Christian Apologetics for Muslims

Christian Apologetics for Muslims

by David Lehman

Apologetices Class Schedule

2/17/08 Why Christianity is the Only True Religion
The Uniqueness of the Bible
Evidence from Creation
Fulfilled Prophecy
Archeological Evidence
Changed Life of the Apostle Paul
The Existence of the Jew
The Changed Life of the Apostles
The Resurrection
Personal Experience
Typology in Scripture
Answered Prayer
The Bible Code
The Trend the World is Taking toward Globalism

2/24/08 Why Islam is not a True Religion
Islam’s Pagan Roots
The Sources of the Qur’an
The Fruits of Islam
False Prophecies of Islam
The Suppression of Truth in Islam
The Evil Character of Islam’s Prophet
Fanciful Tales in the Qur’an and the Hadith
Comparison with the Bible
The Nature of Islam’s God
Contradictions in the Qur’an and Hadith

Two Possible Worldviews

The Creation is Natural Revelation which points us to God since He is the only cause capable of producing the effect. There are only two possible views – either it happened naturally or supernaturally.

Therefore, if you disprove one you've proved the other. Either God did it or he didn’t.

The Creation shows the need for Special Revelation since Natural Revelation is unable to answer questions such as: What is man? What is God like? And what does God require of man?

All of the world’s religions and cults are an attempt to answer these questions. They all have some authoritative source (written or tradition) with which to understand who God is, how the Creation got here, what is required of us, and what we can do to control our destiny both now and in the afterlife.

The Only True Account of Origins

The false philosophy of evolution has led the modern scientific and educational
establishments to develop elaborate naturalistic development scenarios for the
universe and its many components, including human beings. The only true
account of origins, however, is given in Genesis. In outline form, with Scriptural
texts accompanying, the sequence of origins events as revealed in Genesis is as
follows:
Initial Creation of Space/Mass/Time Universe (Genesis 1:1).
Formation of Solid Earth and Biosphere (Genesis 1:9, 10).
Origin of Stars and Solar System (Genesis 1:14-19).
Formation of Marine and Atmospheric Life (Genesis 1:20).
Creation of Conscious Animal Life (Genesis 1:21-25).
Creation of Man in Image of God (Genesis 1:26, 27.
Origin of Marriage and Home (Genesis 1:28; 2:23, 24).
Origin of Decay and Death (Genesis 3:17-19).
Origin of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry (Genesis 4:2).
Origin of Urbanization (Genesis 4:17).
Origin of Technology (Genesis 4:20-22).
Origin of Nations (Genesis 10).
Origin of Different Languages (Genesis 11:1-9).
Origin of Chosen Nation Israel (Genesis 12).
The Creation According to Islam

The Qur'an of the Muslims says in Sura 41:9-12 that it took God 8 days to create the world (4 days + 2 days + 2 days = 8 days). Yet in Suras 7:51 and 10:3 we read that the creation of the world took only 6 days. The Qur'an in Sura 11:32-48 says that one of Noah's sons refused to go into the Ark and was drowned in the flood. In Sura 11:44 it states that the Ark came to rest on Mount Judi while the Bible says Mount Ararat. The Qur'an puts the flood and Moses, the tower of Babel and Pharaoh, Nimrod and Abraham, Haman and Moses, Mary and Aaron as if they all were together at the same time.

The Muslim view of creation is that of six days yet each day can range from 1,000 to 50,000 years. Life began in the water. The universe was initially a mass all in one block which God split up. There are seven heavens and several earths. Adam taught the angels all the names of the things taught him. God ordered all the angels to bow down to Adam, and all obeyed except Iblis (Satan) who promptly refused and hence rejected the faith. Although man is given authority over all God's creation, he is not allowed to be wasteful or misuse nature. Hunting is allowed only if its for food. Dangerous animals can be killed for man's protection, but they must be killed with the least possible degree of pain. Man is free to explore the planets, but he must not destroy them.

This model accommodates evolution and disagrees with the Bible. For example, God defines each day as having an evening and a morning. Several creatures such as plants and insects which depend upon one another were created on different days. If the days were long periods then none of those symbiotic relationships would have survived. Also if either the evening or the morning were an extended period of time plant life would not have survived. The Biblical account has life beginning on land. Rather than being taught by God, man was commanded to name the animals. Sura 41:9, 10, 12 says that it took God eight days to create the world (4 days + 2 days + 2 days).

According to the Qur'an, Adam and Hauwa (Eve) were sent down to earth from a Heavenly Garden after Satan's temptation, and they realized their sin and repented. The only way man can regain the "Garden" is to oppose Satan relentlessly and successfully by obeying the Law of God.

All people are born Muslims, innocent, pure, and free. There is no original sin which was passed on from Adam. Islam does not believe man is sinful but imperfect and forgetful. Therefore he needs to constantly be reminded of the right path through the prophets and revelation. Islam focuses on the intellectual capabilities of man and his responsibility for obedience to the will of God, while Christianity focuses on the relational capacity and the need to fill that longing with a personal relationship with God and his fellow man.

The source of evil for Islam is Satan. Man's sin in the garden was not a willful and deliberate disobedience. Evil only touches those who yield to it. So evil is avoidable if one is sincere in one's worship of Allah. It is forgivable and is not hereditary.

Muslims believe that God would send a fresh message or revelation whenever the faith of people declined. The Qur'an speaks respectfully of all the prophets, some 124,000, before Muhammad and to regard their Scripture as from God, to live amicably with the People of the Book, and even marry their women.

Islam’s Scripture

According to Islam the Qur'an is the most widely read book ever written. It is the textbook from which all Muslims learn to read Arabic. It is the central reality in Islamic life. The Prophet Muhammad himself directed the proper recording and arrangement of the Qur'an as commanded by Allah. No word, order or punctuation mark has been changed, omitted, or added.

The idea that God must continue to update and change His message is seen in Baha'i where all of the World Religions and their prophets are considered to have been sent by the same God even though they can't even agree if there is a God up there, and Jehovah's Witnesses whose truth can only go back as far as the latest Watchtower.

Muhammad is seen as being a righteous reformer who did away with the idolatry, the wine drinking, gambling, raiding, and blood feuds of his day. It seems closer to the truth to say that Muhammad took the traditional practices and customs of the Arab - murder, predatory war, slavery, polygamy, concubinage, vain glory, and self-conceit and made a religion out of them.

Islam’s God

Islam teaches that God's nature is far beyond our limited conception. No one else can share even an atom of His Divine power and authority. God has no son, no father, no brother, no wife, no sisters, and no daughters. God does not rest on the seventh day but continues to evolve new forms and sustains all that He has created. God has revealed to mankind ninety-nine names. God is merciful to everyone but only loves those who submit to His will. God is the possessor of all power and gives power to rulers as He pleases. God is wise and all-knowing as well as eternal. There is no self-disclosure or relationship with man in Islam’s God.

Mormonism’s View of Creation

Mormonism teaches that matter always existed and that all men and women existed in the form of an intelligence from all eternity. As Joseph Smith said, "The mind of man is as immortal as God himself...their spirits existed co-equal with God...God never did have power to create himself: intelligence exists upon a self existent principle, it is a spirit from age to age, and there is no creation about it."

This God who had a father and mother and whose father was the product of his father and mother and so on from eternity past now produces spirit children by means of sexual relationship with his wife even though they are both physical beings. These spirit babies whom grow up into full grown spirits having somehow been made from their eternal intelligence now have to be compressed into physical baby bodies and, in the process, lose their memory of their previous existence. Joseph Smith said that God could indeed create nothing, only procreate and organize out of already existent materials. This he could do because he was taught by other Gods and Goddesses the complex principles of the universe.

Hinduism’s View of Creation

All the Eastern religions and New Age cults see the Universe as self existent. The idea that matter created the universe is like saying the ink on the page wrote the book. There is no teleonomy or specific information coded into raw matter. Hinduism teaches there are innumerable galaxies comparable to our own, each focusing in an earth from which men wend their ways to God. Ringing each earth would be a number of finer worlds above and inferior ones below to which souls would repair between incarnations. Periodically the cosmos collapses into a night of Brahma and all phenomenal being is returned to a state of pure potentiality. This oscillation is a permanent feature of existence; the universe had no beginning and will have no end. If God is removed the universe will collapse. Non-dualists approach creation by distinguishing three modes of consciousness under which it may appear. Dualists see the world as real yet less exalted than God.

Jehovah’s Witnesses view of Creation

Jehovah's Witnesses teach that Jehovah's first creation was Jesus Christ. Prior to this time He was all alone. This He did not out of pre-existent matter but out of nothing with the help of a "female principle". Next God created other spirits also called "sons of God" or angels which along with Satan are, in a sense, brothers of Jesus Christ.

The angels are God’s heavenly organization and are spoken of as Jehovah's wife. This heavenly organization produces all the members of the anointed class and it, not the earthly church, is the mother of the 144,000. Finally, billions of years ago, God created the material universe.

A long time therefore elapsed between this initial creation and the beginning of the creation week. Each of the seven days of creation, it is taught, was a period of 7,000 years, making a 49,000 year week. Man was supposed to have been created on the last day of the sixth 7,000 year period, after 42,000 years of the creation week had gone by.

The seventh day, on which God rests from creating is also 7,000 years long and is now in progress. If man was created in 4026 BC, which they claim by using a modified Ussher's chronology, then 6,000 years later would be 1975. This would be the time that Christ would return and destroy all non-Jehovah's Witnesses at Armageddon, and the millennium or final 1,000 years would begin.

Since this did not happen they say that the 6,000 years must have begun with the creation of Eve, which as of 1992 would be at least 17 years after Adam's creation, giving him a lot of time to realize he was lonely. The Watchtower publications: NEW HEAVENS AND A NEW EARTH, LET GOD BE TRUE, PARADISE LOST, MAKE SURE OF ALL THINGS, YOUR WILL BE DONE ON EARTH, and DID MAN GET HERE BY EVOLUTION OR CREATION can be used to further study their views on creation.

Abiogenesis

OUR WORLD BEGINS—Evolutionary theorists tell us that long ago, our world spun off from a stellar condensation or collision of some kind. At first it was a molten mass of very hot rock. Gradually this is supposed to have cooled over a period of millions upon millions of years.

THE PRIMITIVE ENVIRONMENT - Finally it was time for life to originate by spontaneous generation from (according to which theorist is speaking) warm wet dirt, seashore, hot and dry dirt, ocean water, desert sand, lake, poisonous chemicals or fumes, electrified mud puddle, a volcanic rim, or something else. An atmosphere of some type had formed, and occasionally lightning would strike the earth.

Scientists have tried to analyze what conditions would have had to be like in order for spontaneous generation of life from non-life to occur. They call this the "primitive environment."

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION—The theory of life from non-living things

is the error of "spontaneous generation," an error which was not fully eliminated until more than a century ago. Modern evolutionists believe in and teach spontaneous generation, which they now call biopoiesis, so students will not recognize that they are still advocating spontaneous generation. (Earlier in the twentieth century, it was called abiogenesis.)

In contrast, Biogenesis is the scientific name for the important biological truth confirmed by Louis Pasteur and others, that life can only come from life. "Biogenesis is a term in biology that is derived from two Greek words meaning life and birth. According to the theory of biogenesis, living things descend only from living things. They cannot develop spontaneously from nonliving materials. Until comparatively recent times, scientists believed that certain tiny forms of life, such as bacteria, arose spontaneously from non-living substances."— *"Biogenesis," World Book Encyclopedia, p. B-242 (1972 edition). Spontaneous generation was believed by many scientists, prior to the careful experiments of Spallanzani (1780), and Pasteur (1860), which totally disproved that foolish idea. People thought that fruit flies spontaneously came forth from fruit, geese from barnacles, mice from dirty clothes, and bees from dead calves. Even Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, *Hegel, and *Shilling believed it, but that did not make it right. Great people believing an error does not make the error truth. Evolution teaches spontaneous generation. Think about that for a moment. We’re returning to the Dark Ages!

"Pasteur’s demonstration apparently laid the theory of spontaneous generation to rest permanently. All this left a germ of embarrassment for scientists. How had life originated after all, if not through divine creation or through spontaneous generation? . .

"They [today’s scientists] are back to spontaneous generation, but with a difference. The pre-Pasteur view of spontaneous generation was of something taking place now and quickly. The modern view is that it took place long ago and very slowly."—*Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), pp. 638-639.

In contrast, true science teaches biogenesis, which means, in general, that life can only come from life and, specifically, that species can only come from living parents in the same species. Speaking of *Rudolf Virchow, the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us:

"His aphorism ‘omnis cellula e cellula’ [every cell arises from a preexisting cell] ranks with Pasteur’s ‘omne vivum e vivo’ [every living thing arises from a preexisting living thing] as among the most revolutionary generalizations of biology."—*Encyclopedia Britannica, 1973 Edition, Vol. 23, p. 35.

The Law of Biogenesis

Duplicate copies of the double helix representing DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) are coiled up in each of the 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) cells in your body. You have 46 segments of DNA in almost all of your cells. You received 23 segments from your mother and 23 from your father. DNA contains the unique information that determines what you look like, much of your personality, and how every cell in your body is to function throughout your life. If the DNA (46 segments) in one of your cells were uncoiled, connected, and stretched out, it would be about 7 feet long. It would be so thin its details could not be seen, even under an electron microscope. If all this very densely coded information from one cell of one person were written in books, it would fill a library of about 4,000 books. If all the DNA in your body were placed end-to-end, it would stretch from here to the Moon more than 500,000 times! In book form, that information would fill the Grand Canyon more than 75 times.

If one set of DNA (one cell’s worth) from every person who ever lived were placed in a pile, the final pile would weigh less than an aspirin! Understanding DNA is just one small reason for believing you are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

(Ps 139:14)

Laws of Information

Anything material such as physical/chemical processes, cannot create something
non-material
Information is a non-material entity and not a property of matter.
Information requires a material medium for storage and transmission.
Information cannot originate in statistical processes.
There can be no information without a code.

All codes result from an intentional choice and agreement between sender and recipient.

The determination of meaning for and from set of symbols is a mental process that requires intelligence.

There can be no new information without an intelligent purposeful sender.
Any given chain of information can be traced back to an intelligent source.
Examples of radio, antennae, or library.
Information comprises the non-material foundation for all
Technological systems
Works of art
Biological systems

Using the density of information found in DNA, one pin head would contain enough information to compose a pile of books the distance from the earth to the moon five hundred times.

Since DNA code of all life forms is clearly within the definition domain of information, we conclude there must be a sender.

Since the density and complexity of the DNA encoded information is billions of times greater than man’s present technology, we conclude the Sender must be supremely intelligent.

Where did God get his information from? Answer: an over God who got it
from and over, over God, etc.
Not an infinite number of gods but an infinite God
The sender must be omnipotent
He must know everything in the present
He must know everything in the past
He must know everything in the future
The sender must be eternal
The sender must be spirit
Laws of Information - Conclusion

Must be a sender – Psalm 14:1 “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’” Must be omniscient – John 16:30 “Now we are sure that thou knowest all things…”

Must be omnipotent – Revelation 1:8 “I am alpha and omega…which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”

Must be eternal – Psalm 90:2 “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” Must be Spirit – John 4:24 “God is Spirit…” Who is the sender? For that we need special revelation – The Bible Since man can produce information then man must have a non-material element – spirit.

Not By Chance

The human brain consists of approximately 12 billion cells, forming 120 trillion interconnections. The light sensitive retina of the eye (which is really part of the brain) contains over 10 million photoreceptor cells. These cells capture the light pattern formed by the lens and convert it into complex electrical signals, which are then sent to a special area of the brain where they are transformed into the sensation we call vision.

In an article in Byte magazine (April 1985), John Stevens compares the signal processing ability of the cells in the retina with that of the most sophisticated computer designed by man, the Cray supercomputer:

"While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina's real-time performance goes unchallenged. Actually, to simulate 10 milliseconds (one hundredth of a second) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second."

Acquired Characteristics

Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. For example, large muscles acquired by a man in a weight-lifting program cannot be inherited by his child. Nor did giraffes get long necks because their ancestors stretched to reach high leaves. While almost all evolutionists agree that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, many unconsciously slip into this false belief. On occasion, Darwin did.

However, stressful environments for some animals and plants cause their offspring to express various defenses. New genetic traits are not created; instead, the environment can switch on genetic machinery already present. The marvel is that optimal genetic machinery already exists to handle some contingencies, not that time, the environment, or “a need” can produce the machinery.

The First Cell

If, despite virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance processes, there is not the remotest reason to believe they could ever form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, self-repairing, metabolizing, living cell. There is no evidence that any stable states exist between the assumed naturalistic formation of proteins and the formation of the first living cells.

No scientist has ever demonstrated that this fantastic jump in complexity could have happened—even if the entire universe had been filled with proteins.

Biochemistry of a Single Human Cell

Metamorphosis

Most insects (87%) undergo complete metamorphosis; that is, a larva (such as a caterpillar) builds a cocoon or chrysalis around itself. Its body inside then disintegrates into a thick, pulp like liquid. Days, weeks, or months later, the adult insect emerges—one that is dramatically different, amazingly capable, and often beautiful, such as a butterfly. Food, habitat, and behavior of the larva also differ drastically from those of the adult.

Evolution claims that:

Mutations slightly alter an organism’s genetic material which later generations inherit. On rare occasions the alterations are beneficial, enabling those offspring to reproduce more of themselves and the improved genetic material. [Supposedly] after many generations, dramatic changes, even new organs, accumulate.

If this were true, each organism must be able to reproduce and must be superior, in some sense, to its ancestors. How then could metamorphosis evolve in many stages?

What mutations could improve a larva? Certainly none that destroyed its nerves, muscles, eyes, brain, and most other organs, as occurs within a cocoon. So even if a larva improved, it later ends up as “mush.” From an evolutionary standpoint, liquefying complex organs is a giant step backwards.

As Michael Pitman wryly noted,

Maggots will more or less dissolve themselves when developing into a fly. Was the process pre-programmed from the first “production run”? Or was the ancestral fly a dissolved maggot?

The millions of changes inside the thick liquid never produce something survivable or advantageous in the outside world until the adult completely forms. How did the genetic material for both larva and adult develop? Which came first, larva or adult? What mutations could transform a crawling larva into a flying monarch butterfly that can accurately navigate 3,000 miles using a brain the size of a pin head? Indeed, why should a larva evolve in the first place, because it cannot reproduce?

Charles Darwin wrote, If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

Based on metamorphosis alone, evolution “breaks down.”

Obviously, the vast information that directs every stage of a larva’s and an adult’s development, including metamorphosis, must reside in its genetic material at the beginning. This fits only creation.

Many animals experience an amazing transformation that refutes evolution. One example is the monarch butterfly. As a 2-week-old caterpillar (left), it builds a chrysalis around itself (center). Then its complex organs disintegrate. From an evolution perspective, this should cause its extinction—a thousand times over. Two weeks later, a beautiful butterfly emerges with different and even more remarkable capabilities (right). Some people might believe a complex machine, such as an automobile, evolved by natural processes, but if they saw that machine disintegrate and quickly reemerge as an airplane, only the most naive and unscientific would still believe natural processes could produce such marvelous designs.

PEPPERED MOTH

The peppered moth in England is the most frequently discussed evolutionary "proof" of natural selection. In fact, it is mentioned ten times for every instance in which any other evidence is mentioned! Therefore, it deserves special attention. The problem is that evolutionists really have no proof, and the peppered moth surely is not one.

"This is the most striking evolutionary change ever to have been witnessed by man."—*International Wildlife Encyclopedia (1970 edition), Vol. 20, p. 2706. Noting that Darwin was plagued by his inability to demonstrate the evolution of even one species, *Jastrow said:

"Had he known it, an example was at hand which would have provided him with the proof he needed. The case was an exceedingly rare one—the peppered moth."—*Robert Jastrow, Red Giants and White Dwarfs, p. 235.

In his large 940-page book, Asimov’s New Guide to Science, *Isaac Asimov mentions that some fools oppose evolution, saying it has never been proven; and then Asimov gives us a single, outstanding evidence: the peppered moth. This is astounding—in view of the fact that it is no evidence at all! Isaac Asimov is the leading evolutionary science writer of the mid-twentieth century. If the peppered moth is the best he can come up with in defense of evolution, surely evolutionists have no case.

"One of the arguments of the creationists is that no one has ever seen the forces of evolution at work. That would seem the most nearly irrefutable of their arguments, and yet it, too, is wrong. In fact, if any confirmation of Darwinism were needed, it has turned up in examples of natural selection that have taken place before our eyes (now that we know what to watch for). A notable example occurred in Darwin’s native land. In England, it seems, the peppered moth exists in two varieties, a light and a dark."—*Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), p. 780.

White Bodied Peppered Moth [Biston Betularia]

Black Bodied Peppered Moth

There is a postscript to the peppered moth story. The above description included data about the habits of peppered moths in England, as cited by evolutionists.

They have been telling us for years that the variation in the wing color of the peppered moth was the fact that they rest on the sides of trees, and the trees became darker. Well, it turns out that they did not even get that story straight. Peppered moths do not alight on the sides of trees! And the stock evolutionary "research photos" were made of dead moths pasted on the sides of trees!

EVOLUTION COULD NOT DO THIS

The teeth of a rat are designed so the top two front teeth go behind the bottom two, at just the right angle to produce self-sharpening teeth. Engineers at General Electric wanted to design a self-sharpening saw blade in order to obtain exactly the right angle in relation to the metal it is cutting; so they studied the teeth of a rat. They found there was no other way it could be done as efficiently. As it slices through the metal, small pieces of the new blade are cut away by the metal, thus always keeping the blade sharp. That self-sharpening blade lasts six times longer than any other blade they had previously been able to make. All because the trained researchers studied the teeth of a rat. Who designed those teeth? Why do you have odor-detecting cells in your nose? Why can you taste with your tongue? Why does food have built-in flavors? The food and your tongue were designed for one another! Why do you have semi-circular canals in your ears, sending signals to your brain, so you can stand without falling over?

Symbiotic Relationships

Many different forms of life are completely dependent upon each other. Examples include fig trees and the fig gall wasp, the yucca plant and the yucca moth, many parasites and their hosts, and pollen-bearing plants and the honeybee. Even members of the honeybee family, consisting of the queen, workers, and drones, are interdependent.

If one member of each interdependent group evolved first (such as the plant before the animal, or one member of the honeybee family before the others), it could not have survived. Because all members of the group obviously have survived, they must have come into existence at essentially the same time. In other words, creation.

Sexual Reproduction

If sexual reproduction in plants, animals, and humans is a result of evolutionary sequences, an unbelievable series of chance events must have occurred at each stage.

a. The amazingly complex, radically different, yet complementary reproductive systems of the male and female must have

completely

and independently evolved at each stage at about the

same time

and

place

. Just a slight incompleteness in only one of the two would make both reproductive systems useless, and the organism would become extinct.

b. The physical, chemical, and emotional systems of the male and female would also need to be compatible.

c. The millions of complex products of a male reproductive system (pollen or sperm) must have an affinity for and a mechanical, chemical, and electrical compatibility with the eggs of the female reproductive system.

d. The many intricate processes occurring at the molecular level inside the fertilized egg would have to work with fantastic precision—processes scientists can describe only in a general sense.

e. The environment of this fertilized egg, from conception through adulthood and until it also reproduced with another sexually capable adult (who also “accidentally” evolved), would have to be tightly controlled.

f. This remarkable string of “accidents” must have been repeated for millions of species.

Either this series of incredible and complementary events happened by random, evolutionary processes, or sexual reproduction was designed by intelligence. Furthermore, if sexual reproduction evolved, the steps by which an embryo becomes either a male or female should be similar for all animals. Actually, these steps vary among animals.

Evolution theory predicts nature would select asexual rather than sexual reproduction.f But if asexual reproduction (splitting an organism into two identical organisms) evolved before sexual reproduction, how did complex sexual diversity arise—or survive?

Finally, to produce the first life form would be one miracle. But for natural processes to produce life that immediately had the capability to reproduce itself would be a miracle on top of a miracle.

Immune Systems

How could immune systems of animals and plants have evolved? Each immune system can recognize invading bacteria, viruses, and toxins. Each system can quickly mobilize the best defenders to search out and destroy these invaders. Each system has a memory and learns from every attack.

If the many instructions that direct an animal’s or plant’s immune system had not been preprogrammed in the organism’s genetic system when it first appeared on earth, the first of thousands of potential infections would have killed the organism. This would have nullified any rare genetic improvements that might have accumulated. In other words, the large amount of genetic information governing the immune system could not have accumulated in a slow, evolutionary sense. Obviously, for each organism to have survived, all this information must have all been there from the beginning. Again, creation.

A few “stem cells” in your bone marrow produce more than 100 billion white blood cells and other types of blood cells every day. Each white blood cell moves at up to 30 microns (almost half the diameter of a human hair) each minute. So many white blood cells are in your body that their total distance traveled in one day would circle the earth twice. © Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH; photo by Lennart Nilsson.

White bacterium, shown at the left. Your health, and that of many animals, depends on the effectiveness of these “search-anddestroy missions.” Consider the capabilities and associated equipment this white blood cell must have to do its job. It must identify friend and foe. Once a foe is detected, the white blood cell must rapidly locate and overtake the invader. Then the white blood cell must engulf the bacterium, destroy it, and have the endurance to repeat this many times. Miniaturization, fuel efficiency, and compatibility with other members of the body are also key requirements. The equipment for each function requires careful design. Unless all this worked well from the beginning of life, a requirement that rules out evolution

, bacteria and other agents of disease would have won, and we would not be here to marvel at these hidden abilities in our bodies.

Living Technology

Most complex phenomena known to science are found in living systems— including those involving electrical, acoustical, mechanical, chemical, and optical phenomena. Detailed studies of various animals also have revealed certain physical equipment and capabilities that the world’s best designers, using the most sophisticated technologies, cannot duplicate. Examples of these designs include molecular-size motors in most living organisms; advanced technologies in cells; miniature and reliable sonar systems of dolphins, porpoises, and whales; frequency-modulated radar and discrimination systems of bats; efficient aerodynamic capabilities of hummingbirds; control systems, internal ballistics, and combustion chamber of bombardier beetles; precise and redundant navigational systems of many birds, fish, and insects; and especially the self-repair capabilities of almost all forms of life. No component of these complex systems could have evolved without placing the organism at a selective disadvantage until the component’s evolution was complete. All evidence points to intelligent design.

Arctic Tern Migration Routes and Cockpit. The Arctic Tern, a bird of average size, navigates across oceans, as shown above, with the skill normally associated with navigational equipment in modern intercontinental aircraft. A round trip for the Tern might be 22,000 miles. The Tern’s “electronics” are highly miniaturized, extremely reliable, maintenance free, and easily reproduced. Furthermore, this remarkable bird needs no training. If the equipment in the lower picture could not have evolved, how could the Tern’s more amazing “equipment” have evolved?

Many bacteria, such as Salmonella, Escherichia coli, and some Streptococci, propel themselves with miniature motors at up to 15 body-lengths per second, equivalent to a car traveling 150 miles per hour—in a liquid. These extremely efficient, reversible motors rotate up to 100,000 revolutions per minute. Each shaft rotates a bundle of whiplike flagella that acts as a propeller. The motors, having rotors and stators, are similar in many respects to electrical motors. However, these electrical charges come from a flow of protons, not electrons. The bacteria can stop, start, and change speed, direction, and even the “propeller’s” shape. They also have intricate sensors, switches, control mechanisms, and a short-term memory. All this is highly miniaturized. Eight million of these bacterial motors would fit in the circular cross section of a human hair. Evolutionary theory teaches that bacteria were one of the first forms of life to evolve, and therefore, they are simple. While bacteria are small, they are not simple. They can even communicate among themselves using chemicals. Some plants have motors that are one-fifth the size of bacterial motors. Increasing worldwide interest in nanotechnology is showing that living things are remarkably designed—beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.

Schematic of a Bacterial Motor. Although no one completely understands how these tiny motors work, many studies have deduced the presence of the above components. From “Learning How Bacteria Swim Could Set New Gears in Motion,” by Tom Koppel, figure by Johnny Johnson. © September 1991 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

Language

Children as young as seven months can understand and learn grammatical rules. Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that language is learned only from other humans; humans do not automatically speak.

So the first humans must have been endowed with a language ability.

There is no evidence language evolved .

Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees and gorillas to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by editing the animals’ successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer’s hidden promptings.)

Wild apes have not shown these vocabulary skills, and trained apes do not pass their vocabulary on to others. When a trained animal dies, so does the trainer’s investment. Also, trained apes have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No known evidence shows that language exists or evolves in nonhumans, but all known human groups have language.

If language evolved, the earliest languages should be the simplest. But language studies show that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, verb form, and inflection. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler instead of more complex. Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.

Speech

Speech is uniquely human. Humans have both a “prewired” brain capable of learning and conveying abstract ideas, and the physical anatomy (mouth, throat, tongue, larynx, etc.) to produce a wide range of sounds. Only a few animals can approximate some human sounds.

Because the human larynx is low in the neck, a long air column lies above the vocal cords. This helps make vowel sounds. Apes cannot make clear vowel sounds, because they lack this long air column. The back of the human tongue, extending deep into the neck, modulates the air flow to produce consonant sounds. Apes have flat, horizontal tongues, incapable of making consonant sounds.

Even if an ape could evolve all the physical equipment for speech, that equipment would be useless without a “prewired” brain for learning language skills, especially grammar and vocabulary.

Mutations

THE LAST HOPE—It is well-known among many knowledgeable scientists that if evolution could possibly occur, mutations would have to accomplish it. There simply is no other mechanism that can make changes within the DNA. Natural selection has consistently failed, so mutations are the last hope of a majority of the evolutionists today.

"It must not be forgotten that mutation is the ultimate source of all genetic variation found in natural populations and the only new material available for natural selection to work upon."—*E. Mayr, Populations, Species and Evolution (1970), p. 103.

"The process of mutation is the only known source of the new materials of genetic variability, and hence of evolution."—*T. Dobzansky in American Scientist, 45 (1957), p. 385.

Yet they have not been able to provide proof that mutations actually produce evolution.

"The complete proof of the utilization of mutations in evolution under natural conditions has not yet been given."—*Julian Huxley, Evolution, the Modern Synthesis, pp. 183 and 205.

Finding that so-called "natural selection" accomplished no evolutionary changes, modern evolutionists moved away from Darwinism into neo-Darwinism. This is the revised teaching that it is mutations plus natural selection (not natural selection alone) which have produced all life forms on Planet Earth. "Evolution is, to put it simply, the result of natural selection working on random mutations."—*M. Ruse, Philosophy of Biology (1973), p. 96. Neo-Darwinists speculate that mutations accomplished all cross-species changes, and then natural selection afterward refined them. This, of course, assumes that mutations and natural selection are positive and purposive.

FOUR SPECIAL PROBLEMS In reality, mutations have four special qualities that are ruinous to the hopes of evolutionists:

(1) RARE EFFECTS—Mutations are very rare. This point is not a guess but a scientific fact, observed by experts in the field. Their very rarity dooms the possibility of mutational evolution to oblivion.

"It is probably fair to estimate the frequency of a majority of mutations in higher organisms between one in ten thousand and one in a million per gene per generation."—*F.J. Ayala, "Teleological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology," in Philosophy of Science, March 1970, p. 3.

Mutations are simply too rare to have produced all the necessary traits of even one life form, much less all the creatures that swarm on the earth. Evolution requires millions upon millions of direct, solid changes, yet mutations occur only with great rarity.

RANDOM EFFECTS—Mutations are always random, and never purposive or directed. This has repeatedly been observed in actual experimentation with mutations.

"It remains true to say that we know of no way other than random mutation by which new hereditary variation comes into being, nor any process other than natural selection by which the hereditary constitution of a population changes from one generation to the next."—*C.H. Waddington, The Nature of Life (1962), p. 98.

*Eden declares that the factor of randomness in mutations ruins their usefulness as a means of evolution.

