A Process of Elimination Proving the Koran's Inspiration

Introduction

This article presents a process of elimination which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the Koran is a God-inspired book. It uses history, logic and comparative religion to do so.

The Koran’s Unique Treatment of a Tale from 1 Samuel, And What It Indicates

Now, the Koran states repeatedly that its purpose is to confirm the earlier scriptures, which are listed in these verses:

87:18 - Surely this is in the ancient scrolls,

87:19 - The scrolls of Abraham and Moses.

4:163 - ....We gave to David Psalms.

5:46 - And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light....

So there are four previous scriptures the essence of which are contained in the Koran. The first is an unidentified scripture that the blessed Abraham wrote. The second is the Pentateuch that the blessed Moses wrote. The third is the Psalms of the blessed David (none of the Psalms written by other people having been inspired by God, given what the Koran said). The fourth was a Gospel revealed to the blessed Jesus himself, and not written by some other anonymous author about him from a third-person point of view the way that the four Gospels are. The Koran said that this Gospel was revealed to the blessed Jesus himself, so presumably he either wrote it himself or dictated it. This Gospel is now obviously one of the lost books of the Bible, and might possibly have been the Gospel of the Nazarenes, which was being used in Arabia at the time of the Koran’s writing. For more on this possibility, see http://understanding-islam.com/related/text.asp? type=question&qid=299/.

It may bother some people that two of the four scriptures the Koran says it confirms either cannot be found or cannot be positively identified, but it doesn’t matter to us Muslims, as we believe that everything we need to know from these unknown scriptures is in the Koran.

But moving on, and getting closer to my point, the Koran says repeatedly that it is here to confirm these scriptures, but there is something else that many people miss, especially if they’re Christians making the extremely common and extremely absurd assertion that according to the Koran, the Bible is infallible. (The Koran, in fact, does not even mention the Bible at all except to call Christians and Jews “people of the Bible”.) The Koran says that, in addition to confirming what the earlier scriptures said, it also corrects them where they have been corrupted (the corruption itself being mentioned specifically in 2:75-79 and 2:174):

10:37 - This Koran could not have been forged apart from God; but it is a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinguishing of the Book, wherein is no doubt, from the Lord of all Being.

5:15 - People of the Book, now there has come to you Our Messenger, making clear to you many things you have been concealing of the Book, and effacing many things....

There are a few stories in the Koran which did not come from these four scriptures, but no actual doctrines or laws.

On this subject, let’s look at the Koran’s version of the story of David (peace be upon him) and Goliath. In the Bible’s version of the tale (which can be found in 1 Samuel 17) the Jews gather to fight the Philistines, and David (peace be upon him) is a small boy who kills Goliath, the hugest man in the army of the Philistines, with a slingshot, and as if that were not unlikely enough, the army of the Philistines retreat when they see this. It doesn’t matter how big or strong Goliath was, or how great a warrior he was: he was one man and they were an entire army. I refuse to believe that an army would ever flee at the sight of one of its men being killed, even if it were by a child with a lucky shot with his weapon. Instead, a real army would be motivated to attack at that moment, and avenge the death of their respected warrior. When have you ever heard of an army retreating from a slingshot? Or even from a single death of one of their numbers due to any means?

You might ask why am I talking about this. Yes, there is a point to it, and I am now getting to it. Now, compare the events in the Bible that I’ve been describing to the Koran’s account of the same events below:

2:249 - ...Said those who reckoned they should meet God, “How often a little company has overcome a numerous company, by God’s leave! And God is with the patient.”

2:250 - So, when they went forth against Goliath and his hosts, they said, “Our Lord, pour out upon us patience, and make firm our feet, and give us aid against the people of the unbelievers!”

2:251 - And they routed them, by the leave of God, and David slew Goliath....Had God not driven back the people, some by the means of others, the earth had surely corrupted; but God is bounteous unto all beings.

That is the entire account of the battle and David (peace be on him) and Goliath.

Now, I have learned much over the course of my life about myth and folklore, studying it as a hobby for many, many years. Through my studies I have found that if you see enough instances of how factual (or possibly factual) occurences become embellished and distorted, thus made into legends, you get a sense for how it happens, the way legends are constructed. That sense is strong when I compare the Bible’s and Koran’s versions of this story. If neither account of these events is completely accurate, then the stories are legends at least to some extent, having some elements of the story changed (usually embellished, embellishment being the most common means of distortion of facts as a legend grows and changes).

Picture this: a small army fights a large army and overcomes it, the larger army eventually fleeing. One fight during this battle which is somehow significant (if only because it involves famous people) is between David (peace be on him) and a man named Goliath. Now picture this: after the story of what happened has been distorted with the inevitable embellishments that result from word of mouth tales, people end up changing the small-army-overcoming-a-large-army fact into the story that a small boy named David (peace be on him) overcome a large man named Goliath, using only an unlikely weapon, and the enemy army of the Philistines fled when they saw this kill take place. It makes perfect sense. In fact, it is a flawless example of how a historical event becomes legend.

The Koran’s Unique Treatment of the Story of the Blessed Noah, And What It Indicates

Another instance of this sort of thing happening in the Koran is what you get when you compare the two respective versions of the tale of Noah (peace be on him) in the Koran and in the Bible. In the Bible’s version (Genesis 6-9), God floods the whole world (and despite what creationst “scientists” may tell you, there is really no evidence of such a huge, worldwide flood having ever occurred), and somehow a man collected two of every species of animal out there and somehow squeezed them all aboard a single ship, and the animals all stayed on board, and none of the animals killed any other animals. Further-more, a single man and his family turn out to be the only good and pious people on the face of the earth. Once the flood is over, God creates the rainbow as a symbol of His promise that he won’t flood the world again. (Imagine an infallible, omniscient and morally perfect Being actually regretting something He did!)

To be fair, you could interpret the rainbow element as simply meaning that God told Noah (peace be on him) to look for the rainbow that inevitably comes after the rain to be reminded by the clear symbolism of the rainbow that, even through the worst future floods, there will always be one there, beautiful peace after a terrible storm. But even if that is the meaning of the promise and the text is not actually claiming that the rainbow was invented after this flood, the number of clear legendary and unrealistic elements in the story is quite high.

Now, in the Koran’s version of this story (which has little bits and pieces of the blessed Moses’s preaching and what not spread throughout many surahs, but the real story is told in 11:25-49 and in all of Surah 71), the blessed Noah preached to his own civilization and was rejected by most of its people, yet he managed to gain some followers, and he took them aboard the ship with his family and the local animals, and his civilization was flooded. There was no need to take two of every species on earth because the whole earth was not being flooded. The part about the rainbow is left out. The Koran’s version of the tale matches the findings of modern history, which reveal that, while there is no real evidence of a worldwide flood (despite the easily disproved misinformation that creationist “scientists” may offer you), there were many very large, local floods in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, sometimes destroying entire civilizations (like Heleneke, if I spelled that correctly). This Bible-to-Koran comparison of the story is another case where it looks exactly like the Bible contains the legendary version of the story whereas the Koran contains what seems to be the truth behind the embellishments and myth.

Now I finally come to my point. Several things must be considered here. First, people these days are always going on about the Koran being a compilation of numerous variant versions of different traditions--such big news, considering that the Koran itself, in oh so many words, admits to this itself! (This is a subject I will discuss at a later time.) Now as for these variant versions of existing stories, chew on this: when have you ever heard of a later written version of any legend being more realistic and historically accurate than another version having been written centuries ago? Centuries of oral tradition? Are the earliest tellings of a legend not always the least embellished (or close enough to always that you may as well use the word)? In all the reading I’ve done on folklore and myth, do you know how many examples of this outside the Koran I have seen, altogether? The grand total is zero. Zero times.

How Could These Things Have Happened?

No, it is a well known fact that legends slip further and further away from their basis in fact as time goes on, and many centuries elapsed between the supposed events of the blessed Noah’s ark and the Jewish war against the Philistines. And yet the Koran’s variant traditions of these stories looks like a quite possible rendition of the events stripped of all later legendary embellishments, and these in the versions that came centuries after--in fact, the latest and as such most modern versions of the stories. In seventh century Arabia, people passed down stories through oral tradition. Modern methods of historical research did not exist. Considering these things, how could somebody from seventh century Arabia be able to construct such a convincing depiction of the facts behind the myths in stories coming from other countries and handed down through centuries of oral tradition?

It wasn’t even likely that the blessed Muhammad was able to read the original biblical accounts of these stories, because even if he turned out not to be illiterate, it wouldn’t matter since the Bible had not been translated into Arabic by that time. And even if he could read the Bible in its original languages or have it translated to him, for the reasons I stated he wouldn’t have been capable of tracing the roots of the biblical stories. The only possible explanation for his realistic and historically superior treatment of them would be that he was actually brilliant enough to figure out a plausible root-of-the-legend telling from his own historically ignorant standpoint.

