Concept of God in Quran

[Safaa]

From : Safaa

Sent : Saturday, October 28, 2006 4:23 AM

 

Subject : RE: Finally some truth about Islamic empires... the concept of GOD

 

 

 

Ala,

 

It might be my misunderstanding taking your emphasizing iterations as a point of difference. What I wanted to confirm is that I found a Quranic agreement with those points of having free choice as a base line. As for those who glorify Quran or religion, there should be no objection to their ways. They have the full right to experience their interface "faith" the way that they think more closer to them selves.

 

Those who believe in coupling and merging God and Prophecy as one identity might find my comment on Quran's beauty wordings as odd. I think this issue need to be detailed before we move to other points.

 

>These are very courageous words and reflect a lot of real faith in God

Indeed these words are not mine , these are of Quran. To the possible surprise of those who might consider your hypothesis , of possible Mohamed visioning of God words ,as non Islamic. I would refer them to the most power statement by Quran describing the process of revelation of Quran.. Quran used the word "inspire" Wahee.. Have a look

الأنعام 19

 

قُلْ أَيُّ شَيْءٍ أَكْبَرُ شَهَادةً قُلِ ٱللَّهُ شَهِيدٌ بِيْنِي وَبَيْنَكُمْ وَأُوحِيَ إِلَيَّ هَـٰذَا ٱلْقُرْآنُ لأُنذِرَكُمْ بِهِ وَمَن بَلَغَ أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَشْهَدُونَ أَنَّ مَعَ ٱللَّهِ آلِهَةً أُخْرَىٰ قُل لاَّ أَشْهَدُ قُلْ إِنَّمَا هُوَ إِلَـٰهٌ وَاحِدٌ وَإِنَّنِي بَرِيءٌ مِّمَّا تُشْرِكُونَ

 

الأنعام 93

 

وَمَنْ أَظْلَمُ مِمَّنِ ٱفْتَرَىٰ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ كَذِباً أَوْ قَالَ أُوْحِيَ إِلَيَّ وَلَمْ يُوحَ إِلَيْهِ شَيْءٌ وَمَن قَالَ سَأُنزِلُ مِثْلَ مَآ أَنَزلَ ٱللَّهُ وَلَوْ تَرَىۤ إِذِ ٱلظَّالِمُونَ فِي غَمَرَاتِ ٱلْمَوْتِ وَٱلْمَلاۤئِكَةُ بَاسِطُوۤاْ أَيْدِيهِمْ أَخْرِجُوۤاْ أَنْفُسَكُمُ ٱلْيَوْمَ تُجْزَوْنَ عَذَابَ ٱلْهُونِ بِمَا كُنتُمْ تَقُولُونَ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ غَيْرَ ٱلْحَقِّ وَكُنْتُمْ عَنْ آيَاتِهِ تَسْتَكْبِرُونَ

 

 

 

النحل 68

 

وَأَوْحَىٰ رَبُّكَ إِلَىٰ ٱلنَّحْلِ أَنِ ٱتَّخِذِي مِنَ ٱلْجِبَالِ بُيُوتاً وَمِنَ ٱلشَّجَرِ وَمِمَّا يَعْرِشُونَ

 

 

 

الإسراء 39

 

ذَلِكَ مِمَّآ أَوْحَىٰ إِلَيْكَ رَبُّكَ مِنَ ٱلْحِكْمَةِ وَلاَ تَجْعَلْ مَعَ ٱللَّهِ إِلَـٰهاً آخَرَ فَتُلْقَىٰ فِي جَهَنَّمَ مَلُوماً مَّدْحُوراً أُوحِىَ

 

الكهف 27

 

وَٱتْلُ مَآ أُوْحِيَ إِلَيْكَ مِن كِتَابِ رَبِّكَ لاَ مُبَدِّلَ لِكَلِمَاتِهِ وَلَن تَجِدَ مِن دُونِهِ مُلْتَحَداً أوْحَى

 

مريم 11

 

فَخَرَجَ عَلَىٰ قَوْمِهِ مِنَ ٱلْمِحْرَابِ فَأَوْحَىٰ إِلَيْهِمْ أَن سَبِّحُواْ بُكْرَةً وَعَشِيّاً

 

 

Quran is very sensitive in using words. So using such Wahee word need to be examined. And your point is not violating the broad meaning of inspiration by God.

 

I think Quran is the miracle of Mohamed, not because of it's wordings though. if wording style is the miracle then it would be contradicting to the message of Quran that clearly specifies that Mohamed was send as blessing to the whole humanity

{ إِنَّ فِي هَـٰذَا لَبَلاَغاً لِّقَوْمٍ عَابِدِينَ } * { وَمَآ أَرْسَلْنَاكَ إِلاَّ رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ }

 

Alanbia 21-107

 

The blessing here wouldn't be completed when Quran gets translated. Indeed Muslim Ulamaa "scholars" had noticed this and prohibited translation till about one hundreds years ago. They knew that it's beautiful wording might losses it's power upon translation.