"It is our contention that if ‘random’ is given a serious and crucial interpretation from a probabilistic point of view, the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws."—*Murray Eden, "Inadequacies of Neo- Darwinian Evolution as Scientific Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution (1967), p. 109.

Mutations are random, wild events that are totally uncontrollable. When a mutation occurs, it is a chance occurrence; totally unexpected and haphazard. The only thing we can predict is that it will not go outside the species and produce a new type of organism. This we can know as a result of lengthy experiments that have involved literally hundreds of thousands of mutations on fruit flies and other small creatures.

Evolution requires purposive changes. Mutations are only chance occurrences and cannot accomplish what is needed for organic evolution.

NOT HELPFUL—Evolution requires improvement. Mutations do not help or improve; they only weaken and injure.

"But mutations are found to be of a random nature, so far as their utility is concerned. Accordingly, the great majority of mutations, certainly well over 99%, are harmful in some way, as is to be expected of the effects of accidental occurrences."—*H.J. Muller, "Radiation Damage to the Genetic Material," in American Scientist, January 1950, p. 35.

HARMFUL EFFECTS—Nearly all mutations are harmful. In most instances, mutations weaken or damage the organism in some way so that it (or its offspring if it is able to have any) will not long survive.

As mentioned earlier, scientists turned to neo-Darwinism in the hope that it could do that which Darwinism could not do. The man more responsible than any other for getting scientists on the neo-Darwinian bandwagon was *Julian Huxley. But in his writings, even he knew he was on thin ice:

"A proportion of favorable mutations of one in a thousand does not sound much, but is probably generous, since so many mutations are lethal, preventing the organism from living at all, and the great majority of the rest throw the machinery slightly out of gear."—*Julian Huxley, Evolution in Action, p. 41. Elsewhere in the same book, he admitted this:

"One would expect that any interference with such a complicated piece of chemical machinery as the genetic constitution would result in damage. And, intact, this is so: the great majority of mutant genes are harmful in their effects on the organism."—*Julian Huxley, op. cit., p. 137.

Here are 28 reasons why it is not possible for mutations to produce species evolution:

1 - NOT ONCE—Hundreds of thousands of mutation experiments have been done, in a determined effort to prove the possibility of evolution by mutation. And this is what they learned: NOT ONCE has there ever been a recorded instance of a truly beneficial mutation (one which is a known mutation, and not merely a reshuffling of latent characteristics in the genes), nor such a mutation that was permanent, passing on from one generation to another!

Read the above paragraph over a couple times. If, after millions of fruit-fly mutation experiments, scientists have never found one helpful and non-weakening mutation that had permanent effects in offspring—then how could mutations result in worthwhile evolution?

"Mutations are more than just sudden changes in heredity; they also affect viability [ability to keep living], and, to the best of our knowledge invariably affect it adversely [they tend to result in harm or death]. Does not this fact show that mutations are really assaults on the organism’s central being, its basic capacity to be a living thing?"—*C.P. Martin, "A Non-Geneticist Looks at Evolution," in American Scientist, p. 102.

2 - ONLY HARM—The problem here is that those organisms which mutations do not kill outright are generally so weakened that they or their offspring tend to die out. Mutations, then, work the opposite of evolution. Given enough mutations, life on earth would not be strengthened and helped; it would be extinguished. This gradual buildup of harmful mutations in the genes is called

genetic load. "The large majority of mutations, however, are harmful or even lethal to the individual in whom they are expressed. Such mutations can be regarded as introducing a ‘load,’ or genetic burden, into the [DNA] pool. The term ‘genetic load’

was first used by the late H.J. Muller, who recognized that the rate of mutations is increased by numerous agents man has introduced into his environment, notably ionizing radiation and mutagenic chemicals."— *Christopher Wills, "Genetic Load," in Scientific American, March 1970, p. 98. 3 - USUALLY ELIMINATE—Because of their intrinsic nature, mutations greatly weaken the organism; so much so that if that organism survives, its descendants will tend to die out.

The result is a weeding-out process. Contrary to the hopes of the neo-Darwinians, natural selection does not enhance the effects of the mutation. Natural selection eliminates mutations by killing off the organism bearing them!

"After a greater or lesser number of generations the mutants are eliminated."— * G. Ledyard Stebbins, Processes of Organic Evolution (1971), pp. 24-25. "If one allows the unquestionably largest experimenter to speak,—namely

nature, one gets a clear and incontrovertible answer to the question about the significance of mutations for the formation of species and evolution. They disappear under the competitive conditions of natural selection, as soap bubbles burst in a breeze."— *Herbert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung, p. 174 4 - MUTAGENS—It is a well-known fact that scientists have for decades been urging the removal of radiation hazards and mutagenic chemicals (scientists call them mutagens) because of the increasing damage mutations are doing to people, animals, and plants.

It is time that the evolutionists, who praise the value of mutations, admit very real facts. How can such terrible curses, which is what mutations are, improve and beautify the race—and produce by random action all the complex structures and actions of life?

If scientists really believed in mutations as the great improvers of the race, they would ask that more, not less, mutagenic radiations might be given to plant and animal life! But they well-know that mutations are extremely dangerous. Who is that confirmed neo-Darwinist who is willing to let his own body be irradiated with X-rays for minutes at a time, so that his offspring might wonderfully improve?

5 - DANGEROUS ACCIDENTS—How often do accidents help you? What is the likelihood that the next car accident you have will make you feel better than you did before?

Because of their random nature and negative effects, mutations would destroy all life on earth, were it not for the fact that in nature they rarely occur.

"An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one’s watch or one’s radio set will seldom make it work better."—*Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (1964), p. 126. [Dobzhansky is a geneticist.]

6 - INTERTWINED CATASTROPHE—A new reason why mutations are so insidious has only recently been discovered. Geneticists discovered the answer in the genes. Instead of a certain characteristic being controlled by a certain gene, it is now known that each gene affects many characteristics, and each characteristic is affected by many genes! We have here a complicated interweaving of genetic-characteristic relationships never before imagined possible!

Touch such a delicate system with mutations and you produce interlocking havoc. 7 - ONLY RANDOM EFFECTS—We have tended to ignore the factor of random results. What if mutations were plentiful and always with positive results, but still random as they now are? They would still be useless.

Even assuming mutations could produce those complex structures called feathers, birds would have wings on their stomachs, where they could not use them, or the wings would be upside down, without lightweight feathers, and under- or oversized.

Most animals would have no eyes, some would have one, and those that had any eyes would have them under their armpits or on the soles of their feet.

The random effects of mutations would annihilate any value they might otherwise provide.

8 - ALL AFFECTED—Mutations tend to have a widespread effect on the genes. "Moreover, despite the fact that a mutation is a discrete, discontinuous effect of the cellular, chromosome or gene level, its effects are modified by interactions in the whole genetic system of an individual . . Every character of an organism is affected by all genes, and every gene affects all other characters. It is this interaction that accounts for the closely knit functional integration of the genotype as a whole."—*Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species, and Evolution, p. 164 [emphasis his].

Each mutation takes its toll on large numbers—even all the genes, directly or indirectly; and since 99 percent of the mutations are harmful and appear in totally random areas, they could not possibly bring about the incredible life forms we find all about us.

Since each altered characteristic requires the combined effort of many genes, it is obvious that many genes would have to be mutated in a GOOD way to accomplish anything worthwhile. But almost no mutations are ever helpful. 9 - MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—Fortunately mutations are rare. They normally occur on an average of perhaps once in every ten million duplications of a DNA molecule.

Even assuming that all mutations were beneficial—in order for evolution to begin to occur in even a small way, it would be necessary to have, not just one, but a SERIES of closely related and interlocking mutations—all occurring at the same time in the same organism!

The odds of getting two mutations that are in some slight manner related to one another is the product of two separate mutations: ten million times ten million, or a hundred trillion. That is a 1 followed by 14 zeros (in scientific notation written as 1 x 1014). What can two mutations accomplish? Perhaps a honeybee with a wavy edge on a bent wing. But he is still a honeybee; he has not changed from one species to another.

More related mutations would be needed. Three mutations in a sequence would be a billion trillion (1 with 21 zeros). But that would not begin to do what would be needed. Four mutations, that were simultaneous or sequentially related, would be 1 with 28 zeros after it (1 x 1028). But all the earth could not hold enough organisms to make that possibility come true. And four mutations together does not even begin to produce real evolution. Millions upon millions of harmonious, beneficial characteristics would be needed to transform one species into another. But ALL those simultaneous mutations would have to be beneficial; whereas, in real life, mutations very rarely occur and they are almost always harmful. (By the way, you would need to produce all those multi-mutations in a mated pair, so they could properly produce young. Otherwise it would be like mating a donkey and a horse—and getting a sterile offspring.)

10 - GENE STABILITY—It is the very rarity of mutations that guarantees the stability of the genes. Because of that, the fossils of ancient plants and animals are able to look like those living today.

"Mutations rarely occur. Most genes mutate only once in 100,000 generations or more." "Researchers estimate that a human gene may remain stable for 2,500,000 years."—*World Book Encyclopedia, 1966 Edition.

"Living things are enormously diverse in form, but form is remarkably constant within any given line of descent: pigs remain pigs and oak trees remain oak trees generation after generation."—*Edouard Kellenberger, "The Genetic Control of the Shape of a Virus," in Scientific American, December 1966, p. 32.

11 - SYNTROPY—*Albert Szent-Gyorgyi is a brilliant Hungarian scientist who has won two Nobel Prizes (1937 and 1955) for his research. In 1977, he developed a theory which he called syntropy. *Szent-Gyorgyi points out that it would be impossible for any organism to survive even for a moment, unless it was already complete with all of its functions and they were all working perfectly or nearly so. This principle rules out the possibility of evolution arising by the accidental effects of natural selection or the chance results of mutations. It is an important point.

"In postulating his theory of syntropy, Szent-Gyorgyi, perhaps unintentionally, brings forth one of the strongest arguments for creationism—the fact that a body organ is useless until it is completely perfected. The hypothesized law of ‘survival of the fittest’ would generally select against any mutations until a large number of mutations have already occurred to produce a complete and functional structure; after which natural selection would then theoretically select for the organism with the completed organ."—Jerry Bergman, "Albert Szent-Gyorgyi’s Theory of Syntropy," in Up with Creation (1978), p. 337.

12 - MINOR CHANGES DAMAGE OFFSPRING THE MOST—With painstaking care, geneticists have studied mutations for decades. An interesting feature of these accidents in the genes, called mutations, deals a stunning blow to the hopes of neo-Darwinists. Here, in brief, is the problem:

(1) Most mutations have very small effects; some have larger ones. (2) Small mutations cannot accomplish the needed task, for they cannot produce evolutionary changes. Only major mutational changes, with wide-ranging effects in an organism, can possibly hope to effect the needed changes from one species to another.

And now for the new discovery: (3) It is only the minor mutational changes which harm one’s descendants. The major ones kill the organism outright or rather quickly annihilate its offspring!

13 - INCONSEQUENTIAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS—A major problem here is that, on one hand, mutations are damaging and deadly; but on the other,—aside from the damage—they only directly change small features.

"Is it really certain, then, as the neo-Darwinists maintain, that the problem of evolution is a settled matter? I, personally, do not think so, and, along with a good many others, I must insist on raising some banal objections to the doctrine of neo- Darwinism . .

"The mutations which we know and which are considered responsible for the creation of the living world are, in general, either organic deprivations, deficiencies (loss of pigment, loss of an appendage), or the doubling of the preexisting organs. In any case, they never produce anything really new or original in the organic scheme, nothing which one might consider the basis for a new organ or the priming for a new function."—*Jean Rostand, The Orion Book of Evolution (1961), p. 79.

14 - TRAITS ARE TOTALLY INTERCONNECTED—Experienced geneticists are well-aware of the fact that the traits contained within the genes are closely interlocked with one another. That which affects one trait will affect many others. They work together. Because of this, all the traits, in changed form, would have to all be there together—instantly,—in order for a new species to form!

Here is how two scientists describe the problem:

"Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all interdependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation."—*A. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (1975), p. 129.

"Most biological reactions are chain reactions. To interact in a chain, these precisely built molecules must fit together most precisely, as the cogwheels of a Swiss watch do. But if this is so, then how can such a system develop at all? For if any one of the specific cogwheels in these chains is changed, then the whole system must simply become inoperative. Saying it can be improved by random mutation of one link . . [is] like saying you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and thus bending one of its wheels or axles. To get a better watch all the wheels must be changed simultaneously to make a good fit again."—*Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, "Drive in Living Matter to Perfect Itself," Synthesis I, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 18 (1977), [winner of two Nobel Prizes for scientific research and Director of Research at the Institute for Muscle Research in Massachusetts].

15 - TOO MANY RELATED FACTORS—There are far too many factors associated with each trait for a single mutation—or even several to accomplish the needed task. Mathematical probabilities render mutational species changes impossible of attainment.

"Based on probability factors . . any viable DNA strand having over 84 nucleotides cannot be the result of haphazard mutations. At that stage, the probabilities are 1 in 480 x 1050 . Such a number, if written out, would read

480,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. "Mathematicians agree that any requisite number beyond 1050 has, statistically, a zero probability of occurrence . . Any species known to us, including the smallest single-cell bacteria, have enormously larger numbers of nucleotides than 100 or 1000. In fact, single cell bacteria display about 3,000,000 nucleotides, aligned in a very specific sequence. This means, that there is no mathematical probability whatever for any known species to have been the product of a random occurrence; ‘random mutations,’ to use the evolutionist’s favorite expression."—*L.L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong (1984), p. 205.

16 - REPRODUCTIVE CHANGES LOW—Here is an extremely IMPORTANT point: Mutational changes in the reproductive cells occur far more infrequently than in the cells throughout the rest of the body. Only mutational changes within the male or female reproductive cells could affect oncoming generations. "The mutation rates for somatic cells are very much higher than the rates for gametic cells."—*"Biological Mechanisms Underlying the Aging Process," in Science, August 23, 1963, p. 694.

17 - EVOLUTION REQUIRES INCREASING COMPLEXITY—The theorists have decreed that evolution, by its very nature, must move upward into ever-increasing complexity, better structural organization, and completeness. Indeed, this is a cardinal dictum of evolutionists. Evolutionists maintain that evolution can only move upward toward more involved life forms,—and that it can never move backward into previously evolved life forms.

But, in reality, mutations, by their very nature, tear down, disorganize, crumble, confuse, and destroy.

Here is how one scientist explains the problem:

"One should remember that an increase in complexity is what evolution is all about. It is not conceived as causing a change which continues to maintain the same level of complexity, nor does it mean a change which might bring about a decrease in complexity. Only an increase in complexity qualifies. "Radiations from natural sources enter the body in a hit-or-miss fashion. That is, they are completely random in the dispersed fashion with which they strike. Chemical mutagens also behave in an indiscriminate manner in causing chemical change. It is hard to see how either can cause improvements. With either radiations or mutagens, it would be something like taking a rifle and shooting haphazardly into an automobile and expecting thereby to create a better performing vehicle , and one that shows an advance in the state-of-the-art for cars.

18 - EVOLUTION REQUIRES NEW ORGANS—It is not enough for mutations to produce changes;—they must produce new organs! Billions of mutational factors would be required for the invention of one new organ of a new species, and this mutations cannot do.

"A fact that has been obvious for many years is that Mendelian mutations deal only with changes in existing characters . . No experiment has produced progeny that show entirely new functioning organs. And yet it is the appearance of new characters in organisms which mark the boundaries of the major steps in the evolutionary scale."—*H.G. Cannon, The Evolution of Living Things (1958), p. 87.

19 - EVOLUTION REQUIRES COMPLICATED NETWORKING—A relatively new field of scientific study is called "linkage," "linkage interconnections," or "networking."

This is an attempt to analyze the network of interrelated factors in the body. I say, "an attempt," for there are millions of such linkages. Each structure or organ is related to another—and also to thousands of others. (A detailed study of this type of research will be found in Creation Research Society Quarterly, for March 1984, pp. 199-211. Ten diagrams and seven charts are included.)

Our concern here is that each mutation would damage a multi-link network. This is one of the reasons why mutations are always injurious to an organism. The kidneys interconnect with the circulatory system, for they purify the blood. They also interconnect with the nervous system, the endocrine system, the digestive system, etc. But such are merely major systems. Far more is included. We are simply too fearfully and wonderfully made for random mutations to accomplish any good thing within our bodies.

19 - VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE MUTATIONS—"Visible mutations" are those genetic changes that are easily detectable, such as albinism, dwarfism, and hemophilia. *Winchester explains: (1) For every visible mutation, there are 20 lethal ones which are invisible! (2) Even more frequent than the lethal mutations would be the ones that damage but do not kill.

"Lethal mutations outnumber visibles by about 20 to 1. Mutations that have small harmful effects, the detrimental mutations, are even more frequent than the lethal ones."—*A.M. Winchester, Genetics, 5th Edition (1977), p. 356.

20 - NEVER HIGHER VITALITY THAN PARENT—Geneticists, who have spent a lifetime studying mutations, tell us that each mutation only weakens the organism. Never does the mutated offspring have more strength than the unmutated (or less mutated) parent.

"There is no single instance where it can be maintained that any of the mutants studied has a higher vitality than the mother species . . It is, therefore, absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations."—*N. Herbert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung (Synthetic Speciation) (1953), p. 1157 [italics his].

21 - MUTATIONS ARE NOT PRODUCING SPECIES CHANGE—Theory, theory, lots of theory, but it just isn’t happening!

"No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution."—*Pierre Paul Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms (1977), p. 88. "It is true that nobody thus far has produced a new species or genus, etc., by macromutation [a combination of many mutations]; it is equally true that nobody has produced even a species by the selection of micromutation [one or only a few mutations]."—*Richard B. Goldschmdt, "Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist," American Scientist, January 1952, p. 94.

A "nascent organ" is one that is just coming into existence. None have ever been observed.

"Do we, therefore, ever see mutations going about the business of producing new structures for selection to work on? No nascent organ has ever been observed emerging, though their origin in pre-functional form is basic to evolutionary theory. Some should be visible today, occurring in organisms at various stages up to integration of a functional new system, but we don’t see them. There is no sign at all of this kind of radical novelty. Neither observation nor controlled experiment has shown natural selection manipulating mutations so as to produce a new gene, hormone, enzyme, system, or organ."—*Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution (1984), pp. 67-68.

22 - GENE UNIQUENESS FORBIDS SPECIES CHANGE—The very fact that each species is so different from the others—forbids the possibility that random mutations could change them into new species. There are million of factors which make each species different from all the others. The DNA code barrier that would have to be crossed is simply too immense.

"If life really depends on each gene being as unique as it appears to be, then it is too unique to come into being by chance mutations."—*Frank B. Salisbury, "Natural Selection and the Complexity of the Gene," Nature, October 25, 1969, p. 342.

Survival of the fittest

Organisms are damaged by mutations or otherwise tend to be culled out. Evolutionists call that culling out process "survival of the fittest." But all that actually occurred was that misfits produced by mutations or accidents are eliminated, thus returning the species closer to its pure pattern. "Survival of the fittest" accomplishes the opposite of evolution! The hardships of life cull out the weakened forms of each species, and thus keep each species very stable. There is nothing in this process that has anything to do with evolution—the evolving of one species into another.

What about the evidence for evolution?

Billions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water all over the earth.

Jerry Trout (cave specialist with forest service) says that through photo-monitoring, he has watched a stalactite grow several inches in a matter of days. (Descent, Jan., 1993).

From 1924-1988 there was a visitor’s sign above the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns that said Carlsbad was at least 260 million years old. In 1988, the sign was changed to read 7 to 10 million years old. Then for a while, the sign read that it was 2 million years old. Now the sign is gone.

The Elephant in the Living Room

Writer George V. Caylor interviewed Sam, a molecular biologist. George asked Sam about his work. Sam said he and his team were scientific “detectives,” working with DNA and tracking down the cause of disease.

Here is their
published conversation.
G: “Sounds like pretty complicated work.”
S: “You can’t imagine how complicated!”
G: “Try me.”

S: “I’m a bit like an editor, trying to find a spelling mistake inside a document larger than four complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica. Seventy volumes, thousands and thousands of pages of small print words.”

G: “With the computer power, you can just use ‘spell check’!”

S: “There is no ‘spell check’ because we don’t know yet how the words are supposed to be spelled. We don’t even know for sure which language. And it’s not just the ‘spelling error’ we’re looking for. If any of the punctuation is out of place, or a space out of place, or a grammatical error, we have a mutation that will cause a disease.”

G: “So how do you do it?”

S: “We are learning as we go. We have already ‘read’ over two articles in that
encyclopedia, and located some ‘typo’s’. It should get easier as time goes by.”
G: “How did all that information happen to get there?”
S: “Do you mean, did it just happen? Did it evolve?”
G: “Bingo. Do you believe that the information evolved?”

S: “George, nobody I know in my profession truly believes it evolved.

It was engineered by ‘genius beyond genius,’ and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book. Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise. A bit like Neil Armstrong believing the moon is made of green cheese. He's been there!”

G: “Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?” S: “No. It all just evolved.”

G: “What? You just told me — ?”

S: “Just stop right there. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold on to two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don’t believe in evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures—everything would stop. I’d be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn’t earn a decent living.”

G: “I hate to say it, Sam, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

S: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind’s worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the ‘elephant in the living room’.”

G: “What elephant?”

S: “Design. It’s like the elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up an enormous amount of space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn’t there!”

George V. Caylor, “The Biologist,” The Ledger, Vol. 2, Issue 48, No. 92, 1 December 2000, p. 2. (www.ontherightside.com) Printed with permission.

DNA Production and Repair

DNA cannot function without at least 75 preexisting proteins, but proteins are produced only at the direction of DNA. Because each needs the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the other. The components of these manufacturing systems must have come into existence simultaneously.

This implies creation .

When a cell divides, its DNA is copied, sometimes with errors. Each animal and plant has machinery that identifies and corrects most errors; if it did not, the organism would deteriorate and become extinct. If evolution happened, which evolved first, DNA or its repair mechanism?

Each requires the other .

DNA Quotes

"... Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the power of 40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court ..."

(Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space)

"The chance that useful DNA molecules would develop without a Designer are apparently zero. Then let me conclude by asking which came first - the DNA (which is essential for the synthesis of proteins) or the protein enzyme (DNApolymerase) without which DNA synthesis is nil? ... there is virtually no chance that chemical 'letters' would spontaneously produce coherent DNA and protein 'words.'"

(George Howe, expert in biology sciences)

"...An intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would
be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the
message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for
an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a
message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence."
(Charles B Thaxton, Walter L Bradley and Robert L Olsen: The Mystery of
Life's Origin, Reassessing Current Theories (New York Philosophical Library
1984) pp 211-212)
The Bible Explains What Natural Science Doesn’t About:
The existence of Matter (Space-Time-Mass continuum)
The existence of Life
The existence of Order and Complexity
The origin of Solar System
The origin of the atmosphere and hydrosphere
The origin of Man
The existence of the Conscience (C. S. Lewis)
Reason for Death
Explanation for pain in childbirth
Reason for Thorns
Geologic Strata and the arrangement and existence of Fossils
The Rainbow - God's Covenants
The Seasons
The Origin and existence of Languages
The Beast's fear of Man
The Origin of Religion
The Process of Aging
The Pattern that the world is now taking toward a one world
government
Special Revelation - The Word of God
Tests to Determine Whether a Body of Scripture (the Bible) is the Word of God

1. Inspiration

a. Internal Testimony (3,408 times the Bible claims to be the word of God).

b. Internal Consistency

c. Written over 1600 year span

d. Written by over 40 authors from every walk of life

e. Written in different places

f. Written in 3 different languages

g. Includes subject matter of hundreds of controversial subjects and yet has a continuous story from Genesis to Revelation and without contradiction. Only God could orchestrate such a work.

Unique in its Circulation:

The Bible has been read by more people and published in more languages than any other book. There have been more copies produced of its entirety and more portions and selections than any other book in history.

Unique in its Translation:

The Bible has been translated and retranslated and paraphrased more than any other book in existence.

2. Inerrancy A. Fulfilled Prophecy
3. Tyre
4. Samaria
5. Gaza-Ashkelon
6. Moab-Ammon
7. Petra-Edom
8. Thebes and Memphis
9. Nineveh
10. Babylon
11. Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum
12. Jerusalem's Enlargement
13. Palestine
14. Daniel 11
15. Daniel 9:24-27 (Seventy Weeks)
16. Messianic Prophecies There are hundreds and hundreds of prophesies in the Bible predicting the rise and fall of nations, kings, and many other significant events in history. Here, we will only focus on one group of prophesies, those concerning the Old Testament predictions of Christ. These predictions of Christ were made hundreds and hundreds of years in advance. No one can deny that these detailed predictions are in documents given to the public hundreds of years before He appeared. No one can deny or challenge the fact that these documents were widely circulated among men prior to His birth. Who can imagine anyone to have pre-written a life of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln written from 1500 to 500 years before their births? Nowhere in any other religion in the world, not in the writings of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other, is there this amazing miracle of specific detailed fulfilled prophesy, as the pre-written life of Christ. Only God can know the future, therefore fulfilled prophesy is indisputable evidence that Christianity is true. It has been said that there would not be one honest skeptic in the whole world were the prophecies centered in Christ studied. Some may object that others have made prophesies, such as Jean Dixon or Nostradamus. Not really. It is questionable whether half their prophesies have come true, and even then the prophesies were quite vague. Even if 80% came true, 20% are wrong. That is a false prophet (Deuteronomy 18:22), for if it comes from God 100% of the predictions would come true 100% of the time.

Since the Bible’s message is so important in that it declares man’s eternal destiny depends on His acceptance of Christ, we have a right to know whether the Bible is true. No man, unaided by Divine inspiration can tell the future. Only an almighty and all-knowing God can infallibly predict the future because He has the power to control history. Fulfilled prophesy is one of God’s methods of proving His own truth, and that the Bible is in fact God’s Word, in a way the average man can understand.

To put these prophesies in context, a brief summary would be helpful. The Old Testament is the account of a Nation. The New Testament is the account of a Man. The nation of Israel was founded and nurtured by God to bring that Man into the world. God Himself became Man, to give mankind an understanding of what God is like, and to provide a means of salvation to a fallen race. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, second member of the Godhead, was God in human form. Consequently, His appearance on earth was the central event of all history. The main reason the Old Testament was written was to create an anticipation of, and pave the way for, the coming of Christ. But why was it necessary to work through one nation, and why are Israelites called the “chosen people?”

 After the fall of man God gave a veiled hint in Genesis 3:15 of a coming Redeemer, yet in the next 2000 years spanning through Genesis 11, man degenerated from the monotheistic belief in the one God to the polytheism of false religions. The judgment of the flood in Genesis 6 resulted in a new beginning which restored belief in the true God, yet degeneration into false religion again occurred until the judgment at the tower of Babylon (Genesis 11).  Finally, the fast moving chronology of 2000 years (Genesis 3-11) slows down and the rest of the Bible, beginning with Genesis 12, spans 2000 years of Israel’s history. Since dealing through the world as a whole always resulted in degeneration from the essential truth about God, God now commits to the forming of one nation in which He will make sure they will retain the knowledge of Himself. God decided in Genesis 12 to create a nation out of two people, Abraham and Sarah.

It details how they go from two to 70 people by the time they move to Egypt. Then they increased to 2 million people when they are delivered from slavery in Egypt and brought into the land of Canaan. God now has the ingredients for His nation - people and a country (land).

The Old Testament then shows how God revealed Himself to Israel, not only about His own nature, but about the problem of sin and the hope of a coming Redeemer. He also made sure they did not degenerate into the polytheism of false religions by disciplining them and bringing them back to Himself when they strayed too far. He was to use this nation as a vehicle for His revelation and blessing to the whole world.

Throughout the history of Israel runs another story then that is far more important than its own history. It is the expectancy of the coming of one majestic Person, who would save, rule, and bless the whole world. Long before He arrived, this Person came to be known as the Messiah. “Christ” is from the Greek word which means “Messiah.”

 Jesus Himself frequently cited Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in Him. “And beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). The early Christians did the same thing - “and according to Paul’s custom, he went to them and for three Sabbaths reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and giving evidence that the Christ had to suffer and rise again from the dead...” (Acts 17:2-3). The Old Testament contains over 300 references to Christ. The following is only a brief survey.

Genesis 3:15 is the first hint of the virgin birth, where He is called the “seed of the woman” who will crush Satan’s head. His ancestors are prophesied as Abraham (Genesis 12:3, 22:18), Isaac (Genesis 17:16; 21:12), Jacob (Genesis 35:10-12), Judah (Isaiah 11), and David (2 Samuel 7:12-16; Jeremiah 23:5). Each one of those prophesies state that a descendant from that family line would one day come into the world, and further details about this Majestic Person continued to be progressively revealed. With Abraham, every country on earth was eliminated except Israel. Abraham bore Isaac; Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Half of Israel is eliminated when the Messiah is said to come from Jacob.

 Jacob had 12 sons, and the sons, as they multiplied with their families, became the 12 tribes of Israel (equivalent in our terminology to 12 states in a country). By the choosing of Judah, 11/12ths of Israel is eliminated. Then later King David is born in the line of Judah, and it is his descendant that will be the one who will have an everlasting throne and is even called God (Jeremiah 23:6). Further, the city He would come from is prophesied to be Bethlehem (Micah 5:2).

Think about this amazing fact. If you were going to write a letter and send it to just one person out of the 5½ billion people on the planet, what information would you need? You would need to know the country, state, city, and family name to pick that one person out from everyone else in the whole world! That is exactly what we have in Christ! The prophesies get even more specific.

1. BORN OF A VIRGIN Prophecy (Isaiah 7:14)

Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel.

Fulfillment (Matthew 1:23)

Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel which translated means, "God with us."

2. BORN AT BETHLEHEM

Prophecy (Micah 5:2)

But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel, His goings forth are from long ago, from the days of eternity.

Fulfillment (Matthew 2:1, 4-6)

Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea... And gathering together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he began to inquire of them where the Christ was to be born. And they said to him, "In Bethlehem of Judah, for so it has been written by the Prophet."

3. BOTH GOD AND MAN

Prophecy

(Isaiah 9:6)

For a child we be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

Fulfillment

(John 1:1,3, 10, 14)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.... All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.... He was in the world, the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him.... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory.

4. KING ON A DONKEY

Prophecy

(Zechariah 9:9)

...O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with Salvation, humble, mounted on a donkey, Even a colt, the foal of a donkey.... He will speak peace to the nations and His dominion will be from sea to sea.

Fulfillment

(Matthew 21:7-8)

...and brought the donkey and the colt, and laid on them their garments, on which He sat, and most of the multitude spread their garments in the road, and others were cutting branches from the trees and spreading them on the road.

Consider the following prophecies predicted in Psalm 22, written 1000 B.C.

5. CHRIST/MESSIAH WOULD SUFFER
6. CRUCIFIXION DESCRIBED 1000 YEARS BEFORE IT HAPPENED (and before it was even a known form of punishment)
7. QUOTING THE VERY WORDS AND GESTURES OF THOSE AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS
8. HANDS AND FEET PIERCED
9. CASTING LOTS FOR ROBE

10. BETRAYED FOR 30 PIECES OF SILVER (Not 29 or 31; of silver, not copper, bronze, or any other medium of exchange.)

11. MONEY THROWN INTO GOD’S HOUSE (Also called the temple or sanctuary; and note, the money is not placed, not given, but thrown)
12. MONEY USED TO BUY A POTTER’S FIELD

Note how all these prophecies are fulfilled in following Scripture:

TIME OF CHRIST’S COMING PREDICTED 500 YEARS

BEFORE IT HAPPENED.

This amazing prophecy predicts the exact time, as to year and day, of Christ’s final entry into Jerusalem, or what we call “Palm Sunday.”

Daniel 9:20-27, written about 535 B.C. when Jerusalem was lying in ruins and the Israelites were in captivity by the Babylonians, states that there will be 69 periods of 7 years until the Messiah would come. The calendar used was the Hebrew lunar calendar based on 360 day years. The time count begins when there is a decree issued to rebuild Jerusalem. This happened during the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus, a known figure of history mentioned in standard encyclopedias. The decree was issued in 444 B.C. (Nehemiah 2:5).

