EXPLAINING THE MIRACLE OF QURAN TO A NON MUSLIM - NOUMAN ALI KHAN

[Music] there are multiple issues that he's raised so we have to try to address each one I don't get a chance to address all of them but at least we have to attempt the first thing as a correctional system Mohammed didn't write the Quran because he didn't know how to write yeah and it wasn't compiled in written form until after it was compiled to some extent in his lifetime on parchment leather rock bones of animals but the primary archiving of the Quran was memorization okay so this is the first thing the second thing actually what you present as your fundamental intellectual problem Quran having single source right or the inspiration coming to one and then on top of that it being literal not inspired instead of being the inspired Word of God it's the literal word of God these are actually the things that brought me to my conviction so they could be the conviction but then where where does the original where does the original source saying okay this is a source no now here's the thing there are two parts one to prove the miracle itself what makes it miraculous the fact that it's the literal word of God we have to show that it's somehow this language is superior to any human document beyond the shadow of a doubt to be able to say this is this can't be human so let me ask a question why is the Quran then in your mind more superior than the Vedas or the bhagavad-gita or your Bible or the gospel or any other religious document right so like I said and in my first introduction I'm gonna try to elaborate that point now I didn't get into that yet Islamic scholarship is concerned with self with the subject titled the overpowering miracle of the Quran for a millennium and a half it had this studied from many many many many angles in more recent history you alluded to it there's a discussion of scientific phenomenon in the Quran that could not have been known at the time and are only now coming to rehash and and surface for example the moon not having light of its own or two different kinds of water in the oceans you know heavy water in light water etc these kinds of things that are alluded to the Quran that are not only being discovered in science but this is a recent discussion this predates this you could argue maybe the last 50 70 years but we're Islam Muslims are holding on to their creed that the Quran is miraculous for a millennium and a half that's a long time without any scientific issues right the issue is this in speech we argue that that speech is basically comprised it comprises two components style and content and great speech is that which has meaningful content but it's presented in marvelous style right what we're arguing in in the linguistic study of Quran and this is what's not easily translated into another language is because it's the literal word of God the weight not just what he says but how he says it makes it miraculous now that's very difficult to explain to somebody who doesn't study Arabic and this makes my job particularly difficult because I'm trying to say no Quran is miraculous in a linguistic sense right and so obviously the language that Muslims believe is Arabic so much so that right now this rendition of the Quran it's cover-to-cover English it's a translation of the Quran the title says Quran no Muslim will ever call this Quran you wouldn't call this a Quran you would say this is an attempt at the meanings of the Quran yes at the most right this is across cultures okay well let me let me ask you a question on that so there is a concept in Islam it seems that the Quran must or should be in Arabic yes and that because the lunate it's a literal word of God but it seems to me that and that's not believed by Christians or some Jews believe that about Hebrew although it depends but it seems that and in terms of if Islam is a universal message that the language is accidental or incidental so Christians do not believe that Latin or Greek or even Hebrew are inherently sacred languages they're merely languages that are sacred because of the purpose using them so you could have the vernacular language you could have English you could have historically its laughed and historically it's Greek historically it's Hebrew but it's not inherently Hebrew but it seems that Hindus do believe inherently Sanskrit is more holy yes Arabs believe inherently Arabic is more holy and then some Jews believe inherently Hebrew is more holy but if you have a universal message to me excellent point now here's the thing know you got you have two parts the Quran is a message to the Muslims a message for Humanity and it's a miracle the message has to be translated in every language and it actually started happening even in the life of the Prophet himself the first attempts at a Hebrew translation of the Bible happened by Bernard bus or the aloha a companion of the Prophet who learned Hebrew just to communicate the message to the Jewish community but the miracle of the Quran is something limited to the Arabic in terms of the language there are other aspects of the miracle like the scientific phenomenon and that stuff that can be translated but just to give you a taste of what I'm talking about when I first got into this subject and as I was being raised as a Muslim I was kind of a skeptic myself and I heard over and over again that the Quran is an incredible language unsurpassed language it's the it's the marvel of literature and my first I did I wasn't a student of Arabic at all and in high school in this country I just became curious I started reading the Quran for myself and I found actually that it was confusing literature it was moving from subject to subject tenses were changing context was changing Sooners were changing in their historical context there was a lot of shift and I didn't understand because coming from a Western point of view you have a certain view of how you critique literature right now when I got into Arabic studies and I I I started diving into this question of what makes the Quran miraculous I started discovering things that literally they overpowered me and I'm still a student of them I actually teach a seminar that's traveling the country called divine speech and the entire intent of the seminar is to expose the literary marvel of the Quran to an english-speaking audience without resorting to Arabic that's my that's the seminar now just one example the Quran Muslims believe is a spoken word it's not written we also believe that Muhammad SAW didn't know it didn't have the ability to write we also know that when he would recite the Quran there would be dozens of followers and they