 

 

I think if there is a Quran miracle then it is through setting a new rules of interacting God , that is the rule of using free mind and choice.

Prior to Mohamed, prophets used to come up with physical miracles to prove their divine identity.That was the case when such prophets had came with limited mission, either time wise or people extension wise. So such physical miracle might be convincing to those who experienced it in person. With Mohamed the mission was claimed to be unlimited, time and people wise. It claims itself for every one.. So what type of miracle this should be. I think it chooses to preach the absolute fact , the fact of free experience of God which should be there among all people any time.. That is where I put the Quran statement of

 

Khatam Al nabeen .. the end of prophets

 

 

There is no any boarder for such fact and so there is no any meaning of a later prophecy. every one from now is the prophet of him/her self.!

 

Commenting on your specific exercising God practice , let me remind you of a very interesting aspect of Quranic Sin and good deeds.

 

Among all other religions , Quran was unique in instating checks and balances count for this. There is no absolute Sinful or absolute virtue deed. The final decision is based on the final balance

{ فَمَن ثَقُلَتْ مَوَازِينُهُ فَأُوْلَـٰئِكَ هُمُ ٱلْمُفْلِحُونَ }

 

Almuaminon 23-102

 

Such balances came in a very up normal counting, the virtue is multiplied by ten.So committing ten sins , in religious code, can easily be counter weighted withone act of Charity " Hasana" ! that what Muslims call "Kufara" ..However,looking into main stream Islamic message , the count seems to be ten for the sin

not for the good deeds!! Those who drink a cup of wine, might not be able to avoid the punishment of 80 wiping in a sharia ruled state.

Such mechanism of bad and good might comply with your zoologist interesting point of human

struggle between the two.. I think Quran is emphasizing such fact, admitting that bad is much harder to resist ,OR doing good might so hard to accomplish knowing how much greedy those early were ! So setting the one to ten in balance counting..

 

I couldn't digest your

" Here is an example: Quran at times refers to our perfection but does mention

that God inflicts us with ignorance of so many things and then God demands from

us to follow the right undefined path to faith."

Do you have a proof to the above from a Quranic text, or you might be referring to interpretations by some Scholars.?

 

I personally think Quran has one unified message.. Human are the most perfect creature on earth.You might be referring to the fact that Quran criticizing human for not being some times able to find out the right path, that has nothing to do with perfection. According to Quran , human were equipped with the necessary tools to

visualize the way. It is Satan , the other force, that make the struggle of find it so fun, and so hard too!

 

 

As for the tautology aspect of religion. Quran went to say that other ways of practicing are accepted, so no meaning of tautology as far as religion is concerned. It is experiencing God, the absolute power, that makes sense of such tautology in Quran.

 

Cheers

 

Safaa

[Safaa]

From : ala

Sent : Sunday, October 29, 2006 2:09 PM

Subject : RE: Finally some truth about Islamic empires... the concept of GOD

 

 

Interesting...................

 

((As for those who glorify Quran or religion, there should be no objection to their ways. They have the full right to experience their interface "faith" the way that they think more closer to them selves.))

Of course we are free to worship God the way we choose, it is God who gave us the free will as its/his/her ultimate gift and no one should tamper with the legitimacy of the free will. My principle belief is to allow humans to reach God in whatever mean possible/available for them and in-line with humanistic and existential belief, humans are free and entitled to connect to God with or without religion. So when I refer to critiques of religious people's thoughts I don't mean to degrade or demonise their religious belief system but to open grounds for furthering the debate for the sake of humans' development rather than just the development of our religious beliefs, although you may argue by saying that humans' potential development is directly related to or an extension of their religious belief development, then I would disagree with that and suggest that our religious development is an extension to our personal development to reach our full potential. My concept of reaching God is more related to reaching human's potential than developing religious nonsense to avoid or I should say to be rescued from been punished after death.

 

((Those who believe in coupling and merging God and Prophecy as one identity might find my comment on Quran's beauty wordings as odd. I think this issue need to be detailed before we move to other points.))

The coupling of God and prophets can be seen as the inability of some of us of reaching God in ways beyond the worldly sense and experience of such association, in other words they cannot see prophets as mediums that don't need glorification. People who takes such coupling as their main paradigm to reach God they lack experiencing deep inspirational sense of reaching God with or without prophets. Now...as for the beauty of Quranic text and the fascination with its linguistic beauty and rigour I would say that those people set a hard task for themselves to defend linguistic beauty and rigour that may fade at some point in future human history.

