ It is identical to the Hebrew name for the Creator, ‘Elah’ and the Aramaic (the language of Jesus) ‘Eli’, both being sister languages of Arabic. Arab Christians always called God _Allah’, even before the Messengership of Muhammad.
‘Salawaat’ means Allah’s mentioning and praising someone to His gathered angels.
The word for ‘religion’ is a translation of the arabic word ‘deen’ which is more restrictive than the Arabic. Other suggested translations might be ‘way of life’, or ‘life transaction.’
Shari’ah: literally means ‘watering hole’, but refers to the whole corpus of the Divine Law.
Jinn: The jinn are a different type of creation made from smokeless fire that inhabit the world, eat, drink, procreate, having different languages, tribes, nations and religions just like us. They often inhabit deserted buildings and dirty places. They also have the will to choose Islam or disbelieve, and will be judged on the Day of Resurrection, and punished or rewarded accordingly. They are not visible to us in their natural form, but are able to take the form of humans and some animals. They are also able to possess people, and have unique abilities and strength to carry objects at great distances over a short time. The Devil, or Shaitaan,(Satan) or Iblees is not a fallen Angel but a jinn. Everybody has an evil jinn companion that incites them to wrong. It is through communicating with your familiar jinn that some ‘fortune tellers’ are able to know details of your life, and some magicians perform incredible feats.
Not the purely materialistic, political, social or economic reasons as most ignorantly believe, which serves to illustrate just how blind are those,and helpless the task of those who seek solutions in other than that which Allah has revealed.
These are just some of the forms of worship that must be dedicated to Allah alone. Worship consists of everything that Allah loves, whether it be inward or outer, actions of the limbs, or beliefs of the heart. Allah must be worshipped with both love, fear and hope and not with one to the exclusion of others which is a path to error and disbelief. For to worship Allah with love and hope alone is to deny His wrath, and will inevitably cause one to fall into sins. To worship with fear alone is to deny His mercy, and will cause a fall to extremes. There are two conditions for any good deed to be accepted by Allah. First it must be done sincerely. That entails that you do the deed only because you wish to please Allah, and not to be admired by others etc... Secondly the action must be correct. That means it must be done the way Allah has taught us through the messenger Muhammad. An action that is sincere but not correct is not accepted, and if it is correct but not sincere it is also useless. In fact it is sin, and is a type of lesser shirk, because one is doing something that should be exclusively for Allah for someone other than Him.
Jihad actually means ‘to struggle to the utmost of ones ability’, and is not therefor limited to physical combat. This ‘jihad al nafs’, or jihad of the self has often been called ‘the greatest jihad.’ Although the muhadeetheen (scholars of the sciences of hadeeth) have declared the hadeeth on which this saying is based to be a fabricatio, the meaning is correct in the sense ththe purification of the self is the foundation upon which all the other forms of jihad depend. ‘The matter’ being Islam.
Al-Ainya. the selling of goods to a person for a certain price and then buying them back from him for a far less price. Also the selling of goods one does not own by using the buyers money to purchase those goods. It is a form of riba. This means that the people become content with agriculture and mere day to day living.. From a treaties on jihad by Sheik Abdullah bin Muhammed bin Humaid, translated into to English and can be found in the introduction to the English translation to the collection of Hadith Saheeh al Bukari, and the English Interpretation of the Qur’an by Dr. Muhammed Taqi-ud-deen Al Hilali and Dr Muhammed Muhsin Khan.
Answer: You don’t! For an excellent book that refutes the myth of Muslim hords forcing conversion at the piont of the sword read V.W. Arnolds ‘The Preaching of Islam.’
Sharia: The toatal body of Isalmic law.
Ijtihaad: exertion or effort; a scholars opinion about a certain matter based on his effort to investigate the sources of sharia. This will be covered later, inshallah.
