Jay Smith interviews Robert Spencer on The Critical Qur'an

foreign [Music] Robert Spencer uh it's been a few well has it been about a year since we've been together oh yeah it's good to see you Jay yeah and uh sitting in the same office with on this at the same chair with the same Smile as ever We're Not Gonna discuss anything controversial today and this is not what we're doing we're not going to talk about Jihad or any of these type of things we're all actually going to talk about this book right here this is the critical Quran and folks if you don't have it go get it you need to get this because this is a real compendium this is one of those kind of books that every Library should have and you keep on on your shelf not to read all the way through but to keep as like an encyclopedia as a as a book to refer to a reference book so that you can go back when you get to a verse you don't understand look at this book because this will not only help you understand it it will show you some a lot of ideas and areas that you probably haven't heard before and probably will not had not Robert Spencer taken the time and the effort to put it all together in one compendium now obviously it's a critical Quran explain that why the title yeah you know Jay I actually meant that to have two or three meanings uh at least two offhand one is that it is an attempt at a critical Edition there's no critical edition of the Quran at this point uh you can find lots of critical editions of the Bible and of course by that just in case anybody's not clear what I mean that you can find very easily the the Oxford annotated Bible many others they have variant readings noted different manuscripts giving you different uh versions of the various of various verses they have explanatory notes uh with some historical critical Explorations as to where what might be the actual historical underpinnings of the various accounts in the gospels in the other parts of the Bible and so on and some of them of course come to different conclusions they may disagree with one another but a critical addition is as opposed to an addition that is designed for devotion a devotional Bible will perhaps have AIDS to prayer and worship and uh passages of the scripture that uh illustrates certain points about the Christian faith Illustrated and explained that kind of thing and there are plenty of qurans like that but you can't find a Quran that is a critical Quran that actually does what those Bible those those historical critical Bibles do give you variant readings and explanations of where the text may have come from and what it might really mean and so on and so I thought well you know JD Salinger the novelist the guy that wrote The Catcher in the Rye he said once people as somebody asked him why do you write the books that you write and he said I write the books I want to read that don't exist so I have to make them come into existence so then I can read them and I thought I want a critical Quran there isn't one so I'll have to do it and it's just a first attempt I hope there will be many other critical qurans in the future and I don't expect them all to agree with the conclusions that I have come to in this one but I hope that this is in a certain sense unlocking the floodgates and making it possible for people to think well I can do this uh it's not necessarily A forbidden topic it's not uh something that is completely off limits as the academic world has treated it all this time well obviously just by what you said there's some people who are listening to you are going to be inflamed they're going to get become very angry because even the idea of variant the word variant in the Quran is anathema to Muslims because every if you talk to any Muslim if there are Muslims listening you're gonna say there's no such thing as a variant Quran we don't have variance there's not one word not one letter that's changed it is it is eternal chapter 85 verse 22 is very clear in the Quran makes that claim for itself chapter 10 verse 15 chapter 18 verse 27 says that no man can change God's holy word chapter 15 verse 9 stipulates that Allah himself protects it so the Quran makes these claims and here is Robert Spencer saying no there are variants and they need to be explained and I'm not I'm sitting here keeping from laughing because the reason why no one's written this and Robert is no one would dare write what you've just said yeah it takes a certain kind of craziness I suppose uh people say aren't you afraid for your life or something like that and you know Jay I I it's not as if I mean I'm I'm just like any other individual I'm not saying that I'm so extraordinarily courageous or something like that Quite Contrary but the fact is I've never been worried about that because nobody knows you know nobody knows the next if they're going to have the next day nobody knows what might happen and people die all the time everybody's going to die it seems to me to to to be afraid to speak the truth and to explore these things because of that I just don't understand it and so nonetheless what you're doing you're chewing off a huge amount here and this is why I wanted to bring you on board this is why I want to get this book out there because you and you tend to do this Robert yeah did Muhammad exist that book you came out in 2011 was it 2012 blue opened that whole debate so much so that you've had to rewrite it again just two years ago to get all the newest material because you opened a floodgates of research including myself and that's what we love about you Robert is you take ideas that no one else has dared to do you ask questions that no one else is there to ask and you don't just ask the questions you come up with answers and it's the answers and it's the material that you work with that you've done with this book here no one