About six centuries after Jesus presented mankind with the highest conception man can have of God, as the perfect loving Father of all, Muhammad reintroduced the concept of the wrathful, vengeful, cruel, righteous God of the earlier and inferior records of the Old Testament. Moreover, Muhammad trampled down the idea that God could be the Father of all, much less have a perfect Son who was incarnated on Earth. And Muhammad turned this glorious and liberating revelation of God into the most terrible anathema, as a blasphemy to be condemned to death as decreed by Allah, whose sentence and consummation were to be carried out by every good Muslim.
Exactly the same reason why Jesus was brought to death by half of the Jewish Sanhedrin –his sonship to God– became the reason for the death of Christians at the hands of Muslim believers.
The Qur’an, for all the reasons we have seen in this study and many more, is the most categorical example of how we must be very careful and rigorous in deciding to believe in so-called holy scriptures without using rational discernment or seeking the support of the Spirit of Truth that Jesus left with us for our guidance as he ascended to take charge of his entire universe.
I have sufficient knowledge of the incongruities, contradictions and weaknesses of the Qur’an and the Hadiths, as I also have enough experience of debate with Muslims, to see that, no matter how crystal-clear these contradictions are exposed, Muslims almost in their entirety simply cannot see them. They keep repeating that it is you who do not see the obvious, i.e., the perfection of the supposedly incorruptible Islamic Scriptures.
There is a mechanism in the human psyche that is meant for the person not to collapse and remain solid and firm in the midst of the imponderability of life circumstances. This mechanism is rooted in the ego. The creature instinctively seeks this assurance, because, to the ego, something out of the known value structure is perceived as a potential threat to survival. All the egos of all people, during the period of formation in childhood, puberty and adolescence, have developed unconscious survival strategies. At the stage of our formation, in which we are defenseless creatures depending on the parents’ protection and love, they are our referential and primary refuge, psychologically, even if they are not factually producing this security for the child. It is from the gap between the child’s innate expectation to be loved by the parents and the lack of their correspondence to it in practical terms that acute pathologies arise, such as, for example, the sadistic or masochistic ego.
When our ego “realizes” that it did not die during those first struggles of existence, then it “deduces” for itself that it has accomplished a winning strategy that will protect it for its whole life, in case the ego stands firm in it. Soon, the human being enters in the automatic mode, subconsciously clinging to this winning strategy, with a repeated psychological and behavioral response to stimuli and circumstances. It is the principle of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. For the children the religious faith references are part of that survival package instilled by their parents –or by any authority that plays the parenting role in the children’s unconscious mind.
In societies as authoritarian as the Islamists, where policing customs and external practices is so imposing, children quickly submit to religious authority, practically without possibility of escape, instinctively realizing that only this will ensure their survival. They were born and raised in a context in which their psyche has been branded by fire with the belief that the Islamic Scriptures are perfect, that their Scriptures do not need evolution or amplification, and that the role model for the perfect man is their last prophet, Muhammad, after whom no other prophet will appear. Moreover, it is earnestly pointed out to them that if at any time they doubt these principles, they automatically lose the condition of being Muslims, they lose the right to belong to the “umma” –the community of believers– becoming hated by Allah when doubt assaults their mind, in the occult, and then being rejected by the Islamic community, should their doubt be exposed. As if that were not enough, the “divine” law itself, the Sharia, stipulates that a deserter of Islam is inherently sentenced to death and at any time subject to a faithful believer fulfilling such sentence against him.
With this brief description of the problem, you can already have a good idea of the unconscious forces of a Muslim’s psyche. This is a being at permanent risk, suffering a high level of psychological stress, but with a totally muffled internal tension, not recognized by the deviation holder himself. He or she is mentally programmed to suffer high levels of guilt and self-punishment at any time that the slightest doubt may arise in his or her mind regarding their Scriptures or sharia determinations. The religious prohibition, the dread of the faintest seed of apostasy is engraved with a branding iron in their minds. That is why you see Muslim women zealously defending the use of hijab (Islamic veil), or any practice that diminishes them as a human being and robs them of their rights to a dignified life, and stating, with conviction and sincerity, that this factor of oppression to their feminine condition is supposedly the hallmark of their protection and honoring, the guarantor of their purity and acceptance in the eyes of Allah. The psychological conditioning is so strong that it makes them consider positive and beneficial what is deeply detrimental to them.
Because of this mechanism, if the person does not have a lot of honesty with himself, a love for the truth that allows him to face the overthrow of his most cherished illusions or even physical risk, come what may and whatever is the cost, then he simply will not see the truth, however obvious the contradiction may seem to the external and unconditioned observer. It is not by chance that those Muslims who utter a cry of soul to God to finally be given the truth, with all the sincerity of their heart, are bestowed with powerful signs, often with dreams or even visions in which Jesus visits them and speaks to them, welcomes them into his divine heart and calls them to his harvest. Many Muslims, through their sincere zeal to do God’s will, become the most dedicated Christians, ready to martyrdom for their love of the Lord and dedication to His cause.
