‘Word of God’: Why Muslims are opposed to the burning of the Quran

The Quran is Islam’s holy book, the primary source of guidance and law for Muslims across the world.

Demonstrations have been held in several Muslim countries in recent weeks in response to the repeated desecration and burning of the Quran in Sweden and Denmark.

Muslim nations have been swift to respond with Saudi Arabia summoning the Danish charge d’affaires over the issue.

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Iraq expels Sweden ambassador, embassy stormed over Quran burning

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Denmark to seek legal means to prevent Quran burnings

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Iran also summoned the Swedish ambassador to Tehran while Iraq expelled Sweden’s top diplomat.

In Baghdad, hundreds of people tried to storm the Green Zone, a heavily fortified area with a number of foreign embassies and the seat of Iraq’s government.

Why are Muslims against the burning of the Quran?

The Quran is the holy book of Islam and its most sacred text. It is not merely a book but is considered the literal word of God, and Muslims treat it with utmost respect and reverence.

Muslims believe the Quran’s text has been preserved in its original form since the time of its revelation about 1,400 years ago. As such, Muslims see the burning of the Quran as a desecration of sacred scripture and an unacceptable act.

“This [burning of the Quran] is a humiliation of the faith and beliefs of Muslims, but what is more unfortunate is that this insult to the sanctities of a great population is happening under the guise of protecting freedoms,” Abbas Salimi Namin, a Tehran-based scholar, told Al Jazeera.

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL JAZEERA

Muslims, Christians urge world to respect holy books

Pakistan’s Muslim, Christian religious leadership sets precedent of religious harmony by holding joint presser along with four holy books

LAHORE: For the first time in the history of Pakistan, the religious leadership of Muslims and Christians together with four holy books appealed to the world to respect all the holy books.

Pakistan’s Muslim and Christian religious leadership set a precedent of religious harmony on Sunday as they held a joint press conference along with the four holy books, the Holy Quran, Torah, Zabur and Bible.

Chairman Pakistan Ulema Council, President International Interfaith Harmony Council Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mahmood Ashrafi was leading the gathering and addressed a press conference with the Muslim and Christian leadership at Jamia Manzoorul Islamia Lahore.

No individual, community, country, or organisation should be allowed to give the right to desecrate any divine book or Prophet and Messenger of Allah Almighty, he said, adding what happened in Sweden was unacceptable. He said they were grateful to all those who did not allow the Torah to burn.

The press conference was jointly addressed by Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mahmood Ashrafi, Allama Abdul Haq Mujahid, Maulana Muhammad Rafiq Jami, Maulana Asad Zakaria Qasmi, representative of the Church of Pakistan Pastor Emanuel Khokhar, Pastor Salim, Maulana Nauman Hasher, Maulana Muhammad Shafi Qasmi, Maulana Asadullah Farooq, Allama Zubair Abid, Maulana Aslam Siddiqui, Qari Abdul Hakeem Athar, Allama Tahir Al Hasan, Maulana Muhammad Ashfaq Patafi, Maulana Aziz Akbar Qasmi, Mufti Falak Sher, Mufti Syed Nasimul Islam, Mufti Rehmat Deen, Qari Abdul Majid Haqqani, Qari Kifayatullah, Maulana Abdul Jabar, Qari Muhammad Aslam Qadri, Maulana Qari Mubashir Rahimi, Maulana Abdul Ghaffar Farooqui, Maulana Nasir Haqqani, Qari Faisal Amin, Qari Sajid and others said that it is sad and reprehensible to allow the burning of Torah, Zabur and Injil after the burning of the holy Quran in Sweden.

The religious leaders said the European Union and United Nations should immediately take notice of this and legislate on it and make a law to respect sanctity of all heavenly religions at the global level. They said that Islam and all the heavenly religions teach peace, security, moderation and tolerance, the teachings of any religion were not about violence and extremism and the elements who spread violence and extremism were not representatives of any religion.

The religious leaders said that with the support and coordination of the Church of Pakistan, Pakistan Ulema Council and International Interfaith Harmony Council, a vigorous campaign will be launched across the Pakistan for the promotion of interfaith harmony.

The religious leaders also said that the minorities in Pakistan have full rights, and anyone cannot be allowed to usurp the rights of minorities in Pakistan. The Constitution of Pakistan was the protector of the rights of minorities. The leaders condemned the Israeli delegate’s statement against Pakistan in the United Nations Human Rights Council.