the reason why no one's ever done a critical assessment of the Quran is it could it's not very healthy to do so you could you could be killed and I know I know you say that I'm used to doing that but you know I think the Lord is protecting you and I think you do have a certain Angel over top of you uh fact is I I am aware of the risks I've been getting a lot of sharp uptick and threats since this book came out I understand the parameters of this and I hope that I pray the Lord does protect me and continue to protect me thank God that he's protected me all this time um and you know that's up to him uh I feel like uh I hope I have opened up like I said opened up the floodgates to this and you said as well that there will be many others because there's plenty more that could be done with this text well I also wanted to just say before we go on I said at the beginning there were two meanings at least two critical and the other one is that it is critical it's not a devotional Quran I'm not a believer in Islam I don't believe even that Islam is a very good thing for people and I don't make any secret about that in this book either uh it's it's not that I'm trying to go out of my way to denigrate Muslims certainly or Islam even but to tell the truth about it and unfortunately the truth about it is not very attractive okay and be honest you did mention that we have critical editions of the Bible have had for decades if not even centuries since the 1800s with wellhausen and they do the University of dubigen where they came out with strong critical additions on the book of Moses the jdb uh documentary hypothesis uh redacted criticism Source criticism I mean these criticisms form criticisms have all been have all existed against the Bible not started and not created by biblical criticism but enlarged and certainly matured by biblical criticism so in some ways you're just carrying out a tradition that is very much around has been around since the 1800s people said you know it's I thought one of the nicest things that anybody's ever said about any book that I've written is an Amazon review it's one of the more recent ones and the guy says this is the book in a certain sense Spencer is supplying the lack because the academy has not done this and this is the book that the the Academia should have produced decades ago yeah if not years ago and I thought yeah that's exactly what I'm trying to do trying to fill in this Gap and begin to oversee the catching up of Scholars of the Quran with what's been being done with the Bible for as you noted several hundred years now and there's hundreds of books hundreds you can read that are historical critical explorations of the Bible and even evaluations of it from various other kinds of moral standpoints and people criticizing Jesus on various from various perspectives and so on nobody bets an eye but suddenly if you say gee it's terrible that Muhammad that the the Allah would make people and say I could have guided them to the truth but instead I'm going to fill hell with men that's a that's that's a that's a bit of a difficult thing to say then suddenly you know you're hateful and bigoted and islamophobic I think well that's exactly what the text does say chapter 32 verse 13 and there's another place as well that's escaping me at the moment do you have 693 is there 1693 I think I have the Hadith that say that the hell is going to be filled with women and yes this is going to be filled with men that's all these things and people don't know because even in the universities today or maybe especially in universities today it's all positive about Islam even back in the 80s when I was first studying Islam in graduate school it was all positive it was all uh how wonderful various aspects of it were when we never discussed Jihad we never discussed the treatment of women we never heard those hadiths about hell being filled with women or in multitudes of other things that are part of Islam so this book tries to fill in the Gap it's not very healthy and we've said this many times before now what's fascinating the next question that people will throw at us is why and how can you you don't speak Arabic you're not an air native Arab speaker why how could you be trusted with something of this type of magnitude but you kind of give it right here in the in the the subtitle let me just read the subtitle here where you said explained from Key Islamic commentaries and contemporary historical research so this is not you this is not your research you haven't done the Arabic studies on these words you don't even claim to do that so explain what you have done here it is here but most people don't know that if you could go ahead and unpack that for us absolutely Jay you know it's funny thing because a lot of the Islamic apologists out on Twitter you know and elsewhere they've been saying you know you're not I mean they say you don't know a word of Arabic and things like that which is wildly overstated I know far more Arabic than they think but the fact is you're right I'm not a native Arabic speaker I'm not even able to carry on a competent conversation in it but the fact is that when you talk about word studies in Arabic and explorations of the meanings of the words I know where to find all those and I took them into account in this in this book and when I'm talking about contemporary historical research I'm talking about people who do know the Arabic and do know what the historical background of these things are and I'm reporting on what they say so as you said this there's not this is not my conclusions this is a compendium of the Contemporary Research into the Quran I mean you here if you just look here's this first page well page 13 I just put it up open to the cow I just put open it up at random you only have a little bit of text but look at all