Monday, June 02, 2008

Allah's book


Can we say that the Quran is a book sent by God because as per Islam Allah communicated to Archangel Gabriel who passed it on in bits and pieces to Mohammad over a period of 23 years, who dictated it to various people over the same period and finally a King had it all collated into a book called Quran. A book sent by God or anyone else would be just that, a book. In the case of Quran, it only eventually became a book.


It would have to contain a statement to the effect, “I, God, am sending you this book for your reading pleasure.” But this would not be proof enough unless we are convinced of the veracity of the statement

There is nothing a book can contain to prove that it was sent by God

I take the phrase “sent by God” to mean “divinely inspired” (by divinely inspired I mean a man awake to his inner potential) and since a book can contain only words, the words in the book must convince us that it has been “sent by God.”.

I am not an atheist. The difference I may have with other theists may only be about God's location. Could your question have been born out of the frustration in not getting the atheist to accept any book as being sent by God? But how could they? They don't know of any God.

For me, if man expresses himself through words, the silence upon which his words are built is God. Any work of man that takes us to the silence within us, to our divine nature, proves that we have awoken to our divine nature, however feebly. We would then need no further proof that the particular work is the work of God. There would then be no greater proof of God. The imagery of "God sending down a book" is metaphoric.

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