((I couldn't digest your "

Here is an example: Quran at times refers to our perfection but does mention that God inflicts us with ignorance of so many things and then God demands from us to follow the right undefined path to faith

."))

 

 

First the concept of perfection is beyond, as you've suggested before, the physical or cognitive or emotional or spiritual perfection but the ability to cope, or tolerate/accept the physical/emotional/spiritual pain and pleasure if I can say so, with our in-built inner conflicting forces and also to cope and tolerate our blind/unknown evolution in its physically and mental sense from whatever we were to whatever we're going to be. Second, such human's complexity is more interesting to God than a monotonous and bland compliance with a proposed perfect image of humans. In other words, one can argue saying that God would've created humans perfect without an inherent ability to sin or deviate, i.e. in an angelic form metaphorically speaking, and save itself/herself/himself (i.e. God) the trouble of dealing such tiresome creature, that is human!! as you can see I am using teleology here to reach a conclusion. I don't think you or others should see my reference to contradictions in Quranic text as a reference to a weak point, but as an indication of the complexity of humans that reflect God's capacity to create such unique thing. As for a Quranic textual proof here is a start:

ذَلِكَ مِمَّآ أَوْحَىٰ إِلَيْكَ رَبُّكَ مِنَ ٱلْحِكْمَةِ وَلاَ تَجْعَلْ مَعَ ٱللَّهِ إِلَـٰهاً آخَرَ فَتُلْقَىٰ فِي جَهَنَّمَ مَلُوماً مَّدْحُوراً .َ الإسراء 39

 

Referring to the above ayaa...if God awhaa the wisdom then how God warns us of taking another God and then reminds of the ultimate punishment in -hhel-? The way I read the above is that regardless of the given wisdom (a kind of perfection in some sense) we possibly take another God to worship (ignorance of taking another God) for reasons not mentioned in this ayaa but then there is always a price for that and the price here is that we will be left in a metaphorical -hhel- not burnt but left living on earth with the pain of been blamed and defeated or in other words the pain of not developing beyond the humans sense of defeat. The sense of defeat and blame are not something that are beyond our current world but while living this world. But then what is the meaning of another God? and how we can have another God? and if so what this God can be? and is there a possibility that this reference to the other God is simply a reference to our unacceptable deeds within the way we live???

 

((I personally think Quran has one unified message.. Human are the most perfect creature on earth.))

The perfection here is as I referred to earlier.

 

((You might be referring to the fact that Quran criticizing human for not being

some times able to find out the right path, that has nothing to do with

perfection. According to Quran , human were equipped with the necessary tools to visualize the way. It is Satan , the other force, that make the struggle of find it so fun, and so hard too!))

I want to say that the concept of Satan isn't beyond our us but within us too.

 

 

((As for the tautology aspect of religion. Quran went to say that other ways of

practicing are accepted, so no meaning of tautology as far as religion is

concerned. It is experiencing God, the absolute power, that makes sense of such tautology in Quran.))

 

Maybe we can say that experience in their general sense is a tautology and experiencing God is a tautology then religion can be or cannot be tautology and if religion can or cannot be a tautology then it is not a tautology...................Salam Ala

[Safaa]

From : Safaa Sent : Monday, October 30, 2006 10:28 PM

Subject : RE: Finally some truth about Islamic empires... the concept of GOD

 

Ala,

 

 

 

You wrote

"I would say that the evolution/regression of Islam to its current version isn't the evolution of Islam as such but the evolution/regression of whoever is fond of it and defend it for all sort of reasons. Subsequently, Islam evolution/regression became an extension of the psychology of those people, i.e. an extension of human psychology. In other words, muslims as humans cannot escape the desire to control, to dominate, to raise their self-esteem, to tolerate things and not others...etc as attempts to feel better about themselves, but humans have less perception of how to seek self realization/actualization or self-fulfillment through life experiences which (i.e. self-realization) can be enhanced by some aspects of religion as the sufis may have done"

 

 

I would like to throw a question..

 

If all what we talked about the decoupling, tolerance and ration is what Quran was calling for and what Mohamed wanted to implement, then what had happened to twist all this up down in the completely other direction. In other word, to make the main current stream Islam so irrational ..

 

Cheers

 

Safaa

[Safaa]

From : ala

Sent : Tuesday, October 31, 2006 12:24 PM

Subject : RE: Finally some truth about Islamic empires... the concept of GOD

 

This is terribly good question since it doesn't exploit the benign initial intention of Quran to assume a guaranteed better development of the current version of Islam.