the commentary you have here you put an awful lot of commentary explaining what the exegete say who these are and you use really four major exeges I I if you don't mind if I go through each one of them because I thought it was fascinating you you use uh well first of all you uh uh you go to I just want to get them here IBN IBN katir is probably the most famous who died in 1372 so he would be the classic he's from a classic period he's considered probably the earliest of the exit there I mean there's somebody who is earlier than him but it's even Qatar that most people go to why did you use him well that's why okay because we'll go to him see what the idea is to help people who are not Muslim to understand how does the average Muslim understand this passage when he reads it and so here again I'm not gonna undertake to explain it I'm not going to presume but I go to IBN kathir I go to court to be I go to the two jalals and see I mean that's fashion because they're four 14 59 and 1505 so you're taking really archaic material from 13 1372 1459 1505 yeah okay I would respectfully disagree it's old but archaic is another thing because for the average Muslim who is not a scholar who's reading the Quran who thinks I want to try to understand what this is all about it's much more likely he's going to go to IBN kathir than to some 21st century scholar and these people at these Works have endured and are still Central to the understanding that Muslims have of Islam and the Quran in a way that a lot that the modern Scholars simply don't have that kind of traction yeah so yes but you also go to Mao Duty who is from my part of the world he was born and grew up in Dale Bondi real close I used to go right through his town whenever I went to visit my parents in India and then moved to Pakistan in 1947 died in 1979 and you also use madani um Mohammed isak illahi madani who just died in 2002. these are modern Scholars so you're using both and I understand right exactly that the you have mild duty of course is internationally influential yeah and so when I'm the same argument that I'm using for using that I just gave you for using even get there also applies to using Mao Duty it's not that he's new and they're old it's that both of them are extremely mainstream both of them are if you go into for example if you go into any Islamic bookstore in the United States right now or Europe for that matter or I would expect pretty much all over the world you're going to find IBN kathir you're going to find ma Duty these guys are the central people to understand the Quran that are presented by Muslims for their fellow Muslims let me just say just so people are aware of that mount duty is from the Indian subcontinent that's why he's so popular what people don't realize is that a lot of the Indian subcontinent Muslims get fed up with the Arabs who don't deal with some of the more Modern Problems especially when it comes to Christianity because they don't most your Arab Scholars Muslim Scholars aren't even aware of Christianity or much of the debate that's going on Mao duty is very much aware of Christianity and that's why he's much more representative of modern day uh certainly modern day problems and that's uh he started the Dale Bondi movement he was the one if you go to any of your Indians or pakistanis or bangladeshis they go to mount Duty before anybody else because he resonates with them madani the same way and I think it's great that you have taken two Scholars that are very well known today as well as the uh I don't want to use the way our cake I want to use it anymore but ancient or early Scholars that are certainly have given their have have been around since well in this case since the 14th century and Mild duty is really extraordinary uh I would say I think that his influence is far beyond the subcontinent it's it's International uh I I I mean when I say I think that he's pretty much in any uh bookstore in the United States is there's a reason Robert you know why because all a lot of his stuff is in English and remember all your pakistanis and Bangladeshi speak English and they're all their education is English my duty has been written up in English all of his material is in English so it gets all over England and Britain and also United States that's why we hear him more than anybody else not so much the Arab Scholars today yeah so there you go and those then you have the fact that he is dealing with Communism dealing with other contemporary movements and actually trying to reframe Islam using Marxist language to attract marxists to Islam and it's an extraordinary uh intellectual Endeavor I think actually and uh could have really too in in a different way is trying to engage with the modern world and so that for that reason also they both deserve although mild duty is more of a place they both have a place in this book no you segwaying over into the uh you use pixthal uh and I was a little surprised that you use pictal for your standard for your is for your English translation why pictal well in the first place I've got to say that it's pickthall but it's modernized and it's revised so that it's much easier to read than pickthal's original translation and because I mean and also it's changed completely when it comes to various important passages where it appears that his translation was inferior to others and we opted for different uh a different reading but I actually did that because I wanted to defang the objection that people were going to say that this is not a guy who's fluent in Arabic how can he produce a new English translation and a lot of the people who are criticizing the book without having looked at it they don't realize that we're working from the basis of a translation that is one of the foundational translations of the Quran into English written by a