Preface

Between 2023 and 2024, I committed, as an experiment, to tag along with an Islamic community and learn not only about their liturgical practices, but also their theology and their views on interfaith relations. The experience I received revealed to me two facts; that Muslims are misunderstood by most which leads to our hatred of them, and that Islam is a fundamentally wrong faith, born out of a mishmash of Christian doctrine and Arabic folk religion.

I want to say that I have deep love for Muslims. Most of them are excellent people with a strong respect for tradition and piety. Yes, some grow into extremism and murder people for their faith; some even develop values opposing sanity and humanity, and yes, I believe that Islam is unique in its potential to grow into such deleterious practices because of its authoritarian and highly assertive doctrine. However, Muslims are mostly peaceable, maybe not always in conviction (e.g. Muslims may be indifferent or even supportive of terrorist groups), but at least in action (that is, most Muslims will probably never commit a terrorist attack regardless of their views). A lot of Muslims are also opposing of violence altogether.

I cannot say, however, that Islam is a correct religion. While it is superficially beautiful, simple, and principled, the truth is that anything more profound than a cursory investigation into the religion reveals that it is essentially a pastiche of Christianity, not too dissimilar to Mormonism. It is an Arabic interpretation of local Christian sects, interlaced with bouts of tribal Arabic folklore religion and full of misconceptions arising from heretic cults that lived around Muhammad’s region at the time. On its own, without any of my own religious bias (I am Christian), it is a highly interesting religious combination, but that’s the extent of my appreciation. In all other aspects, it is a corruption of everything Christianity stands for. Even the Islamic Jesus, which they call Isa, has been removed from its purpose and serves only as another prophet with no relevance to the Godhead.

If you are Muslim and reading this, do not take anything personally. It is mostly an academic, objective introspection into Islam and the time I had in the community.

1 — On the Quran

1.1 — Short overview of the Quran

As part of the experiment, I have read the Quran. The respect that Muslims show for it is impressive and, in my observation, surpasses the love and care that we Christians show to the Bible. Of course, this is in part because of how the nature of Quran is different than the nature of the Bible; the Quran is seen in Islam as the verbatim word of God, whereas the Bible is the word of God by proxy, a set of books inspired by God through the Holy Spirit but not his spoken word per se. If the Bible was seen as the verbatim word of God as the Quran is considered as by Muslims, we would have developed the same reverence of the Bible as we have towards Jesus Christ. In Islam, the Quran serves the same divine purpose as Jesus Christ in Christianity, that is, being the principal source of revelation sent by God.

On its own, the Quran is a formidable (albeit somewhat confusing) book. You can easily understand why it is believable and accessible to more than a billion people; it is written in a very authoritative style, and does not use complex vocabulary to express its ideas. Instead of being divided in books like the Bible, the Quran is divided in chapters, and instead of following an arbitrary kind of order like the one the Church has chosen for the Bible, the order of chapters is based on their length. The whole Quran testifies of two things, which are God’s singular existence and the complete nonexistence of parts, components, or “persons” of God (initially contradicting the Christian concept of the Trinity, but more on this later, it gets interesting), and that the Day of Judgment is coming. Indeed, in Islam, there is much emphasis put on the Day of Judgment, more so than Christianity, even though it still remains a very important concept.

1.2 — The challenge of the Quran

The Quran attempts to testify of its own veracity and excellence by issuing a number of challenges to anyone willing to disprove it, which Muslims believe to be the foremost ontological sign of the truth of its provenance as described in Islam. Al-Isra’ verse 88 states the following:

Say, ‘If mankind and the Jinn gathered together to produce the like of this Qur’an, they could not produce the like thereof, even though they should help one another.’

Therefore, a Quranic challenge is established, which is that no one else on Earth can produce a book “like the Quran”. In Hud 13, the challenge is modified; the Quran has a noticeable pattern of modifying earlier doctrine at multiple points in the book, which Muslims do not believe is contradictory but rather is God changing his mind. The modification now challenges us to create ten surah (chapter) like the ones found in the Quran:

Do they say, ‘He has fabricated it?’ Say, ‘Then bring ten surahs like it, fabricated, and invoke whomever you can, besides Allah, should you be truthful.’