Daniel 9:25-26: “So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty two weeks; it will be built again... then after the sixty two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary.”

This prophecy plainly states that after the specified time period, the Messiah will be killed (“cut off”) and the city (Jerusalem) and sanctuary (the Temple) will be destroyed. It is a well known fact of history, that some years after Christ was crucified, in 70 A.D., the Romans totally destroyed Jerusalem and the temple. This shows the Messiah had to come before the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. Anyone armed with a calculator and some easily verifiable facts of history can compute this amazing prophecy.

Luke 3:1 states John the Baptist’s ministry began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. History tells us his reign began in 14 A.D. Thus the fifteenth year of his reign would be 29 A.D. Jesus’ ministry began shortly after John the Baptist. His public ministry lasted 3 ½ years, which brings us to 33 A.D. as the year of His crucifixion.

The time clock begins with the decree of Artaxerxes in 444 B.C. 69 weeks of 360 day years adds up to 173,880 days (69 X 7 = 483 years; 483 X 360 days = 173,880 days). To find out the number of years used in our calendar, divide 173,880 days by 365 ¼ which equals 476 solar years. Add 476 to -444 (B.C.) and it equals 32. Since 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. is one year, a year must be added to 32, making 33 A.D. as the year the Messiah comes to Jerusalem and is killed!

Further study shows that the prediction actually narrows it to the exact month and day! Artaxerxes issued his decree in the month of Nissan. Again, this is a lunar calendar month used by the Hebrews. Nissan begins on the first day of a full moon which falls between March-April on our calendar. Astronomical charts show this day, Nissan 1, would have been on March 5 in 444 B.C. The Jews celebrated Passover on Nissan 14. Christ was crucified on this day (John 19:14). Astronomers show that in 33 A.D., Nissan 14 fell on a Friday, April 3. But Christ entered Jerusalem on the donkey on Monday, Nissan 10, and publicly offered Himself as Israel’s King and Messiah. In 33 A.D. this day fell on March 30. When one uses the exact solar year of 365.24219879 days, or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45.975 seconds added to March 5, 444 B.C., (the day of Artaxerxes decree), it falls precisely on March 30, 33 A.D. ! [1]

Concerning the subject of Passover, there is another amazing fulfillment. The revelation in the Old Testament about the Messiah was progressive, starting with vague hints and increasing in detail. One of the methods used is called “type” and “shadow.” The Passover feast is one example. This feast was instituted by God to celebrate the deliverance of the Hebrew people from bondage in Egypt. When they applied the blood of a lamb, crossed over the door posts of their home, they were delivered from the judgment of death that came upon the Egyptians. The apostle Paul called Christ “our Passover” (1 Corinthians 5:7) in that the feasts actual meaning indicated that when a person has the blood of Christ applied through faith in Him, the judgment of death passes over us. For centuries Nissan 10 would be the day the lamb to be sacrificed would be picked out by a Hebrew family. On Nissan 14 the lamb would be slain, beginning at 3:00 P.M.

On Nissan 10, when people all over Israel were picking out the lambs to be sacrificed, Christ publicly offers himself to Israel as their King, riding into the eastern gate of the city on a donkey. On Nissan 14, Christ was crucified and died at exactly 3:00 P.M., the exact same time people all over the nation of Israel began killing their lambs for the Passover feast! (John 19:14; Mark 15:25, 33)2

[2]

These are just some of the more than 300 prophesies concerning Christ.

Were the prophecies written after Christ?

Certain skeptics, who desire to remain skeptics despite the inexplicable fulfilled prophesies, have tried to offer several explanations. Some have said the documents predicting these things must have been written after Christ.

This is quite impossible, as actual manuscript copies of the Old Testament have been found that predate Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls have copies of Old Testament manuscripts that are dated 100 B.C. Furthermore, a well known translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek, called the Septuagint, was known to be made at 250 B.C.

Deliberately fulfilled?

Others have said the fulfilling of these prophecies was deliberate and planned by a human Jesus who read them and tried to fulfill them. This is also impossible as so many of these prophecies were totally beyond the control of Jesus. How can one deliberately plan his place of birth? Or time of birth? Or being betrayed for 30 pieces of silver and used for the potter? Or people’s reactions - mocking, spitting, staring, gambling for His robe, piercing His hands and feet, the words and gestures at the foot of the cross quoted... all things beyond the control of a mere human Jesus.  Coincidence?

Others have proposed a coincidental fulfillment. Professor Stoner in a book called “Science Speaks,” showed how coincidental fulfillment is impossible. His book was carefully reviewed by other scientists who determined the book was totally accurate as to its scientific material. He points out that by using the mathematical science of probabilities in reference to just 8 prophecies concerning Christ, as being fulfilled accidentally is equivalent to one in 10 to the 17th power. That is a 10 with 17 zeros after it. To illustrate the improbability of this idea, he gives an example.

Suppose “we take 10¹⁷th silver dollars and lay them on the face of Texas. They will cover all of the state two feet deep. Now mark one of these silver dollars and stir the whole mass thoroughly, all over the state. Blindfold a man and tell him that he can travel as far as he wishes, but he must pick up one silver dollar and say that his is the right one. What chance would he have of getting the right one? Just the same chance that the prophets would have had of writing these eight prophecies and having them all come true in any one man, from their day to the present time, providing they wrote them in their own wisdom.”[3] Stoner further considers 48 prophecies instead of 8, and the coincidental chance goes up to 1 in 10 to the 157th power.

Inerrancy

B. Scientific accuracy

1. Creation
2. Circle of the Earth
3. Hare chews cud
4. Paths of the Sea C. Geographical and historical accuracy D. Confirmation of archeology E. Confirmation of written records F. Accuracy at describing the human condition G. Accuracy at prescribing the solution to human problems and conflicts.

Uniqueness of the Bible H. Superiority to other Scriptures

1. The Book of Mormon
2. The Qur'an
3. Hindu Scripture
4. Buddhist Scripture
5. Jehovah's Witnesses Material
6. Pagan Mythology Preservation Textual Criticism If you only have one copy of a manuscript you have no way of knowing what percentage of accuracy it is to the original. If on the other hand, you have over 25,000 extant manuscripts as we have for the New Testament, you can determine by use of textual criticism what percentage accuracy you actually have. You can determine what was added, and when. By applying this to the New Testament we find that we have 99% accuracy of the original words of the text. This comes out to 40 lines or 400 words in the entire New Testament with which there is any doubt. These variants do not change the meaning or the doctrine in any way.

It is interesting to note also, that we have over 89,000 quotations from the New Testament by the early church fathers. One could reconstruct all but 11 verses of the New Testament from these quotations even without the manuscripts.

Canonicity The Canon refers to the authoritative books that are officially accepted and approved as Holy Scripture. These books are based on a standard or “rule of faith.” Some of these standards include: divine inspiration, accuracy, doctrinal truth, consistency, power, and acceptance by the people of God.

The New Testament books are collected and circulated throughout the Mediterranean about the time of Constantine, the Roman Emperor, who legalizes Christianity in AD 313.

The 27 books of the New Testament are formally confirmed as canonical by the Synod of Carthage in AD 397, thus recognizing three centuries of use by followers of Christ.

By AD 400, the standard of 27 New Testament books is accepted in the East and West as confirmed by:

• Athanasius
• Jerome
• Augustine
• Three church councils

Illumination
A. Effect on the Human Conscience and Spirit
B. Necessity of Holy Spirit to Open the Eyes of Unregenerate
C. Giving of Wisdom and Understanding for all of Life's Situations

The Problems with Limited Inerrancy

Answer from Reason

One of the main arguments against the limited inerrancy view of Scripture is that if man is the imperfect vessel which caused the Scriptures to have errors then who is man to judge what is errant?

We might ask for an edition of the Bible with all that is inerrant in red letters so we can know what to believe, teach our children, and send our missionaries out with, but none of the limited inerrantists have been able to come up with one. All of the Bible’s doctrines therefore become subject to a fallible human mind. Vern Sheridan Poythress commented on this problem as follows: (He uses the word “muck” to refer to “error”).

“Now suppose that L (a limited inerrantist) claims that Luke has introduced muck in Acts 5:37 by confusing the order in which Gamaliel placed Theudas and Judas the Galilean. L bases himself on Josephus.

Josephus may have erred in an ordinary way, as humans do. But he also may have erred in an extraordinary way; viz. the word of God ordering the universe may have introduced muck into Josephus’s researches.

In fact , muck in this word of God is far more likely than muck in the more “essential” word of God in Acts 7. Similarly, Gamaliel may have been mucked up. But there are worse possibilities as well. Muck may have been introduced into L’s perception of the page of Acts that he is reading.

“Now suppose that L (a limited inerrantist) claims that Luke has introduced muck in Acts 5:37 by confusing the order in which Gamaliel placed Theudas and Judas the Galilean. L bases himself on Josephus.

Josephus may have erred in an ordinary way, as humans do. But he also may have erred in an extraordinary way; viz. the word of God ordering the universe may have introduced muck into Josephus’s researches.

In fact , muck in this word of God is far more likely than muck in the more “essential” word of God in Acts 7. Similarly, Gamaliel may have been mucked up. But there are worse possibilities as well. Muck may have been introduced into L’s perception of the page of Acts that he is reading.

Muck may have been introduced into his memory of Josephus. Muck may have been introduced so that he doesn’t know what a contradiction is. Muck may have been introduced so that a demon has deluded him at this one point. Surely these are matters of nonessential character. Surely here, if anywhere, God could be expected not to be so careful about whether every last jot and tittle of his word that orders the universe is correct. The name of this view is skepticism.” (Poythress, “Problems for Limited Inerrancy,” pp. 98-99.)

Also in answer to the argument of man being an imperfect vessel we have the analogy of Christ. How can the person of Christ be sinless if humanity is sinful and He is truly human? Is man sinful just because he is a man? Adam was not created sinful (Gen. 1:26-27, 31). Christ gained a genuine human nature through Mary, a sinner, yet was sinless by the overshadowing power of the Holy Spirit. In like manner the writers of Scripture gained infallibility for the writing of Scripture.

Answer from History

• For years the phenomenon of Heilsgeschichte has been with us. The movement gained momentum through the writings of J. von Hoffman, and today is widely accepted. The theory holds that there is a spiritual history which in reality is to be divorced from the historical background there may be many errors and contradictions, but the spiritual history is what is of benefit to us. It is not really clear whether the advocates of this view really believe that such a holy history took place or not.

• The flood, for example, was a mighty judgment, and the lessons of the flood are very clear, but one might ask whether one could have gotten his feet wet in that flood? Archaeology has made it clear to us that we are to treat the so-called details of the Bible with utmost seriousness. We are told that there are spiritual messages in Genesis, but as far as its history is concerned, it has been the subject of much criticism.
• Excavations are causing this opinion to be revised, and today no one can seriously deny the accuracy of its historical background. The Ahalah tablets, for example, excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1946-49 at Tell el-Atshana in northern Syria go back to the time of the larimlin (1900-1700 B.C.) From these we learn that there were Hittites in Syria back in the time of Abraham.

• Before this discovery it had been held that the mention of Ephron the Hittite was an anachronism, but this evidence shows they could have been in Palestine at that time. The critics, however, will simply find something else that the Bible mentions that does not match up with their records of ancient history and the
• battle goes on. Nelson Glueck, the renowned Jewish archaeologist, wrote that “it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference.” (Nelson, Glueck, Rivers in the Desert; History of Neteg, (Philadelphia; Jewish Publications Society of America, 1969), p. 31. William F. Albright, known as one of the great archaeologists of recent times, states:

• “The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phases of which still appear periodically, has been established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history.” (W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, (Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1960), pp. 127-128.
• Before this discovery it had been held that the mention of Ephron the Hittite was an anachronism, but this evidence shows they could have been in Palestine at that time. The critics, however, will simply find something else that the Bible mentions that does not match up with their records of ancient history and the battle goes on. Nelson Glueck, the renowned Jewish archaeologist, wrote that “it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference.” (Nelson, Glueck, Rivers in the Desert; History of Neteg, (Philadelphia; Jewish Publications Society of America, 1969), p. 31. William F. Albright, known as one of the great archaeologists of recent times, states:

• “The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phases of which still appear periodically, has been established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history.” (W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, (Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1960), pp. 127-128.

Answer from Revelation

• If the Bible is inerrant in any part at all it should be inerrant in the portion that it speaks of its own inerrancy. If the Bible has value in the area of “faith and practice” then it should surely practice truthfulness in support of itself. If error has crept in on this count then in what area could the error not have touched? If the Bible is truly inerrant, then we need no other confirmation.
• The Truthfulness of God
• In John 3:33 and Romans 3:4 we read that “God is true,” and in Titus 1:2 we are told that God “cannot lie.” The word used in the first two passages is aleitheis which signifies something that is true to fact in contrast to that which is false. In John 17:3 and I Thessalonians 1:9 these same two writers speak of the “true God.” Here the word is aleithnon, which is real or genuine in contrast to that which is spurious or counterfeit. In other words, this real or genuine God is trustworthy and truthful in all He does and says.

• It is inconceivable that such a God would impart information which is wrong in what He says is the case. It is a very small matter for God to preserve the inerrancy of His word through the fallible human instruments which He used to record it.
• The Enduring Character of the Scriptures
• In Matthew 5:17-19 Christ makes a statement that the very letters which make up the words and the parts of the letters which distinguish them from on another have an abiding character.
• In John 10:33-36, Christ affirms that, “The Scripture cannot be broken.” This statement was introduced with an insignificant quotation from Psalm 82:6. The Lord is saying, because this portion of the Psalm is a part of Scripture and Scripture cannot be broken, neither can this portion be broken. The whole argument is based on the reliability of the one Old Testament verse. Also, the words written in the Old Testament are designated Scripture and because they are Scripture, they must be accepted; for they cannot be annulled (broken). Further note that He does not say “this Scripture” but simply “Scripture.” The point is that Scripture either stands inerrant and infallible or falls altogether.

• Another passage which belongs in this category is Matthew 24:35 “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but may words shall not pass away.” The grammatical construction of the second clause is one that is reserved for matters which the speaker wanted to negate emphatically. He is thus saying that His words will not under any circumstances pass away. His words are those which are recorded here in the New Testament and have just testified to the absolute inerrancy of Scripture.
• Arguments Based on a Word or Form of a Word

• In Matthew 22:23-33 the Lord’s argument is passed on the present tense of the verb “to be” (cf. Ex 3:6); in Matthew 22:43-45 the single word “Lord” is the center of the argument; and in Galatians 3:15-22 Paul makes his point in relation to the singular for the word “seed” in contrast to the plural.



• A similar illustration is given in Hebrews 7:4-10 although the case for the argument rests on a small historical detail concerning payment of tithes rather than on a grammatical form. None of these arguments is valid unless tenses, words, singulars and plurals can be trusted. And they cannot be trusted apart from inerrancy.

Christ’s References

• Our Lord’s references to the Scriptures seem to cover the whole period of history recorded of history recorded in the Old Testament. He speaks of man’s creation, the institution of marriage, the death of Abel, the days of Noah, the flood, the destruction of Sodom, the history of Abraham, the appearing of Jehovah in the burning bush, the manna from heaven, the lifting up of the brazen serpent, the life of David, the glory of Solomon, the ministry of Elijah, the sign of Jonah, and the martyrdom of Zechariah. Besides these references, we find him continually quoting from the Scriptures.

• Over and over from His lips we hear the formula, “It is written!” Still further, if we study the Gospels closely, we shall be amazed at the number of his indirect allusions to the Old Testament. He knew the Scriptures as no other one has known them. His mind, His memory, His speech, was saturated with the Scriptures. Yet in all the record we have of his words, there is not the slightest intimation that the Scriptures may be untrustworthy at any point. Can we not, therefore, with appropriateness quote the Lord’s own words here: “If it were not so, I would have told you” (John 14:2)?

• Dr. Alva J. McClain writes:
• “When the time arrives for him to begin his public ministry, he finds in Isaiah 61 the prophecy which announced it, and declares, ‘This day is the Scripture fulfilled’ (Luke 4:21).
• When the cities where he preaches refuse to hear the message, he reminds them of the awful fate of Sodom and Gomorrah (Matt. 11:20-22). Speaking to Nicodemus about the kingdom of God, he declares that ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up’ (John 3:14). If the Pharisees demand a sign, he points to the much ridiculed experience of Jonah and declared nothing further shall be given. (Matt. 12:39).

• When the disciples come asking about his second coming and the end of the age, he answers with a prophecy from Joel, another from Daniel, an illustration from Genesis, and concludes by saying, ‘Remember Lot’s wife’ (Luke 17:32).
• When the Sadducees come with their astonishing argument against the resurrection, he confutes them by finding continuity of life after death in the present tense of a verb understood in the book of Exodus. And he points to the source of their blunder as ‘not knowing the Scriptures’ (Matt. 22:23-32).

• When the Jews are about to stone him for blasphemy because he called himself the Son of God, he quotes in self-defense an obscure passage from the Psalms and reminds them of what they all admitted, that ‘the Scripture cannot be broken’ (John 10:33-36).
• When Peter draws the sword to defend him from the mob which sought his life, this impulsive disciple is sternly rebuked him with a reminder that all those things written in the ‘Scriptures’ must be fulfilled (Matt. 26:52-54).
• After his resurrection he finds two disciples on their way to Emmaus. He might have turned their despair instantly into joy by simply saying ‘It is I.’ But, instead, he begins at Moses and all the prophets to show them the things written concerning himself. Their faith must rest upon the written Word (Luke 24:27).

• While hanging on the cross, our Lord had seen Scripture after Scripture fulfilled. The sheep had been scattered. He was left alone with no comforters. His hands and feet were pierced. His bones were out of joint. His garments were parted. Lots were cast for his vesture.
• At this point John, as an eye-witness, writes, ‘Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, ‘I thirst’ (John 19:28).
• Why did our Lord say that? Certainly there was the physical necessity. But there was another necessity. In the 69th Psalm it had been written, ‘In my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’ (v. 21). And he could not die until that was fulfilled!

• This is the doctrine of inspiration we learn at the cross. These modern theories of inspiration which dishonor the Bible were not formulated in the shadow of the cross.” (Alva J. McClain, The Inspiration of the Bible; (Winona Lake: BMH Books, 1965), p. 6-7.) The Tower of Babel Romans 1:18-32 graphically describes the resulting moral and spiritual deterioration of Nimrod and his followers. Willfully leaving the knowledge and worship of the true God and Creator, they began instead to worship the creation. This soon led to pantheism and polytheism and idolatry. There is abundant evidence that all forms of paganism have come originally from the ancient Babylonian religion. The essential identity of the various gods and goddesses of Rome, Greece, India, Egypt, and other nations with the original pantheon of the Babylonians is well established. Nimrod himself was apparently later deified as the chief god Merodach or Marduk of Babylon.

These pagan deities were also identified with the stars and planets—the “host of heaven”—with sun-worshiping occupying a central place. This system was formalized in the zodiac, with its numerous constellations—a most remarkable construction which seems to have been the common possession of all the nations of antiquity. Behind this façade of images (both on star charts of the heavens, and in their stone and metallic representations in the temples) of “men and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things” lurked a real “host of the heavens,” the angelic and demonic hosts of Lucifer, the “day-star.”

The development of this system of idolatry and Satan-worship was accompanied by an attempt to unify all mankind under one government. That government was not to be a system of theocracy as implied by God to Noah when He committed to man the responsibility of human government, but rather a dictatorship under Nimrod, the rebel. As later developments indicated, Nimrod not only set up a military dictatorship but also established a priestly oligarchy, in which he himself was chief priest and later the chief object of worship.

Not only has the original Babylonian religious system served as the source of all the world’s non-Christian religions (Babylon, according to Revelation 17:5, was the “mother of harlots and abominations of the earth”), but it has also infiltrated and corrupted Christendom to an alarming degree.

As people left Babylon they brought their religion with them. They had to take temporary quarters such as caves with hunting and fishing for their sustenance until their society could diversify. Eventually nations were formed based primarily on language. Due to inbreeding the “races” were formed.

Spread of Earth Based Spirituality

Earth-Based Spirituality
Biblical Truth vs Earth-Based Spirituality Concerning:
Truth
Righteousness
Peace
Faith
Salvation
Authority

Babylonian Religions

In the Babylonian flood account (the Gilgamesh Epic), Noah’s counterpart is Utnapishtim. He likewise received divine warnings of the Flood, built a huge ark, preserved human and animal life, sent out birds, and offered sacrifices. However the gross polytheism and absurdities of the Babylonian account demonstrated that it suffered from a long oral transmission and that it did not influence Genesis in any way.

Genesis 10:8-10 "And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one (first king) in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD." Nimrod (Heb. nimrodh), a descendent of Ham, was responsible for building the city of Babel (Babylon). This individual was the beginning of the kingdom in Babylonia, and he became the founder of Nineveh and other cities in Assyria. He became distinguished as a hunter, ruler, and builder. He lived for an undetermined amount of centuries after the Flood, and was the grandson of Ham. He was a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded men not to ascribe to God, in order to bring them into a constant dependence upon his own power. He swore to build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! Thus avenging himself on God for destroying their forefathers!

Erect (Heb. ‘erekh), a city of ancient Babylonia founded by Nimrod, the Babylonian form of the name is Uruk. The modern site is called Warka and is located near the Euphrates River, forty miles NW of Ur. Erech was the home of Gilgamesh, the hero of the great Akkadian epic. Archaeologists have found that this city was one of the oldest of Babylonia, founded before 4000 B.C. One of the earliest dynasties of the Sumerians ruled from Erech, it boasted the first ziggurat, or temple tower, and began the use of clay cylinder seals. Nineveh (Heb. nineweh) is one of the most ancient cities of the world, founded by Nimrod. It is on the banks of the Tigris opposite the site of the modern Mosul in Iraq.

New-Age Mysticism (Witchcraft, Goddess Worship, Satanism, etc.)

Paganism is a revival of old gods and goddesses of pre-Christian polytheistic nature religions and mystery cults such as Celtic, Norse, Greek, Egyptian, and other traditions of the Western world. Additionally, Sumerian mythologies, extant tribal religions (Native American religions and shamanism), New Age religions, and occult traditions such as Astaroth, Diana, Hecate, Cernunnos, Osiris, Pan, and others join the list in a journey into a universe inhabited with gods and goddesses.

The witchcraft branch of paganism is trying to dispel the hostility and suspicion they perceive as directed toward themselves and claim to embrace a life-affirming, family religion.

All witches are neo-pagans but not all pagans are witches. However most of the beliefs are similar and what applies to one usually applies to the other.

Archeological Evidence

Archeological excavations are causing this opinion to be revised, and today no one can seriously deny the accuracy of the Bible’s historical background. The Ahalah tablets, for example, excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1946-49 at Tell el-Atshana in northern Syria go back to the time of the larimlin (1900-1700 B.C.) From these we learn that there were Hittites in Syria back in the time of Abraham. Before this discovery it had been held that the mention of Ephron the Hittite was an anachronism, but this evidence shows they could have been in Palestine at that time.

The critics, however, will simply find something else that the Bible mentions that does not match up with their records of ancient history and the battle goes on. Nelson Glueck, the renowned Jewish archaeologist, wrote that “it may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference.” (Nelson, Glueck, Rivers in the Desert; History of Neteg, (Philadelphia; Jewish Publications Society of America, 1969), p. 31.

The Existence of the Jew

In the midst of a corrupt and idolatrous world, Israel was to demonstrate her loyalty and faithfulness to the One who had separated her to Himself. The covenant was unconditional. No provision was made for its revocation. Lest it be argued that Israel’s sin had broken the covenant, the apostle Paul shows clearly in Romans 11 that God has not cast off Israel and that the nation’s present blindness will exist only until the completion of the fullness of the Gentiles (v. 25).

In Isaiah 54:10, God declared that the mountains should depart and the hills be removed, but that his covenant with Israel should not be removed.

In Jeremiah 31:35-36, He declared that only if the sun, moon, and stars departed, would Israel cease to be a nation. Ezekiel 37:25-28 plainly states, “And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob, my servant,” and that this shall be forever; God Himself will dwell in the midst of them and will sanctify His people. The covenant with David in Jeremiah 33:20-26 could be broken only if day and night ceased. Israel’s transgressions could not annul an irrevocable covenant. “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:29).

The Amorites, Amalekites, Hittites, Jebusites, etc. have all disappeared. Israel
alone remains a people, even though she has been separated from her homeland
for 1,700 years.
This is unprecedented.
Personal Experience

All people can say that they have a personal experience and it is difficult to deny, but with Christianity people from all walks of life, all religious backgrounds, all nationalities, in every country have had the same personal experience when they received Christ as Savior.

This subjective experience is based on the objective evidence of the Bible, the Resurrection, and the historical evidence.

The Use of Typology in the Bible

More space is devoted to an account of the Tabernacle that to any other subject treated in the Bible. Two chapters suffice to record God’s creation of the Universe and the Earth for man’s habitation whereas 10 chapters are needed to record the construction of the Tabernacle (Hebrews 9:23-34). “Behold the Tabernacle of God is with men” (Revelation 21:3). “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us” (John 1:14). Jesus was the antitype.

The Tabernacle was a temporary appointment of 30 to 40 years and abode not long in any one place.

It was for use in the wilderness – Nowhere for the Son of Man to lay His head.

It was mean, humble, and unattractive – Divine majesty was hidden beneath the veil of flesh and to the unbelieving gaze of Israel He had no form or comeliness – no beauty that they should desire him.

The Tabernacle was God dwelling place – Just as the Shekinah dwelt between the two Cherubim, so on the Mount of Transfiguration the glory of the God-man flashed forth between two men (Moses and Elijah).

The Tabernacle was the place where God met man – “And there I will meet with thee and commune with thee” (Exodus 25:21-22).

“No man cometh to the Father but by me” (John 14:6).

“There is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (I Timothy
2:5).
The Tabernacle was the center of Israel’s camp.
“Encamp round the Tabernacle” (Numbers 1:50)

“Then the Tabernacle of the congregation shall set forward with the camp of the Levites in the midst of the camp” (Numbers 2:17).

“Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).

The Tabernacle was the place where the Law was preserved (Deuteronomy 10:2-5).

“Yea, Thy law is written in my heart”

Throughout His perfect life He preserved in thought, word, and deed the divine Decalogue, honoring and magnifying God’s law.

The Tabernacle was the place where sacrifice was made. In its’ outer court stood the brazen alter, to which the animals were brought, and on which they were slain. The cross was the altar upon which God’s Lamb was slain.

The Tabernacle was the place where the priestly family was fed.

The priest that offereth it for sin shall eat it, in the holy place it shall be eaten” (Leviticus 6:16-26).

Christ as the food for God’s priest’s family today (i.e., all believers – I Peter 2:5,
9). He is the bread of life.
The Tabernacle was the place of worship.
The place Israelite brought his offerings
Through Christ “By Him we are to offer unto God a sacrifice of praise” (Hebrews
13:15).
The Tabernacle had only one door.
“I am the door” (John 10:9).

The Tabernacle door on the east side where the tribe of Judah was camped.
Judah was on the east side (Numbers 2:3).
The door was on the east side (Exodus 27:12-17).
Jesus is the Lion of the tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5).

The Tabernacle was universal and shows the universal Lordship of Christ.

 Mineral kingdom – Metals and precious stones
 Animal kingdom – Skins and goats – hair curtains
 Vegetable kingdom – Wood, linen, oil, spices
 “Silver is Mine and gold is Mine” (Haggai 2:8).
 “Cattle on a thousand hills are mine” (Psalm 50:10).

The Tabernacle was ministered to by women
Exodus 35:36 – Tabernacle
Luke 7:37 – Christ
The Use of Typology in the Bible
Pentecost (Shavuot)

Feast of Weeks – [Rest on seventh day, land rested on seventh year, fiftieth year was Jubilee year when debts were freed. Pent = 50 (7x7) + 1 = anniversary of receiving the law.

At Pentecost the Spirit of God left the temple and came to reside in the people outside the walls. God changed his address. After the Passover Moses went up on the Mountain and came down with the 2 tablets (1 for each party in the covenant). The fact that Moses had two tablets meant that God was to dwell with his people. God wants to live with His people.

Hebrews 10:16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my LAWS (tablets) into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more.” God is putting both tablets in our hearts signifying He wants to live in us.

Our bodies are then to be “living sacrifices.” The “kingdom of God” is where God’s power is being displayed and when people are being obedient, God is free to display His power. “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose hear is perfect toward him” (II Chronicles 16:9).

The Golden Calf (Exodus 19-20) was punished by the death of 3000 people.

At Pentecost 3000 souls were saved.

The word for “thunder and lightning” signaling the presence of God (Kolot) can also be translated “languages.”

Jesus was not a carpenter. He was a stone mason. The word is builder; however the dwellings were built with stones back then. The translators probably looked around them and saw the wood building that they were in and translated “builder” as “carpenter.” Jesus is the chief cornerstone, the apostles the foundation and we are the building stones. Jesus worked in a rock quarry near his home. He cut us as stones for the Temple of God. Temples were for showing how Great God was. You are going to be my temple. “He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. Faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he…He abandoned the God who made him and rejected the Rock his Savior…You deserted the Rock, who father you; you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deuteronomy 32).

“There is no one holy like the Lord; there is no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God” (I Samuel 2:2).

“The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; (2 Samuel 22:2).

“He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress, I will not be shaken” (Psalm 62:6).

“You also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. (I Peter 2:5).

“Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the Lord: Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn; look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah, who gave you birth” (Isaiah 51:1-2).

The Changed Life of Peter

Peter, cowardly denied Christ three times, and ran away weeping, when Christ was being beaten and humiliated. But something happened to Peter. A short time later Peter is in downtown Jerusalem, right where he has the most to fear in the midst of Christ’s enemies. He preached sermons to thousands of people that Christ is the Savior, and that He was raised from the dead. He is seized by the authorities, warned to stop preaching about Christ and is threatened with death. But Peter responds in effect, “do whatever you want to me, but I am going to continue to proclaim Christ.” Subsequently he and his companions are seized and are flogged. Peter goes on his way rejoicing that he was considered worthy to suffer for the Lord (Acts 4-6).

 What on earth could possibly have changed Peter from a coward to a roaring lion of courage in a matter of days? This is completely impossible to explain, apart from the verse “And He appeared to Peter” (1 Corinthians 15:5). What else can explain the psychological absurdity of lying about Christ to preserve his life, and a short time later proclaiming that Christ was raised to anyone who would listen, and challenging the authorities to take his life? His life, all of a sudden, did not matter to him. The only reasonable explanation is he saw the resurrected Christ; that meant he would be resurrected too; death no longer mattered to him.

Changed Life of the Apostle Paul

Paul was the most rabid anti-Christian of all. He stood by and approved while Christians were murdered. He dragged Christians off to prison, beat them, and clearly hated Christ and his followers. But something happened to Paul. All of a sudden he became the greatest messenger of Christianity, more than all of the rest put together. He suffered most horribly for Christ in countless situations on missionary journeys and ultimately died a violent martyrs death. What could have possibly changed Paul - a complete turn around - from a violent persecutor of the church to its greatest proclaimer? It is impossible to explain apart from Acts chapter 9, when He appeared to Paul. The Changed Life of Thomas Thomas

, who was not present when Christ appeared to the others said, “Unless I shall see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” But something happened to Thomas. He died a violent martyrs death for Christ. That is pretty hard to explain apart from John 20:27, where Christ appears to Thomas and shows him His hands and bids Thomas to put his fingers in the holes and Thomas’ hand into the wound in His side. The Changed Life of the Apostles All the apostles

. Finally we have all the apostles. When Christ was arrested they “all ran and hid themselves.” We see them cowering fearfully behind closed doors. They were in complete disarray and total despair. What changed them? What event is sufficient to explain their instant change of behavior to fearlessly spreading the message of Christ’s resurrection everywhere, and dying violent deaths for Christ’s sake?