They said for peace and order during the month of Muharramul Haram, all the religious schools of thought will fully abide by the Paigham-e-Pakistan code of conduct and pursue the message which says “don’t leave your religious sect nor intervene in others religious sects”.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NEWS (PAKISTAN)

Quran burning in Sweden sparks outrage in Muslim world

The burning of a Quran outside a mosque in Sweden on one of the holiest days in Islam sparked outrage Thursday in many Muslim countries and widespread condemnations of Swedish authorities. In Iraq, several hundred people protested outside the Swedish embassy.

In Iraq, several hundred people protested outside the Swedish Embassy in Baghdad at the urging of Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric who called on the Iraqi government to break off diplomatic relations with Sweden, which he called “hostile” to Islam….

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE DECCAN HERALD

Muslim and Non-Muslim Relations Reflections on Some Qur’anic Texts

Introduction

Humanity lives today in a “global village,” where no people or nation can live in isolation from and indifferent to what goes on elsewhere. Our world is so interdependent and so interrelated that peaceful dialogue has become an imperative. In spite of the general erosion of commitment to “religion,” however interpreted or misinterpreted, religion still plays a pivotal role in shaping people’s attitudes and influencing their behavior. In spite of serious instances of abuse of various religions by some of their claimed followers so as to justify or instigate acts of brutality and bloodshed, there are positive and helpful common themes in these religions. Therefore, peaceful and candid intra-faith and inter-faith dialogues are important tools in working for such goals. This paper is a humble contribution to that dialogue from one perspective within a major world religion that is the professed faith of nearly one fifth of the human race; one that is more misunderstood than any other faith, sometimes, even, by some of its followers. This paper examines the nature and parameters of the normative relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is based mainly on an attempt to understand the Qur’an in its own textual and historical context. To do this, it is necessary to begin with the methodology and assumptions that underpin the paper.

Methodology

The basic methodology and assumptions of this paper are summed up as follows: As a religious faith, normative Islam is not identical with the actions of its “followers.” Like other religions, followers or claimed followers are imperfect, fallible human beings. There are times when their actions conform, in various degrees, to the normative teachings of their faith. But there are also times when their actions are either independent of or even in violation of such normative teachings.

FULL ARTICLE FROM ISLAM ONLINE

The Qur’an and Its Link to Christianity and Judaism

By Charles Mathewes, Ph.D., University of Virginia

In the past 50 years, thinkers have come to realize that Islam is an intrinsic part of the history of Western thinking on evil in complicated ways. Islam is linked to the older traditions of Jewish and Christian thought, but offers an alternate vision to them. There is also the way in which the Islam regards the Qur’an.

Islam and Other Abrahamic Religions

Islamic thought was deeply influenced by earlier Greek, Jewish, and Christian thinkers; and so, to understand Islamic thought reveals things about those earlier traditions that might otherwise go missing.

Islam was itself the source of the transmission of much pre-Christian literature and philosophy, especially Greek philosophy, to Western Christendom. These also picked up a good bit of insight on a series of important topics from the Islamic philosophers and lawyers themselves.

Also, Islam serves in a way as a kind of internal critic of the mainstream of Western thinking about evil; a critic who is both within and without this mainstream. It not only serves as a useful contrastive option to the main line of thinking that Western ideas of evil follow, but it also serves as a vital account that has its own integrity, even if it is somewhat oblique to that mainstream.

This is a transcript from the video series Why Evil Exists. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

The Uniqueness of the Qur’an

The Qur’an has a complicated relationship with the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity. (Image: Acquired by Henry Walters/Public domain)

The Qur’an is unique among the scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths in explicitly rendering the episode of the origin of evil in Creation by recounting the rebellion of Iblis, the rebellious spirit. Iblis is the one who becomes ash-Shaitan, the primordial rebel against God.

The Qur’an is the sacred text of Islam, but it is not viewed, per se, as the Muslim Bible. Yes, it’s roughly as long as the Christian New Testament and similarly divided into sections. There are 114 suras (chapters) in the Qur’an and each of those suras is composed of verses called ayahs, which is also translated as the word ‘sign’.