Then, the Quran modifies the challenge again in Al-Baqara 23, this time claiming that no one can even produce a single surah like the ones found in the Quran*:*

And if you are in doubt concerning what We have sent down to Our servant, then bring a surah like it, and invoke your helpers besides Allah, if you are truthful.

The last modification to the challenge is repeated again in Yunus 38:

Do they say, ‘He has fabricated it?’ Say, ‘Then bring a surah like it, and invoke whomever you can, besides Allah, should you be truthful.’

There are inherent multiple problems with these challenges. First, what exactly entails producing something “like” the Quran is left to interpretation. What is the metric for likeness of the Quran? It provides no definition, and no linguistic cues alludes to what it could possibly mean, but Muslim scholars nonetheless believe in this very nebulous claim. If the likeness of the Quran is defined as fake surah that sounds true to Muslims (which, in my opinion, is what “likeness” is defined as in the Quran, considering that it talks about fabrication), then this challenge is immediately broken by the real existence of many fake surah that Muslims believe or have believed in. A quite humorous example would be the quite infamous surah Corona that an Algerian atheist wrote in 2020, which had in fact led to her arrest by Tunisian authorities.↗

Of course, if this fake surah existed without impacting the beliefs of any Muslim, then the challenge would have stood the test. However, there is more than ample evidence of Muslims believing in the veracity of this surah; a brief search of surah Corona reveals many posts (example↗) of Muslims praising the surah and how God’s wisdom has led to these predictions. Some, of course, detect the fabrication right away, but some blindly believe(d) in the fake surah. How can this be when the Quran states that no one can fabricate a surah like it? Some Muslim commenters have stated that surah Corona does not meet the standards established by the Quran, alluding to the challenge referring to prose, but then some other Muslim commenters argue that the challenge is still undefeated not because of prose but because the fake surah has borrowed content from legitimate Quranic surahs (which is a moot point because whether a fake surah borrows from the Quran or not does not impact its nature as a fabrication); it is evident, yet again, that the undefined nature of the challenge can lead to confusion, ultimately allowing any Muslim to cast doubt on any defeat of the Quranic challenges on any basis.

Of course, it is evident that the Quranic challenge talks about how fake surahs cannot be fabricated and subsequently believed by Muslims; all of the verses mentioning and modifying the challenge talk about non-believers casting doubt on the Quran and treating it as a fabrication, and how the Quran stands above this claim by stating no one can imitate the Quran to the point of belief. However, surah Corona alone (which is one of many examples of fake surah), has proven that this challenge can be defeated, and by an atheist no less.

1.3 — The errors of the Quran

Muslims often state that the Quran stands without contradiction, unlike the Bible which is alleged to contain contradictions. While the Bible superficially contains textual contradictions, of course, there is no ontological contradiction, with most alleged cases of contradiction arising from verses read without their proper context (e.g. Mosaic Law being supplanted by the New Covenant). The Quran, however, has multiple textual and ontological contradictions, with no regular system to solve these problems, other than long-winded explanations that involves hypothesis and theoretical semantics.

Muhammad’s understanding of the Trinity

The first set of obvious errors comes from the sporadic understanding that the Quran has on the Trinity. Indeed, the very doctrine that the Quran (and Muslims) rejects has a strangely corrupted view of the concept of the Trinity. Al Ma’idah 116 **goes as such:

And on Judgment Day Allah will say, “O Jesus, son of Mary! Did you ever ask the people to worship you and your mother as gods besides Allah?” He will answer, “Glory be to You! How could I ever say what I had no right to say? If I had said such a thing, you would have certainly known it. You know what is hidden within me, but I do not know what is within You. Indeed, You alone are the Knower of all unseen.

This verse acts as a Quranic rejection of the Trinity, which is necessary in Islam as the concept of God as composed of three divine persons is considered a form of polytheism. However, one may notice that the Trinity mentioned in this surah includes Mary: “Did you ever ask the people to worship you and your mother as gods besides Allah?” This is a strange mention, because the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as it has developed has never included Mary as part of the Trinity, only the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Why would God, who has supposedly created the Quran, is all-perfect and is without mistake, include an erroneous mention of a Christian doctrine that has never developed an has never been preached?