1.

Liars?

The reasons why people lie are universal. Some lie to gain power and importance, or to get themselves out of trouble. Why would the disciples have lied? Perhaps to gain power, fame, or wealth?

But what happened to the Apostles and other first-century Christians? Did they gain wealth and power? They lost everything they had! They lost their money, their homes and their possessions. Gain fame? The only fame they gained was of the wrong kind. They were hounded from one end of the empire to the other; thrown to lions, slaughtered in coliseums for entertainment, made human torches, had their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes. To suggest they were lying is grasping at straws. They had absolutely NOTHING to gain and EVERYTHING to lose! Why would they suffer all these things for what they knew to be a lie?

Furthermore, who would die for what he knows to be a lie? We are not talking
about Christians of the second and third centuries. The apostles knew whether
Christ was resurrected or not because they were there. What happened to the
apostles?
Andrew - crucified
Simon - crucified
Peter - crucified
Matthew - the sword
Thaddaeus - killed by arrows
James, brother of Jesus - stoned
Philip - crucified
James the son of Alphaeus - crucified
Thomas - spear thrust
Bartholomew - crucified
James, son of Zebedee - the sword
Paul - beheaded

For what purpose would they lie, with everything to lose and absolutely nothing to gain? To suffer exquisite tortures and suffer an agonizing violent death for NO purpose? Is that reasonable to believe? So powerful is this evidence that even skeptics admit the apostles saw something that made them believe.

2. Insane?

As already stated, the writers of the New Testament were not uneducated and ignorant. Peter and John, the pragmatic fishermen; Paul, one of the best educated men of his day, equivalent to a Harvard, Yale, or Oxford man in our culture; Matthew, a politician and tax assessor; Luke a competent Doctor; clearly not the type of men subject to credulity or hallucinations.

We must also keep in mind that belief in the resurrected Christ was not only shared by the apostles, but it was accepted by hundreds of thousands of other people. People who, because of the intense persecution they suffered for their faith, had every reason to critically test whether these things were true - at a time when it could still be checked out! People were still living in considerable numbers who had seen the resurrected Christ (1 Corinthians 15:6) when these people were being persecuted. Before I would let myself be tortured, or watch my wife and children be killed in front of me, I would have visited the villages and spoken to the people who had seen these supernatural events surrounding Christ’s public ministry. It is inconceivable they would have persisted in their faith, in view of the consequences, if they had the slightest reason for believing the apostles were nothing but a bunch of deluded fanatics.

On close scrutiny the hallucination theory has insurmountable problems. With the advent of modern psychology and psychiatry we know certain scientifically verified facts about hallucinations. A certain psychological condition of mind is necessary, one of belief and expectation. But the disciples were not expecting the resurrection, they were in a state of despair, hiding and cowering behind closed doors. They had to be convinced against their wills Christ was resurrected. Some women saw the resurrected Christ and told the apostles, and “these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them” (Luke 24:11). When Christ did appear to them they were frightened and thought they were seeing a ghost. Christ had to take the time to convince them by showing the wounds in his body and eating in front of them (Luke 24:36-43). Thomas would not believe at all even after being told by his most trusted associates. Consider the apostle Paul. If anyone was convinced against his will, he certainly was! He hated Christians, beat and persecuted them, dragged off women and children to prison, and stood by approvingly while they were executed.

Besides hallucinations requiring a state of mind of belief and expectation, they are subjective experiences in an individual’s mind and therefore are not collective or contagious. The experiences cannot be shared. 1 Corinthians 15:6 says “after that he appeared to more than five hundred people at one time, most of whom remain until now...” Paul does not add the obvious - five hundred people can’t all have the same hallucination! Just as 30,000 people cannot all hallucinate fish and bread being created to feed them or scores of people see a decomposing dead man rise from the tomb, or a fig tree wither before their eyes, or see known lepers and blind men healed. Furthermore, the appearances of the resurrected Lord were not just restricted to one place and time; they were all over. Indoors and outdoors, in private and in public, with different geographical locations from the city of

Jerusalem to the countryside of Galilee 70 miles away.

The idea that the apostles and the others were hallucinating is just as untenable as the belief they lied about the resurrection to gain their own deaths!

3. It’s True - the only other logical option.

• The Case Before a Court of Law

Consider the magnitude of 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Lets say we were on a jury in a court of law. We let each of the 500 persons testify, for just five minutes. It would take more than a solid week of testimony, all day long, to get through all the witnesses. What reasonable person would not be convinced after watching 500 separate individuals each take the stand, one after the other, all testifying to the same thing?

One may object that Christ only appeared to those who already believed in Him, so this testimony is tainted as it only comes from Christians. That is more or less a moot point. Can you conceive of anyone, who after having the resurrected Christ appear to them, not being a believer? The Resurrection Core Facts Accepted by All Skeptics

1. Jesus’ death via Roman crucifixion.
2. The disciples and others had experiences they believed were the appearances of the resurrected Christ.
3. Because of these experiences, the disciples were transformed from timidity and fearfulness, to be willing to die for their faith.
4. Paul’s conversion, due to an appearance of the resurrected Christ.
5. Various theories have been put forth by skeptics through the years to explain away a physical resurrection of Christ, such as the “myth” theory or the “stolen body” theory. But all these theories are refuted by the 4 core facts above. Thus, a skeptic can be shown that based on his own rules, using only the facts he accepts, that those theories are false.

For example, the “stolen body” theory postulates that the disciples stole the body of Christ, then claimed the empty tomb as evidence of the resurrection, thereby perpetrating a fraud. This theory is refuted by core facts numbers 2, 3, and 4. The disciples transformation shows they really believed they saw a resurrected Christ. If they stole the body, how does one explain the accepted fact they died for their faith? Liars don’t make good martyrs.

The “myth” or legend theory that the resurrection myth was added by later Christians in the second century is refuted by the fact it was the disciples who had these experiences, and the teaching of the resurrection is based on the original eye-witnesses experiences, not later legends.

7. A Newsweek article on Easter (April 8, 1996), included some new theories, one of which was John D. Crossan’s idea that Christ’s body was eaten by dogs.

Again, such claims are refuted by the very core facts accepted by skeptics that are familiar with the actual historical data.

8. Nevertheless, it serves to show that virtually any theory, no matter how outlandish and totally lacking in any substantiation is given credence.

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE COMPARED

Only a few religions are actually based on a miraculous historical event. One such religion is Islam. In about 610 A.D. a man named Muhammad, when he was around the age of 40, began to hear voices and have visions. At first he did not know whether these voices and visions were from demons or God. He later became convinced they were from God. The book of Koran is the content of these revelations, as authored by Muhammad. Now to a pertinent question. Who else heard these voices? Who else saw these visions? Do we even have one witness, or one shred of corroborating evidence it was really God speaking to Muhammad? None! So here is a religion with 450 million adherents which is based on the say-so of one single individual who said it was God speaking to him. There are many smaller religions and some Christian cults which are similarly based on the claims of one single individual who says he received special revelations or visions allegedly from God. But again, no witnesses, no evidence, no verification whatsoever. There are many people today who claim God speaks to them; some are charlatans with their own agenda to gain wealth and fame, and some are in mental institutions. Others are involved in the occult and speak of supernatural communications with other beings. While I do not necessarily deny the reality of the experience, the question is, does this experience point to truth or deception?

How does the historical evidence for Islam or other religions with similar origins (alleged unverifiable miraculous revelation to one person) compare with the tens of thousands of eyewitnesses to the miraculous events of Christianity?

The vast majority of non-Christian religions in the world such as Buddhism, Confucianism, or Hinduism, are based on the ethical teachings of its originators - not on a verifying historical event. Therefore they do not lend themselves to any methodology of determining the validity or invalidity of their claims. There is no way to determine which of the ethical teachings are true! Witnesses and evidence are utterly worthless as a means to validate the authenticity of a philosophy. When you get right down to it, a philosophy is nothing more than someone’s personal opinion. These are not prejudicial statements intended to deride other people’s beliefs. It merely reflects the reality of the historical record, based on the actual evidence present, which may be easily confirmed by any researcher.

Other religious opinions abound. Some, as espoused in the book Chariots of the Gods, believe we were put here by aliens from outer space. Others just have personal opinions that vary. I once told an acquaintance of mine who was an atheist, that if he lived his life consistent with his beliefs he should live life as if it did not have any meaning. Why make any moral sacrifices? Why strive for any worthy cause whatever, other than ones own self gratification? If there is no life after death and no judgment, it would not matter whether he lived his life as Adolf

Hitler or Mother Theresa. We all go to the same compost pile when it is all over. Upon admitting he did live his life as if it had meaning, he saw the inconsistency. He then replied “well, how do you know we have not evolved to the point where our spirits continue to live on after this life, I believe that is possible.” But that, I told him, is blind faith. He then accused me of the same thing, to which I replied “but that is exactly the difference. You have no reason whatsoever to believe that. It is based totally on your subjective opinion. But there are good and adequate reasons for believing what I believe as a Christian.” While I do have a subjective opinion on it, the basis for Christianity does not depend on that. It depends on objective historical facts which can be verified totally apart from my subjective opinion. Anyone who objectively and thoughtfully compares the historical evidence for Christianity with the basis for all the other world religions cannot come to any other conclusion.

Are the New Testament Texts Reliable?

The first step in investigating the validity of any past historical event or person when the eye witnesses are no longer living is to examine the documentary evidence. How do we know that Julius Caesar once lived and ruled the Roman Empire, or that Plato, Socrates, Aristotle or Napoleon, lived and acted in events as described and accepted in history? We know about them in the same way we know about Jesus Christ; by the writings that have been handed down through the centuries. Do we deny the existence and the historical events associated with the above mentioned persons simply because all of the eyewitnesses are dead? No more than we would deny the existence of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln because of the lack of living eye witnesses.

But with all of the numerous writings that have been handed down, some for thousands of years, how can we ascertain which are legendary and which are true? What about embellishments, exaggerations, additions, or deletions possibly engaged in by deceivers or over zealous and imaginative copyists accruing down through the centuries? These are valid questions.

History is taught with a high degree of certainty, so there must be a satisfactory method to evaluate these handed down documents for accuracy. This method is called the “bibliographical test.” We will evaluate the written records of Christian origins not with some special bias and subjective “religious” test, but use the exact same criteria used to evaluate the documents of all historical events, the “bibliographical test.”

Bibliographical Test of Verification

There are two parts to this test. One concerns the number of manuscripts still in existence. Before the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, books had to be copied by hand (manuscript). If an event was significant, many manuscript copies would be produced. Numerous copies surviving today speak of a far greater number no longer in existence.

The greater the number of manuscripts shows greater circulation, geographical spread, and wide spread public acceptance and knowledge. It also attests to the fact something significant happened, important enough to generate numerous painstaking manuscripts and geographical spread.

The other part of the test is the time distance between the original events and first recording of them and the earliest manuscript copy found to date. As manuscripts are read, they begin to wear out necessitating more copies to be made. Then copies of those copies were made, on and on down through the centuries. In this chain of manuscripts, what is the date of the earliest ones still in existence? This is important because the greater the time distance the greater the chance for embellishments or untruths to slip in. If a copyist added something untrue in a manuscript 1000 years after the event, who is going to challenge it? All the generations close to the event are long since gone. However, if someone were to write a book that the south won the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War was fought against the French, such a book would be quickly challenged, and would not receive widespread recognition or circulation. Even though those wars were over 100 and 200 years ago, we are still close enough to the events to know they did not happen that way.

The following chart lists historical persons and books of antiquity that are accepted without question by not only all scholars, but by virtually everyone. Listed by each work are the time span and the number of manuscripts and portions of manuscripts in existence.

Author Time Written Earliest Copy Time Span No. of

_________________________________ _in Existence_____from

Event ___ Copies

Pliny the Younger (History) 61-113 A.D. 850 A.D. 750 yrs. 7 Plato (Tetralogies) 427-347 B.C. 900 A.D. 1,200 yrs. 7 Caesar (Gallic wars) 100-44 B.C. 900 A.D. 1,000 yrs. 10 Thucydides (History) 460-400 B.C. 900 A.D. 1,300 yrs. 8 Tacitus (Annals) 100 A.D. 1100 A.D. 1,000 yrs. 20 Sophocles 496-406 B.C. 1000 A.D. 1,400 yrs. 193 Herodotus (History) 480-425 B.C. 900 A.D. 1,300 yrs. 8 Aristotle (of 1 work) 384-322 B.C. 1100 A.D. 1,400 yrs. 49 Euripides 480-406 B.C. 1100 A.D. 1,500 yrs. 9 Catullus 54 B.C. 1550 A.D. 1,600 yrs. 3 Aristophanes 450-385 B.C. 900 A.D. 1,200 yrs. 10 Illiad - Homer (2nd most) 900 B.C. 400 B.C. 500 yrs. 643 New Testament 40-100 A.D. 125 A.D. 25 yrs 24,000

No scholar would even listen to an argument that doubted the authenticity of Herodotus, Plato, Caesar, or Aristotle; yet all these survive on just a handful of manuscripts which are dated over 1000 years from when they wrote. By contrast there are over 24,000 copies (over 5,300 in Greek) of portions of the New Testament in existence today. No other book is even a close second. The 25-year time gap is incredible. Erroneous accounts being painstakingly copied by hand and reproduced in such tremendous numbers in view of the small time span is inconceivable.

It would be equivalent of a book coming out today that said Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed to be God, walked on the water, raised people from the dead, and was himself resurrected. He lived over 50 years ago. Or a book about John F. Kennedy that states he was assassinated 30 years ago by his car blowing up with a hand grenade. Such stories would never get published or circulated much less believed. Too many people are still alive who were living during those times who know those stories are false. The 25 year time span for the Gospels shows they had to have been circulated prior to this, which means it was during the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses of Christ. Men who had known and heard the Apostles were still living in considerable numbers at the time and any alteration would be quickly discovered and corrected.

The written records of Christian origins are available in far greater number and antiquity than are those of any other personages or happenings in the whole history of the world prior to the invention of the printing press! No one, for example, ever doubts for an instant that a man named Julius Caesar once ruled as an emperor of Rome. But the manuscript evidence for the New Testament events is incomparably superior to that for the existence of Caesar![2] Nothing even remotely comparable exists for any other ancient writings - including all of the other religions in the world put together. If one still doubts the transmission and authenticity of the Gospels, then to be consistent he would have to dismiss Plato, Caesar, Aristotle, and all the rest. This conclusion is inescapable since the New Testament is unsurpassed in the very evidentiary elements of the bibliographical test that authenticates all of the other literature.

These manuscripts survived despite the most intense eradication effort imaginable. Christians were killed, written records were burned, and edicts were issued to destroy all of the world’s Bibles and people even found with them were killed. Nevertheless, from this relatively small population base (world population at that time was only 138-170 million) the manuscripts continued to be hand copied in such great number. What motivated such extensive work? Why have not other religions, with less persecution, which had prominent leaders who had public ministries for the duration of their lifetimes, rather than the short three-year ministry of Christ produced similar evidence?[3]

Nonbiblical Documents About Christ

Some people object “if Christ existed why was he not mentioned in non-Christian literature from the first century?” He was indeed! First of all, very few written works of anything have survived from the first century. According to one scholar, bookends set one foot apart could contain every thing written between 50-70 A.D. [4] Nevertheless, the historicity of Christ is verified by many of these non- Christian historical writings. Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian (born 52-54 A.D.), writes how Nero “punished with the most exquisite tortures, the persons commonly called Christians... Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate...” (Annals, XV.44). Flavius Josephus (born 37 A.D.) was a Jewish historian, who writes “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man... for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive truth with pleasure. He drew over both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles... and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him.... And the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day.” (Antiquities, xviii. 33.).

Many other first-century and early second- century writers, Thallus, Pliny the Younger, Hadrian, Suetonius, Phlegon, Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, and others mention in their writings the darkness of the earth when Christ was crucified, the earthquake, the crucifixion of Christ by Pilate, the resurrection of Christ believed by his followers, the persecution of Christians, etc. All this from unbelievers in Christianity.

So convincing and inescapable is this testimony that even the Encyclopedia Britannica, concerning the testimony of these many independent secular accounts of Jesus, records:

These independent accounts prove than in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the eighteenth, during the nineteenth, and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE The Miracles

One of the greatest credentials through which Christ authenticated His identity were through the miracles that He did. Someone may say “what does that prove? People do things today that are claimed to be miraculous. There are claims of haunted houses, supposed faith-healers on television and a host of other supernatural claims and unexplained phenomena.” But Christ did miracles that are in a different category that cannot be duplicated. Christ demonstrated power over the forces of creation which can only belong to God, the Creator and author of these forces.

He stilled a raging storm, calmed the sea, raised people from the dead, and healed people with visible outward maladies of the flesh. He healed the blind, the deaf, and the paralyzed, cleansed lepers, created food, raised the dead even from a decomposed state - and all this before thousands upon thousands of eye witnesses! Let’s look at some of these miracles in detail.

The Gospels record an account of Christ feeding 5000 men and on another occasion 4000 men (Matthew 14:21; 15:38). In both cases the text specifically says “besides women and children.” Adding women and children to 9000 men we have at least 30,000 people who are eyewitnesses to a miracle only the Creator can do; that of creating enough food to feed 30,000 people.

Most of these miracles were done in public. Historians have shown there were well over one million people in and out of Jerusalem during Passover time. Christ did miracle after miracle in downtown Jerusalem before thousands of witnesses. The miracles were not healing back-aches and internal ailments that cannot be verified.

Lepers, men with ulcerated skin, likely missing parts of their face or bodily extremities, he healed instantly, before the very eyes of onlookers. He healed a man born blind that was a well known local figure that all knew had been blind all of his life (John 9). Peter struck a man in the Garden of Gethsemane cutting off his ear. And Christ, before the very crowd who had come to arrest Him, restores the ear (Luke 22:50-51)! Christ healed people from great distances without even being present, raised numerous people from the dead, restored people with withered limbs, made water into wine, and even commanded the fish,[6] creatures which, needless to say, do not obey men!

Consider the great number of witnesses to these things. In the case of the multiplication of the fish and loaves we can conservatively estimate 30,000 eyewitnesses, but in the other cases there is not a specific number given. How could there be? If you were writing about such an event, likely all you could say is there was a “great crowd” of people.

The witnesses to these miracles are described variously as “many people,” “large crowds,” “great number,” “great multitudes,” and other descriptors denoting it was a lot of people! It got so bad Christ could not even enter a village without pandemonium breaking out and large crowds following him everywhere. So how many total eyewitnesses to all of these miracles - the type of miracles that cannot be duplicated which demonstrate power over the forces of creation which can only belong to the Creator? Clearly, at least 100,000, which is a very conservative number. The Witnesses  1. Uneducated and Ignorant?

Let us take a look at the witnesses themselves. It is sometimes assumed that the people of that age were ignorant, uneducated masses that were easily deceived. That simply isn’t true. Just to focus on the writers of the New Testament shows the fallacy of such thinking. Luke was a physician; Peter and John were business men in the fishing business, Matthew was a tax collector. Does the IRS employ ignoramuses? Are physicians considered ignorant? In that culture education was compulsory to a certain level. Even the relatively “uneducated” fishermen were highly literate. They spoke and wrote in at least three languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek - more languages than most “educated” people today. The Apostle Paul was highly educated, a true scholar who quoted freely from a wide range of literature.

Nevertheless, many skeptics point out many things today would have been considered miracles long ago, such as a transistor radio, television, or a watch. But consider the miracles Christ did. Walking on the water, raising decomposing dead people to life, healing lepers, blind, deaf, and the paralyzed with a mere word; putting an amputated ear back on a persons head with a touch, stilling a raging storm - these things are just as much miracles today as they were to those in the first century.

2. Hostile Witnesses It is a well established fact in our judicial system that the weightiest testimony in a court of law would be that of a hostile witness confirming a statement of the defendant. Let’s say a man had an alibi which removes him from the scene of the crime. His friend, a neutral person, and one who is antagonistic and hostile toward him all testify. Whose testimony would have the greatest weight? Surely, if the hostile person absolves the man he hates by also confirming he was not at the scene of the crime, this would be the most powerful confirmation of the event.

It is pertinent to note that even the enemies of Christ not only never denied he did the miracles, but confirmed their occurrence by either trying to attribute his power to another source[7] or trying to suppress the evidence. After the raising of Lazarus from the dead great multitudes of Jews who saw Lazarus now alive began believing in Christ. John 12:10-11 says “The chief priests took counsel that they might put Lazarus to death also; because on account of him many of the Jews were going away, and were believing in Jesus.”

3. Government Officials Even King Herod, a close equivalent in our country to the President, knew of Jesus’ miracles and wanted him to perform them for him. A reading of those passages show that Herod regarded his sources of information as being totally dependable, because he regarded the miracles as facts (Matthew 14:1-2).

Paul, while on trial before the highest officials of the land, both Roman and Jewish, testifies to King Agrippa in reference to the supernatural events of Christ, that he knew these things did not escape the Kings notice, that the King himself knew about them because they “were not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). These people were not Christians; but government officials. Paul appeals to knowledge that he knew they had, and they did not deny it.

Answered Prayer

Dwight L. Moody went to England for a rest after the Chicago fire after he had stayed long enough to feed the poor and provide a new building for his work. He did not intend to preach but to hear some of the great preachers on the other side of the ocean. He was invited to preach at a Congregational Church by Mr. Lessey. The morning sermon was a burden. The evening sermon was the same until after a few minutes of preaching there seemed to be the powers of an unseen world which had fallen upon the audience. Five hundred people stood up at the invitation to receive Christ; the answers to the prayers of a bedridden saint. In Boston at the International Christian Worker’s Convention which was held in the Old Tremont Temple seating 3,500, R.A. Torrey had to introduce the next speaker on the program which he described as a dancing, card-playing, theater-going Christian. A woman of wealth, he introduced her and then dropped his head as if he’d done something he was ashamed of. As she began to speak every one of those 3,500 pairs of eyes were riveted on the woman. Later they began to weep, and then, throwing all disguise to the winds, he saw them bow their heads on the backs of the seats in front of them and sob as if their hearts would break. Before that wonderful address was over that whole audience was swept by the power of that woman’s words as the trees of our forests are sometimes swept by the cyclone. She had had an experience at a mission which caused both her and her husband to rededicate their lives. When asked about the message afterwards she replied, “Would you like to know the secret of it? Last night as I thought of the great throng that would fill the Tremont Temple this morning and of my own inexperience in public address, I spent the whole night on my face before God in prayer.” If we would spend more nights in prayer before God there would be more days of power when we faced our congregations.

R. A. Torrey told his new congregation how glad it would make him if some of the congregation would stay up late Saturday or get up early Sunday morning to pray for their new pastor. The Lord began packing 2,700 people into the church until the fire marshal would not allow any more. The overflow meeting rooms below which seated another 1,100 were then filled as well as the Institute lecture hall. The great majority did not unite with Moody Church but were just passing through. There were conversions in and about the church practically every day. They received 2,000 people into membership in eight years and it went on just the same the four years after Torrey left. It did not matter who the pastor was, it was the people praying them into power. Then when Torrey started around the world those people still followed him with their prayers. It was reported by one who claimed to know that there were more than 102,000 persons who made a definite profession of accepting Christ in the different places he visited in those months that he was away.

How did the great revival that so marvelously blessed our nation in 1857 come about? A humble city missionary in the city of New York, a man named Landfear, became burdened because of the state of the Church. He and two other men who were like minded began to pray for a revival. They opened a daily noon-meeting for prayer and invited others. These meetings were poorly attended at first, with sometimes Landfear being the only one. But soon interest began to deepen and large crowds began to flock to the meetings. After a while prayer meetings were held every hour of the day and night in New York City, and not only the churches were used but theaters and other public places were being crowded with praying men and praying women. The fire spread from New York to Philadelphia and to other cities, and then swept over the entire country. A young man came into one of the meetings in Chicago and said that he had just come back from a trip to the far west, and that at every place where he had stopped on the way back to Chicago prayer meetings were being held. The news of what God was doing in America spread to the north of Ireland, and the General Assembly of Presbyterian Church of Ireland sent a commission to America to see what was going on. Four men in the town of Kells, in north Ireland, banded themselves together and met every Saturday night for prayer and revival. They spent the whole night in prayer. They were humble men: one a farmer, one a blacksmith, one a school teacher. After a while they decided to preach, but their preaching did nothing so they went back to prayer. God hear their prayer and the work went on in such power that in some parts of Ireland the courts adjourned because there were no prisoners to incarcerate, and in some places even the grain stood ungarnered in the fields because men were so taken up with the things of God that they had no time for their immediate needs. Many of the most notorious and hardened sinners in the land were converted.

Charles Finney tells of a mighty man of prayer who was interested not only in the work at home but abroad. After his death his diary was found and in examining it they found that on certain days he had a great burden for some specific mission field, and upon inquiry it was found that in each instance revivals on the foreign field had followed this man’s insistent intercession, and followed in the exact order of his petitions as recorded in his diary.

Cain

, Genesis 4:13-15;

Abraham

, for a son, Genesis 15; Pleading for Sodom, Genesis 18:23-33; for Ishmael, Genesis 17:20; for Abimeleck, Genesis 20:17 Hagar

, for deliverance, Genesis 16:7-13

Abraham’s serv

ant for guidance, Genesis 24:12-52

Rebecca

, concerning the pains in pregnancy, Genesis 25:22, 23

Jacob

for deliverance from Esau, Genesis 32:8-32; 33:1-8 “And was there alone; and a man wrestled with him until dawn, and when the man saw he couldn’t win the match, he struck Jacob’s hip, and knocked it out of joint at the socket. Then the man said, ‘Let me go, for it is dawn.’ But Jacob panted, ‘I will not let you go until you bless me.’ ‘What is your name?’ the man asked. ‘Jacob,’ was the reply. ‘It isn’t any more!’ the man told him. ‘It is Israel – One who has power with God. Because you have been strong with God, you shall prevail with men.’ (Hosea 12:4).

Moses

, for help at the Red Sea, Exodus 14:15-16; the water of Marah, Exodus 15:25; at Horeb, Exodus 17:14; concerning the murmuring of the Israelites for meat, Numbers 11:11-35; in behalf of Miriam’s leprosy, Numbers 12:13-15

Scriptural Use of Numbers

The Number Seven in Scripture. The last book of the Bible is the book which fills up and completes the Scriptures. In it we find seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets, seven personages, seven vials, seven dooms, and seven new things. In Revelation 1, there are seven glories of the Son of Man. There are seven beatitudes of blessing. The word “Jesus” is found seven times in Revelation. The words, “Jesus Christ” is found seven times. The vengeance and wrath of God are found seven times. However, the word “dragon” is found thirteen times, and that is the number of evil. The keyword to the book of Hebrews is “better.” There are seven better things in Hebrews: covenant, promise, substitute, hope, sacrifice, word, and resurrection. There are seven walks in Ephesians. There are seven precious things in Peter. In Gen. 12:2, 3 we have seven parts of the covenant. Exodus 6:6-8 gives us the seven-fold promise to Israel. There is a seven-fold sprinkling of blood in the book of Leviticus. Naaman was told to dip seven times in the Jordan.

The Number Seven in Scripture

. . Seven miracles are recorded in John’s Gospel. In this same gospel we have repeated seven times, “mine hour.” There are seven sayings on the cross and these are made up of forty-nine Greek and Arabic words. The righteous are spoken of seven times in Gen. 18, where Abraham carried on intercession of behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the twenty-second chapter of Genesis the angel of the Lord called out “Abraham, Abraham;” and there are seven people throughout Scripture who received this double call: Seven earthquakes have taken place in Scripture. In the second verse of the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, there is a seven-fold description of the Holy Spirit as resting upon the Lord. Seven gifts are given in Rom. 12:6-8. The Greek word “agape,” which means love, occurs seven times in John’s Gospel. The phrase, “a new song,” occurs seven times in the Old Testament and is always given in connection with the second coming of the Lord.

The Number Seven in Scripture

. In Psalm 29 the phrase, “the voice of the Lord,” is found seven times. There are seven men who lived to be over 900 years of age, with Noah, the perfect man, as the seventh. Lamech, the father of Noah, is marked by an age of 777 years. The first verse of the Bible contains seven Hebrew words, and these seven words have twenty-eight letters, or 4 times 7. The first three words have fourteen letters, the last four words have fourteen letters, the fourth and fifth words have seven letters. And the sixth and seventh words have seven letters. The gematria of the three nouns in the verse, “God, heaven, and earth” is exactly 777. The Trend the World is Taking toward Globalism

1. Economic Agenda A. North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
2. In Mexico the Minimum wage is 58 cents an hour with few pension benefits, negligible health care, and non-existent safety regulations..
3. Today, a multinational company can choose to base its manufacturing operations in Mexico with low wages, no unions, no pensions, and no health benefits; or they can build a manufacturing plant in North America, with high wages, strong unions, expensive health benefits, and large pension obligations. B. General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)

1. Under the new rules of the WTO, America cannot use trade sanctions without having trade sanctions put on American exports. This will severely limit the options of a future American president to influence another countries actions through trade sanctions.

C. World Trade Organization (WTO)

1. This treaty attacks the U.S. government’s control over America’s economy and businesses. It is a 22,000 page text which only one Senator actually read and he voted against it.
2. In the WTO the United States will have no more voting power than small countries such as Mongolia, or Monaco. Only one vote among 117 nations and the U.S. will have not veto power over the actions of this trade body.

D. Plans to replace U.S. currency

2. Coming Economic Collapse A. The Federal Reserve Monetized Debt to produce inflation B. The U.S. National Debt Crisis - The Cause of future Hyper-Inflation C. The staggering rise in Taxes D. The Federal Reserve’s Role in the Coming Economic Collapse E. The Coming Stock Market Crash
3. Organizations Planning the Coming World Government

a. The Council on Foreign Relations

b. The Trilateral Commission

c. The Bilderbergers

d. The Council of Europe

e. The Club of Rome

f. The World Federalist Movement

g. The Asian Pacific Economic Community

4. The Transforming of the United Nations into the Coming World Government

a. The plot to abolish the nation state

b. Enlarging of the United Nations Power

c. Plans to build a permanent United Nations Armed Forces

5. Population Control
6. The Environmental Movement C. The Secret Teachings of the New World Order D. Preparation for the Mark of the Beast
7. Attack on Privacy and private property
8. Health Security Card - National Identification System
9. Gun Control Regulations
10. Attack on Civil rights
11. Technological Advances that threaten our security
12. Police Confiscation of property in the United States
13. National Identification Center
14. Government Surveillance
15. Computer Identification chips
16. Magnetic Fingerprints

11. Smart Cards
12. Presidential Executive Orders E. Wars and Rumors of Wars F. Earthquakes G. Volcanoes H. Evil shall “Wax worse”
13. Media Agenda to Corrupt Morals
14. Rock Videos and CD’S
15. Recent Films that attack Christianity
16. Movie violence
17. Attitude of the Movie Elite I. One World Church and the rise of Ecumenism J. Jews back in their land K. The “Desert Blooms” L. Tension in the Middle East M. Apathy among believers

Apologetices Class Schedule
2/24/08 Why Islam is not a True Religion
Islam’s Pagan Roots
The Sources of the Qur’an
The Fruits of Islam
False Prophecies of Islam
The Suppression of Truth in Islam
The Evil Character of Islam’s Prophet

Fanciful Tales in the Qur’an and the Hadith
Comparison with the Bible
The Nature of Islam’s God
Contradictions in the Qur’an and Hadith

UNDERSTANDING ISLAM

What Muslims Believe

According to the Qur'an, Adam and Hauwa (Eve) were sent down to earth from a Heavenly Garden after Satan's temptation, and they realized their sin and repented. The only way man can regain the "Garden" is to oppose Satan relentlessly and successfully by obeying the Law of God. All people are born Muslims, innocent, pure, and free.

There is no original sin which was passed on from Adam. Islam does not believe man is sinful but imperfect and forgetful. Therefore he needs to constantly be reminded of the right path through the prophets and revelation. Islam focuses on the intellectual capabilities of man and his responsibility for obedience to the will of God, while Christianity focuses on the relational capacity and the need to fill that longing with a personal relationship with God and his fellow man.