Muslim for fellow Muslims and that is still popular today and considered to be in the main reliable and so that is it's it's hard they really can't assail the translation that's in the critical Quran without attacking pickthal which gets them into some difficulties and then pixthal is modernized and revised in in light of various discoveries of modern scholarship various uh philological investigations that are explained in the notes some some Scholars today prefer people like Aubry or drog because they do to the Arabic and the Quran what the nasb has done to the Hebrew and the Greek and the Bible they go right word by word by word and follow it through so it's probably the most correct but they're difficult to read whereas piktol is much easier to read yeah and so you have to balance the two the thing about translating is any language to any language there is a pitfall not a pickthall in uh going word by word I like our berry a whole lot because he goes word by word but I do find it sometimes that it obscures rather than elucidates what is going on for an English-speaking reader and so I thought pickthol is kind of a happy medium that he gives you the flavor of the text often goes word by word but does not do so when the meaning needs to be brought out in a way that this requires a departure and that's you know that's just something that always happens with translations that's why one translation of the same book is different from another yeah yeah I am I just for those of you who don't know what we're talking about we're talking about this book here the critical Quran so it's a critical Edition that means it's going to be it's going to look at not only the unpacked the verses but also give you the background to why possibilities these verses were added why they weren't added who is responsible what are some of the what do some of the exegetes say exegetes for those who actually unpack the crown uh people like IBN katir or the Jala lines or Mao Duty or madani these are the famous ones and uh you've taken some of the best ones out there I want I just want to open it up and kind of show people how you did it it's just so that they could see what I like is great you not only you not only put the verses up here you unpack it down here so this is the very first one the opening which is the Fatiha only seven verses you would think not much to say yet you take a whole two pages of of background material and it's amazing that's the kind of stuff that I think that we need to see the fact that you take I'm sorry two not two pages two complete columns just looking and unpacking it and what you did is you did something that I haven't seen yet done before and that is you actually looked and zeroed in not only on the the first verse but you also zero it on the the seventh verse those who uh cause you anger and those who have fallen away you take that and you unpack what is and what do the XG say about that most people are not even aware that those are the Jews and the Christians it's actually the cursing prayer against us and you actually put it there because you know there's so many politicians nowadays who invite imams into say the the state legislature over here or a prayer meeting in a church or something like that and the Imam uh praised the Fatiha yeah and the assembled Christians and Jews and whatever they say amen and they have no idea that they've just been cursed not only that we have we have a lot of people in our churches who are asking Christians to memorize those seven verses to go into mosque and pray with them and I uh we had a church in California do that for my denomination and I said please don't do that you're cursing yourself the Muslims know you're cursing yourself they're patting themselves on the back and I got a real lot of uh of a backlash from the church itself and from the pastor saying you don't know what you're talking about Mr Smith and I say I may not know what I'm talking about then why don't you just read the critical edition of Robert Spencer's book and he'll set you straight because it's not you that's saying this it's what the Effigies have said it it's that what the exeges say about this verse and we have to be aware of that otherwise we're going to walk into these minefields one after another now I want to bring up one or two questions I have for you yes I want to bring up one or two questions I have for you Robert uh one of them is chapter 3 verse 55 which is a huge verse for those of us who are defending Jesus and the crucifixion you know that in chapter 4 verse 157 it's very clear um that he was not crucified another was given His Image and you do a great job on chapter 4 157 showing that this is a probably borrowed from a gnostic uh agnostic writing in the third Century that this is probably the first occasion where that could be barred from again being very critical not Muslims are not going to like that because that assumes therefore it's someone putting this together whoever the person who's writing chapter 4 verse 117 57 is borrowing from another source source criticism is harmful to the veracity of the Quran what I find interesting is in chapter 3 verse 55 confronts this head on concerning the word mutawafika in Arabic one more I want to bring up before we go and that's chapter 19 verse 33. 