An answer that some Muslim scholars offer is that the Quran does not ever recognize the Christian Trinity as it is a fabricated doctrine anyway, and that this verse simply refers to the worship of Mary; indeed, even some Christians believe that the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox veneration of Mary constitutes worship. This argument could have been true if it wasn’t for the many other mentions of the Trinity elsewhere in the Quran, sometimes even mentioning Mary in the very same verse. For example, An-Nisa 171 states the following:

O People of the Book! Do not go to extremes regarding your faith; say nothing about Allah except the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger of Allah and the fulfillment of His Word through Mary and a spirit created by a command from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers and do not say, “Trinity.” Stop!—for your own good. Allah is only One God. Glory be to Him! He is far above having a son! To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And Allah is sufficient as a Trustee of Affairs.

And again, the Trinity is mentioned, this time even more explicitly, in Al-Ma’idah 73:

Those who say, “Allah is one in a Trinity,” have certainly fallen into disbelief. There is only One God. If they do not stop saying this, those who disbelieve among them will be afflicted with a painful punishment.

Therefore, we can conclude that the Quran recognizes the Christian concept of the Trinity for the purpose of rejecting it, and mistakenly includes Mary as part of it. However, how could this be if the Quran is not a product of its time, and is in fact a universal book that stands outside of time, uncreated (as it is, in the eyes of Muslim, an attribute of God, which is uncreated)? There is a surprisingly simple answer, which is that, unfortunate to Muslim beliefs, the author of the Quran, Muhammad, received part of his understanding of the Trinity from a local Christian sect that lived in his whereabouts at the time, the Collyridians. Historian and Christian scholar Philip Schaff says this of the Collyridians in History of the Christian church, Volume 3, Chapter 7↗:

Epiphanius, in his seventy-eighth Heresy, combats the advocates of the opposite view in Arabia toward the end of the fourth century (367), as heretics under the title of Antidikomarianites, opposers of the dignity of Mary, i.e., of her perpetual virginity. But, on the other hand, he condemns, in the seventy-ninth Heresy, the contemporaneous sect of the Collyridians in Arabia, a set of fanatical women, who, as priestesses, rendered divine worship to Mary, and, perhaps in imitation of the worship of Ceres, offered little cakes to her; he claims adoration for God and Christ alone. Jerome wrote, about 383, with indignation and bitterness against Helvidius and Jovinian, who, citing Scripture passages and earlier church teachers, like Tertullian, maintained that Mary bore children to Joseph after the birth of Christ.

Philip Schaff goes further on the matter, explaining how this could have impacted Muhammad’s beliefs more directly:

In rude misconception or wilful perversion, Mohammed seems to have understood the Christian doctrine of the trinity to be a trinity of Father, Mary, and Jesus. The Holy Spirit is identified with Gabriel. “God is only one God! Far be it from his glory that he should have a son!” Sura 4, ver. 169; comp. 5, ver. 77. The designation and worship of Mary as “the mother of God” may have occasioned this strange mistake. There was in Arabia in the fourth century a sect of fanatical women called Collyridians, who rendered divine worship to Mary. Epiphanius, Haer. 79.

Again, if the Quran was an uncreated, universal book that stands outside of time and applies regardless of epoch, then why would it refer to this extremely specific divergence of the Trinity in one small, local sect in Arabia instead of referring to the broader, more commonly believed concept of the Trinity that every (trinitarian) Christian believes today? Again, the answer is simple: Muhammad authored the Quran, perhaps not by writing, but nevertheless has authored it. It is clear he based his beliefs upon his local environment to which he was exposed, and that environment included the heretical Collyridians.

Muhammad’s belief in Jinn

Jinn, the Arabic term for genies, are invisible creatures or spirits from Arabic folklore. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry talk widely about jinn, and played an important role in the many folk religions that existed at the time. Dr. Maxim Yosefi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies of the University of Göttingen and fan of tribal Arabia, studied the history of jinn and profoundly analyzed and dissected their pertinence to Arab poetry, stating the following in his seminal work The origins of the traditional approach towards the jinn of poetic inspiration in tribal Arab culture (p. 293)↗:

In tribal Arabia, a clear connection has been made between being a poet and coming into direct contact with jinn (sing. jinnī) or shayāṭīn (sing. shayṭān) of inspiration. Medieval Arabic writings provide reports on the spirits of well-known poets, giving their personal names and describing encounters with them (al-Jāḥiẓ 1965–1969, vi: 225–226; al-Qazwīnī 1967: 373; al-Qurashī 1981: 47–63; al-Thaʿālibī 2003: 62–67). Pre-Islamic and early Islamic poets, as well as heathen soothsayers, address jinn in their production (al-Ṣafadī 2000, xxiv: 305; al-Aʿshā 1968: 125, 221), which proves that these reports may have truly reflected ancient popular notions of the source, or agents, of divinatory and poetic inspiration.