The Inconsistency of the Approach Involved If The Blessed Muhammad Was Trying To Strip the Tales of Legend

But--and here we are getting closer to the elimination of the last secular possibility--if that were the case, if he were trying to determine in this writing of his the real events earlier religions described, stripped of legend, and was able to make such very convincing guesses at it, then why did he still write of the miraculous and marvelous in certain other stories in his Book? The stories in this Book include a baby speaking fluently while being born (19:24-33), a camel appearing out of thin air (7:73, 17:59), a staff turning into a snake (26:32), a clay bird being made into a real bird by breathing onto it (5:110), someone living nine-hundred-and-fifty years (29:14), a man controlling the winds (21:81), and et cetera. Did the blessed Muhammad want to strip only certain stories of legendary embellishments and elements to make them seem realistic, and leave others the way they were in the earlier scriptures or traditions, things that would undoubtably seem legendary to those who have faith in miraculous events?

The Book knows that this reaction is inevitable and was already commonly being made during the time of its gradual revelation (the book mentioning the fact that it was being revealed gradually in 25:32, 17:106 and 76:23), as you can see from many verses such as this one:

68:15 - When Our signs are recited to [the kafir], he says, “Fairy-tales of the ancients!”

Why make attempts with some stories to strip them of legend, removing most or all of their marvelous or dubious qualities, and leave other stories brimming with the miraculous? On the one hand, the Book is so much of the former, as I have pointed out, with the stories of the blessed Noah and his ark or the blessed David and Goliath, and on the other hand, the Koran also, for example, leaves many of the most astonishing and mind-bending of miracles from both the canonical Gospels and some non-canonical ones exactly as Christians believed they occurred. You have the virgin birth, the feeding of the five thousand, and even the blessed Jesus raising the dead.

One Final Secular Explanation And The Reason It Doesn’t Work

The whole thing just doesn’t add up. The only way it could add up is if there were different authors of the Book with different ideas about ancient legends. At this point skeptics will often be jumping all over that possibility, asking me how I knew that the Koran was written by only one person. I have already discussed this in part in my response to Denis Giron’s article “Qur’an: A Work of Multiple Hands?” on the “Criticisms on Islam” page of this site. Furthermore, it is generally accepted even by non-Muslims, including non-Muslim scholars, that the Koran was written by the blessed Muhammad alone--its consistent style, for example, being evidence of this. But above all else, you can tell that there was only a single author behind the Koran because when the Book responds to the accusations of its contemporary critics, both the critics being quoted and the responses the Koran gives always refer the author as a single person. Some examples of this:

37:35 - When it was said to them, “There is no god but God,” they were ever waxing proud,

37:36 - Saying, “What, shall we forsake our gods for a poet possessed?”

21:5 - Nay, but they say: “A hotchpotch of nightmares! Nay, he has forged it; nay, he is a poet! Now therefore let him bring us a sign, even as the ancient ones were sent as Messengers.

52:29 - Therefore remind! By thy Lord’s blessing thou art not a soothsayer neither possessed.

59:30 - Or do they say, “He is a poet for whom we awair Fate’s uncertainty?”

59:31 - Say: “Await! I shall be awaiting with you.”

59:32 - Or do their intellects bid them do this? Or are they [just] an insolent people?

59:33 - Or do they say, “He has invented [the Koran]?” Nay, but they do not believe.

59:34 - Then let them bring a discourse like it, if they speak truly.

The Inescapable Conclusion

As far as I can tell, there is really only one way in which everything fits together logically, and that is that this single author called the blessed Muhammad was a true prophet. He knew what really happened in the cases of each event he recorded, some containing miracles and/or excitement, some quite mundane which were embellished after they happened into dramatic and arguably (or more than arguably) incredulous tales. The Koran’s unprecedented approach is the work of someone who had the truth revealed to him about things that happened in other countries and long before he was born. He told the truth about all the stories he accounted, because the truth was in him, undoubtably placed there by a higher being who knows the truth, cares about truth and wants to reveal truth to the human race.

And so I am going to close here with a last quotation from this Book the wonders of which I have just spelled out in part, this quotation taken from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation while all the previous ones were taken from A.J. Arberry’s translation because Ali translated this verse more clearly and powerfully, and it sums up the conclusion to this matter, and perhaps the whole Koran:

21:18 - Nay, We hurl the Truth against falsehood, and it knocks out its brain, and behold, falsehood doth perish!....