19 33 on page 213 of your book because this is about Jesus and it confronts chapter 4 verse 157 because he that's Jesus as a child saying Blessed Be me the day I was born the day I die so that's the future because he's a child and the day I rise again when Muslims try to come back say well he's talking about the future of course he's a child of course it's in the future tense because he's as a baby he wouldn't die yet until he was an adult yeah except if they didn't crucify him well obviously you know the problem there's why you need 355 and and 1933 they confront 4157 so one of the things that I thought was fascinating you bring up in uh chapter 2 verse one you bring up these letters alef Lam meme and these have always I mean this whole part about 25 of the Quran is known as what we call dark passages these are well known the scholars know that nobody understands them just these letters are part of those dark passages and you give an answer to it you actually show where it actually comes from and I think it's fascinating explain to the people where these letters come from that no scholar seems to know no muslim scholar seems to know but you seem to have an answer it's uh it's Christoph luxenberg's answer and I think it's compelling that he says that it is liturgical markings um you know Jay I'm an Orthodox Christian yeah that's the book the serial Aramaic reading of the Quran and in in in in in in Orthodox Christianity we have what's known as electionary they have the Catholics have one as well uh you know instead of just the pastor explain what that is yeah instead of the pastor picking a passage of the scripture to read and to preach on for a given day there's a whole schedule for the whole year and a special book that has the scriptures rearranged in the order that uh they will generally be read during the year there are a lot of exceptions a lot of changes a Lot of Things That Vary depending on uh what time of year it is and what other cons feasts may be interposed and so on but there's a general book called the lectionary and it has the readings one after the other so they're not in the order in which they are in the Bible they're in the order in which they're read in the church and so if you think about the Quran in the first place that's the first thing that might make sense of it that the quran's a chaotically ordered book that it doesn't have a thematic order it doesn't have a chronological order it doesn't follow historically either the life of Muhammad as we have it in the Sarah or the chronology of the stories it's recounting but if you think maybe it was a lectionary and so it's a bunch of disconnected readings that were supposed to be used at different times of the year ah they're out makes sense and the alif lam Meme and all the other letters at the beginning of the passages are telling you where to go next because I'll tell you something uh these are Keys these are Keys you might say yeah if you were an orthodox priest and you want to do the Liturgy for a Sunday morning the prayer service for Sunday morning you can't just go to one book and read it all out it's not all in there you have to get a piece from here for the for the readings of the day the the hymns of the day the gospel of the day and they're all in different books and so you might have a and you have a central book where it will tell you what to find where to go to find what you need for this particular day like say the sixth Sunday after posca Easter and so you have this re this Gospel reading and this prayer and this hymn and they're all marked where to go to get them but you got to go get them in different books so what Luxembourg is saying is that alif La meme is exactly that that kind of thing that you want to go to whatever they were we don't know what they were now but you want to go to the place is where the liturgical readings are found that you suppose that you're supposed to do after this section and that that's what the letters stand for just some I want to put up two other books that he's talking about he's referring to these three books this is the first one that came out by Gunther Luling in the 1970s where he looked at and took off the dots and put on Aramaic dots and found all these hymns beautiful hymns written in Aramaic that made up an awful lot of the Poetry that's in the Quran that was a source for it you have this book here that's written by Gabriel Salma who is an Arabic aramaist himself that's his mother tongue and has been trying to tell the world much of the Quran comes from us give credit where credit is due we are Syriac aramaics and we are the ones that can read it in its original language and then of course you have this one here written by Christoph Luxembourg that's not his real name he has to go in hiding and swell isn't this tragic that he can't even give us we don't even know who the real man is we do know that he also is a Syriac scholar and he he is the one that looked at these 25 different these 25 dark I mean 25 percent of the Quran that's dark passages and was able to reproduce it by using a seven step process of taking out the dots taking out the balls replacing them with Aramaic dots and vowels and then looking at Aramaic lectionary lexicons to find but the meaning of the words are and by doing that he not only found that these were lectionaries he found that many of them are actually poems written by Saint Ephraim in the 4th century amazing Surah 23 um is one of the found one of the most popular hymnographers of the Orthodox tradition and a great deal of the poems that he wrote and hymns that he wrote are still used to this day in the Orthodox liturgy and so from there it's just a hop skip and a jump if you see that a great many of these things that are in the Quran are just uh arabicism Arabic sizing the Aramaic hymns of Saint Ephraim and you realize that Saint Ephraim has used liturgically well then that supports his argument in regards of the mysterious letters yeah Robert you're doing I mean what you're doing is such a boon for all of us because you're unpacking this material you're adding it to it you're putting it in the footnotes and saying here is a part of a lectionary here are letters that show you where the the reader the priest is supposed to go from each other context it unpacks it so brilliantly because it shows that almost all of the Quran is