The source of evil for Islam is Satan. Man's sin in the garden was not a willful and deliberate disobedience. Evil only touches those who yield to it. So evil is avoidable if one is sincere in one's worship of Allah. It is forgivable and is not hereditary.

Muslims believe that God would send a fresh message or revelation whenever the faith of people declined. The Qur'an speaks respectfully of all the prophets, some 124,000, before Muhammad and to regard their Scripture as from God, to live amicably with the People of the Book, and even marry their women. According to Islam the Qur'an is the most widely read book ever written. It is the textbook from which all Muslims learn to read Arabic. It is the central reality in Islamic life. The Prophet Muhammad himself directed the proper recording and

Expansion under Mohammad (AD 622 to AD 632) Expansion from AD 632 to AD 661 Expansion from AD 661 to AD 750

BYZANTINE

EMPIRE

KINGDOM OF DONGOLA

FRANKISH KINGDOM

• Mecca
• Medina
• Jerusalem
• Contantinople
• Damascus

Kabul •

• Toledo
• Venice

Mediterranean Sea

Black Sea

Persian Gulf

Arabian Sea

arrangement of the Qur'an as commanded by Allah. No word, order or punctuation mark has been changed, omitted, or added.

The idea that God must continue to update and change His message is seen in Baha'i where all of the World Religions and their prophets are considered to have been sent by the same God even though they can't even agree if there is a God up there, and Jehovah's Witnesses whose truth can only go back as far as the latest Watchtower.

Muhammad is seen as being a righteous reformer who did away with the idolatry, the wine drinking, gambling, raiding, and blood feuds of his day. It seems closer to the truth to say that Muhammad took the traditional practices and customs of the Arab - murder, predatory war, slavery, polygamy, concubinage, vain glory, and self-conceit and made a religion out of them.

All people are born Muslims, innocent, pure, and free. There was no original sin because Adam, being a prophet couldn't sin. Man is not sinful but imperfect and forgetful. Therefore he needs to constantly be reminded of the right path through the prophets and revelation. God is not a person or a spirit for that would demean the exalted One. The Devil was created from fire and angels from light.

Angels are inferior to human prophets, because they were commanded to prostrate themselves before Adam.

Every believer is attended by two recording angels, one of whom records his good actions, and the other his evil actions. These are kept in The Book of Deeds. In this book every spoken word and every action great or small is written down. On the last day the body will be raised and united to its soul. One bone of the body will be preserved uncorrupted until the last day, at which time the rest of the body will grow from it. The last day will be preceded by three blasts of a trumpet. At the second blast all creatures in heaven and earth will die. At the last blast, forty years later, all will be raised again for judgment. This will be a general resurrection of men, angels, jinns, and animals. When all are assembled for judgment the angels will keep them waiting for 40 years or up to 50,000 years depending on which commentary is read. After this God appears to judge them, and Muhammad intercedes for them after Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus have declined, feeling unqualified for such a great task. Each person will be examined from his own book of deeds. All the deeds or books will be weighed in a balance scale with one balance over paradise and the other over hell. There are seven divisions of heaven, the highest called paradise which is a garden with beautiful women, couches, and wine that does not intoxicate. God does not appear at all.

The Muslim hell as seven divisions. The Orthodox teaching is that all Muslims will go to hell. The degree and duration of punishment is dependent upon the seriousness of the sins committed. For Muslims who have committed no serious sins hell will be cool and pleasant. However, for us infidels who say God is plural, we will stay there forever, subjected to burning flames and icy cold. The Muslims believe in the law of abrogation where later verses in the Qur'an cancel out earlier verses they contradict.

Muslims believe that during Ramadan the gates of Paradise are open and the gates of Hell closed, and that all who keep the Fast will be pardoned of all their past venial sins.

A pilgrimage to Mecca is required by every Muslim once in his life if he can afford it and is in good health. Among the many duties of the pilgrim are: to wash himself at the sacred Mosque, kiss the famous black stone, circle the Kaaba seven times, kissing the black stone each time he passes it, run between Mt. As Safa and Mt. Ak Marwa seven times repeating prayers on the top of each hill, and return to Mina where they cast seven stones at each of three pillars, the largest of which is called the Great Devil. According to Muhammad, "He who he makes the pilgrimage for God's sake and does not talk loosely nor act wickedly, shall return as pure from sin as the day he was born."

Holy War is a duty for every male, free, adult Muslim who has the means to reach an army. This duty is on Muslims until the whole world is Islamized. The Holy War must led by a Muslim leader or Imam, which means that since the Shiite Imam is invisible now, they cannot fight a holy war until he reappears. Muslims who die in fighting in a holy war are assured of going to Paradise and of having special privileges there.

The only door of the Kaba with the curtain over it.

The Kaba

Inside the Kaba
there are two pillars inside (others report 3 pillars)
there is a table on the side to put items like perfume
there are two lantern-type lamps hanging from the ceiling
the space can accommodate about 50 people
there are no electric lights inside
the walls and the floors are of the marble
there are no windows inside - there is only one door
the upper inside walls of the Kaba were covered with some kind of curtain with
the Kalima written on it.

The Maqam Ibrahim is located in front of the only door of the Kaba. Inside the building is a boulder about 2 x 3 feet in size and that claims to have the footprint of Abraham which was imbedded when his foot miraculously sank into the rock when he stood on it. Muslims believe (without proof) that this is the spot where Abraham used to perform prayers near the Kaba. They also believe he used it as a stepping stone to build the kaba.

Muslims believe (without proof) that the revered "black stone" (Alhajar Al-Aswad) is a special divine meteorite that pre-dates creation that fell at the foot of Adam and Eve. It is presently embedded in the southeastern corner of the Kaba. Muslims touch and kiss the black stone during Hajj but non-Muslims are strictly forbidden to even touch it.

"Before Muhammad appeared, the Kaba was surrounded by 360 idols, and every Arab house had its god. Arabs also believed in jinn (subtle beings), and some vague divinity with many offspring. Among the major deities of the pre-Islamic era were al- Lat ("the Goddess"), worshiped in the shape of a square stone; al-Uzzah ("the Mighty"), a goddess identified with the morning star and worshiped as a thigh-bone-shaped slab of granite between al Talf and Mecca; Manat, the goddess of destiny, worshiped as a black stone on the road between Mecca and Medina; and the moon god, Hubal, whose worship was connected with the Black Stone of the Kaaba. The stones were said to have fallen from the sun, moon, stars, and planets and to represent cosmic forces. The so-called Black Stone (actually the color of burnt umber) that Muslims revere today is the same one that their forebears had worshiped well before Muhammad and that they believed had come from the moon. (No scientific investigation has ever been performed on the stone.

In 930, the stone was removed and shattered by an Iraqi sect of Qarmatians, but the pieces were later returned. The pieces, sealed in pitch and held in place by silver wire, measure about 10 inches in diameter altogether and several feet high; they are venerated today in patched-together form.)" (Peter Occhigrosso, 1996 The Joy of Sects)

The Black Stone

It is presently embedded in the southeastern corner of the Kaba. Muslims touch and kiss the black stone during Hajj but non-Muslims are strictly forbidden to even touch it.

The "Stand" on Mount Arafat

Mount Arafat On the 9th of Dhu al-Hijjah pilgrims leave Mina for the plain of 'Arafat for the wuquf, "the standing," the central rite of the hajj. In a re-enactment rite based upon a story of Muhammad, all are required to stand from midday to sunset in the very hot sun meditating. God told Christians such rites are valueless: "These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence." Col 1:23

The plain of Arafat

The plain of Arafat at the Mount of Mercy, is where Muhammad is supposed to have delivered his Farewell Sermon

The "Stone Throw" in Mina The throw: (the Rummy) Pilgrims walk to Mina where they throw 7 stones at stone pillars which represent the devil. This is based upon a mythical event in the life of Abraham. The Koran says that Abraham was told by God to sacrifice his only begotten son Ishmael. (all world history and the Bible says Isaac). On the way to make the sacrifice, the devil tried to convince Abraham not to sacrifice Ishmael. Abraham gathered up some stones and threw them at the devil until he disappeared. So Pilgrims throw 7 stones at the stone pillars in Mina which represent evil and the devil, reenacting the way Abraham threw stones at the Devil.

The "Stone Throw" in Mina re-enactment ritual based upon an mythical event in the life of Abraham. The devil tried to talk Abraham out of sacrificing Ishmael (the Bible says Isaac). So Abraham threw stones at the devil till he disappeared.

Pilgrims stop at Mina to throw seven small stones at stone pillars which are evil and the devil.

#1. The Kabah was of pagan origin.
Many local pagan sanctuaries like the Kaba at Mecca.
Muhammad's tribe was in charge of "Allah's" sanctuary in Mecca.
"In northern Arabia, certain tribes looked after particular sanctuaries."
(Britannica, Arabian Religions, p1059, 1979)

Not only do both the Holy Bible and archaeology contradict this claim, the sound Hadith itself makes it impossible for Abraham and Ishmael to be the ones who built the Kabah: "I said, "O Allah's Apostle! Which mosque was built first?" He replied, "Al-Masjid-ul-Haram." I asked, "Which (was built) next?" He replied, "Al-Masjid-ul-Aqs-a (i.e. Jerusalem)." I asked, "What was the period in between them?" He replied, "Forty (years)." He then added, "Wherever the time for the prayer comes upon you, perform the prayer, for all the earth is a place of worshipping for you."" (Hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari 55:636, Narrated Abu Dhaar).

This Hadith affirms that the Kaba was actually built long after Abraham and Ishmael had died. Abraham lived about 2000 BC and the Temple was built by Solomon in about 958-951 BC. This implies that the Kabah was built approximately 998-991 BC. If Muhammad is correct, then the Quran is wrong. But if the Quran is correct in stating that Abraham and Ishmael built the Kaba, then the Hadith is wrong. Yet, if this particular Hadith is wrong then this throws into question the authenticity of the entire Hadith collections, especially Bukhari's collection which is considered to be the most reliable and authentic collection.

#2. The Pilgrimage to Mecca

"After the Pilgrimage, in Pagan times, the pilgrims used to gather in assemblies in which the praises of ancestors were sung. As the whole of the Pilgrimage rites were spiritualized in Islam, so this aftermath of the Pilgrimage was also spiritualized. (The holy Qur’an, text, translation and commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. 1872-1952, First published in 1938, 1973 ed. p. 80, footnote 223) "temples of the moon gods, with rituals similar in many details to those of the pre- Islamic and Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca." (Britannica, Arabia, History of, p1045, 1979)

"A principal public celebration of the Arabians was an annual pilgrimage, in which tribes who shared a common bond of worship of a deity at a specific sanctuary would reunite there. A pattern of ceremonial procession around the baetyl [the sacred stone] was common, and this pattern may be seen in the surviving Islamic custom of the pilgrimage to Mecca." (Britannica, Arabian Religions, p1059, 1979)

Muhammad merely borrowed this wide spread polytheistic worship style and adopted it into Islam as a central rite. Same polytheistic pilgrimage under the disguise of a modified monotheism.

It is true that in the hajj many pre-Islamic practices were retained, but as has been shown above, the origin of these practices is traceable to Abraham, and every one of them carries with it a spiritual significance. (The Religion of Islam, Maulana Muhammad Ali, p. 448, 1936, Muslim).

Is it not unfortunate that so many Orientalists have misinterpreted the Muslim's veneration of the Ka'bah, the Black Stone and the pilgrimage rites as a whole, imagining them as some kind of idol worship, or dismissing the rites as silly, ridiculous or merely the relics of idolatrous superstition? Another faulty assumption is that the rites of pilgrimage were remnants of a pre-Islamic cult included by the Prophet in an attempt to reconcile the idolatrous Meccans with the faith. (The Sublime Qur'an and Orientalism , Mohammad Khalifa, p. 140, 1983, Muslim).

"The Arabs during the pre-Islamic period used to practice certain things that were included in the Islamic Sharia. They, for example, did not marry both a mother and her daughter. They considered marrying two sisters simultaneously to be a most heinous crime. They also censured anyone who married his stepmother, and called him dhaizan. They made the major [hajj] and the minor [umra] pilgrimage to the Ka'ba, performed the circumambulation around the Ka'ba [tawaf], ran seven times between Mounts Safa and Marwa [sa'y], threw rocks and washed themselves after intercourse. They also gargled, sniffed water up into their noses, clipped their fingernails, plucked their hair from their armpits, shaved their pubic hair and performed the rite of circumcision. Likewise, they cut off the right hand of a thief." (Al-Milal wa al-Nihil, Muhammad ibn 'Abdalkarim al-Sharastani, Muslim, vol. 2 chapter on the opinions of the pre-Islamic Arabs, as quoted in al- Fadi, Is the Qur'an Infallible ?, p. 122, non-Muslim)

#3. Praying 5 times a day

Polytheistic worshippers prayed 5 times a day towards their local kaba’s. "The Sabeans have five prayers similar to the five prayers of the Muslims. Others say they have seven prayers, five of which are comparable to the prayers of the Muslims with regard to time [that is, morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night; the sixth is at midnight and the seventh is at forenoon]. It is their practice to pray over the dead without kneeling down or even bending the knee.

They also fast for one lunar month of thirty days; they start their fast at the last watch of the night and continue till the setting of the sun. Some of their sects fast during the month of Ramadan, face Ka'ba when they pray, venerate Mecca, and believe in making the pilgrimage to it. They consider dead bodies, blood and the flesh of pigs as unlawful. They also forbid marriage for the same reasons as do Muslims." (Bulugh al-'Arab fi Ahwal al-Arab, Muhammad Shukri al-Alusi, Vol 1, p 121-122, Muslim) Prior to Islam the people would pray 5 times a day facing Mecca (The Encyclopedia of Islam p. 303)

Worshippers in pagan Sabian religion that worshipped stars were "obliged to pray three times a day" (Preliminary Discourse to the Koran, Sale, 1801)

At first, Muhammad prayed towards Jerusalem, but when he was rejected by the Jews, started directing his prayers towards Mecca. Today, monotheistic Muslims pray 5 times a day towards Mecca to Allah. Muhammad grafted this pagan practice into Islam.

#4. Crescent moon symbol

The crescent moon symbol was used since 2100 BC in paganism. Polytheism has extensively used the symbol of the crescent moon as far back as Abraham as hundreds of archeological examples verify.

All the Arabs at the Kaba in Mecca worshipped the moon god Hubal.

Crescent moon is the official symbol of Islam on top of every Mosque in the world and beside the Kaba on top of the Maqam Ibrahim! It is the last remaining polytheistic remnant of ancient moon worship under a new sanitized monotheistic veil. #5. "The Run" Pagans performed a fast walk between As-Safa and Al-Marwah. Muhammad redefined the meaning while retaining the ritual.

Islamic pilgrimage requires a fast walk between As-Safa and Al-Marwah.

#6. "The Throw"

The polytheistic pilgrimages required throwing stones at the devil. Muhammad retained this concept where the Islamic pilgrimage requires throwing pebbles at three fixed points in Mina, which represent evil. The pilgrim throws rocks over his shoulder at the three stone pillars which he has been told will frighten away the "djinn" or demons which the stone pillars represent.

#7. The Black Stone

"A principal sacred object in Arabian religion was the stone, either a rock outcropping or a large boulder, often a rectangular or irregular black basaltic stone ... " (Britannica, Arabian Religions, p1059, 1979)

"Of the numerous baetyls, the best known is the Black Stone of the Ka'bah at Mecca, which became the central shrine object of Islam." (Britannica, Arabian Religions, p1059, 1979) The black stone is believed to be a meteorite that struck the earth at the time of Adam.

"Moslems do not worship the Black Stone, but only show special reverence and veneration for its dignity and they kiss it only after the example of the Prophet and to keep their Covenant with God to obey His Will and avoid His disobedience." (The Spirit of Islam, Tabbarah, p. 173, Muslim). "The kissing of the meteorite is a firm practice in Islamic law because Muhammad did it. You must not ask about the wisdom behind that because this rite is (an expression) of worship in spite of the obscurity of its wisdom" (Legal Opinions, Sheikh Sha'rawi, pt. 3, p. 167, Muslim)

#8. Holy Days: Friday & Fasting during Ramadan

Polytheistic pilgrimage required fasting for the month that begins and ends with the crescent moon for each pagan god.

During the holy month of Ramadan (November) Muslims begin and end month long fast exactly the same time and manner as the polytheism that pre-dated Muhammad.

Muslim practices such as gathering on Friday and the four sacred months of Islam were also pre-Islamic customs: "In Bulugh al-'Arab fi Ahwal al-'Arab, we read, 'The four sacred months, Rajab, Dhu al-Qa'da, Dhu al-Hijja and Muharram, had been considered sacred during the pre-Islamic period [Jahiliya].

Raids, taking revenge, war, fighting and disputes were forbidden during them. If a man were to meet his enemy who killed his father or brother during these months, he would not quarrel with him... During the sacred months, [the people] were under restriction not to fight or make raids, and had to remove [their] spearheads as a sign that they would avoid fighting at all costs.' Obviously, Islam borrowed the hallowing of these months from Pre-Islamic Arabs and introduced nothing new into the world." (Is the Qur'an Infallible?, 'Abdallah 'Abd al-Fadi, Light of Life, , p. 127, non-Muslim)

#9. Abstinence during Pilgrimage

"Another practice that left its influence on Islam was ceremonial abstinence. The South Arabian festival of Halfan was a moratorium on the use of weapons. Certain times were specified for fasting and abstention from sexual relations. Burnt offerings and sacrifices were common." (Britannica, Arabian Religions, p1059, 1979)

This identical pagan origin ceremonial abstinence is present today in Islam. Muhammad merely continued this pagan ritual and retained it in Islam.

#10. Allah

"The verses of the Qur’an make it clear that the very name Allah existed in the Jahiliyya or pre-Islamic Arabia. Certain pagan tribes believed in a god whom they called ‘Allah’ and whom they believed to be the creator of heaven and earth and holder of the highest rank in the hierarchy of the gods. It is well known that the Quraish as well as other tribes believed in Allah, whom they designated as the ‘Lord of the House’ (i.e., of the Ka’ba)...It is therefore clear that the Qur’anic conception of Allah is not entirely new." (A Guide to the Contents of the Qur’an, Faruq Sherif, (Reading, 1995), pgs. 21-22., Muslim)

#11. Praising Allah

1. "After the Pilgrimage, in Pagan times, the pilgrims used to gather in assemblies in which the praises of ancestors were sung. As the whole of the Pilgrimage rites were spiritualized in Islam, so this aftermath of the Pilgrimage was also spiritualized. It was recommended for pilgrims to stay on two or three days after the Pilgrimage, but they must use them in prayer and praise to God. See ii. 203 below." (The holy Qur’an, text, translation and commentary , by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. 1872-1952, First published in 1938, 1973 ed. p. 80, footnote 223, commenting on 2:200, "So when ye have accomplished your holy rites, celebrate the praises of God, as ye used to celebrate the praises of your fathers,- yea, with far more Heart and soul.") Why Muslims Pray Five Times a Day Salat Time Salat-ul-Fajr Between the first light of dawn and sunrise Salat-ul-Zuhr After Midday Salat-ul-Asr Mid-afternoon Salat-ul-Maghrib Sunset Salat-ul-Isha From one and a half hours after sunset Early in building his base for Islam, Muhammad had a dream or night vision that was so unbelievable, when he related to his followers, many turned away from his teaching. He quickly received a revelation explaining that the vision was a test of faith for his disciples. Muhammad learned his lesson, and never made this kind of extravagant claim again.

In this dream, Muhammad mounted "a white animal which was smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey" called "the Buraq." He flew from Mecca to Jerusalem and from there ascended to heaven. He was escorted by Moses through seven heavens into the presence of God. There, at Moses instigation, Muhammad pleads with God to reduce the number of daily mandatory prayers from fifty to five.

The night vision explains why Muslims pray five times a day. It is attested to in the Qur'an as being a true happening, though it is not recorded in the Qur'an. To read the description of the event, we must again turn to the Hadith.

Because Muhammad's ascension into heaven is believed to have occurred here, the mosque built in Jerusalem is one of the most sacred sites to Muslims.

Interesting Quotes from the Qur’an It is not good to enter a house from the back

A. "They ask thee concerning the New Moons. Say: They are but signs to mark fixed periods of time in (the affairs of) men, and for Pilgrimage. It is no virtue if ye enter your houses from the back: It is virtue if ye fear Allah. Enter houses through the proper doors: And fear Allah: That ye may prosper," (2:189).

A boy and his dog sleep for 309 years in a cave.

A. "Such (being their state), we raised them up (from sleep), that they might question each other. Said one of them, "How long have ye stayed (here)?" They said, "We have stayed (perhaps) a day, or part of a day." (At length) they (all) said, "Allah (alone) knows best how long ye have stayed here...So they stayed in their Cave three hundred years, and (some) add nine (more)," (18:19,25).

The sun set in a pool of murky water

A. "Until, when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it set in a spring of murky water: Near it he found a People: We said: "O Zul-qarnain! (thou hast authority,) either to punish them, or to treat them with kindness." (18:86, Yusuf Ali, translation).

Jesus spoke while in the cradle

A. “But she pointed to the babe. They said: "How can we talk to one who is a child in the cradle?" He said: "I am indeed a servant of Allah: He hath given me revelation and made me a prophet," (19:29-30).

King Solomon learned the speech of birds

A. "And Solomon was David's heir. He said: "O ye people! We have been taught the speech of birds and on us has been bestowed (a little) of all things: this is indeed Grace manifest (from Allah.)" (27:16).

B. "And Solomon was David's heir. And he said: O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of birds, and have been given (abundance) of all things. This surely is evident favor," (27:16, Pickthall, trans.).

Ants can speak

A. "At length, when they came to a (lowly) valley of ants, one of the ants said: "O ye ants, get into your habitations, lest Solomon and his hosts crush you (under foot) without knowing it," (27:18).

B. "Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you, unperceiving," (27:18, Pickthal, trans.).

Allah made seven heavens and seven earths

A. "Allah is He Who created seven Firmaments and of the earth a similar number. Through the midst of them (all) descends His Command: that ye may know that Allah has power over all things, and that Allah comprehends, all things in (His) Knowledge," (65:12)

Shooting stars are for driving away evil spirits

A. And we have, (from of old), adorned the lowest heaven with Lamps, and We have made such (Lamps) (as) missiles to drive away the Evil Ones, and have prepared for them the Penalty of the Blazing Fire, (67:5).

The soul exits through the collar-bone when leaving the body.

A. "Yea, when (the soul) reaches to the collar-bone (in its exit), 27And there will be a cry, "Who is a magician (to restore him)?" 28And he will conclude that it was (the Time) of Parting,: (75:26-28). Quotes from the Qur’an concerning Women

1. Men have more rights regarding divorce than do women (2:28)
2. Muslim men may marry up to four women, but no such provision is made for Muslim women. (4:3).
3. A man's inheritance should be a portion of two females (4:11).
4. It is okay to beat wives (4:34).
5. In Paradise, voluptuous women await men for sensual gratification A. "Verily for the Righteous there will be a fulfillment of (the heart's) desires; Gardens enclosed, and grapevines, And voluptuous women of equal age," (78:31)

Quotes from the Hadith

1. Angels stop asking Allah to forgive people when they pass wind. Volume 1, Book 8, Number 436 : Narrated Abu Huraira:
2. You should not pray to Allah saying "If you wish."
3. What Jesus looks like is described
4. Satan touches people when they are born.

The Prophet said, "When any human being is born. Satan touches him at both sides of the body with his two fingers, except Jesus, the son of Mary, whom Satan tried to touch but failed, for he touched the placenta-cover instead." Volume 4, Book 54, Number 506: Narrated Abu Huraira:

5. Jesus spoke while still in the cradle.

The Prophet said, "None spoke in cradle but three: (The first was) Jesus, (the second was), there a man from Bani Israel called Juraij. . . " Volume 4, Book 55, Number 645 : Narrated Abu Huraira

6. Upon dying, two angels come and ask you about Muhammad The Prophet said, "When a human being is laid in his grave and his companions return and he even hears their foot steps, two angels come to him and make him sit and ask him: What did you use to say about this man, Muhammad?
7. Allah made Adam 60 cubits high (generally a cubit was 18 inches. Therefore,

Adam was 90 feet tall)

The Prophet said, "Allah created Adam, making him 60 cubits tall. When He created him, He said to him, "Go and greet that group of angels, and listen to their reply, for it will be your greeting (salutation) and the greeting (salutations of your offspring." So, Adam said (to the angels), As-Salamu Alaikum (i.e. Peace be upon you). The angels said, "As-salamu Alaika wa Rahmatu-l-lahi" (i.e. Peace and Allah's Mercy be upon you). Thus the angels added to Adam's salutation the expression, 'Wa Rahmatu-l-lahi,' Any person who will enter Paradise will resemble Adam (in appearance and figure). People have been decreasing in stature since Adam's creation." Volume 4, Book 55, Number 543, Narrated Abu Huraira.

8. Water flowed out from under the fingernails of Muhammad We used to consider miracles as Allah's Blessings, but you people consider them to be a warning. Once we were with Allah's Apostle on a journey, and we ran short of water. He said, "Bring the water remaining with you." The people brought a utensil containing a little water. He placed his hand in it and said, "Come to the blessed water, and the Blessing is from Allah." I saw the water flowing from among the fingers of Allah's Apostle , and no doubt, we heard the meal glorifying Allah, when it was being eaten (by him). Volume 4, Book 56, Number 779, Narrated 'Abdullah:

9. Muhammad was once bewitched "Once the Prophet was bewitched so that he began to imagine that he had done a thing which in fact he had not done." Volume 4, Book 53, Number 400 , Narrated Aisha.
10. Muhammad said that one wing of a house fly has a disease and the other

wing has the cure

The Prophet said "If a house fly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure for the disease." Volume 4, Book 54, Number 537 , Narrated Abu Huraira.

11. Angels don't enter houses with dogs in them The Prophet said, "Angels do not enter a house witch has either a dog or a picture in it." Volume 4, Book 54, Number 539 , Narrated Abu Talha.

12. The Angel Gabriel had 600 wings I asked Sir about the Statement of Allah: 'And was at a distance of but two bow-lengths or (even) nearer. So did Allah convey the Inspiration to His slave (Gabriel) and then he (Gabriel) conveyed that to Muhammad.' (53.10) He said, "Abdullah (bin Mas'ud) informed us that Muhammad had seen Gabriel with six hundred wings." Volume 6, Book 60, Number 380, Narrated assailant.
13. Jinn eat dung and animal bones

That once he was in the, company of the Prophet carrying a water pot for his ablution and for cleaning his private parts. While he was following him carrying it (i.e. the pot), the Prophet said, "Who is this?" He said, "I am Abu Huraira." The Prophet said, "Bring me stones in order to clean my private parts, and do not bring any bones or animal dung." Abu Huraira went on narrating: So I brought some stones, carrying them in the corner of my robe till I put them by his side and went away. When he finished, I walked with him and asked, "What about the bone and the animal dung?" He said, "They are of the food of Jinns. The delegate of Jinns of (the city of) Nasibin came to me--and how nice those Jinns were--and asked me for the remains of the human food. I invoked Allah for them that they would never pass by a bone or animal dung but find food on them." Volume 5, Book 58, Number 200, Narrated Abu Huraira.

14. The moon was cut into two pieces During the lifetime of Allah's Apostle the moon was split into two parts; one part remained over the mountain, and the other part went beyond the mountain. On that, Allah's Apostle said, "Witness this miracle." 388The moon was cleft asunder while we were in the company of the Prophet, and it became two parts. The Prophet said, Witness, witness (this miracle)." Volume 6, Book 60, Number 387-388, Narrated Ibn Masud and Abdullah. See also 389-391.

15. A fever is from the heat of hell fire I used to sit with Ibn 'Abbas in Mecca. Once I had a fever and he said (to me), "Cool your fever with Zam-zam water, for Allah's Apostle said: 'It, (the Fever) is from the heat of the (Hell) Fire; so, cool it with water (or Zam-zam water)." Volume 4, Book 54, Number 483 , Narrated Abu Jamra Ad-Dabi.
16. Prayer offered in a congregation is 25 times better than prayer offered alone

and each step towards a mosque results in forgiveness of a sin.

The Prophet said, "The prayer offered in congregation is twenty five times more superior (in reward) to the prayer offered alone in one's house or in a business center, because if one performs ablution and does it perfectly, and then proceeds to the mosque with the sole intention of praying, then for each step which he takes towards the mosque, Allah upgrades him a degree in reward and (forgives) crosses out one sin till he enters the mosque. When he enters the mosque he is considered in prayer as long as he is waiting for the prayer and the angels keep on asking for Allah's forgiveness for him and they keep on saying: 'O Allah! Be Merciful to him, O Allah! Forgive him, as long as he keeps on sitting at his praying place and does not pass wind. (See Hadith No. 620). Volume 1, Book 8, Number 466, Narrated Abu Huraira,

17. If you recite a certain prayer and die that day, your sins will all be forgiven. The Prophet said "The most superior way of asking for forgiveness from Allah is: 'Allahumma anta Rabbi la ilaha illa anta, Anta Khalaqtani wa ana abduka, wa ana 'ala ahdika wa wa'dika mastata'tu, A'udhu bika min Sharri ma sana'tu, abu'u Laka bini'matika 'alaiya, wa Abu Laka bidhanbi faghfirli innahu la yaghfiru adhdhunuba illa anta." The Prophet added. "If somebody recites it during the day with firm faith in it, and dies on the same day before the evening, he will be from the people of Paradise; and if somebody recites it at night with firm faith in it, and dies before the morning, he will be from the people of Paradise." Volume 8, Book 75, Number 318, Narrated Shaddad bin Aus, See also 335:

18. Saying a certain prayer 100 times gets the same reward as freeing 10 slaves,

and forgives sins.

Allah's Apostle said,"Whoever says: "La ilaha illal-lah wahdahu la sharika lahu, lahu-l-mulk wa lahu-l-hamd wa huwa 'ala kulli shai'in qadir," one hundred times will get the same reward as given for manumitting ten slaves; and one hundred good deeds will be written in his accounts, and one hundred sins will be deducted from his accounts, and it (his saying) will be a shield for him from Satan on that day till night, and nobody will be able to do a better deed except the one who does more than he." Narrated Abu Huraira: Volume 8, Book 75, Number 412 . Allah's Apostle said, "Whoever says, 'Subhan Allah wa bihamdihi,' one hundred times a day, will be forgiven all his sins even if they were as much as the foam of the sea," Volume 8, Book 75, Number 414, Narrated Abu Huraira,

Dave Hunt has done an excellent job of putting this DVD together to show the world’s turning against Israel in the last days and the true nature if Islam

Pre-Islamic Arabia

Most Muslims believe that Allah has always been the One True God (Surah 2:136: 29:46). They believe that Abraham, Hagar, Ishmael, Moses, David and Yeshua were all Muslims (e.g. Surah 2:135, 140; 3:67; 22:78). The Koran believes that Jews and Christians have forged and distorted the Scriptures (Surah 3:71,99).

Islam believes that originally, the Bible was full of references to Allah, Mecca and the Kab’a (the black cube, an ancient pagan center of pilgrimage in Mecca) but that nearly all these references have been deliberately removed from the Bible by non-Muslims. But a brief look at Arabian history prior to Muhammad reveals that the origins of Allah worship are to be found in pagan polytheism.

In approximately 430 BC Herodotus the Greek historian refers to the fact that various deities were worshipped in Arabia, including a female deity known as alil-Lat (The Histories, Book iii – this word could well be the female form of Allah). The Koran, written down nearly 1100 years later, refers to the fact that

Ali Dashti’s excellent study of the prophetic career of Mohammad three female deities named al-Lat (the same word as al-il-Lat), al-Uzza, and Manat were worshipped in Arabia.