The number of contradictions in the Islamic Scriptures is overwhelming. I am not going to explore the intricacies of these enormous and numerous incongruences here, for which a whole book would be necessary, but I will focus only on the item of the so-called incorruptibility of the Islamic Scriptures. Muslims believe that the Qur’an is incorruptible and that it now exists in its unique form as it appeared about 1,400 years ago. That is not true. Discoveries have been made that prove that the Qur’an is not in its original form, which no one even knows what it was. There are currently twenty-six different versions of the Qur’an in Arabic. This study is still in the initial phase and more than five thousand differences of meaning have already been found between several versions. Note, these are not syntax and grammatical differences arising from different regions and nations of Islam, but differences of meaning.[1]
Only between two of the twenty-six, the Hafs and Warsh versions, scholars have already detected more than 1,300 differences of meaning. The oldest copies of the Qur’an that are known are different from each other and from the most current versions. In 1924 a version was canonized, the Hafs, which aimed at standardizing the Qur’an for the whole Islamic world, and that is in fact the most used of all versions. However, all the other twenty-five versions are still out there. And what is the fidelity of this standardized text of 1924 in relation to the original text, if nobody knows which one (if any) is the original Qur’an?
As if all these divergences were not enough, the very emergence of the Qur’an is based on highly debatable and doubtful determinations. It was eighteen years after Muhammad’s death until the Qur’an was compiled, by order of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. This caliph made this emergency decision because Muslims began to diverge on the recitations of the Qur’an while the tradition was essentially oral, and when there were many fragmented and scattered written records. Facing this emergency, Uthman ordered the compilation of the Qur’an, and after this work was finished he ordered that all the existent copies and fragments that were not portions of the version selected by him were burnt. However, if now in the 21st century there are twenty-six versions of the Qur’an in the Arabic language, which one would be that of Uthman (if any)?
Even with Uthman’s emergency intervention, there are traditions in the Hadiths about verses that have been forgotten, even one of them at least forgotten by Muhammad himself. There is even reference to an entire missing chapter. Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, relates that when she was in mourning after Muhammad’s death there was a goat that invaded her chambers and ate a whole chapter of the Qur’an.
The very Hadiths only began to emerge 240 years after Muhammad’s death, and I am referring to the ones considered to be more trustworthy by Muslims.
An incorruptible Qur’an is an obvious myth, but one that any Muslim refuses to recognize as a myth. And there they stand, continually repeating their mantra that the Qur’an is incorruptible, that there is only one version upon Earth from its inception, and nothing can dodge the direct protection of Allah to his sacred Scripture, even though the different versions of the Qur’an in Arabic are there in the world, concrete, materialized, palpable, visible to anyone to confirm the differences; and even if all the scriptural and archaeological surveys of the Islamic sources themselves are showing that the book’s corruption has happened early on and is still in force. No one knows among them which Qur’an was the original one, if any of them. That is the indisputable fact. But how can Muslims accept the evidence if their own allegedly perfect book, supposedly Allah’s word, is stating that their holy book is incorruptible? Few psyches are amenable to suffering this internal painful fracture to the ego when so many “divine” threats hang over the Muslim believer. And all this is in the deep subconscious.
Moreover, this foundation of the Qur’an’s incorruptibility is indissolubly sustained in the Islamic ideology that the Bible has been corrupted. It is this corruption of the Bible that gives Islam its whole reason of being, its whole existence. If this foundation is overthrown, then the entire Islam collapses. Can the reader thus understand that the psychic phenomenon that shapes Muslim children is the same key that is imprisoning the Islamic community as a whole? That the subconscious individual fear of ever being allowed to question the Qur’an and Muhammad is intrinsically linked to the collective fear that the community of believers may be depending on a farce or gross error, a mistake that the mere existence of the Bible and its concepts have denounced since 1,400 years ago? Hence so much hatred and rejection of the Bible, Christianity and Judaism. This had already been the beginning of Muhammad’s conflict toward the Jews and Christians of the Arabian peninsula, who did not believe in Muhammad’s incipient “prophetic” claims. So he made a point of slaughtering them whenever they did not want to convert, and he tried to validate this heinous act in the Islamic Scriptures as if it were a sacred command from Allah.
It is the Truth brought by Jesus, whose remnants can be detected in the Gospel of the New Testament, which will defeat Islam. Can you see how the sword coming out of the mouth (the Word) of the King of kings and Lord of lords, Jesus Christ, will defeat the Beast, the Dragon and the False Prophet?
11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war.
12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.
13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.
15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.
16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.[2]
[1] If you want to have an excellent overview, substantiated and contextualized on all this matter, with constant updates on the latest research and discoveries linked to Islam, you can check the activities of Jay Smith, cofounder of the Pfander Center for Apologetics.
[2] Revelation 19:11-16.
