Murad now looks at where the Standard Islamic Narrative (i.e. the much later Islamic Traditions) was imposed onto the Arabic in the Qur'an.

Murad suggests that when Muslims needed to find their prophet or their city in the Qur'an, they simply imposed them into whatever texts they could find. Here are 3 examples:

6) Surah 75:17 says: “Surely upon us is its combination and its reading". But the translators of the Qur'an (Khattab’s "The Clear Qur’an” and “Saheeh International”) have added “It is certainly upon Us to make you memorize and recite it”, and “Indeed, upon Us is its collections in your heart and to make possible its recitation”.

Can you notice that the translators have added many more words in English, and have introduced Muhammad into the translation with the word "you", when he isn’t there in the Arabic? This is all done later by the composers of the S.I.N.

7) Surah 33:33 refers to the word “jahaliyya”, which the translations suggest is “pre-Islamic ignorance”, or “in the pagan past”, suggesting that before Islam the Arab part of the world was in a state of ignorance, or was very pagan.

Surah 48:26, again with the word “jahaliyya”, the translators say that this was the environment of ignorance, which preceded the coming of Muhammad.

Yet, in both cases the word “jahaliyya” was meant for individuals, referring to the state of ignorance in people before they came to faith, which was aimed primarily at the Muslim people, not an era which preceded Islam.

Once again, the translators are imposing a much later S.I.N. meaning to the Arabic, to support their view that before Islam the world in that area was in a state of Ignorance, including the ignorance of Judaism and Christianity, who thus needed the prophet to bring them out of ignorance to the truth of Islam; yet, the original Arabic says nothing of the sort.

8) Surah 6:92 says that “the book was sent down to warn the mother of settlements”. Yet, according to the translators this was changed to “the mother of cities”, or “the mother of towns”, with the bracket [i.e. Mecca] added to the text.

Thus, the reader assumes that the 'mother of cities' must be Mecca, when in reality, the only place where this city is named in the Qur’an is in Surah 48:24. By adding it here, further authority is given for this Mecca in the Qur’an.

Yet, according to the Arabic text, from what we know of that time, the only city which would have qualified as the “mother of settlements” would have been Jerusalem, as it was the seat of both Judaism and Christianity in the 7th century, while the city of Mecca was nowhere to be found in any documentation, or on any map from that century, or before.

Surah 3:96 says in Arabic “The first house [of worship] established for mankind was that at ‘bakkah’”. The translators have added in brackets [i.e. Mecca], to again impose the S.I.N. view that this had to be Mecca.

Yet, it is obvious in the text that the Arabic is distinctly ‘Bakkah’, which in Arabic and Hebrew is the 'valley of weeping', and is located north, near Jerusalem, where the Jews who were on pilgrimage to Jerusalem stopped to freshen up before they entered Jerusalem to finish their pilgrimage.

What’s more, the Arabic letters in the word itself is clearly ‘b, k, k’, and not ‘m, k, k’. It is easy to distinguish between the letters ‘b’ and ‘m’ because the first is just an open smiley face, while the latter is a closed circular letter, so that no one would confuse the two.

The latter Muslim commentators of the S.I.N. had to impose Mecca onto this word because of its importance for Islam demanded that there be numerous references to it. And that is why the later translators were forced to include the word ‘Mecca’ in brackets, as a sort of commentary on the text, when clearly the word 'Mecca' simply wasn’t there in the Arabic.

CONCLUSION: When the latter Islamic Traditions (SIN) were written, the Muslims needed to create a backstory for the person of Muhammad and for his city Mecca. Consequently, in order to find both him and his city, they had to impose them both into the text of the Qur’an, or at least into the translations themselves.

Thus, they inferred that Surah 75:17 was referring to Muhammad, while the word ‘Jahaliyya’ found in Surahs 33:33 and 48:26 had to be an era of ‘ignorance’, or rather, to be precise, the time of the Jews and the Christians, so that the reason for Muhammad’s coming made sense.

Then they had to find a number of references to his city Mecca, since it is found only once in the entire Qur’an, so they imposed it onto Surahs 6:92 and 3:96.

These impositions created by the later S.I.N. compilers were then copied by those who translated the Qur’an into English, and are still assumed to be correct even today.

But once we go back to the original text in Arabic we can see just how wrong they really were.

© Pfander Centre for Apologetics & Polemics - US, July 28, 2024
(108,620) Music: 'Joy at Word' by Musicifiles, from filmmusic-io