People would often turn to these goddesses in intercession (Surah 53:19-20). These three deities were also known as “the daughters of Allah”, as the edited text of Surah 53:21-22 explains. These three deities were only some of the many spirits and demons worshipped by Arabs in the centuries before Muhammad. Another such deity was Hubal – a Moabite/ Nabatean/North Arabian demon – known from stone inscriptions dated to 1-5 AD, whose idol was a giant stone placed atop the Ka’ba (according to Ibn al-Kalbi.). Other deities included Isaf and Na’ilah (two lovers who were turned to stone for cohabiting in the Ka’ba, and whose idols were placed on two little hills, Safa and Marwa, near the Ka’ba), Awf (a great bird), and Allah.

A book called ‘Siratu’l Rasul’ (“The Life of the Messenger” – originally written by Ibn Is’haq in the 600’s AD and later revised by Ibn Hisham) recounts a story from Muhammad’s youth, prior to his later spiritual revelations. Abdu’l Muttalib, Muhammad’s grandfather, was preparing to sacrifice one of his sons to “the god at the Ka’ba”. This god’s name is known from other Muslim sources as Hubal – possibly a form of the Semitic ‘Ha-Ba’al’ – ‘The Lord’. Hubal was known as ‘rabb al-bayt’ or ‘lord of the house’.

 According to Ibn Is’haq, the idol of Hubal was originally brought from al-Balq’a in Syria to the Ka’ba in Mecca by an Arab named Amr bin Luhayya. In the above account divination was then used to determine Hubal’s will (by casting arrows to the ground). Muhammad’s father Abd’allah (Arabic for ‘slave of Allah’ – an indication that Allah was only one of the many deities worshipped at the Ka’ba) brought Muhammad to be sacrificed in his stead. The grandfather then consulted a sorcerer who counseled him on how to obtain an answer (through divination) which would satisfy the deity yet leave Muhammad alive.

This was the religious background that shaped young Muhammad’s spiritual world view – sacrificing children, consulting sorcerers, and worshipping tribal idols. When he was approximately 40 years old, Muhammad received a spiritual revelation, ostensibly from the angel Gabriel (‘Jibril’ in Arabic; see Siratu’l Rasul 5:152; Mishkat 4:356-57).

This spirit revealed to him that Allah (the local god of his father Abd’allah) was not just one deity of many being worshipped in the Ka’ba, but that Allah was actually the supreme deity. Further, Jibril told him that Allah wanted Muhammad to become his ‘rasul’ – his apostolic prophet. Muhammad’s reaction was anxiety and fear that he might be going mad. His wife Khadija and her cousin Waraqa reassured him that his prophesying was similar to what Moses had received. Eventually Muhammad became convinced of this as well.

Allah, the spirit who for centuries had seemed content to take his place in the Ka’ba pantheon along with 359 other demons (that number comes from Waqqidi’s biography of Muhammad, written 120 years after Muhammad’s death), was suddenly describing himself as the ‘only true god’.

A deity who had been content to receive worship in a polytheistic shrine for centuries was now advocating strict ‘monotheism’ on his own terms. Allah’s accommodation to polytheism is totally different from what the Bible teaches about YHVH’s response to a polytheistic context (when the Ark of the Covenant was brought into the Philistine shrine of Dagon in 1 Sam.5:1-12)!

The Life of Muhammad

Muhammad (full name is Muhammad Ibne Abdullah) was born in 570(?) in Mecca which is now located in Saudi Arabia. Mecca was then the cultural and religious center of Arabia. The area had no central government and was full semi-warring tribes with numerous, competing, polytheistic religions. At the heart of Mecca was the Ka'aba (cube in Arabic), a shrine about 60 feet, by 60 feet, by 60 feet, containing hundreds of idols, and known as the House of Allah. Allah was recognized as the supreme deity, but was worshipped along with other deities. The Ka'aba was believed to have been built by Abraham and his son Ishmael on the same spot as the first shrine to God built by Adam. On the eastern corner of the Ka'aba is the Black stone called in Arabic, Hajar al Aswad. The Black Stone is probably a meteorite.

Muhammad was born to his mother Amina, into the Quraish, the then ruling tribe of Mecca. Up to the age of eight, he was raised by his grandfather Abdul Muttalib because Abdallah, his father, died in Yathrib a few weeks before Muhammad was born. Amina, his mother, died when he was six. After the death of his grandfather, his uncle Abu Talib then assumed responsibility for raising Muhammad.

Abu Talib was a businessman involved in trade so it is likely that Muhammad went with him on business trips and encountered both Jews, 280 miles to the north in Medina, and Christians also to the north and to the south in Nejran. History tells us that when he was 12 he accompanied his uncle on a trading caravan to Syria. His encounters with Jews and Christians seems to be reflected in the Qur'an in passages that refer to "The People of the Book" (3:64, 71, 187; 5:59). The term "People of the Book" is a reference to Jews and Christians who had received God's word through the prophets before Muhammad.

At 25 years old, Muhammad was hired to manage the business of a wealthy widow named Khadija who was 15 years older than he. He went to Syria and traded there successfully. Apparently this impressed Khadija. She ended up proposing to Muhammad later and in 595 they were married. They had two sons, who died in infancy, and four daughters: Zaynab, Ruqaiyah, Fatima and Umm Kulthum. Muhammad and Khadija were married for 25 years until Khadija died at the age of 65 during the month of Ramadan, well after the start of Islam. Around 35 Muhammad assumed the habit of going outside of Mecca to Mt. Hira for meditation and contemplation. There was a cave there and he often went there for solitude. It was during one of these times of meditation that Muhammad said an angelic being appeared to him, calling him. This disturbed Muhammad (Qur'an 81:19-29) and he told his wife Khadija that he thought he had been visited by an evil Jinn.

 Jinn are supposed to be living beings like people, but not angels, who were created from fire and are invisible, yet dwell on the earth. A short time later, in the year 610 (believed to be the 26th of Ramadan), while in a cave on Mt. Hirah, Muhammad said that the angel Gabriel appeared to him and commanded him to recite (96:1-19).

This recitation became the Qur'an. In these encounters with the angel Gabriel, sometimes he would see the angel, other times he would only hear him, and at others he only heard the sound of a bell through which the words of the angel came.

Muhammad could neither read nor write so he was instructed to memorize the words given to him by Gabriel. This complete recitation which Muhammad received over a 23 year period, ending in 632, the year of his death, is known as the Qur'an. Initially, Muhammad doubted that he was being called by Allah to be a prophet.

Others, including his wife and a cousin, counseled him by saying that Allah would only be truthful to him and would not allow him to be deceived. Muhammad became convinced and even wrote in the Qur'an, "Say: Whoever is an enemy to Gabriel-for he brings down the (revelation) to thy heart by Allah's will, a confirmation of what went before, and guidance and glad tidings for those who believe," (2:97).

The Beginning of Islam

Anis Shorrosh presents an excellent account of Islam as seen from a Christian Arab’s perspective.

It became the mission of Muhammad to proclaim the truth of Islam, given to him by Allah, through the angel Gabriel. Muhammad called the people of his area to repent from their idol worship, to do good, and to serve the one and true God, Allah.

He taught that man is God's slave and it is his duty to submit to God and obey him. He said that the Day of Judgment was coming and that a man's works will be weighed on that day. Those whose good deeds out weigh their bad may, by Allah's grace, be saved and enter Paradise which is full of sensual pleasures. The unsaved go to hell.

His first converts were his wife, Khadija, his cousin Ali, and his adopted son Zaid ibn Haritha. Soon afterwards, Abu Bakr also believed. In his first three years of proclaiming Islam, he had 40 converts.

Though his continued preaching brought only a few converts, it did bring much opposition. The ruling tribe, the Quraish, tried to get Muhammad to stop his preaching by appealing to his uncle, Abu Talib. But, Muhammad adamantly refused to stop proclaiming the message he had received. Because Abu Talib was very influential in the Quraish, Muhammad's life was protected and he was able to continue his preaching which angered many people.

The Quraish began to persecute the Muslims by beating them and boycotting their businesses. During public prayers, Muhammad was accosted and mocked. His followers were likewise treated poorly. But, Muhammad remained steadfast.

Hegira

622 is a significant date for Muslims. It is known as the year of the Hijra, or Migration from Mecca to Yathrib (which later became Medina) where they established their first real Islamic community. The Muslim calendar begins its history from July 16, 622 the first day of the lunar year in which the Hegira took place.

In Medina, he preached about Allah and monotheism and urged all people to return to the true faith of Abraham. At that time in Medina, he would pray facing Jerusalem, as did the Jews who were very populous in that city. He preached about repentance, one God, and forgiveness of sins. His first sermon in Medina was on a Friday. Therefore, Islamic congregational worship occurs on Fridays. Gradually, however, the Jews began to disapprove of him and his movement. He confronted them and told them they had misread the Scriptures. This estranged the Jews in the region and finally one day while praying, he suddenly changed direction and faced Mecca. He said the Ka'aba, in Mecca, was the true place of worship since it was built by Abraham. To this day, all Muslims are to face Mecca when praying.

After two years in Medina, the Muslims were not fairing too well financially and that, combined with mild persecution, prompted a revelation to come to Muhammad permitting him to raid passing caravans. This he did and the Muslim financial problems were solved. Soon afterward, there was then a significant battle at Badr where Muhammad, with 350 men, defeated an army of 1,000 men. This boost gave confidence to the Muslims, encouraged more converts, and made the Quraish even more uneasy.

In the fifth year of the Hegira, the Quraish tried to destroy the Muslims but failed. By now the Muslims were too strong so the Quraish never again tried to defeat them. Muhammad then set his sights on Mecca. At one point in 628, Muhammad took 10,000 men and entered Mecca unchallenged. The leader of the Quraish converted to Islam.

From there, Muhammad's movement gained further momentum. In 631 two tribes joined Muhammad. They were the Hijaz and Najd. From this time on, many battles ensued. In 625 there was the Battle of Uhud. In 627, the Battle of the Trench. In 628 Muhammad signs a treaty with Quraish. There is the Battle of Hunsin. In 630 Muhammad had conquered Mecca and he destroyed all the idols in Mecca.

In 632, Muhammad delivers his last sermon, later falls ill, and dies in the presence of his favorite wife, Aisha, and her father, Abu-Bakr. He was buried in Medina in his own house. His father in law, Abu-Bakr, becomes Caliph, the religious leader of Islam.

Dr. William Campbell, a missionary to Muslims in France, has written an excellent answer to Marice Bacalle’s Book, The Qur’an, The Bible and Science and the Qur’an’s supposed insight into embryology from a medical doctor’s perspective.

John Gilchrist, from South Africa, an Englishman who speaks fluent Arabic has some of the best studies on Islam in book and tape in the world today.

The Qur’an

The Qur'an (Koran, Quran) is the Holy Book of Islam and the religion's most sacred writing. Muslims consider it the actual word of Allah and not the word of Muhammad to whom it was given. Muslim tradition states that the angel Gabriel visited Muhammad and gave him the words directly from Allah.

These words were Allah's words of wisdom, truth, and commandments to His creation.

The Qur'an (which means recitation) was revealed in the Arabic dialect used by the Quraish tribe of Mecca of that time. This dialect became the formal Arabic of the Islamic nations due to the distribution of Qur'anic scriptures throughout the Islamic empire. In the Arabic the Qur'an is poetic in style with rhymes, meter, and shifts in line lengths. Those who speak the language say it is a beautiful work.

The Qur'an deals mainly with what and how Allah wants mankind to believe and do in Man's moral struggle. Its primary theme is that of complete submission to the will of Allah. However, it also teaches . . .

There is only one sovereign God (3:191; 5:73; 112:1-4).

There will be an end of the world and judgment day (:30; 35:33-37).

Those who are not Muslims will go to hell (2:24; 3:12).

That those whose good deeds exceed their bad will obtain paradise (3:135; 7:8-9; 21:47).

social and ethical behavior for Islamic society.

In the year 610 (believed to be the 26th of Ramadan), while in a cave on Mt. Hirah, which is now called Mount Jabal Nur, Muhammad said that the angel Gabriel appeared to him and commanded him to recite (96:1-19).

From that point on, Muhammad claimed to have received revelations up to the time of his death, 23 years later in 632. In these encounters with the angel Gabriel, sometimes Muhammad would see the angel, other times he would only hear him, and at others he only heard the sound of a bell through which the words of the angel came.

Since Muhammad could not read or write, his companions wrote down what he said. These recitations were copied onto a variety of materials: papyrus, flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather and wooden boards.1 Additionally, these sayings were also being memorized by Mohammad's followers. In fact, to this day, great emphasis is placed upon memorizing the entire Qur'an and there are many thousands of Muslims who have committed it to memory. The work is roughly the same size as the New Testament. Apparently, there was no attempt made to collect all of the sayings given by Muhammad during his lifetime. After all, Mohammad was continuing to give ' recitations' on a somewhat regular basis. But, after he died in 632, Abu-Bakr, Muhammad's father in law, became the caliph (religious leader of the Muslims) and there was a small effort to collect the fragments of Qur'anic sayings into a common place.

But, it wasn't until the fourth leader of Islam, Caliph Uthman, that the whole Qur'an was finally assembled, approved, and disseminated throughout the Muslim world.

The Quran is divided into 114 chapters, called Surahs. The word surah means "row". Today the Koran is arranged with the longer surahs first and the shorter ones after, with the whole thing divided into 30 approximately equal lengths. "Islamic law prohibits the touching of the physical Arabic Qur'an (and formal, but not casual, recitation) unless the person is in a state of purity which corresponds to the greater of Ablution...every Moslem must commit at least 12 vs. or lines of the Qur'an to memory."2 The revelations are identified as having been revealed either in Mecca or Medina. Generally, those revealed in Mecca are the earlier ones and are more poetic and deal with apocalyptic themes. The Medina revelations deal more with the law of Allah.

Many have noted that the arrangement of the Qur'an is not chronological or thematic. The subjects tend to be disjointed and shifting. This is due in part to the directions of Mohammad to put certain sayings in different places in the Surahs. Muslims are aware of this and considered as to be the divine order in the Koran.

Doctrines of Islam

1. There is only one God (5:73; 112:1-4).
2. God is called Allah by Muslims (5:73)
3. Allah sees all things (40:20), is present everywhere (2:115; 7:7).

W. St. Clair-Tisdall has given us an excellent study on the some twenty-two sources for the Qur’an, all available to Muhammad at the time. St. Clair-Tisdall was an excellent Textual Critic and a favorite of Dr. Gleason Archer.

4. Allah is the sole creator and sustainer of the universe (3:191).
5. Allah is not a Trinity, but is one (5:73).
6. Allah is all-knowing (2:268; 10:61) and all powerful (6:61-62).
7. Allah created the heaven and earth (2:29; 6:1, 73; 25:61-62; 36:81; 46:33).

The Doctrines of Islam-Salvation

1. Allah will judge all people on the day of judgment (3:30; 35:33-37; 99:6-8).
2. If your good deeds exceed your bad deeds, and you believe in Allah, and sincerely repent of sins, you may go to heaven (3:135; 7:8-9; 21:47; 49:14; 66:8-9).
3. There is an eternal hell for those who are not Muslims, not practicing and of the truth faith (3:77).
4. Hell is a place of unlimited capacity (50:30) eternal torment (2:39; 14:17; 25:65; 39:26), fire (9:63; 11:16; 25:11-12; 104:6-7), with boiling water (38:55-58; 55:43-44), where skin is burned and renewed (4:56), for unbelievers (3:13; 19:49) and Jinn (11:119), with faces covered with fire (14:49-50).

5. There is a tree in hell, named Tree of Zaqqum, from which bad fruit is given and the damned are forced to eat (37:62-67; 44:43-48; 56:52-55).
6. Heaven (Paradise), a Garden (79:41) of bliss and fruit (69:21-24), has rivers (3:198), with maidens pure and holy (4:57), and carpets and cushions, (88:8-16).
7. There will be a physical resurrection of all people (19:93-95) on the day of judgment (3:77; 15:25; 16:38; 42:29).
8. Judgment is based on a person's sincere repentance (66:8-9) and righteous deeds (5:9; 24:26; 45:21-22; 64:7). Other Doctrines

1. There is an afterlife (2:154;75:12).
2. There are such things as angels, created by Allah, that are created from light. Angels are obedient slaves incapable of refusing to do Allah’s will. The angel Gabriel brought the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad (2:97).
3. The Holy Spirit is the angel Gabriel (2:97; 16:102).

Some excellent resources on Islam and why it is difficult for most Muslims to become Christians

A. There is no actual verse where the Holy Spirit is said to be Gabriel or is identified as Gabriel. These verses show that both the Holy Spirit and Gabriel brought down the revelation.

4. Jinn are unseen beings, created (51:56) from fire (15:27; 55:15), but are not angels. They have communities. There are good and bad Jinn.
5. The Devil, called Iblis, (2:34) is a bad Jinn.
6. Jesus was a great prophet but not the son of God (9:30), is not divine (5:17, 75), was not crucified (4:157).
7. Muhammad is Allah’s greatest and last prophet and his message supercedes all other past prophets including Jesus.
8. The Koran is Allah’s word. He literally spoke it to Gabriel who gave it to Muhammad.

9. There are other holy writings but they are superceded by the Koran. The other works are: i. Torah - the First Five books of Moses ii. Injeel - the message that Jesus gave, written down, but no longer exists. The writings have been altered by scholars. Whatever agrees with the Koran is true.

iii. Zaboor - the Psalms

10. Pre-ordainment (Qadar) is the teaching that all things, good and bad, are preordained to occur.
11. Fasting is to be observed during the month of Ramadan (2:185).
12. Drinking alcohol is forbidden (2:219; 4;43; 5:93-94; 16:67)
13. Gambling is forbidden (2:219; 5:90-94).
14. Man is made from the dust of the earth (23:12).
15. There is no last minute repentance (4:18). The Five Pillars of Islam
16. Shahada

A. The Shahada is the Islamic proclamation that "There is no true God except Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah."

B. This is the confession that Allah is the one and only true God, that Allah alone is worthy of worship, that Allah alone is the sovereign lord who does what he wills with whoever he wills. It means that all his rules and laws found in the Koran are to be followed. It means that the Christian doctrine of God as a Trinity is false as are all other belief systems including pantheism.

C. Muhammad is the true and greatest prophet of Allah and recognition of Muhammad as the Prophet of God is required. It was through Muhammad that Allah conveyed the last and final revelation.

2. Prayer (Salat)

A. Prayer involves confession of sins which begins with the purification of the body and ends with the purification of the soul. Prayer is performed five times a day. The first prayer is at dawn and the last at sunset.

B. The names of the prayers are Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha. The Maghrib prayer is the sunset prayer. Isha is the prayer that is said after sunset. There is also a prayer that is said right after Fajr known as Shurooq.

3. Fasting (Saum)

A. The month of Ramadan is the month of fasting in Islam. It is an act of worship where the faithful follower denies his own needs and seeks Allah. Usually, this fasting entails no drinking, eating during, or sexual relations during the daylight hours for the entire month of Ramadan.

4. Alms-giving or charity (Zakat)

A. Charity given to the poor. It benefits the poor and it helps the giver by moving him towards more holiness and submission to Allah. Alms-giving is considered a form of worship to God.

5. Pilgrimage (Hajj)

A. This is the pilgrimage to Mecca. All Muslims, if they are able, are to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. It involves financial sacrifice and is an act of worship. Muslims must make the pilgrimage the first half of the last month of the lunar year

The Hajj Pilgrimage

Pictured to the left above is the walking between the hills of Safa and Marwah. This was actually the place of two pagan dieties which Muhammed adapted to Hagar’s search for water for Ishmael.

Pictured to the left Below is the ritual of casting stones at the devil in Mina. This was supposedly in memory of Abraham’s stoning of the devil on his way to sacrifice Ishmael.

The Hajj The Kaba

Two Million visit make the Hajj pilgrimage every year

Circling the Kaba 7 times counting from the corner of the Kaba with the black stone. Islamic myth says that the Kaba in Mecca Saudi Arabia, was built by Adam. Muslims also believe solely because the Koran says so, that the revered "black stone" (Alhajar Al-Aswad) is a special divine meteorite, that pre-dates creation and fell at the foot of Adam and Eve. It is presently embedded in the southeastern corner of the Kaba. Muslims touch and kiss the black stone during. When Muslims circle the Kaba 7 times, they use the black stone as the starting point to count.

Muslims believe (without proof) that the Kaba, in its present location, was built by Adam, and rebuilt by Abraham, Ishmael and Muhammad. It is not known when the Kaba was first build but there are no historical records of the Kaba existing before about 400AD.

Worshippers touching the stones of the Kaba.

The Qur’an does not explain or accept pagan ritual as such, of course, but it does offer clues. What was done at Mecca in the name of religion in the days before Islam was in part the work of a debased paganism, but it also bore some trace of what Islam's holy book calls "the religion of Abraham" (2:130), the practices that God had earlier commanded should be instituted in connection with His House in that city. The

The Kaba is the building towards which Muslims face five times a day, everyday, in prayer. The pagans were already praying 5 times a day towards this Kaba before Muhammad was born. Here are worshippers touching the stones of the Kaba.

Quran says nothing, however, about the remote origins of a holy place at Mecca; it speaks only of the era of Abraham and of Ishmael there, and of the providential construction of the Ka'ba, this "sacred House" (5:100), this "ancient House" (22:29), that sat in the midst of the town. But Islamic tradition did not rest on that scriptural testimony alone. Later generations of Muslims who had access, through Jewish and Christian converts to Islam, to a vast body of stories and legends about the earliest times of God's dispensation, were able to trace the history of the Ka'ba and its sanctuary back to the very beginning of Creation, and even before.

The Quran traces the progression of God's will through the history of mankind from Adam to Abraham, with special emphasis on Noah. But Noah has no link with Mecca, and it is not until the thread of Sacred History reaches Abraham that biblical history converges with the Quran. The Quran's Abraham is called both a muslim and a hanif, terms that, in this context at least, appear to mean the opposite of an "associator," a pagan polytheist. Abraham’s father and other relatives were such; and although the Quran is neither a history nor a treatise in systematic theology, we are given a fairly clear idea of the paganism from which the Patriarch had liberated himself. like the Meccans of Muhammad's day, the family of Abraham worshiped idols (Quran 21:56-65).

The Quran passes directly from Abraham's "conversion" from the paganism of his father to God's command to construct the Ka'ba. There is no mention in the sacred text of Hagar or Sarah, or of the Bible's elaborate story of the births of Ishmael and Isaac. It was left for the later tradition, which possessed more detailed and sophisticated information, to spell out the events that brought Abraham and Ishmael from the land of Palestine to distant Mecca in the Hijaz. More than one Muslim version recounts how that occurred, and the historian Tabari presents a conflation of a number of them. I According to... al-Suddi: Sarah said to Abraham, "You may take pleasure in Hagar, for I have permitted it." So he had intercourse with Hagar and she gave birth to Ishmael. Then he had intercourse with Sarah and she gave birth to Isaac. When Isaac grew up, he and Ishmael fought. Sarah became angry and jealous of Ishmael's mother. . . . She swore to cut something off her, and said to herself, "I shall cut off her nose, I shall cut off her ear-but no, that would deform her. I will circumcise her instead." So she did that, and Hagar took a piece of cloth to wipe the blood away. For that reason women have been circumcised and have taken pieces of cloth (as sanitary napkins) down to today.

Sarah said, "She Will not live in the same town with me." God told Abraham to go to Mecca, where there was no House at that time. He took Hagar and her son to Mecca and put them there....

According to ... Mujahid and other scholars: When God pointed out to Abraham the place of the House and told him how to build the sanctuary, he set out to do the job and Gabriel went with him. It was said that whenever he passed a town he would ask, "Is this the town which God's command meant, 0 Gabriel?" And Gabriel would say. "Pass it by." At last they reached Mecca, which at that time was nothing but acacia trees, mimosa, and thorn trees, and there was a people called Amalekites out-side Mecca and its surroundings. The House at that time was but a hill of red clay. Abraham said to Gabriel, "Was it here that I was ordered to leave them?" Gabriel said, "Yes. " Abraham directed Hagar and Ishmael to go to al-Hijr,' and settled them down there. He commanded Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, to find shelter there. Then he said, "My Lord, I have settled some of my posterity in an uncultivable valley near Your Holy House ... that they may be thankful" (Quran 14:37). Then he journeyed back to his family in Syria, leaving the two of them at the House.

At his expulsion from Abraham's household, Ishmael must have been about sixteen years old, certainly old enough to assist his father in the construction of the Ka'ba, as is described in the Quran and is implicit from the last line of the Tabari's narrative from Mujahid and others. Tabari's version of what next occurred is derived from Genesis 21:15-16, transferred from a Palestinian setting to a Meccan one. The object is now clearly to provide an "Abrahamic" explanation for some of the landmarks of the Meccan sanctuary and the features of the pilgrimage to it. The helpless Ishmael sounds much younger than sixteen in the tale, and some Muslim versions of the story in fact make him a nursing infant, 3 which means, of course, that Abraham will have to return on a later occasion to build the Ka'ba with him. 4 Then Ishmael became very thirsty. His mother looked for water for him, but could not find any. She listened for sounds to help her find water for him. She heard a sound at al-Safa and went there to look around and found nothing. Then she heard a sound from the direction of al-Marwa. She went there and looked around and saw nothing. Some also say that she stood on al-Safa praying to God for water for Ishmael, and then went to al-Marwa to do the same.

Thus the origin of the pilgrimage ritual of "running" back and forth between the two hills of Safa and Marwa on the eastern side of the Meccan sanctuary. Tabari continues:

Then she heard the sounds of beasts in the valley where she had left Ishmael. She ran to him and found him scraping the water from a spring which had burst forth from beneath his hand, and drinking from it. Ishmael's mother came to it and made it swampy. Then she drew water from it into her waterskin to keep it for Ishmael. Had she not done that, the waters of Zamzam would have gone on flowing to the surface forever. (Tabari, Annals 1.278-279 = Tabari 11: 72-74)

Abraham the Builder

Though the Quran knows nothing of Adam's connection with Mecca or the Ka'ba there, it is explicit on the subject of Abraham as the builder of God's House. Remember We made the House a place of assembly for the people and a secure place; and take the station of Abraham (maqam Ibrahim) as a prayer-place (musalia); and We have a made a pact with Abraham and Ishmael that they should sanctify My House for those who circumambulate it, those using it as a retreat, who bow or prostrate themselves there.

And remember Abraham said: My Lord, make this land a secure one, and feed its people with fruits, those of them who believe in God and the Last Day... And remember Abraham raised the foundations of the House, yes and Ishmael too, (saying) accept (this) from us, for indeed You are All-hearing and MIknowing. (Quran 2:125-127)

Behold, We gave to Abraham the site of the House; do not associate anything with Me (in worship)! And sanctify My House for those who circumambulate, or those who take their stand there (qa'imun), who bow or prostrate themselves there. (Quran 22:26)

What the Muslims were told on divine authority about the ancient cult center at Mecca is summed up in those verses. It was left to later generations of Muslims to seek out additional information. And many of them did. The authority here is Zamakhshari (d. 1144 C.E.), commenting on Quran 2:127:

Then, God commanded Abraham to build it, and Gabriel showed him its location. It is said that God sent a cloud to shade him, and he was told to build on its shadow, not to exceed or diminish (its dimensions). It is said that he built it from five mountains: Mount Sinai, the Mount of Olives, Lebanon, al-judi, and its foundation is from Hira. Gabriel brought him the Black Stone from Heaven. It is said that Abu Qubays brought it forth,5 and it was taken out of the place where it had been hidden during the days of the Flood. It was a white sapphire from the Garden, but when menstruating women touched it during the pre-Islamic period, it turned black.

It is said that Abraham would build it as Ishmael would hand him the stones. "Our Lord" (2:127) means that they both said "Our Lord" [that is, not Abraham alone], and this activity took place in the location where they erected (the House) in (its) position. Abdullah demonstrated that in his reading, the meaning of which is: "The two of them raised it up, both of them saying, 'Our Lord."' (Zamakhshari, Tafsir, 311)

Zamakhshari does not pretend to add historical detail; he simply fleshes out the story at one or another point, as does the commentator Tabarsi (d. 1153 C.E.) on Quran 2:125. Tabarsi was by then convinced, as were all of his contemporaries, that the Quran's not entirely self-evident reference to a "station of Abraham" referred to a stone venerated in the Mecca Haram.

God made the stone underneath Abraham's feet into something like clay so that his foot sunk into it. That was a miracle. It was transmitted on the authority ofabu Ja'far al-Baqir (may peace be upon him) that he said: Three stones were sent down from the Garden: the Station of Abraham, the rock of the children of Israel, and the Black Stone, which God en-trusted Abraham with as a white stone. It was whiter than paper, but became black from the sins of the children of Adam. "Abraham raised the foundations of the House" (2:127). That is, the base of the House that was [already there] before that, from Ibn Abbas and Ata, who said: Adam was the one who built it. Then its traces were wiped out. Abraham ploughed it (in the original place to establish the foundations). That is the tradition from our Imams. But Mujahid said:

Abraham raised it up (originally) by the command of God. AL-Hasan used to say: The first to make the pilgrimage to the House was Abraham. But according to the traditions of our comrades, the first to make the pilgrimage to the House was Adam. That shows that he was [the one who built it] before Abraham. It was related on the authority of al-Baqir that he said: God placed four columns beneath the Throne.... He said: the angels circumambulate it. Then, He sent angels who said, "Build a House like it and with its measurements on the earth." He commanded that whoever is on the earth must circumambulate the House. (Tabarsi, Tafsir 1.460,468)

This, then, is how most later Muslims understood the proximate origin of the Ka'ba, as alluded to in the Quran: to wit, the patriarch Abraham, on a visit to his son Ishmael in Mecca, put down, on God's command, the foundation of the House on a site already hallowed by Adam.

The beginning of the Hajj

Once the building of the Ka'ba was completed, God ordered Abraham to make public proclamation of the pilgrimage to be performed there.

Announce to the people the pilgrimage. They will come to you on foot and on every lean camel, coming from every deep and distant highway that they may witness the benefits and recollect the name of God in the well-known days (ayyam ma'lumat) over the sacrificial animals He has provided for them. Eat thereof and feed the poor in want. Then let them complete their rituals7 and perform their vows and circumambulate the Ancient House.

Such is it [that is, the pilgrimage]. Whoever honors the sacred rites of God, for him is it good in the sight of his Lord. (Quran 22:27-30)

It is clear from these and similar Quranic texts that the original pilgrimage rituals were not so much being described to Abraham as alluded to for the benefit of a Meccan audience that was already quite familiar with them.' It was once again left for later commentators to fill in the details, not of the Hajj, to be sure, which was well known to all, but of Abraham and Ishmael's connection with it. The authority here is al-Azraqi (d. 834 C.E.), who, though not a Quranic commentator, was one of the earliest historians of Mecca and so an expert whose interests were somewhat different from those of Zamakhshari or Tabarsi. In this passage he describes how Abraham, at God's urging, performed that original pilgrimage ritual.

Abu al-Walid related to us ... (from) Uthman ibn Saj: Muhammad ibn Ishaq reported to me: When Abraham the Friend of the Merciful finished building the sacred House, Gabriel came and said: "Circle it seven times!" and he circumambulated it seven times with Ishmael, touching all the corners during each circumambulation. When they had completed seven, he and Ishmael prayed two prostrations behind the stone [maqam].

He said: Gabriel got up with them and showed him all the ritual stations: al-Safa, al-Marwa, Mina, Muzdalifa, and Arafat.

He said: When he left Mina and was brought down to (the defile called) al-Aqaba, the Devil appeared to him at Stone-Heap of the Defile (jamrat al-Aqaba). Gabriel said to him: "Pelt him!" so Abraham threw seven stones at him so that he disappeared from him. Then he appeared to him at the Middle Stone-heap (aljamra al-wusta). Gabriel said to him: "Pelt him!" so he pelted him with seven stones so that he disappeared from him. Then he appeared to him at the "Little Stone-heap" (al-jamra al-sughra). Gabriel said to him: "Pelt him!" so he pelted him with seven stones like the little stones for throwing in a sling. So the Devil withdrew from him.