John B. Taylor, Director of Dialogue with people of Living Faiths and Ideologies of the World Council of Churches wrote in his book _Thinking about Islam’: ‘...Thus we can feel confident that the Qur’an which we have today is as far as is humanly possible the text which was established within a few years of the Prophet’s death.’ A brief comparison with the Biblical texts would be useful. The oldest complete Biblical text is the Codex Sianaticus, found in St. Catherine’s monastery by a German biblical scholar, Constantine Tishendorf, in 1844 and is now located in the British Museum. This oldest complete Biblical text was written three hundred and sixty years after Christ. It also contains notable textual differences from the modern standard bibles, including an extra gospel, the gospel according to the Shepherd Hermes, and also an Epistle of Barnabas, not found anywhere else. The oldest copies of any substantial portion of the gospels date to about 200 C.E. The Catholic Bible contains seventeen extra books considered apocrypha by the Protestants, and other variations exists between the numerous different Christian sects. The language of Jesus was Aramaic, and all the oldest Biblical fragments are in Latin and Greek. No original Aramaic text exists, and it is noteworthy that all three languages (four including ancient Hebrew) are dead. This, as any entomologist will tell you, leaves serious problems for the correct interpretation of texts. A phrase, that in its original form and context might have a completely inoculous meaning, translated literally into another language takes a completely different connotation. Indeed it is open to serious scholarly dispute as to how much of the sayings and happenings ascribed to Jesus actually took place. None of the evangelists were eye witnesses. Even the names of the Gospellers are questionable, as the Gospels were originally circulated anonymously. In fact it was not until the council of Nicea, three hundred and forty five years after Christ, that the beginnings of what is now called "the Bible" began to be canonised. In the council of Nicea, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were four gospels chosen out of over two thousand, and by whom, and by what criterion? All the gospels were put in the middle of a room, and the group of assembled Bishops were told to go away and pray all night. The four on top were to be chosen as canonical! The Gospels themselves contain numerous contradictions, as does the Old Testament. The Hindu vedas, and writings of the Buddhists and Zoroastrians are not more able to validate scriptural texts. The Qur’an suffers from none of these inadequacies.
The Islamic calender starts from the emigration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, so is called Hijri, meaning _emigration’.
The nineteenth century saw an attempt by the likes of Noldeke and Goldiziher to discredit the hadeeth. Their arguments have been effectively refuted. Francesco Gabrielli comments in his book _Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam’:’This scepticism is opposed by some of Muhammad’s recent biographers who, while admitting that our knowledge, especially of his origins and early life, contains gaps, uncertainties and pious legends, consider tradition on the whole trustworthy and worth using, with critical discrimination, in its main out line and many details.’This position is exactly that which has always been held by the Muslim scholars of Hadith. John Bagot Glubb wrote in _The Life and Times of Muhammad’:’In consequence a new learned profession came into existence, that of the traditionalist, whose task it was to distinguish between the real saying of Muhammad and those false stories which had been forged.’
Uhaz is in Iraq.
The Kaaba is the cube like structure in the centre of the sacred Mosque in Mecca originally built by Abraham and Ismael for the worship of Allah. It was rebuilt when the Prophet was a youth, and had become the centre of idol worship throughout Arabia.
Al Bihar-Seas, so called because of the way the poem moves, according to its rhythmic patterns. At-Tawil, al-Bassit, al-Waafir, al-Kaamil, ar-Rajs, al-Khafeef, al-Hazaj, al Muttakarib, al-Munsarih, al-Muktatab, al-Muktadarak, al-Madeed, al-Mujtath, al-Ramel, al Khabab.
Quraish: The leading tribe of Mecca, indeed of Arabia. They were responsible for caring for the pilgrims during Hajj, the annual pilgrimage. Muhammad was from Beni Hashim, a sub-tribe of the Quraish.
Tawaaf: the ritual of circumbulating the Kaaba as part of the pilgrimage. See Appendix 1 Muhammed’s Prophethood. An analytical view.
Islam rejects belief in astrology. The stars do not determine anyone’s fate, nor influence their life. Ultimate control is with Allah, and _good’ and _bad luck’ are solely under the power of Allah. Belief in fortune tellers, or the stars,or the belief that some things, like rabbits feet, bring good fortune, or others bad luck, is to ascribe to those things power that only belongs to Allah, and thus commit shirk, or polytheism. Some knowledge, however, is picked up by the evil jinn who listen to the Angels issuing commands, and they carry this information to the fortuneteller, but mixes the truth with a hundred lies.
For a fascinating insite into the statements in the Bible, and the mentioning of the Prophet’s name, see Appendix ‘Muhammad in the Bible.’Deuteronomy 18:20-22S
Shaving, or cutting the hair is one of the rituals of the pilgrimage.
This was before the verses forbidding gambling were revealed.
The two authorative books of hadeeth are Saheeh al Bukari and Saheeh al Muslim.