would immediately memorize what he said and it would just spread so there's no editorial process you can't go back on what you recited it's gone it's out there now you can't take it back it's kind of like sending an email nowadays right now one just as an example one phrase in the Quran that's part of a large discussion is the phrase what abacus Aqaba in arabic it says what abacus Aqaba which means and declare the greatness only of your Lord now recall I said something about a fusion of style and content thus the content is beautiful and it's part of a passage in which the signs of the Lord have been mentioned the struggle has been mentioned and then the messenger is being told declare the greatness only of your Lord what's interesting is the phrase or Abeka is a palindrome in other words it spells backwards and forwards the same way so the quran is declaring the greatness of the Lord in a way in its spelling form and this is multiple instances in the spoken Quran that it's actually a linguistic palindrome now when you want to generate a palindrome in English like a race car or Bob or dad or something like that small one syllable ones are easy to generate maybe a big word is a little harder but a sentence it would take you some time to sit down with words that are spelled backwards and forwards and come up with something that and then even if you do that your concern isn't your content what's your concern the spelling so the spelling is actually dictating your content here you have multiple instances in the Quran where this the content hasn't been altered the content is continued it flows with the passage and yet the spelling structure is you know it's a palindrome it's symmetrical backwards and forwards the same way and this is not one these are multiple instances in the Quran and this is one area of the many areas of the linguistic marvel of the Quran the only other thing I want to comment that's easily understandable actually two things one from a historical point of view in the 1600s I believe this was a profesor of the Catholic Church had written a paper about the the great error in the Quran the great historical error in the Quran and that refers to you know the Pharaoh and Moses well Pharaoh in the Quran tells one of his ministers whose name is Haman okay he tells him to build him a tower so he may reach the god of Moses and you know to discuss with him now this occurs about four or five times in the Quran how man is mentioned a total of six times in the Quran when Christian and Jewish scholarship came into contact with this passage the criticism was first of all there's no high man mentioned in the Bible in association with the Pharaoh second of all he is he has been mentioned in the book of Esther's under the King Xerxes in the story of the Tower of Babel on Intolerable the famous story and this is a thousand years after Moses so it's a completely different historical era where her man and that man that man Haman has been mentioned as building a tower so the obvious alleged error was that Mohammed mahalo may have confused these stories that he was kind of getting from the Christians and Jews and kind of mixed them together and presented this and this has been something that's been reiterated in Jewish Studies encyclopedia and well let me break in on here and I am NOT an expert in this so it's hard for me to comment on the specific but that there is allegation that the Quran is bits and pieces of different Gnostic and different other religious literature that was out there at the time yeah there's no evidence to it and and the coherence of the Quran the cohesion of it as a text is the ultimate proof to the contrary but just on that historicity point maurice lacroix in like it's about 70 years ago that he engaged in this study he said well Jewish history contradicts what the Quran is saying about Haman and this tower building let's look at Egyptology let's look at Egyptian history because the French and the Germans at the early part the late part of the 1800s had already started translating or are getting into Egyptian hieroglyphics and we reformulating the language to try to translate some of the ancient Egyptian texts Egyptology was a big deal in the early 1900s even so he travels to speak to some of these Egyptologists says to them the Quran has this name Haman as a minister working for the historical Pharaoh at the time of Moses that specific Pharaoh the Egyptologists tell him and this is actually articulated in his book the Bible Quran in science that there's no way this man could have known that name and we probably it's not even going to be there because that language the Egyptian hieroglyphic language was already dead for a couple of thousand years nobody knew that language after translation he goes to Austria and finds out there's actually a list of people that worked in the the the court of Pharaoh they find Harlan as the chief architect that's actually found in Egyptology a name mentioned in the Quran so from the historical point of view a last comment on this issue of the miraculous nature of the Quran the Quran claims in Nana's and Ithaca we are the ones who have revealed the ultimate reminder we meaning we got himself he speaks of himself in the Royal and he says we've made the Quran easy for remembrance we've made the Quran easy for a moment occurred multiple times and the Quran to this day the only book that to my knowledge that is memorized by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people of all ages despite their language background in by the letter from one end of the book to the other is the Quran without photographic memory I don't have photographic memory I just started learning Arabic in 2000 I've already memorized half the Quran and this is part-time endeavor you know in Chicagoland probably you'd find a couple of hundred kids that have easily memorized the entire Quran in China you'll find kids that I remember adults that I memorize Quran so the fact that the Quran says that it's miraculously you memorized a 600 page document miraculously easy to memorize and it's memorized by people from all over the word by it to the letter in and of itself is America we're gonna

Channel: Digital Ummah

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Keywords: islam, muslim, faith, religion, allah, muhammad, ramadan, islamic lecture, Islamic, Lecture, Digital Ummah, Nouman Ali Khan, mercifulservant, sunni, prophet, muhammed, mekka, medina, Forgiveness, Islam, nouman, nouman ali khan, bayyinah, yasir qadhi, jibreel, omar suleiman, quran, quran recitation

Id: tBcRSCay9OE

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020