Similarly, Dr. Amira El-Zein of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar researched the worship of jinn among the Arabic tribes and the parallels between them and angels, demons, and other entities that Arabic tribes learned from their neighbors. In her work Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn↗, she writes (p. 34):

*The term jinn in Arabic refers to all invisible spiritual entities. As already mentioned, each time the two Arabic letters jim and nun occur together, they carry the meaning of invisible, hidden, and mysterious. Hence, the term jinn in Arabic encompasses jinn, demons, and angels, because all three are invisible. This use of the term jinn was prevalent in pre-Islam, and remained in use during Islam, at least in the beginning.*

It is academically and historically clear that jinn pre-existed Islam. Of course, this is on par with virtually every culture in the world, which always had some concept of ghosts, spirits, angels, or demons. However, this opens up a very penetrating question: why is it that the Quran, the authentic word of God according to Islam, mentions jinn? The Quran has an entire surah dedicated to jinn, al-Jinn, and talks widely about how they can even convert to Islam. Here is an example of a verse explicitly mentioning Jinn, al-Jinn 1:

Say, O Prophet, “It has been revealed to me that a group of jinn listened to the Quran, and said to their fellow jinn: ‘Indeed, we have heard a wondrous recitation.

Jinn, ontologically and historically speaking, does not exist outside of Arabia. Jinn as a folkloric belief arose exclusively in Arabic tribes and had a unique interpretation as semi-material contributors to Arabic poetry, sometimes lovers, sometimes enemies. Why is it that the Quran, the verbatim word of God that transcend all space and applies universally to the entirety of the world, mention a class of ghostly entity exclusive to Arabic folklore and treat them as fact?

Yet again, the answer is simple: Muhammad authored the Quran, perhaps not by writing, but nevertheless has authored it. It is clear he based his beliefs upon his local environment to which he was exposed, and that environment included the belief in jinn.

2 — On the hadiths

2.1 — Short overview of the hadiths

Much like the Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is a companion to the Bible, Muslims believe that the body of hadiths is a companion to the Quran. A hadith, in short, is a biographical account of Muhammad’s life, describing his activities, his teachings, and various details on Islam. Essentially, the body of hadiths is the Islamic analogue of the Bible (whereas the Quran is their analogue of Jesus Christ). Most Muslims believe that the hadiths has authority, believing that they can even override teachings of the Quran, and that hadiths can be authenticated through their chain of narration. The reason why such care and attention is provided to hadith is because the Quran mandates Muslims to follow the prophet’s example in Al-Hashr 7:

As for gains granted by Allah to His Messenger from the people of other lands, they are for Allah and the Messenger, his close relatives, orphans, the poor, and needy travellers so that wealth may not merely circulate among your rich. Whatever the Messenger gives you, take it. And whatever he forbids you from, leave it. And fear Allah. Surely Allah is severe in punishment.

Even though hadiths regularly override the contents of the Quran (examples will follow), they are not considered contradictions by Muslims, but rather abrogation. The concept of Islamic abrogation is that every apparent contradiction is in reality a context-dependent ruling, which is only to be applied in each circumstance described in each alleged contradiction. Now, the Quran accounts for its own abrogation, evidenced by An-Nahl 101:

When We replace a verse with another—and Allah knows best what He reveals—they say, “You Muhammad are just a fabricator.” In fact, most of them do not know.

It is this permission that the Quran provides to itself that allows, for example, for the gradual evolution of the prohibition of alcohol. However, the Quran does not account for hadith-based abrogation. Whether hadiths can abrogate the Quran is an extrapolation from the previously mentioned verse Al-Hashr 7, and the validity of this extrapolation is not recognized by all Islamic schools of thoughts. Indeed, the Shafiʽi and Hanafi schools of thoughts in Sunni Islam does not agree on the matter, with some providing the Quran with the final say on scriptural matters, and others allowing hadiths to override the Quran through the principle of abrogation.