Each of the verses, thus, of each of the suras of the Qur’an is a sign of God’s providence and love towards humanity. So far so good; it looks like another holy book.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE GREAT COURSES

Faith and Values : Muslims, Christians have much in common

All months tend to bring to mind the special events that occur within them; for the month of April, it is Spring and Easter.

Muslims also believe in Jesus, the son of Mary. As a matter of fact, from the 114 chapters that consist in the Holy Qur’an, the 19th one is named after his Mother, Surah Maryam, or Chapter Mary.

Within this chapter, the story of Jesus’s miraculous birth is told. He is mentioned many times throughout the Holy Qur’an. Millions of Muslims are also named after the son and mother, which is Isa and Maryam in Arabic. Thus, if studied, one will find many similarities with the Christian faith when it comes to Jesus, from his virgin birth to his miracles, i.e. curing the lepers and bringing the dead back to life.

The main differences between Muslims and Christians about Jesus regard his divinity and his death. Muslims honor Jesus as a great prophet of God who was not crucified, but taken to the heavens alive, and that he and will reappear during the end of time, the Second Coming of Christ.

A very interesting note is that Easter this year will be on April 21, 2019, which will fall on the Islamic date of the 15th of the month of Shaban, the birth anniversary of the 12th Imam, Muhammad al Mahdi. He is the great-grandson of Prophet Muhammad.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE MORNING CALL 

Five myths about hijab

From hijabi Barbie to the hijabi emoji, the Muslim headscarf is now ubiquitous. For some, a woman with her hair covered or her face veiled evokes victimhood and a system of domination, or perhaps exoticism (think of the real-life and theatrical versions of “Not Without My Daughter”). Fox News host Jeanine Pirro stoked those fears this month when she said the “hee-jab” worn by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is “antithetical” to the Constitution. That’s one of many myths that persist about wearing hijab.

MYTH NO. 1

‘Hijab’ means’headscarf.’

This month, Army Times reported on an alleged incident in which an Army sergeant was ordered to remove her headscarf by a senior noncommissioned officer, even though the sergeant had “an approved exemption from her brigade commander to wear a hijab in uniform.” In a story about first lady Melania Trump covering her head for a 2017 audience with the pope but eschewing a scarf for a visit to Saudi Arabia, NBC News reported that the Saudi government “did not request that Mrs. Trump wear a head covering known as a hijab, or a headscarf.”

“Hijab” means “curtain” or “partition,” not “headscarf.” The Koran uses forms of the words “khimar” and “jilbab,” but not “hijab,” when describing women’s dress. “Khimar” means “cover” and corresponds to what we would call a scarf; “jilbab” is an outer garment.

“Hijab” has become a common way of describing a Muslim woman’s head covering, but sharia rules on modesty are about more than covering one’s hair — they deal with a range of attire and conduct, applicable to both men and women, intended to protect interactions between men and women from sexual innuendo. It’s not necessarily offensive to use “hijab” as a synonym for “headscarf.” (It’s a lot closer than other terms, as long as you say “wearing hijab” rather than “wearing a/the hijab.”) But either way, fixating on one piece of cloth misses the point of sharia’s holistic rules for modest behavior.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

‘This is about equality’: Muslim couple produces braille Quran in English

(RNS) – When Yadira Thabatah converted to Islam 13 years ago from Catholicism, she was eager to learn everything she could about her new religion.

The only thing slowing Yadira down was that the 34-year-old mother of four living in Fort Worth, Tex., was born blind. When she and her husband, 33-year-old Nadir Thabatah, who is legally blind but has partial vision, looked for high-quality, English-language resources that she could read, they found nothing.

So in 2017, she and Nadir decided it was time for some DIY action. They spent eight months converting a popular English-language translation of Islam’s holy book into braille characters, then used a crowdfunding site to raise money to buy a braille embosser and began producing Quran translations right in their garage.

In the past three years, under the auspices of their nonprofit, Islam By Touch, the couple has sent more than 150 braille Qurans to U.S. mosques for distribution to visually impaired Muslims as well as to individuals directly. They have also launched an app to help visually impaired Muslims learn about their faith.

The first time Yadira was able to read the Quran for herself was when she was proofreading her own braille rendering of an English translation.