borrowed from other sources it's borrowed from just you're right to your syrac Aramaic sources from ethiopic sources we now know a lot comes from Hebrew sources we're even finding that lot some of it comes from zoroastrin sources sassinian sources so all of this makes sense now when you if you're to take it back to its original Source it will show you what the meaning what I love is that much of these much of these these hymns and the most beautiful parts of the Quran are all about Jesus yes he's been taken out of it we need to take him back to Jesus but that's that's the beauty thing about your your critical crime you started this process this is just the first of probably many volumes that you're going to come up with and I hope you keep I hope you keep going and adding new material as new new and newer material comes out we want to see not only the 2023 Edition we want to see the 2024-2025 as it becomes a a real Handy encyclopedia that we can keep on ourselves so whenever there is a question now you do before I end I just want to bring up one more and you do get into the whole kit up problem yes explain that why you brought this up in your critical Edition well it has everything to do with the variant readings that in the Islamic tradition of course as we've discussed before and as you've gone into I mean I used a great deal of your own research of course in this uh in this material the the idea the there are Hadith that explain and it's a foundation of Islamic theology that the Quran was revealed in seven readings and these are the kirat that the the the each each one Islamic apologists will say this is just dialects of Arabic for the pronunciation but there are actual variants and it does seem as if that the stories about the Quran being revealed in these different dialects were apologetic in intent and designed to cover up the fact that there were variant readings in different manuscripts but these became entire manuscript traditions and it becomes quite complicated uh with various people than copying the different traditions and then it becomes more than seven because then there are 10 readers and it becomes a dizzying number of different variants and then of course we have hatun going was it to Morocco and finding what was 35 different no she only found about five or six in Morocco she came back to England and showed me them and I said you can find a good 30 of them so she started sending people to Jordan she started sending people they were going to Jordan she didn't send them or they were going to Morocco or they were going uh to Yemen those are the three countries and she says whenever you're going into a Marketplace I need I mean here they are here are the 30 right here here these are the 30 that you need to look for and you have the seven right here then green these and I'll put this up here on the screen here these are the initial seven well what's interesting and you do this in your book you do this in your critical run you give the dates to these that destroys this argument that these could be these could have been given to Muhammad because look at their dates 736 770 738 785 745 772-805 these are a century or more after Muhammad none of them knew Muhammad none of them were there to receive these different dialects and these are not dialectical differences these are violation differences and also diacritical differences and I note a lot of them in the in the notes I also note that there are many others a lot of them I left out because I wanted to give ones that would be absolutely clear and easy to stand for the English-speaking reader and not get caught up into a lot of things that would be very difficult for or people who didn't know Arabic to understand the ones that are noted in the critical Quran are just designed to give the reader the understanding that there's not a single quranic text and that these variants have existed from the beginning of the quranic tradition itself and the stories about the different dialects and all that were obviously made up to explain the differences rather than the differences actually arising from some decision on the part of a false prophet or on the part of a law to reveal his perfect word in different versions what I think is fascinating is ibid mujahid who was given the responsibility to choose the first seven which start from 736 and go 1885. he did that choosing in 936 just before he died in the 10th Century but that's just the first seven the next 14 which were two students of each of the seven was chosen by al-shatabi in 1194 that's the 12th century and yet then you have our good old friend al-jazadi who comes along and chooses another three kid odds and six students all of this in 1429 that's the 15th century that's 800 years after Muhammad so this is not something that all happened Muslims think this all happened at the time of Muhammad it continued on for 800 years until finally in 1924 it was unmanageable and they could not have standardized tests with 30 different derivations on every verse they had to just choose one and they choose they chose this one the Huff's text this guy is from al-shatabi's list he was chosen in the 12th century but he was writing in 796. that's the eighth Century that's 144 years after Muhammad why did they choose this one do you know the reason they chose um Al Haddad chose this one in 1924 because the Ottomans chose him oh well there you go yes there you go is because this is the ottoman Choice why did they choose it because it was the closest to them in kufa and it was the most simple the most simple to understand that is not how you choose a text I was fascinating we could go on and on for a whole hour on this but thanks for putting that into your book I mean you've got a number of good ones there and I see the ones that you have are probably the strongest