Then, Abraham finished the pilgrimage and Gabriel waited for him at the ritual stops and taught him the ritual stations up through Arafat. When they arrived there, Gabriel said to him: "Do you know your ritual stations?" Abraham answered: "Yes." He said: It is called "Arafat" because of that statement: "Do you know your ritual stations?"'

He said: Then Abraham was commanded to call the people to the pilgrimage. He said: Abraham said: "O Lord, my voice will not reach (them). " God answered: "You call! The reaching is My responsibility."

He said: So Abraham climbed onto the stone [maqam] and looked out from it. He became (as high as) the highest mountain. The entire earth was gathered for him on that day. the mountains and plains, the land and the sea, the humans and the jinn so that everything heard him, He said: He stuck a finger in each ear and turned to face the south, the north, the east, and the west, and he began with the southern side. He said: "0 you people! The pilgrimage to the ancient House is written as an obligation for you, so answer your Lord!" So they answered from the seven regions, and from the east and the west to the broken soil: "At Your service, 0 God, at Your service.

He said: The stones were as they are today except that God desired to make the stone [maqam] a sign, so his footprint remains on the stone [maqam] to this day... He said: Everyone who has made the pilgrimage to this day was one of those who answered Abraham. Their pilgrimage (today) is a result of their response on that day. Whoever makes the pilgrimage twice has answered positively twice, three pilgrimages, answered thrice.

He said: Abraham's footprint on the stone [maqam] is a sign, which is demonstrated by the verse: "In it are dear signs [such as] the maqam Ibrahim. Whoever enters it is secure" (Quran 3:97). (Azraqi 1858:33-34)"

As these accounts attempt to demonstrate, the complex ritual the Muslims call the Hajj or Pilgrimage can be traced back, in general and in each specific detail, to Adam and, more proximately, to Abraham, whose intent and practices Muhammad was to restore so many centuries later. For the non-Muslim, however, the Meccan rituals are striking remnants of a pagan, albeit Semitic, past in Arabia, which the Prophet of Islam permitted to survive by incorporating them into his own prescriptions. For the Muslim, it is Abraham who transforms those same rites into an authentic Muslim cultus. Abraham, the first of the submitters (muslimum: Quran Z:13i, and elsewhere), was also the first of the generation after the Flood to perform the rites, and Muslims are simply commemorating what the Patriarch himself had done under God's guidance."

THE PRIMITIVE SANCTUARY

Midway in the Arabian peninsula, between the Jordanian border on the north and that of Yemen on the south, forty-five miles inland from the Red Sea port of Jidda, stands the city of Mecca and, in its midst, an unusual building called simply al-Ka'ba or "the Cube." The flat-roofed building rises from a narrow marble base on mortared courses of a local blue-gray stone, and its dimensions are not exactly cubical: it is fifty feet high, and while its northeast wall and its southwestern mate are forty feet long, the two "side" walls are five feet shorter. It is the corners rather than the walls that are oriented toward the compass points. The northeastern face is the facade in the sense that in it is the only door of the building, about seven feet above ground level. Inside is an empty room with a marble floor and three wooden pillars supporting the roof. There are some inscriptions on the walls, hanging votive lamps, and a ladder leading up to the roof Built into the eastern corner of the Ka'ba, about four feet above the ground, is a blackish stone of either lava or basalt, which is fractured and now held together by a silver band. The building is draped with a black brocade cloth embroidered in gold with Quranic texts; the bottom edge can be raised or lowered by a series of cords and rings.

The Ka'ba stands in the midst of an open space enclosed by porticoes. This is the Haram, the "sanctuary," and there are some other constructions in it. Facing the northeastern facade wall of the Ka'ba is a small domed building called the Station of Abraham (maqam Ibrahim), a title that applies equally to the stone that it enshrines and in which human footprints are impressed. Behind this building is a colonnaded wellhead called Zamzam, and next to that a pulpit.

For hundreds of millions of Muslims the Ka'ba is the holiest building in the world, and its holiness, like that of the Zamzam and the Station of Abraham and, indeed, of the entire sequence of pilgrimage rituals that surround them and the environs of Mecca, derives, as we have already seen, from their connection with Abraham, the biblical patriarch. It is to this shrine complex that we now turn.

The Haram

Mecca the haram, the holy place, appears to antedate Mecca the city. The later Muslim authorities credit establishment of the latter to Qusayy, who, if he is a historical personage, must be dated in the late fourth or early fifth century C.E." That there was a shrine before a settlement in that inhospitable valley we assume simply from the circumstances of the place: Mecca possessed none of the normal inducements to settlement, none, certainly, that would give the place a history or even a long tradition of contested possession. A holy place, on the other hand, requires little beyond the sanctity of the site, a sanctity connected with a spring, a tree, or a mountain. Only its sanctity, however obscure the origins of that holiness, explains the existence of Mecca, and only a shrine linked to other considerations-social, economic, or political-explains the eventual presence of a city there.

It was the Zamzam, then, or perhaps the two high places called Safa and Marwa, 13 that established the sanctity of the site of Mecca, though how long before Qusayy we cannot say. Our sources, as we have seen, trace the sanctity of the Meccan Haram exclusively to the Ka’ba, the edifice built at God's express command by Abraham and Ishmael. In the face of this unyielding unanimity in the literary sources, there are two ways to approach the shrine at Mecca: to compare the evidence of ancient Semitic cult centers that seem similar to the arrangement in Mecca; and to examine more contemporary evidence in the expectation that some of the older practices survived the advent of Islam. What we know of early practice comes chiefly from literary sources like Ibn al-Kalbi (d. 821 C.E.), and such information will be noted in due course. As for archeological evidence, it is sparse indeed, particularly from Arabia, where excavation is still in its very early stage and the sparse results are speculative in the extreme.

At least for the time being, then, we are left with the Muslim literary authorities. More promising than archaeological tidbits are other examples of the shrine phenomenon, some from ancient sources and some reflecting more contemporary practice in Arabia, which can be used to understand and interpret the often random information supplied by the early Muslim authors.

Before Islam, Arab law was what it continued to be in many places even after Islam, namely, customary law, a set of procedures that governed the behavior of one member of a tribe toward all other members of the same tribe. This "internal" law was neither divinely prescribed nor supernaturally guaranteed but was rather constituted by a type of mos majorum, defined by constant usage within the tribe and reinforced by the tribe's willingness to impose sanctions on its own members. No such system prevailed among the tribes, however, and the Arab version of international law had to appeal to other, more universal grounds. We are less certain of how this larger order operated, under what aegis tribe met tribe and conducted social and economic business or resolved differences in an atmosphere of security. We can find no divinely revealed or guaranteed law and order prevailing among tribes, yet the religious component seems more apparent on this international scale than it does within tribes. The tribes came together in sacred months, on sacred terrain, and often under the (temporary) tutelage of what are clearly religious figures.

There was and is more than one holy domain at Mecca. At the heart of the present city, and of the settlement for as long as we have records, there is a holy building, the ka'ba, which is venerated by a series of ritual acts but which is apparently no more taboo than the space that surrounds it: entry is not restricted, for example, as it was in the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem." The Ka'ba is in turn surrounded by two larger areas, both defined in the manner of a temenos and both marked by prohibited and privileged behavior within them. The one immediately surrounding the Ka'ba is called the "sacred shrine" (al-masjid-haram) and was regarded in Muslim times as a mosque. A third and far larger area, the true haram and called simply by that name, extends well beyond the settled area of Mecca city and is defined by stone boundary markers (ansab al-haram)." This is the sacred territory prohibited to non-Muslims throughout its history.

The Ka'ba

The Quran's interest in the history of the Ka'ba, "the House," as the sacred book often calls it, extends no further than Abraham and Ishmael's role in its construction. But God's Book gave it a central place in the new Islamic cult, both as the continuing center of certain rituals, such as the circumambulation long practiced in Mecca, and as the qibla, or focal point, to which every Muslim would turn in the new liturgical prayers prescribed by Islam. With that incentive, Muslims turned to reconstructing out of their own memories, and out of the stuff of legend, a history of "the House." The task was neither simple nor direct: between Abraham’s original construction and the building remembered by the earliest Muslims were a series of possessions at the hands of various pagans who had occupied Mecca. Consequently, there was a strong likelihood that the building had been modified to one degree or another.17 In a chapter entitled "The Building of the Ka'ba by the Quraysh in the Age of Barbarism," the Meccan historian at-Azi-aqi (d. 834 C.F.) collected some of the traditions still extent on the early appearance of the House before its substantial reconstruction during the early manhood of Muhammad.

Some men from quraysh sat in the sanctuary ... and were remembering the building of the Ka'ba and they described how it was before that time. It was built of dried [unmortared] stones and not with clay or mud. Its door was on ground level and it had no roof or ceiling. The curtain (kiswa) was hung on its wall on one side and was tied to the top of the center of the wall. On the right as one entered the Ka'ba there was a pit where gifts of money and goods for the Ka'ba were deposited. In this pit sat a snake to guard it, which God had sent at the time of the (tribe of) jurhum.... The horns of the ram that Abraham had slaughtered (in place of Isaac or Ishmael) were hanging on the wall facing the entrance. The were ornaments hanging in it which had been given as gifts. (Azraqi 1858: 106) Tabari tells a story from Ibn Ishaq that casts a little more light on the earlier building:

The, reason for their [the Quraysh's] demolition of the ka'ba (early in the seventh century C.E.) was that at this time it consisted of loose stones rising to somewhat above a man's height, and they wished to make it higher and roof it over since some men, Quraysh and others, had stolen the treasure of the Ka’ba, which was kept in a well in its interior. (Tabai-i, Annals 1.1130 = Tabari vi: 51)

By this account the Ka'ba does not appear to be a house at all but rather some kind of enclosure built around a pit or dry well, an enclosure that was, however, draped with a cloth curtain (kiswa) in a manner to give it the appearance of a tent. Some Arab authors in fact called the early Ka'ba by the same name used to describe the Israelites' tent or tabernacle in the desert." It is unlikely, however, that such a rude enclosure would be called, as the Meccan edifice was for as long as we have a historical tradition, "the cube," for that is indeed what ka'ba means. A tent like structure makes more sense, and it has been plausibly suggested that the later cubiform stone building, the ancestor of the one that stands in Mecca today, succeeded a square or quadrangular tent and so was distinguished from the round tents of the inhabitants of the settlement.19 The sequence would not be very different, then, from the Israelite one: the Ark of the desert wanderings continued to be housed in a tent even after its transfer to urban Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6:17); and when it was finally housed in a stone building, that "holy of holies" was likewise a ka'ba, twenty cubits in length and width and height (1 Kings 6:20). Nor was Mecca's the only Such building in Arabia. An early Muslim historian of the antiquities, Hisham ibn al-Kalbi, reported the presence of other ka'bas in and around the peninsula:

The Banu al-Harith lbn Ka'b had in Najran a ka'ba which they venerated. It is the one mentioned by al-A'sha in one of his poems. It has been claimed that it was not a ka'ba for worship, but merely a hall for people mentioned by a poet. In my opinion this is very likely the case since I have not heard of the Banu al-Harith ever mentioning it in their poetry.

The Iyad had another ka'ba in Sindad, (which is located) in a region between Kufa and Basra (in Iraq). It is mentioned by al-Aswad ibn Ya'fur in one of his poems. I have, however, heard that this house was not a place of worship. Rather it was just a famous building and it was for that reason that al-Aswad mentioned it.

A certain man of the Junayna named Abd al-Dar ibn Hudayb once said' to his people, "Come, let us build a house, to be located in a spot in their territory called al-Hawra, with which we might rival the Ka'ba (at Mecca), and so attract to ourselves many of the Bedouin. " They deemed his suggestion very grave and refused his request. (Ibn al-Kalbi 1952: 38-39)

As Ibn al-Kalbi somewhat reluctantly testifies, in Mecca we are in the presence of a not unusual type of Arabian, or perhaps even Semitic, temple building. The Meccan exemplar is unusual only in that it housed no deity. Unhappily, all the evidence is literary: we have no preserved examples save the Meccan one of what might reasonably be called a ka'ba. We cannot say, then, how typical the obviously crude Meccan structure was. But whether typical or not, its primitive and makeshift architecture comes as no surprise: not only was it situated in a wadi, and so vulnerable to the normal destructive consequences; but the Meccan Ka'ba was also built to serve people who were originally nomads and who had, even by the late sixth century, so little skill at construction that they required the assistance of a foreign carpenter to put a timber roof on the edifice. But for all that, it was a temple and had all the primary characteristics of such: a quadrangular cella oriented to the cardinal compass points, 20 a sacred rock and sacred spring, a characteristic haram with the usual privileges of the right of asylum, and so on. 21 In most ancient temples, in obvious contrast to later synagogues, churches, and mosques, whatever ritual was required was practiced outside the building, generally in the form of sacrifice upon an altar. The inner parts of the building might be entered; but because they were regarded as the domicile of the god, entry was denied to the profane, those who stood "before the shrine." Indeed, at that other Semitic temple in Jerusalem, access to the ka'ba, the cube-shaped Holy of Holies, was severely limited to the high priest, and then under strictly controlled circumstances. Although it is true that the primary liturgy connected with the Mecca building, the ritual circumambulation, was performed outside, there is almost no trace, either before or under Islam, of the notion that the interior of the Ka'ba was in any way more sacred than the surrounding Haram. Access to it was controlled, as we shall have many occasions to see, but exclusively, it would appear, on the grounds of political privilege. People, including Muhammad himself, prayed both inside and outside the Ka'ba 22 and visited it whenever the privilege was granted to them. The Ka'ba was not, then, a more sacred haram within the larger Haram that surrounded it. The truly profane non-Muslims were kept out of Mecca, or even Arabia at times, and no Muslim might approach the precincts of Mecca as a pilgrim without having previously entered, like a Jerusalem high priest, a state of ritual purity.

The Black Stone

Built into the southeast corner of the Ka'ba, about four feet from the ground, is the Black Stone. According to Muslim tradition, this had been a part, though not a structural part, of the building from the beginning, that is to say, from Adam’s original construction of the House of God. But the tradition also remembered that the stone had come from Abu Qubays, a mountain overlooking Mecca." The two strands of tradition were harmonized in an account whereby the stone was concealed on Abu Qubays during the era of the Flood, when Adam's original Ka'ba was destroyed, and then restored to Abraham for inclusion in his version of the Ka'ba. 24 But the harmonization was not perfect. Other traditions recollected that the Black Stone, or at least its inclusion in the Ka'ba, was of much more recent origin. Ibn Sa'd says that the Quraysh brought it down from Abu Qubays only four years before Muhammad's first revelation. 21 In another account, from al-Fakihi, it is traced back to the Quraysh’s first reconstruction of the building, possibly at the time of Qusayy. 26 Was the Black Stone part of the construction of the Ka'ba from the beginning? The sources are obviously uncertain on the question, and so too are we, though the probability seems high that it was. On one account, the gathering of local idols into the Meccan sanctuary goes back to the time of the pre-Quraysh ruler Amr ibn Luhayy;27 and as a sacred stone from Abu Qubays, the Black Stone too would have been part of Amr's religious synoikism.21 But if, as seems equally likely, the stone was originally one of the portable betyls of the early settlers at Mecca, its incorporation into the structure of the Ka'bal like the depiction of similar stones on the walls of temples at Madain Salih and elsewhere, would signal the decision of nomads to make a fixed settlement."

The Hijr

Opposite the northwestern face of the Ka'ba is an area of special sanctity defined by a low semicircular wall (hatim). The area is called the hijr, and Muslim tradition identifies it as the burial place of Ishmael and Hagar.10 Not much is said of it in pre-Islamic times. The area first becomes prominent when Ibn al-Zubayr, a seventh-century Muslim ruler of Mecca, incorporated it into the Ka'ba by connecting the hatim to the building. His work was shortly undone, and the hatim was left a free-standing wall, as it is today. There are few plausible explanations of why there should be a wall there in the first place. It has been suggested, for example, that a low wall, and so the hijr enclosure, once surrounded the Ka'ba on all sides and marked the area within which the idols were worshiped through sacrifice,31 or, more enticingly but less convincingly, that the hatim represents the remains of the apse of a Christian church oriented toward Jerusalem, which, it will be seen, was the direction in which once Muhammad prayed while he was still at Mecca.31 The word hijr itself means "inviolable" or "taboo," and it occurs once in that sense in the Quran (6:137-139), in reference not to the area near the Ka'ba but to animals and crops earmarked as belonging to the gods, a sense that supports the contention that the hijr, whatever its original extent, may have served as a pen for the animals destined for sacrifice to the idols around the Ka'ba.33 Whether it was so used in Muhammad's own lifetime seems doubtful, however, at least on the evidence of the Muslim authorities. As the hijr is portrayed in Muhammad's day, it was a place of common assembly where political matters were discussed, or people prayed, or, as it appears, slept.34 We may be misreading the evidence, however. The sleepers in the hijr are generally dreamers, and their dreams have a divine purport: Abd al-Muttalib was inspired to discover the Zamzam while sleeping there, the mother of the Prophet had a vision of her son's greatness, and Muham-mad was visited by Gabriel there before beginning his celebrated Night journey all commonplace examples of inspiration in the course of an incubation, that is, sleeping in a sacred place. 35 The latter example is particularly striking in light of the fact that Jacob's dream of the ladder reaching to heaven (Genesis 28:ii-ig) took place at the "House of God" and the "gate of heaven," a spot that the Jewish tradition identified as the place where Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac or Ishmael, as the Muslims sometimes had it-and where the Temple was later located. Ishmael too, the Muslims claimed, had been promised by God that a gate into heaven would be opened for him in the hijr. 36

Another Stone: The Maqam Ibrahim

The Black Stone was not the only venerated stone in the Meccan sanctuary. In Islamic times visitors were shown one bearing the footprint of Abraham himself and called the "station" or "standing place" of Abraham (maqam Ibrahim). The latter expression occurs twice in the Quran. The mention at 3:97 is connected with a place called Bakka, apparently the site of the House 37 and the place in which are God's manifest signs, including the Station of Abraham, an allusion that suggests a place within the Haram. In 2:125 the believers are urged to "take the maqam Ibrahim as a place of prayer (musalla)," or, more literally, "take some place from the maqam Ibrahim as a place of prayer," a mode of expression that suggested to some commentators that the "station of Abraham" might refer to the entire sanctuary or even the entire area of the pilgrimage.31 In the end, however, the consensus settled upon the free-standing stone also located within the sanctuary.

As with much else connected with the sanctuary there was no great assurance on why this particular stone was called the Station of Abraham.39 Although it made easy sense to suggest that Abraham stood upon it while building the Ka'ba, a far more likely explanation traces it back to Abraham's place of prayer. indeed, there is an explicit reference in Genesis 19:17 to just such a place: "Abraham rose early and went to the place where he had stood (maqom) in the presence of the Lord." The Talmud cites this passage (BT Berakhot 6b) when it recommends that each believer should have a personal maqam for prayer. 40 Whatever was being referred to in the Quranic verse, there was a stone in the Haram at Mecca, measuring roughly two feet by three feet; and as we shall see, it had a history in the Islamic era. Part of that history was the discovery (or rediscovery) in 870 C.E. that there was writing on the stone. The occasion was a refurbishing of the stone-it had earlier become cracked and the parts pinioned together-and there was a very good witness present, the subsequent historian of the city, al-Fakihi, who recorded the events of that occasion in his Chronicle of mecca.

When the stone was brought on the 1st of I Rabi' to the government house ... people examined it closely. And I looked on with them.

Fakihi noted a variety of lines and geometric shapes on the stone and an inscription:

There is an inscription on the stone in Hebrew, but some say it is in Himyari script. It is the inscription which the Quraysh found in the Age of Barbarism. I copied the inscription from the maqam on the order of (the governor) Ali ibn al- Hasan with my own hand. I copied it (exactly) as I saw it inscribed on the stone and I spared no effort. And this is what I copied.

The Fakihi manuscript reproduces three lines of the inscription. The rest was unclear to him, and he did not copy it. He inquired among other scholars as to the meaning of the lines, and Abu Zakariyya al-Maghribil an expert in Egyptian hieroglyphics, translated it for him: "I am God, there is no deity except Me" <first line> "a king who is unattainable" <second line> "Isbaut" <third line>. Abu-1-Hasan al-Faridi quoted from the Tafsir of Sunayd a passage for the elucidation of the meaning of the transliterated but untranslated Isbautas corresponding to al-Samad, "the Eternal," in Arabic." Al-Fakihi then records a tradition traced back to Ibn Abbas stating that there is an inscription on the maqam saying: "This is the House of God, He put it on the quadrangles of His throne, its sustenance will come from this and that, its people will be the first to suspend its sanctity." 42

The Zamzam

Close by the Ka'ba is a well from whose depths water can be drawn for the benefit of the pilgrims who cherish the well-attested blessings that come to those who drink it. If pilgrims are drawn to it, so too are historians, who see in the source called Zamzam a plausible explanation of why there was a sanctuary in the wadi of Mecca in the first place. In the nineteenth century Julius Wellhausen pronounced the Zamzam "the only spring of Mecca and so likely the origin of the holy place as well as the city," and other authorities have generally been inclined to agree. 13 There are problems, however. Other wells quenched Mecca," as Ibn Ishaq reveals when speaking of the Zamzam.

Zamzam utterly eclipsed the other wells from which the pilgrims used to get their water, and the people went to it because it was in the sacred enclosure and because its water was superior to any other; and also because it was the well of Ishmael, son of Abraham. Because of it the Banu Abd Manaf behaved boastfully towards the Quraysh and the other Arabs. (Ibn Ishaq 1955: 65)

The Zamzam was not, then, unique; it was simply superior, and the basis of that superiority-leaving aside the debated question of the quality of its water-was that its origin went back to Abrahamic days, when, as we have seen, it was miraculously discovered and saved the life of Ishmael. Zamzam, it was argued, was thus mentioned in the Bible, particularly if one accepted its identification with the miraculous life-saving spring mentioned in Genesis 21:19. 45 The Zamzam was said to have been hidden by the pagan Jurhum who succeeded Ishmael, and it remained unknown and unused down to the days of Abd al- Muttalib, Muhammad's grandfather. Abd al-Muttalib was a descendent of Abd Manaf, the son to whom Qusayy, that founder of Quraysh-and Meccan-fortunes, handed on as a hereditary trust the office of siqaya, the privilege of supplying water to the Meccan pilgrims.

On the face of it, this possibly lucrative honor could have had nothing to do with the Zamzam, because the well was unknown to Qusayy and every member of Abd Manaf down to Abd al-Muttalib. Did the Zamzam replace the other wells of

Mecca at some point, perhaps at some very late date in the history of the city, when the Abrahamic story began to circulate? There are grounds for thinking so, not the least of which is the lack of any essential connection between the Zamzam and its water and the pre- or post-Islamic Haji . 46

Safa and Marwa

Somewhat to the east of the Ka'ba were two low hills, which have since disappeared under the leveling topography of modern Mecca. The one on the south was called Safa and that on the north Marwa, and there occurred between them one of the ritual acts connected with the religious life of Mecca. It was, in fact, another form of circumambulation, a circling back and forth between the two places, part of which had to be conducted at a run, whence its later name, "the running" (say). The practice was later incorporated into the Umra and the Hajj, though obviously not without some objection, as is manifest from the Quran's reference to it:

Indeed, Safa and Marwa are among the indications of God. So for those who make the Hajj to the House or the Umra, there is no sin in circumambulating them. (Quran 2:158)

This is as much as the Quran says. But the Muslim tradition offers two explanations for the practice, one "pagan" and one "Abrahamic." As we have already seen, the latter simply identifies Hagar's frantic search for water for the infant Ishmael with the ritual running between the hills before her providential discovery of the Zamzam. What is obviously an older and more primitive explanation has to do with two humans named Asaf and Na'ila, members of the jurhum:

(The Quraysh) adopted Asaf (or Isaf) and Na'ila by the place of Zamzam, sacrificing beside them. They were (originally) a man and a woman of jurhum ... who copulated in the Ka'ba so God transformed them into two stones .... But God alone knows whether this is the truth. (Ibn Ishaq 1955: 37)

Despite Ibn Ishaq’s explicit misgivings, the colorful story became current in the Muslim authors and has been the point of departure for a wide variety of attempts to explain the reality, if any, behind the story and its connection with the "running" ritual .17 The names, which have to do with stones, appear to be Aramaic rather than Arabic and so have suggested foreign origins. What were transparently sacred stones, or perhaps stone idols-the jurhum story may reflect an etiological myth or be a distant echo of some form of ritual prostitution at the Ka'ba or nearby 48 were originally worshiped atop the "high places" of Safa and Marwa and then brought down somewhere in the vicinity of the Ka'ba by Qusayy himself. The circumambulation ritual continued to be performed at the two hills, but thereafter sacrifices were offered at the new sites of the idols.

ARABIAN PAGANISM

The Muslim Arab authorities were not at all certain who of the early Arab intruders, the Jurhum or the Khuza'a, was first or chiefly responsible for turning Ishmael's holy place into a pagan city. More, their version of the degradation of the Meccan cultus has to do principally with the cult of idols, though we are assured by somewhat wider evidence that who was being worshiped in Arabia, and how and why, were much broader questions than our eighth- and ninth-century sources were willing to allow. The inhabitants of Arabia assuredly had a religious tradition before Islam, and although we are not particularly well informed about it, that tradition appears to have been quite complex. And this is what we would expect to discover in societies that were splintered into tribes and clans of widely varying sizes, some of them sedentary and some of them nomadic, with a number of the latter ranging seasonally over enormously broad terrains. The inhabitants of the Hijaz worshiped the way they lived: the small settled population at fixed shrines in oases; the Bedouin in transit, carrying their gods with them.50 The objects worshiped were principally stones and trees and heavenly bodies,51 or rather, the gods thought to reside in them, or possibly -and here we begin to enter a world we do not fully understand -the gods represented by them.51 What is reasonably clear is that in the more recent Arabian past sacred stones were more often being shaped into human likenesses rough or fine,53 perhaps, it has been surmised, because of the extension of Hellenistic styles into the peninsula.54 lbn al-Kalbi describes what one of them might have looked like, on the authority of his scholar-father, who poses the question in this passage. I requested Malik ibn Haritha, "Describe to me (the god) Wadd in such a way which would make it appeal- vividly before me. " Malik replied: "It was the statue of a huge man, as big as the largest of human beings, covered with two robes, clothed with the one and cloaked with the other, carrying a sword at his waist and a bow on his shoulder, and holding in one hand a spear to which had been attached a standard, and in the other a quiver full of arrows." (Ibn al-Kalbi, Book of Idols, 56 = Ibn al-Kalbi 1952: 49)

However the devotees thought of it, Arabian cultus was highly volatile. The deities often shared characteristics, or were harmonized into families, or passed into the possession now of this tribe and now of that. There is a distinctly tribal notion to the Arabs' worship of the gods. On the basis of the South Arabian evidence, with which the more meager Arab tradition concurs, each tribe or tribal confederation had a divine patron whose cult gave the group a focus for its solidarity. And in a practice that points directly to what was occurring at Mecca, each of these "federal deities" was the "lord" of a shrine that served as the cult center of the federation.

What seems to be clear is that the bedouin came into the towns to worship at the fixed shrines of the gods there. The incentive may have been principally commercial-fairs are a consistent feature of such urban shrines-and there was undoubtedly conscious policy at work: the movement of the effigy of a popular god into a town shrine meant that its worshipers would eventually follow, if certain conditions could be guaranteed. The chief of those was security. Bedouin were ill at ease in very close quarters: a vividly remembered network of tribal vendettas and blood feuds incurred from earlier collisions on the steppe made any tribal encounter potentially dangerous. The solution was the usual one of the "truce of God," sacred months when hands and weapons were restrained by divine injunction. Under such security, tribes came together, worshipped, and traded, and then returned to their more normal ways.

Sacred shrine, sacred truce, worship, and trade is a combination with a venerable history. Small wonder, since it worked to everyone's advantage, and not least to that of the guardians of the shrine-the Quraysh at Mecca, for example.

How Paganism and Idol Worship Came to Mecca

One aspect of the worship of the pre-Islamic Arabs that attracted the attention not only of Greek and Latin authors who came in contact with Arab society but also of later Muslim authorities on the Age of Barbarism was a widespread cult of stones. For both sets of observers it seemed odd to venerate stones, whether they were totally unshaped or fashioned into some kind of very rudimentary idol. It was not, of course, the stones that were being worshiped but an animated spirit within them. 55 The practice is testified to among sedentarized Arabs like the Nabateans of Petra and the priestly Arabs of Emessa in Syria, who had enshrined one such stone within their temple- which their high priest Elagabalus carried off to Rome with him when he became emperor -as well as among the nomads who carried stones enclosed in portable shrines into battle with them. 56 Later Muslims had some idea of these practices, and they traced them back to the earliest history of Mecca, when the sons of Ishmael lapsed into paganism. Ibn al- Kalbi, who made a special study of the pre-Islamic past of Arabia in his Book of Idols, connected idol worship directly to the degeneracy of the Banu Ishmael: The reason that led them [the descendents of Ishmael] to the worship of images and stones was the following. No one left Mecca without carrying away with him a stone from the stones of the Sacred House as a token of reverence to it, and as a sign of deep affection to Mecca. Wherever he settled he would erect that stone and circumambulate it in the same manner he used to circumambulate the Ka'ba (before his departure from Mecca), seeking thereby its blessing and affirming his deep affection for the Holy House. In fact' the Arabs still venerate the Ka'ba and Mecca and journey to them in order to perform the pilgrimage and the visitation, conforming thereby to the time-honored custom which they inherited from Abraham and Ishmael. In time this led them to the worship of whatever took their fancy, and caused them to forget their former worship. They exchanged the religion of Abraham and Ishmael for another. Consequently they took to the worship of images, becoming like nations before them.

At this point, Ibn al-Kalbi ties his story to an explanation of Quran 71:20-24: Noah said: "O Lord, they rebel against me, and they follow those whose riches and children only aggravate their ruin." And they plotted a great plot, and they said, "Forsake not your gods; Forsake not Wadd and Suwa', nor Yaghuth and Ya'uq and Nasr." And they caused many to err. Ibn al-Kalbi's text continues: They sought and determined what the people of Noah had worshiped of those images and adopted the worship of those which were still remembered among them. It was important, however, in the light of Muhammad's own adoption of certain of the cult practices in the Mecca of his day, to maintain some kind of continuous link with the authentic Abrahamic past.

Among these devotional practices were some which had come down from the time of Abraham and Ishmael, such as the veneration of the House and its circumambulation, the Hajj, the Umra [or lesser pilgrimage], the "standing" on

Arafat and Muzdalifa, sacrificing she-camels, and raising the voice (tahlil) (in acclamation of God) at the Hajj and Umra, but they introduced into the latter things that did not belong to it.

Ibn al-Kalbi then supplies an example of just such an "unorthodox" pre-Islamic "acclamation" (talbiyya):

Here we are, 0 Lord! Here we are! Here we are! You have no partner save the one who is Yours; You have dominion over him and whatever he possesses.

Ibn al-Kalbi continues his own remarks:

Thus they declared His unity through the talbiyya and at the Same time associated their gods with Him, placing their [that is, their gods'] affairs in His hands. (Ibn al-Kalbi, Book of Idols, 6-7 = Ibn al-Kalbi 1952: 4-5)

Stone worship is not quite the same thing as idol worship, as even Ibn al-Kalbi understood. According to most authorities, including Ibn al-Kalbi ' the pagan practices in Mecca took a new turn when Khuza’i intruders under their leader Amr ibn Luhayy-who had married the daughter of Amr ibn al-Harith, the jurhum chief-replaced the Jurhum as the paramount tribe in the settlement.

When Amr ibn Luhayy came (to Mecca) he disputed Amr ibn al-Harith's right to its custody, and with the aid of the Banu Ishmael he found the Jurhumites, defeated them and cleared them out of the Ka'ba; he then drove them out of Mecca and took over the custody of the House after them.