“I actually cried,” Yadira told Religion News Service. “I’m a reader by nature. Going from being Muslim for about a decade and never having read the Quran, the word of Allah, to actually giving this amazing opportunity to other blind people. I can’t put it into words.”

Other Muslims had recommended audio tapes of Islamic literature over the years, and Yadira did listen to plenty, as well as CDs with translations of the Quran. They got the job done, she said, but she still longed to read the Quran with her own hands.

Do men have the exclusive right to interpret the Qur’an?

ASMA BARLAS 25 February 2019

Several years ago, Muslim students of the Avicenna Society of Rotterdam organized a debate between Tariq Ramadan and myself about the status of Muslims in the West. In speaking about the discrimination and violence Muslim women have suffered in the name of Islam, I pointed out that the Qur’an actually affirms their equality with men. It does so by teaching that God created both from the same self (nafs), made them viceregents (khalifa) on earth and appointed them one another’s guides and guardians (awliya) with the mutual obligation to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong. Yet, there is no trace of these verses in dominant interpretations of the Qur’an or in Muslim law. Instead, both law and exegesis foreground a handful of verses/lines (less than six out of more than 6,000 verses) that they take as advocating male supremacy over women.’

My larger point was to question why Muslims invest only men with the authority to interpret the Qur’an and why they are averse to interpreting it differently than they do. I have read it as an egalitarian and anti-patriarchal text in Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an. At the end of the debate, several women in the audience asked Ramadan what he thought about women’s readings of the Qur’an. Women, he eventually said, had to achieve a certain mastery in order to be able to comment on it knowledgeably. All these years later, I can still recall the incensed face of a young woman in hijab who was repeatedly pushing him to clarify just how many more centuries he felt women had to wait before men would regard them as being knowledgeable. He didn’t say.

The truth is that the Qur’an doesn’t authorize only men or a scholarly community to interpret it and nor is there an ordained clergy or church in Islam. Nor does the Qur’an say it came only for the literate. To the contrary it says it is meant also for the “unlettered” Bedouins in the deserts of Arabia. In a remarkably post-Reformation vein, it insists that believers should have a direct relationship with God and should rely on our own reason and intelligence to decipher its verses (ayat, or “signs” of God).

FULL ARTICLE FROM OPEN DEMOCRACY 

Strangely Familiar

‘God in the Qur’an’

In his 1966 book The Gates of the Forest, Elie Wiesel relates the Hasidic tale of the long line of rabbis who performed a miraculous ritual, averting catastrophe for their communities in times of crisis. They would go into the forest to meditate, light a fire, and recite a special prayer. They did so in imitation of the eighteenth-century master of all Hasidim, Israel ben Eliezer, usually known by the honorific title “the Baal Shem Tov,” the master of the Holy Name. The generations of rabbis who succeeded the Baal Shem Tov, Wiesel recounts, gradually forgot parts of the ritual. The fourth in that forgetful lineage, Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn, spoke plaintively to God of his predicament: “I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And indeed, telling the story was sufficient to avert the catastrophe. Why? The Hasidic tale ends with a great tribute both to God and to humankind: “God made man because he loves stories.”

God made Jack Miles because God also loves someone who loves stories. In his 1996 Pulitzer-prizewinning God: A Biography, Miles approached the Hebrew Bible as one might approach a body of literary work produced by Yahweh-Elohim, the Lord God; in a follow-up 2001 book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, he undertook the same task with the New Testament, focusing in particular on the four Gospels. Holder of a Harvard doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Miles left the Society of Jesus before undertaking formal theological studies; yet his Jesuit education, tracing back to his days in a Jesuit high school in Chicago, equipped him to  comprehend multiple languages and their literatures: English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and Spanish; but also Hebrew, Aramaic and, last but not least, Ethiopic (Ge’ez), the ancient Semitic language of the Horn of Africa. He has enjoyed a long career as a Distinguished Professor of both English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Miles admits that he does not know Arabic very well, but his background in other Semitic languages and his careful comparative study of various English and other renderings of the Qur’an allows him to read it with notable sensitivity. Most of the stories told at some length in the Qur’an that have biblical resonances find their parallels in the Torah, especially Genesis and Exodus. Thus do Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the family of Abraham, the patriarch Joseph, and Moses appear on stage again to play their parts in the Qur’an.

FULL ARTICLE FROM COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE