Let me share with you some real religious truths: the Koran likens the murder of an innocent life to the murder of the entire humanity, such is its.
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This means that the Qur'an was a living text during the lifetime of Muhammad.
Religion: The Koran (Qur'an)
Certain verses revealed to Muhammad were later repudiated by him as "satanic" verses revealed not by Gabriel but by Satan. These verses were expunged from the text that so many had memorized. After the death of Muhammad, the text of the Qur'an was written down in the caliphate of Abu Bakr. Until 'Uthman, one and only one written text existed. For more than a decade after the death of Muhammad, the Qur'an remained primarily an oral text in the memories of the faithful.
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Nevertheless, the military expansion of Islam led to two direct consequences concerning the integrity of the Quranic text. First, large numbers of the faithful were dying out in the various military expeditions. Each time someone died who had the Quranic text memorized, that meant that one copy of the Qur'an disappeared forever. Second, the expansion of Islam swelled the ranks of the faithful. Many of these new converts spoke other langagues and the original Arabic of the Qur'an began to corrupt.
Faced with these two threats to the integrity of the Qur'an , 'Uthman orderd a rescension of the text to be made and to serve as the definitive written version of the text. A rescension is a version of a text that is assembled from all the variant versions of that text. In Islamic history, there is no variation between these two sources, so the Uthmanic "rescension" is largely a codifying of a single version of a text.
This version, the 'Uthmanic rescension , is the version of the Qur'an that has remained, unchanged, the central holy text of Islam. The Qur'an has one overriding theme, endlessly repeated and elaborated throughout the text: The God of Islam is both a stern judge and endlessly forgiving; obedience to God wipes away all transgression. This submission, however, must be fully and rationally given; faith iman is a rational consent to the truth of the word of God.
Quran - Wikipedia
Therefore, much of the Qu'ran concerns the word of God and how it is received and believed, or not received and believed as the case may be. Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library. Religion Around the World.
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Freedom of Religion in Israel. Treament of Jews in Arab World. References to Jews in the Koran. King James New Testament. About the New Testament. But it seems there are more. Manal Al Sharif, a campaigner for women's right to drive in Saudi Arabia. Women scholars taught judges and imams, issued fatwas, and traveled to distant cities. Some made lecture tours across the Middle East. For most of Western civilization, men wrote history, and they wrote what they knew. In the context of Islamic culture, the erasure of women was rather more complex. In an effort to keep women shielded from public view, the lives and works of learned women were simply left unrecorded.
A generation ago, my own mother had done the same.
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Given the tradition of the unnamed woman, the nine thousand women the Sheikh had found were probably just a fraction of the female Islamic scholars through history. Bust of Aristotle, ca - BC.
Before Aristotle became a core text, and before the medieval scholars enshrined their views on gender roles in to law, men and women were accorded far more equal freedoms in Islam. The Taliban gunman who shoots a girl for going to school. The mullah who bars women from his mosque. The firebrand who claims that feminism is a Western ideology undermining the Islamic way of life. The Westerner who claims that Islam oppresses women, and always has. And yet, with the exception of a single-volume introduction, published in English, his research lies dormant in the hard drive of his computer.
Forty volumes would prove too expensive, said his usual publishers in Damascus, Beirut, and Lucknow. Despite entreaties from his students, he wants to see it as a book before publishing it online. Some of his students have started a Muhaddithat fund, attempting to raise money for publication.
The Qur'an
Women praying in Shiraz, Iran. She has divided opinions ever since the seventh century, among both Muslims and non-Muslims. Khadija ran a caravan business in Mecca. Her marriage proposal to the future Prophet was forthright: Khadija emerges as an impressive presence, but it is Aisha who shimmers: She was betrothed at six or seven. He was shown my picture in silk. She is your wife. The marriage was an extremely happy one. Nujoud Ali, the year-old divorcee from Yemen, She was ten when I met her, in Sana, Yemen. A child with a passion for Tom and Jerry cartoons, she had been married at nine.
After one sister was kidnapped and another raped, her unemployed father, who had sixteen children and two wives, figured an early marriage would keep Nujood fed and safe. On her wedding day, she got a twenty-dollar ring, three dresses, and two hijabs, but the excitement wore off by the evening, when, she said, her thirty-year-old groom raped her. A year later, she made Yemeni history by taking a taxi downtown to the courts and demanding a divorce. Asked by her future lawyer why, she responded: When a law in Yemen was passed raising the minimum marriage age to seventeen, it met with so much opposition from conservatives that it was repealed.
It took until for there to be a concerted push to pass a law banning child marriages. Akram teaching a class. One Sunday, the Sheikh was teaching a class on child marriage in Oxford. Arzoo raised her hand and asked how Islamic law could possibly condone anything that led to such suffering. She spoke of parents marrying off their kids for money rather than protection; of internal bleeding and prolapsed uteruses, those all-too common results of underage intercourse and underage childbirth.
For weeks, Azroo and Mehrun, another female student, debated the issue with Akram. At first, he held that while child marriage was permissible, no girl should have sex before she begins menstruating. He had gone back to the sources, and had found an eighth-century judge and jurist, Ibn Shubruma, with a sound fatwa against the practice of child marriage. Ibn Shubruma argued that the issue hinged on autonomy. When girls reach puberty, they can choose whom to marry. By being married in childhood, this choice was taken away from them.
Saudi women wait for their drivers outside a shopping mall in Riyadh, Unfortunately, many of the men who deny their wives and daughters basic freedoms hide behind their Korans. A favourite passage for patriarchs is the famous 4: These six lines must surely rank among the most hotly debated in Muslim scripture. One popular translation, by the early-twentieth-century English translator Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, reads:. So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.
Debates on how to translate the verse rage. New translations suggest less sexist meanings than earlier ones. Suffragettes in Zurich, Switzerland, January One thing remains certain: Muftis, or Islamic judges, cite it to excuse domestic violence.