ones you are correct they're uh just between Huffs and Waters we have 5 000 different variants between all of them if you look at all 30 it's over it's upwards of it's over 93 000 where else soon to approach a hundred thousand so there you could not and put that all in this book but the ones you did put here and I hope people are listening look and see the variance he did put here because they are all manageable they're ones that you can use they are ones that make a lot of sense and mo folks they don't just change the vowels and the dots they change the meanings and when you change the meanings as Robert's going to show you they changed the Theology and sometimes they change the doctrine at other times and they change the practice all three things happen you can't just have a neutral change just because people Muslims always say well didn't change any meaning it didn't change any meaning it's the same word it's just a different diet no it absolutely does change the Theology and the doctrine and you folks need to know about that so listen Robert this has been great I I know I want to thank you you've done a great job you you I don't know where you have the energy to get all this writing done but um I guess you you just have you have an amount you must have an amazing uh encyclopedic mind because you have an ability to pull threads in from all different areas and bring it down and what I love about your books is that your you communicate it so the Layman can understand it well that's really what I can do I don't uh you know people it's a funny thing Jay because uh a lot of times the Islamic apologists come at me and say this guy says he's a scholar and he's not a scholar of Islam and uh you know you can call me whatever you want I don't care it's really that that the answer to that depends on what what your definition of a scholar is but all I am ever all I've ever claimed to do is pass on the results of what the people who are doing the actual investigating dude I do think that I can make that make break it down and make it clear in a way that it's not so accessible when you read the Sarah RMA no no criticism intended of Professor Luxembourg but his book is hard to read yeah and so a lot of people are discouraged and so in the critical Quran you get the thrust of his argument completely credited to him beginning to end but it's it's in manner that people who are not specialists in this field can understand well thank you for that you are a specialist in the field you're not the originator of the research you're not the one doing the actual research you're taking what the those who are the linguists those who understand the material you're taking their they're not great communicators we know this anybody who studied under them or you could say read their books they don't communicate well and what you have done you've done us all a great favor by putting it down so that we can understand that and I want to thank you again folks do get this book it's called the critical Quran you can get it on Amazon it's up there and if you go into it and read it make sure you keep it in your library don't read the whole thing in one night and well you'll probably get a stomach upset because it is full of material that is not not very pleasant to go to sleep on nonetheless because it is critical because it does uh quote and also help you understand what the original thinkers the exegetes are saying what they are putting together what their how they apply it and these are Muslim exegees all of these are Muslim exegetes that's how why Robert is so important because he takes that which many of us have never heard they're too obscure for us to really pull into if you're not a Muslim yourself if you're a Muslim scholar you will know all about the jalalans you'll know about IBN katir you'll know about Mount Duty and you sort of you know about madani those are well-known names but you all knew that so that's why let Robert do that for you thank you for your efforts thank you for your energy thank you for this book I can't wait to make sure that I keep going from page to page now as I find that any problem I have with a verse I'm just going to use this by my side to be able to unpack it and also to be able to argue with Muslims because this is their book they need to know about how it was put together and why what it's saying is why it's saying what it's saying anything you want to say uh I really appreciate you discussing this uh I do think people need to know in America what's going on what the Quran is all about a lot of people think uh the problem of jihad terrorism is something that's from the early 2000s we're all through that now it's all over unfortunately that's not the case we're going to hear from the jihadis again and we need to know what they are all about that's been the big failing actually the American government and law enforcement that they've decided that they don't need to know anything about what these people believe or why they believe it what their motives and goals are that's another thing that the book is designed to elucidate yeah listen everything that we're finding that the jihadis are doing that Isis did that Al-Qaeda does the Boko Haram it all comes out of this book it comes straight out of the Quran and then understand that you need this book to help you unpack it uh I I want to thank you again Robert for putting it together so that we have it I want people to go out and buy it as much quickly give it to others you should have it on your shelves anyhow this has been great unpacking it for you all this is Robert and Jay a few hundred miles apart over now foreign [Music]

Channel: JihadWatchVideo

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Id: R_cE8jzoCe8

Length: 45min 2sec (2702 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023