 

It appears that one of the reasons can be traced to the dominant influence of cultural/biological/psychological factors over the Quranic instructional and spiritual factors during the process of our social development. In other words, we, humans, though are more tempted to follow a particular religious path to set some religious discipline ( to recover from emotional crisis, for instance) in our lives we are also tempted to develop capacities to meet our cultural/biological/psychological needs. The forces involved in such conflicting process are more in favour of the cultural/biological/psychological needs which subsequently developing to meet the humans’ desires and physical needs, but then you may argue by saying that religious/spiritual factors can be part of the cultural set of factors and that where we suggest that cultural/biological/psychological factors dominate leaving humans to develop in-line with our psychological/biological desires more than the spiritual ones. For example our hunter and gatherer ancestors’ societies suggest the need for dominant/aggressive male for secure food for instance for the family, so earlier societies including the west develop religions that let male’s domination as a normal course of action. Following this line of reasoning we can conclude that for instance hijab can be seen as a gesture of male subjugation of female to maintain a biological set up that prevent the attraction of other male to his (a particular male) female and to guarantee the production of offsprings for this female……..Salam Ala

[Safaa]

From : Safaa Sent : Saturday, November 4, 2006 1:26 AM

Subject : RE: Finally some truth about Islamic empires... What went wrong

 

 

 

 

Ala,

While fully agree with the personal factors in drawing the collective Social and religious beliefs and thoughts, I would also put the Social-economic factors as the real reason behind the early evolution in Islam. Which, I think, governed the main stream Islam till now.

Islam had also brought its own conflict in a dialectic Hegelian paradigm...

Under sever Poor deserted Arabia, calling for peace and prohibiting Ghazoo" attacks" that Arab Bedouins were used to in their life survival, early Muslims were in natural need to develop a new paradigm of survival... Some of their leaders thought it to be through attacking other non Muslim neighbors under big umbrella of spreading Islam...

Such survival mechanism found itself through the transformation of Islam from the religion of people to the religion of State. A transformation that necessitate a big evolution in the theological and Social believes. One can easily trace such evolution with the creation of the Khaliefa position after the death of Mohamed. A central position that is critically needed to run the new absolute religious state that ruled Muslims for next fourteen centuries. If you look deeply into that political change, you might end up with a whole new set of teachings that are based on the core teachings of Quran but to steer it into completely different direction. For example, the self centric Islam is now the nation "Ummah" centric one. Also in order to facilitate the new strong central government, the notion of absolute obedience to the Khalief became part of Islam pillars... The message of defense ONLY fight by Quran would be replaced by aggression under the spreading of Islam. The tolerance was replaced by cruelty...

 

Such transformation was not without opposition by those who failed to understand such necessity. Some had refused it considering it as non Islamic such as those who refused to admit to the new Khaleef "Ahel rida" . They were fought to death as we know. Though might be in agree with the new system, others asked to implement it in some other ways that have some religious legitimacy, these were Ali's party "Alrawafid".

 

Such change had also generated a new set of thoughts on how to interpret Quran and deal with Mohamed and his Successors "Khalief". Instituting the absolute power of the Khlaif necessitates the absolute power of the original source "the prophet"..

From there the Sunna of Mohamed became sacred to the same level of Quran, and so the Sunna of the Khaleefs for Sunnis and Imams for Shia.

Abo Baker was quoted in his first speech as Khaleef

"I am the successor of GOD"

one disgraced Muslim immediately jumped in

" you are the successor of the prophet, we appoint you and we have the right to change that"..

The old highly spiritual Khaleef agreed, but later on, his successors went too far to consider them selves as equivalent to GOD him/herself!

 

Inorder to give legitimacy to the Khaleef, the sacred prophet biography "sunna" was much easier to manipulate and to be used to re interept Quran itself. The notion of secrecy was extended later to include the early companions too, specially those who agreed to this new paradigm. I don't know if such sacrecy was known during Mohamed life. Muslims used to question him “Is it from you or from Allah?"

 

The conflict had ended up with two parties in action, those who believe in using mind to interpret Quran and Islam against those who believed in using same mind but in following the formers "Takleed".. The leader of the first , Ali, was quoted when some of his followers asked him to comply with Maweia's call during Safeen war for judging per the Quran,

" Damn you, it is a text in the book , It is people who read to theirs" .

 

The later finaly won while the first's groups were brutally fought. They either got extinct "e.g. Muatazilis and Failasoofs" or got evolved in much more irrational paradigms of Welaya and sacred Imama "e.g. Sofi and Shia" .

 

Let me know your comment on this. It is important to examine my thoughts from different prospective before step further into this very interesting subject that I think critical in understanding our current problems...

 

Cheers

Safaa

[Safaa]

Please go to the thrird part of this debate "What went wrong " under the link

 

 

http://baghdadee.ipbhost.com/index.php?act...f=12&t=749&st=0