2.2 — Inauthentic hadith that made it through the chain of narration

Muslims believe that there is authentic and inauthentic hadith. Authentic hadiths can abrogate the Quran and provide useful knowledge on the practice of Islam, while inauthentic hadiths are evil fabrications serving only to corrupt Islam. Today, most Muslims believe in a set of hadiths they believe to be undeniably authentic because they come from a scholarly-studied chain of narration that can be historically traced back to Muhammad himself.

However, the set of “authentic” hadiths as they believed to be today contains inauthentic hadith. Dr. Joshua Little, graduate of Pembroke College, has spent years studying the validity of the Aisha hadith - universally believed by Muslims to be true and authentic hadith - for his PhD, and found out that it was a mere fabrication made by Proto-Sunni Muslims to increase the reputation of Muhammad’s underage wife Aisha. The following is recorded in al-Bukhari, the most authoritative hadith collection:

Muḥammad b. Yūsuf related to us: “Sufyān related to us, from Hišām, from his father, from ʿĀʾišah, that the Prophet married her when she was a girl of six years, and she was taken to him when she was a girl of nine, and she lived with him nine [years].”

Dr. Joshua Little states the following in the abstract of his thesis, The Hadith of ʿĀʾišah’s Marital Age: a study in the evolution of early Islamic historical memory↗:

This ur-hadith appears to have been created and disseminated by the Madinan tradent Hišām b. ʿUrwah b. al-Zubayr (d. 146-147/763-765) after he moved to Iraq towards the end of his life, probably as a reaction to local proto-Šīʿī polemics against his great-aunt, ʿĀʾišah.

This hadith has then spread across the early caliphates, mutating a few times before eventually being accepted in the canon of hadiths widely accepted by Muslims, without any apparent investigation as to where the hadith came from:

Following on from this, I traced the spread and diversification of the hadith across the early Abbasid Caliphate, including the way in which some Hadith scholars reworked its content and/or replaced the original isnad with local and/or familial isnads, thereby naturalizing it in their respective regions. Thereafter, I explored the reception of the hadith by the proto-Sunni Hadith critics, who rejected or criticized some versions, but accepted others, seemingly without a thorough or systematic investigation of their provenance and transmission.

The importance of the Aisha hadith being fabricated cannot possibly be understated for it both destructs a vital point used by social opponents of Islam (the criticism of Islamic scripture for promoting child marriage) and creates a new point to theologically oppose Islam (inauthentic hadith has made its way into the faith and corrupted it).

3 — On the community

The Islamic community, at least in its local Western instances as one may subjectively experience through his environment, is wonderful. The most radiant Muslims are extremely generous, hard-working people whose actions are paved with good intentions and the desire to submit to God. A small amount of exposure to a Muslim community will change the usually prejudiced view of the takbir, Allahu Akbar, from a violent expression of jihad to one that reflects their inner piousness. This is not to say that Muslim communities are not without fault — how many communities have given rise to terrorist extremism and lesser attacks on their neighbouring peoples? — but their existence as a threat to Western civilization, as is claimed by many, is vastly exaggerated. While yes, many values of Islam do come in conflict with the Western values created by Christianity, a lot are compatible and may in fact complement with one another. Not everything is right, but not everything is wrong either.

I will say however that the Muslim community as a whole has absolutely no pragmatism. Evidenced by how little Islam has changed since the times of the caliphates, Muslims are extremely resilient to change, which is good in theological matters but not necessarily in socio-cultural matters. As the world progresses in its scientific understanding of the universe and of human community, so does the structure and the execution of human community evolve. We have made many advances in these fields that the Muslim community, through their guiding light of Islam, are attempting to revert, or at least replace with their equivalents. For instance, we have made great strides in increasing respect and equality towards women, which Christianity has integrated in its own way (the equality of women does not contradict the existence and enforcement of traditional familial roles), but Islam tries to oppose as much as possible, with some Muslims claiming that the Islamic view of women is in fact the most perfect execution of this equality when they don’t want to claim that equality is bad.