Amr ibn Luhayy then became very sick and was told: There is a hot spring in Balqa in Syria.57 If you go there, you will be cured. So he went to the hot spring, bathed therein and was cured. During his stay there he noticed that the inhabitants of the place worshiped idols. So he questioned them: "What are these things?" To which they replied, "To them we pray for rain, and from them we seek victory over the enemy." There-upon he asked them to give him (some) and they did. He took them back with him to Mecca and erected them around the Ka'ba. (Ibn al- Kalbi, Book of Idols 8 = Ibn al-Kalbi 1952: 7)

Later Ibn al-Kalbi turns his attention to the cult of the idols:

Every family in Mecca had at home an idol which they worshiped. Whenever one of them purposed to set out on a journey, his last act before leaving the house would be to touch the idol in hope of an auspicious journey; on his return, the first thing he would do was to touch it again in gratitude for a propitious return.... The Arabs were passionately fond of worshiping idols. Some of them had a temple around which they centered their worship, while others adopted an idol to which they offered their adoration. The person who was unable to build himself a temple or adopt an idol would erect a stone in front of the Sacred House [the Ka'ba at Mecca] or in front of any other temple he might prefer, and then circumambulate it in the same manner in which he would circumambulate the Sacred House. The Arabs called these stones "betyls" (ansab), but whenever these stones resembled a living form they called them "idols" (asnam) and "images" (awthan). The act of circumambulating them they called "circumrotation" (dawar).

Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station (to spend the night), he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest of them and adopt it as his god, and then use the remaining three as supports for his cooking pot. On his departure he would leave them behind, and would do the same at the other stops.

And, like many other Muslims, Ibn al-Kalbi was convinced that Arab paganism was simply a degenerate form of the rituals of the Ka'ba:

The Arabs were accustomed to offer sacrifices before all these idols, betyls and stones. Nevertheless, they were aware of the excellence and superiority of the Ka'ba, to which they went on pilgrimage and visitation. What they did on their travels was merely a perpetuation of what they did at the Ka'ba, because of their devotion to it. (Ibn al-Kalbi, Book of Idols, 32-33 = Ibn al-Kalbi 1952: 28-290)

The Meccan Pantheon

Ibn Ishaq provides a kind of catalog of which tribes worshiped which idols and where:

Quraysh had an idol by a well in the middle of the Ka'ba called Hubal. And they adopted Asaf and Na'ila by the place of Zamzam, sacrificing beside them. They were a man and woman of Jurhum-Asaf ibn Baghy and Na'ila bint Dik-who copulated in the Ka'ba and so God transformed them into two stones. 5' Abdullah ibn Abu Bakr ... on the authority of Amra bint Abd al-Rahman ... that she said, I heard Aisha [one of the wives of Muhamniad] say, "We always heard that Asaf and Na'ila were a man and a woman of jurhum who copulated in the Ka'ba so God transformed them into two stones." But God alone knows the truth.

Al-Lat belonged to the Thaqif in Ta'if, her overseers and guardians being the Banu Mu'attib of the Thaqif Manat was worshiped by the Aws and the Khazraj, and such of the people of Yathrib who followed their religion, by the sea-shore in the direction of al-Mushallal in Qudayd. (Ibn Ishaq 1955: 38-39)

HUBAL

Among the gods worshiped by the Quraysh, the greatest was Hubal, this on the expert testimony of Ibn al-Kalbi:

The Quraysh had several idols in and around the Ka'ba. The greatest of these was Hubal. It was made, as I was told, of red agate, in the form of a man with the right hand broken off It came into the possession of the Quraysh in this condition, and they therefore made for it a hand of gold.... It stood inside the Ka'ba, and in front of it were seven divinatory arrows. On one of these was written the word "Pure," and on another "associated alien." Whenever the lineage of a new-born was doubted, they would offer a sacrifice to Hubal and then shuffle the arrows and throw them. If the arrows showed the word "Pure," the child would be declared legitimate and the tribe would accept him. If, however, the arrows showed "associated alien," the child would be declared illegitimate and would reject him. The third arrow had to do with divination concerning the dead, while the fourth was for divination about marriage. The purpose of the three remaining arrows has not been explained. Whenever they disagreed concerning something, or proposed to embark upon a journey, or undertake some other project, they would proceed to Hubal and shuffle the divinatory arrows before it. Whatever result they obtained they would follow and do accordingly. (Ibn al-Kalbi, Book of Idols 28-29 = Ibn al-Kalbi 1952: 23-24) Some additional details on this cleromantic deity, the most powerful of the pagan idols of Mecca, is supplied by the Meccan historian Azraqi.

Abraham, as we have seen, had dug a pit inside the Ka'ba, and it was here that the Khuza'i Amr ibn Luhayy set up the idol of Hubal:

Amr ibn Luhayy brought with him (to Mecca) an idol called Hubal from the land of Hit in Mesopotamia.59 Hubal was one the Quraysh's greatest idols. So he set it up at the well inside the Ka'ba and ordered the people to worship it. Thus a man coming back from a journey would visit it and circumambulate the House before going to his family, and he would shave his hair before it.

Muhammad ibn Ishaq said that Hubal was (made of) cornelian pearl in the shape of a human. His right hand was broken off and the Quraysh made a gold hand for it. It had a vault for the sacrifice, and there were seven arrows cast (On issues relating to) a dead person, virginity and marriage. Its offering was a hundred camels. It had a custodian (hajib). (Azraqi 1858: 73-74)

Finally, among the pictures that decorated the interior of the Ka'ba in pre-Islamic days, there was one, as Azraqi says, "of Abraham as an old man." But because the figure was shown performing divination by arrows, it seems likely that it was Hubal. The suspicion is strengthened by the fact that when Muhammad finally took over the sanctuary, he permitted the picture of Jesus to remain but had that of "Abraham" removed with the dry comment, "What has Abraham to do with arrows?""

Has Hubal depicted as "Abraham the Ancient" anything to do with the "Ancient House," as the Ka'ba is often called? Or, to put the question more directly: Was it Hubal rather than Allah who was "Lord of the Ka'ba"?" Probably not. The Quran, which makes no mention of Hubal, would certainly have raised the contention. Hubal was, by the Arabs' own tradition, a newcomer to both Mecca and the Ka'ba, an outsider introduced by the ambitious Amr ibn Luhayy, and the tribal token around which the Quraysh later attempted to construct a federation with the surrounding Kinana, whose chief deity Hubal was. Hubal was introduced into the Ka'ba, but he never supplanted the god Allah, whose House it continued to be.

THE DAUGHTERS OF ALLAH

If the Quran is silent on Hubal, it often adverts to three other deities of the many worshiped at Mecca in pre-Islamic days: Manat, al-Uzza, and al-Lat, called collectively by the Quraysh the "daughters of Allah." "What," the Quran complains, "has Allah taken daughters out of His creation and allowed you the choice of sons?" (43:16), an odd arrangement indeed in a society in which female infants were often left to die. One of the characteristics of Arab paganism as it has come down to us is the absence of a mythology, stories that might serve to explain the origin or history of the gods. Rather, the gods are cult objects, and we have only the cult, and an occasional nominal qualifier, to instruct us about them. Thus we have no idea why the Quraysh should have assigned them their filial roles, save perhaps simply to introduce some order into the large and somewhat chaotic Meccan pantheon. Nothing we know suggests that Allah was otherwise thought to have had daughters or that the three goddesses possessed any family relationship. They often swapped characteristics and shared shrines, but Manat, Uzza, and Lat were quite discrete divinities, and the best examples, by all accounts, of the personified worship of heavenly bodies. 62

Even though their principal shrines lay north and east of Mecca, al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Manat were all worshiped by the Quraysh of Mecca, and at least al-Uzza numbered no less than Muhammad himself among her worshipers. 63 The same three goddesses appear -and then disappear-in an extremely curious and much-discussed place in Sura 53 of the Quran. The exact context is unknown, but Muhammad was still at Mecca and was apparently feeling the pressures of the Quraysh resistance to his message:

When the Messenger of God saw how his tribe turned their backs on him and was grieved to see them shunning the message he had brought to them from God, he longed in his soul that something would come to him from God that would reconcile him with his tribe. With his love for his tribe and his eagerness for their welfare, it would have delighted him if some of the difficulties which they made for him could have been smoothed, and he debated with himself and fervently desired such an outcome. Then God revealed (Sura 53) ... and when he came to the words "Have you thought al-Lat and al-Uzza and Manat, the third, the other?" (VV. 19-20) Satan cast on his tongue, because of his inner debates and what he desired to bring to his people, the words: "These are the high-flying cranes; verily their intercession is to be hoped for."

When the Quraysh heard this, they rejoiced and were happy and delighted at the way in which he had spoken of their gods, and they listened to him, while the Muslims, having complete trust in their Prophet with respect of the message which he brought from God, did not suspect him of error, illusion or mistake. When he came to the prostration, having completed the Sura, he prostrated himself and the Muslims did likewise.... The polytheists of the Quraysh and others who were in the mosque [that is, the Meccan Haram] likewise prostrated themselves because of the reference to their gods which they heard, so that there was no one in the mosque, believer or unbeliever, who did not prostrate himself ... Then they all dispersed from the mosque. The Quraysh left delighted at the mention of their gods. (Tabari, Annals 1.1192-1193 = Tabari vi: 108-109) This is the indubitably authentic story-it is difficult to imagine a Muslim inventing such a tale--of the notorious "Satanic verses." It has profound implications for Islamic scriptural theology and jurisprudence, but what is important here is what it reveals of the contemporary regard for the three goddesses. What was first granted and then rescinded was permission to use the three goddesses as intercessors with Allah. It was, as has been suggested, a critical moment in Muhammad's understanding of the distinction between Allah as simply a "high god," the head of the Meccan or Arabian pantheon within which the lesser gods and goddesses might be invoked as go-betweens," and the notion that eventually prevailed: Allah is uniquely God, without associates, companions, or "daughters." The goddesses were, as the revision (Quran 53:23) put it, "nothing but names," invented by the Quraysh and their ancestors.

And what precisely are we to understand by "exalted cranes"? The Muslim authorities were uncertain about the meaning of gharaniq, as are we. 65 But what they did know was that this was the refrain that the Quraysh used to chant as they circumambulated the Ka'ba: "Al-Lat, and al-Uzza and Manat, the third, the other; indeed these are exalted (or lofty, ‘ula) gharaniq; let us hope for their intercession." 66 It is as close as we shall come, perhaps, to a Qurashite prayer formula offered up to Allah-clearly not the goddesses in question-as the devotees moved in a processional liturgy around His Holy House.

THE HIGH GOD ALLAH

Muhammad no more invented Allah than he did al-Lat, al-Uzza, and Maiiat. The Cult of the deity termed simply "thc god" (al-ilah) was known throughout southern Syria and northern Arabia," and it was obviously of central importance in Mecca, where the building called the Ka'ba was indisputably his house. Indeed, the Muslim profession of faith, 11 there is no ilah except al-ilah," attests to precisely that point: the Quraysh are being called upon to repudiate the very existence of all the other gods save this one. It seems equally certain that Allah was not merely a god in Mecca but was widely regarded as the "high god," the chief and head of the Meccan pantheon, perhaps the result, as has been argued, of a natural progression toward henotheism or of the growing influence of Jews and Christians in the peninsula." The most convincing piece of evidence that the latter was at work is the fact that of all the gods of Mecca, Allah alone was not represented by an idol.

How did the pagan Meccans view their god Allah? The Quran provides direct and primary evidence.

If you ask them [the pagan Quraysh] who created the heavens and the earth and made subject the sun and the moon, they will certainly reply "Allah.". . . And indeed if you ask them who sends down the rain from the sky and so restores life to the earth after its death, they will certainly reply, "Allah." (Quran 29:62, 63) And if you ask them who created them, they will certainly reply, "Allah." (Quran 43:87)

Say: Who is it who sustains you from the sky and from the earth? Or who is it who has power over hearing and sight? And who is it who brings out the living from the dead and the dead from the living And who is it who rules and regulates all affairs? They will soon answer, "Allah."

If you ask them who created the heavens and the earth, they will certainly say "Allah." Say: Those (female) things you call upon apart from Allah, do you think that if God wills evil to me, they can remove this evil, or, if He wills mercy to me, they can hold back this mercy? (Quran 39:38)

In this latter verse the "high god" relationship is quite marked. On the one hand, there is Allah, the creator, sustainer, and ruler of the universe, and on the other, a host of minor deities-the "daughters of Allah" among them-who intercede with the lord of the gods, precisely the view that is attacked in the Quran:

They serve apart from Allah that which neither harms nor benefits them, and they say, "These arc our intercessor’s with Allah." Say.- Are You informing God of something He knows not in the heavens or on earth? Glory be to Him! He is far above any partners. (Quran 10:18)

When they embark upon ships, they call upon Allah, putting their faith in Him (alone); but once He has delivered them safely back to land, they associate (others With Him). (Quran 29:65)

The Quran is our most certain testimony to the religious life in Mecca before the appearance of Islam. At least at the beginning of his career, Muhammad was concerned not with regulating the life of a community of believers, as he later was in Medina, but rather with reforming the beliefs and practices of his fellow Meccans. "Reforming" is a more appropriate term than "converting," because the Quran also reveals, as we have seen, that the worship of Allah was already well established there before Muhammad. What was at question, then, was not simply belief in or worship of Allah, which the Quraysh certainly did, but the Meccans' " association," as the Quran calls it, of other deities with Allah, a practice that seemed to accept the existence of other gods in the "exalted assembly" while at the same time denying that they had any autonomous power, though perhaps they could help men if God so willed. So it appears, at any rate, in some parts of the Quran:

Say. Call upon those whom you assert [to be gods] apart from Allah. They do not have so much as the weight of a mote in the heavens nor on the earth. They have no partnership in either of them, nor does He depend on any of them for support. Intercession will avail nothing with Him except for him to whom He gives permission. (Quran 34:22-23)

Some verses of the Quran openly concede the existence of such gods, simply pointing to the fact that they are Allah's creatures (25:3) and that, rather than being Allah’s partners, they are His servants:

What, do they associate (with Allah) that which creates nothing, but are themselves created, and which have no power to help them, nor (even) to help themselves.... Those on whom they call other than Allah are [His] servants just as you are. Ifyou are speaking the truth, just call on them and let us hear them answer you. Do they have feet, so that they walk, or hands, so that they pick things up, or eyes, so that they see, or ears, so that they hear? Go, call on your "god-partners" and let them do their worst to me, without let-up. (Quran 7:191-195)

Finally, Allah's position vis-a-vis the other gods whose existence even the Quran seems to acknowledge is illuminated by one of the epithets applied to Him, together with a self-gloss, in Sura 112., itself a basic statement of Quranic monotheism: 69 Say: He is Allah: One; He is Allah: the samad. He is neither begotten, nor was begotten, And no one is equal to Him. (Quran 112)

Sacrifices

Like their Semitic and Arab fellows elsewhere in the Near East, the Arabs of the Hijaz used sacrifice as a primary way of forging and maintaining a relationship with the realm of the divine. "To every people," the Quran says, "did We appoint rites of sacrifice that they might celebrate the name of God over the sustenance He gave them from animals" (22:34). This is said with clear approval, but immediately preceding these verses is a considerably more obscure passage, though apparently on the same subject:

But if someone holds in esteem the (sacrificial) tokens (sha'air) of God, that esteem should come truly from piety of the heart. In them [the sacrificial animals?] you have benefits for an appointed term, but then their place (of sacrifice) is toward the Ancient House. (Quran 27:32-33)

Then follow more precise directions on the benediction and the consuming of the animal sacrifice, again reflecting on what seems to have been the current practice: For your benefit We have made the sacrificial camels one of the signs from God; there is much good for you in them. So pronounce the name of God over them as they line up (for sacrifice), and afterwards as they lie slain, eat of them and feed such as already have food and such as beg in humility. Thus have We made animals subject to you, that you might be grateful. (Quran 22:36)

The sacrifice of animals, which disappeared out of the Mecca Haram in Islamic times but continued to be practiced at Mina during the Hajj," was but one form of sacrifice known to the Arabs. The Arab authorities tell us of animals simply consecrated to the gods and kept within their sacred precincts without being sacrificed, and the Quran seems to refer to the practice of animal offerings as part of a repertoire of pagan ritual practices:

And was it not God who made the (custom of) a slit-ear she-camel, or a she-camel let loose for free pasture, or sacrifices for twin births, or stallion camels (freed from work)? (Quran 5:106)

Each devotee offered his own victim. Although animals sacrificed in the desert sometimes might be simply left behind, as they often were at Mina throughout Islamic times, in town the animal was usually cooked and eaten as part of a common meal, a practice that created problems for Muslims as it had earlier for Christians. Among the things forbidden to the believer by the Quran is "that which has been sacrificed upon a stone (nusub)" (5:4). Such stones (ansab) are described as "abominations" and the "work of Satan" (5:93). These are familiar objects indeed, already known from the story of Jacob's beryl in Genesis (35:14). Stones on which one poured out the blood of sacrifice were widely used among the ancient Arabs, not only as here in the vicinity of the Ka'ba, but even as tomb-stones and boundary markers for sacred enclosures. 71 With the coming of Islam, their use constituted a form of idolatry, and the believer might not share in the food.

Pilgrimage and Other Festivals

From our perspective, which is shaped by the Quran's own view, the best-known pagan ritual at Mecca was the pilgrimage. The Quran did not qualify it as pagan, of course-it was affirmed as a genuine remnant of Abrahamic practice-but beyond question it was performed, in one form or another, by both Meccans and visitors to their shrine city before Muhammad received the revelations that were to incorporate it into Islam. Only at a relatively late date, when the triumph of Islam was assured, were pagans prevented from making pilgrimage (Quran 9:17-18). "The months for the pilgrimage are matters of common knowledge," the Quran declares (2:197), as surely they were.

The pre-Islamic pilgrimage was not a single act but a complex of rituals joined in a manner, and for reasons, we cannot easily discern. The later Muslim tradition "harmonized" the Islamic version of the complex by identifying each of its elements with some incident in the Abraham legend, which was itself enriched by association with otherwise inexplicable practices in the Hajj ritual. The construction of the Ka'ba is described in the Quran as the work of Abraham and Ishmael (2:127), and the circumstantial evidence suggests that this may have been a common belief among the pre-Islamic Quraysh. Yet there is no evidence, Quranic or circumstantial, that such a claim was made by Muhammad or had been accepted by the pagan Quraysh for the various Hajj rituals. Their association with Abraham appears to have occurred well after the Hajj had been embraced as an acceptable and meritorious way for a Muslim to worship God (Quran 2:197; 3:97).

Absent the Abrahamic motif, the Hajj of Muhammad's Mecca disintegrates into an obscure series of acts centering not on Mecca but on the mountain called Arafat, eleven miles east of the city The Hajj, it has been maintained, originally had nothing to do with Mecca, as even the Islamic version of the ritual testifies: the climax of the Muslim Hajj was and is the "standing" at Arafat, followed by a procession to Mina and sacrifice there, after which the pilgrim was free to remove the ritual vestments." More, it was common knowledge that not the Quraysh but the Sufa, and later the Tamim, held the religious offices, the so-called "permission" (ijaza), at Arafat and Mina." And not only was Mecca not part of the original Hajj; there may have been no trading in the city in connection with its own rituals. Such, at any rate, one might conclude from the fact that the famous pilgrimage fairs-and Mecca is never numbered among them-are associated with Arafat and Mina and that the Quraysh seem to play no major role in them. 14 Thus the Meccan ritual was at some point joined to the Hajj, probably by Muhammad himself.

The Quran brings up the question of whether Muslims, who focused their religious orientation toward Mecca and were not accustomed to linking commerce with ritual, were permitted to indulge in trade, as did the Hajj habitués of Arafat and Mina. In this context the revelation preserved in Quran 2:198 was made public: "It is no fault for you if you seek the bounty of the Lord." There is little doubt that these verses refer to the pilgrimage season. Someone apparently had objected to mixing commerce and the pilgrimage ritual, a practice for which Muhammad then announced God's explicit permission. We obviously do not know every-thing behind the objection,15 but what does seem reasonably clear is that previously pilgrimage trading had been restricted to the fairs, of which Mecca apparently was not one.7' After the revelation of this verse at Medina, Mecca was sanctioned as a pilgrimage trading center, even though the Muslims could not take full advantage of the permission until the capture of Mecca shortly before Muhammad's death.77 If the Hajj was not Meccan, the Quraysh had their own holy days, including the spring festival called 'umra and celebrated in the month of Rajab .71 In Islamic times the Umra lost its seasonal aspect with the ban on intercalation, and some of its distinctive character its sacrifices, for example 72 disappeared in its combination with the Hajj." But it preserved its special, and peculiarly Meccan, identity well into Islamic times, as we shall see.

The Muslims later made a careful distinction between 'umra -a word whose exact literal meaning is unclear -and hajj or pilgrimage properly so called, but it may not always have been thus. On the model of the two Jewish spring and fall haggim of Passover and Sukkoth, to which both Arab festivals appear to be closely related, the Umra and (Muslims') Hajj were both originally hajj. It may well have been Muhammad himself who determined that the Arafat ritual was the "Great Hajj" and the Umra the "Lesser," a distinction nowhere apparent in pre-Islamic times.

The distinction between Umra and Hajj is already present in the Quran (2:197), but the latter ritual, which became an obligation for every Muslim, may be a composite of several different cult activities some at Mecca, some at shrines outside the city, woven, whether by Muhammad or by someone earlier, into a single liturgical act. The "running" between Safa and Marwa, for example, originally belonged to neither the Umra nor the Hajj, and some Muslims in fact protested its inclusion in either, objections that were presumably silenced by the revelation of Quran 2:158.

There is no evidence that Muhammad substantially altered any of the basic rituals of the Meccan pilgrimages, whereas he did modify the chaotic "overflowing" (ifada) from Arafat and the time of the departure from Muzdalifa for Mina." So we may assume that the donning of special clothing and the entering into a taboo state was practiced in pre-Islamic Mecca as it was elsewhere in the Semitic world. The ritual in the Haram had chiefly to do with a circumambulation of the Ka'ba, which in Islamic days included the "greeting of the Black Stone," a gesture of touching, pressing, or kissing with abundant precedents in pre-Islamic practice, though of a very different import, as we shall see. Outside the Haram, ritual required the devotee to run back and forth, another type of "circumambulation,"" between the two hills of Safa and Marwa, the sites of the well-known idols of Asaf and Na'ila in pre-Islamic days. This latter ritual ended with the offering of sacrifices at Marwa."

Pilgrimage Fairs

Sura 106 of the Quran, the one called "The Quraysh," played a critical role, perhaps the critical role, in the later Muslims' understanding of their ancestors at Mecca and, through them, on the modern interpretation of the entire Meccan enterprise before Islam.

For the covenants of security of the Quraysh, The covenants (covering) the journey of winter and of summer, Let them worship the Lord of this House, Who provides them with food against hunger and security against fear. (Quran 106) This is the currently standard translation/interpretation of the sura, which might be paraphrased as: "Because the Lord granted (or perhaps guaranteed) the treaties enjoyed by the Quraysh, treaties which have made possible their annual commercial journeys, let the Quraysh recognize this and worship the Lord of the Ka'ba, who has, through these treaties and their consequences, provided the Quraysh with both sustenance and security." This is intelligible in English, but the Arabic of the sura has posed serious linguistic and syntactical problems that have bothered commentators from the beginning. 84 And not everyone read the celebrated "two journeys" of Sura 106 as an expanded opportunity for trade. The commentator al-Razi (d. 1209) for one thought that the "journey of winter and of summer" referred to the travel of pilgrims to Mecca, the one referring to the Umra of the month Rajab and the other to the Hajj of the month Dhu al-Hijja. 85 If it was a guess, it may have been an inspired one. Muslim commentators, who lived in an era and a society without intercalation and so with-out seasonal festivals, would have had difficulty imagining the seasonal pilgrimages, as all such were in pre-Islamic days. Such pilgrimages would surely have been "eased" if they took place under the authority and protection of the now saintly Quraysh. Thus, on this reading of Sura 106, every year, twice a year during the sacred months, pilgrims were drawn to Holy Mecca on pilgrimage, and their fee of homage was the supply of provisions on which the Quraysh and the other Meccans lived. Trade enters nowhere in this equation, particularly not the long-distance trade read by some of the commentators into the second verse of the sura. Trade may have been a background issue, however, or rather the Quraysh’s participation in it. Some members of Muhammad's audience appear to have opposed it, or such seems to be the sense of the already cited Sura 2:198: "It is no fault for you if you seek the bounty of the Lord." Detailed prescriptions regarding the pilgrimage "in the well known months" immediately precede and follow that verse. Muslim historians had a good deal of information on the circumstances and places where the "Lord's bounty" was reaped by interested parties, namely, the holy-day fairs (mawasim). That trade should be tied to the pilgrimage was natural to most of the participants, save perhaps to the puritanical Hums, who, as we shall see, had a fierce and exclusive devotion to Mecca. Peoples who for reason of danger or distance did not normally associate came together under the protection of the truce of God to worship and, it seems clear, to trade.

Azraqi's is the most detailed sketch of the market fairs:

The Hajj was in the month of Dhu al-Hijja. People went out with their goods and they ended up in Ukaz on the day of the new moon of Dhu al-Qa'da. They stayed there twenty nights during which they set up in Ukaz their market of all colors and all goods in small houses. The leaders and foremen of each tribe oversaw the selling and buying among the tribes where they congregate in the middle of the market.

After twenty days they leave for Majanna, and they spend ten days in its market, and when they see the new moon of Dhu al-Hijja they leave for Dhu al-Majaz, where they spend eight days and nights in its markets. They leave Dhu al-Majaz on the "day of tawarih, " so called because they depart from Dhu al-Majaz for Urfa after they have taken water (for their camels) from Dhu al-Majaz. They do this because there is no drinking water in Urfa, nor in Muzda-lifa.

The "day of tawarih" was the last day of their markets. The people who were present at the markets of Ukaz and Majanna and Dhu al-Majaz were merchants, and those who wanted to trade, and even those who had nothing to sell and buy because they can It is not easy to make sense of this description, particularly in its relationship to the pilgrimage. Although the actual location of the markets is uncertain, all the places mentioned seem to be close to Mecca-though, significantly, not in Mecca-and to be connected to the Hajj." And the sequence seems carefully arranged, possibly by the Quraysh, so that no two occasions coincided: from the first to the twentieth of Dhu al-Qa'da was the fair of Ukaz; from the twenty-first to the twenty-ninth, that of Majanna; from the first to the eighth of Dhu al-Hijja, that of

Dhu alNfajaz; on the ninth and tenth the Hajj took place; and finally, from the eleventh to the thirteenth, the fair of Mina."

Pilgrims on the pre-Islamic Hajj thus traded at various locations in the vicinity of the Hajj sites and, it seems likely, at Mina and Arafat as well, before performing their rituals, a practice that did not extend, as we shall see, to Mecca. Thus the wealth of the pre-Islamic Quraysh had nothing to do, as it certainly did in the Islamic era, with trading with pilgrims at Mecca during the Hajj season. If Meccans traded, they did so elsewhere, at the fairs outside of Mecca-fairs they did not control"-or else as a function of the regional trading network set up as a result of arrangements with the bedouin and the Quraysh's own status as a holy tribe, a condition that had been formally institutionalized not long before Muhammad's birth by the confederation known as Hums.

The Hums

The Meccan historian Azraqi provides a succinct definition of the pre-Islamic religious sodality that the Muslims later remembered as Hums.

We are the people of the Haram. We do not leave the Haram. We are Hums, and the Quraysh become Hums and all who are born to the Quraysh. Humsis and the tribes that became Humsis with them were so called because they were strict fundamentalists in their religion, and so an ahmasi [sing.] Is a man who is religiously conservative." (Azraqi 1858: 115) Ibn Ishaq adds many more historical and ritualistic nuances to the portrait:

I do not know whether it was before or after the Year of the Elephant [traditionally, 570 C,E.] that the Quraysh invented the idea of Hums and put it into practice. They said, "We are the sons of Abraham, the people of the holy territory, the guardians of the temple and the citizens of Mecca. No other Arabs have rights like ours, or a position like ours. The Arabs recognize none as they recognize us, so do not attach the same importance to the outside country as you do to the sanctuary, for if you do, the Arabs will despise your taboo and will say 'They have given the same importance to the outside land as to the sacred territory."' So they [the Hums] gave up the halt at Arafat and the departure from it, though they recognized that these were institutions of the Hajj and the religion of Abraham. They considered that other Arabs should halt there and depart from the place, but they said, "We are the people of the sanctuary, so that it is not fitting that we should go out from the sacred territory and honor other places as we, the Hums, honor that, for the Hums are the people of the sanctuary." They then proceeded to deal in the same way with the Arabs who were born within and without the sacred territory. Kinana and Khuza'a joined them in this. (Ibn Ishaq 1955: 87) The Hums were, then, fellow tribesmen of the Quraysh, the Kinana, the Khuza'a, and the Amir ibn Sa'sa'a. They had embraced, or perhaps had even newly embraced, what is called "the religion of Abraham," which the members closely identified with the cult of the Ka'ba in Mecca, even to the exclusion of the other pilgrimage rituals, chiefly the Hajj, which was focused on places like Mina and Arafat." On this view, and we have no reason to doubt it, the original Hajj had nothing to do with the "religion of Abraham," and the Quraysh as Hums did not recognize the Hajj because some of its rituals took place outside the Haram. This passage from Ibn Ishaq seems to draw the Hums' definition of the Haram somewhat short of Arafat.

The Hums used to say, "Do not respect anything profane and do not go outside the sacred area during the Hajj," so they cut short the rites of pilgrimage and the halt at Arafat, it being in the profane area, and would not halt at it or go forth from it. They made their stopping place at the extreme end of the sacred territory at Namira at the open space of al-Ma'ziinan, stopping there the night of Arifat and sheltering by day in the trees of Namira and starting from it to Muzdalifa. When the sun turbaned the tops of the mountains, they set forth. They were called Hums because of the strictness of their religion. (Ibn Ishaq 1955: 89) These limited cult excursions outside of Mecca may have been by way of concession to to some of the bedouin members of the solidarity or to new comers who found it difficult to break old habits. Other reports stress the Hums' narrower definition of their sacred zone as the area immediately around the Ka'ba, as in this from Muqatil ibn Sulayman:

The Hums-they were Quraysh, Kinana, Khuza'a and Amir ibn Sa'sa'a-said: "Safa and the Marwa do not belong to the sacred sites of Allah. " In the Age of Barbarism there was on the Safa an idol named Na'ila and on the Marwa an idol named Asaf 91 They [the Hums] said: "It is improper for us to make a turning (tawaf) between them," and there-fore they did not make a turning between them. (Muqatil, Tafsir, ms. 1.25b9') If we are to believe this, the Hums attempted, perhaps not entirely successfully,93 to exclude even Safa and Marwa, within a stone's throw from the Ka'ba, from their own particular rites. Or perhaps not. Muslim commentators continuously sought to supply the historical background for the Quran's great number of verses without context. One such verse directly addresses Safa and Marwa and what appears to be a group of Meccans who hesitated to accept the cult there:

Safa and Marwa are among the indications of Allah. It is therefore no sin for him who is on pilgrimage to the House of God, or visiting it, to go round them. (Quran 2:158)

This is a classic example of a Quranic answer without the question. We, and Muqatil ibn Sulayman, must supply it: "Is it a sin to perform the tawaf around Safa and Marwa?" And its two possible implications: Is it or is it not permissible in your new religious system to continue the current practice of performing the "turning" between Safa and Marwa? Or, as a member of the Hums might ask: Must we discontinue our present "Abrahamic" practice and revert to the old pagan custom of running between Safa and Marwa Muqatil's report neatly supplies the context of the Quran's unasked question: Muhammad was breaking with the Hums' characteristic limitation of Allah's ritual to the Ka'ba alone. Confining cult rituals to the Haram of Mecca was only one aspect of Hums observance. There were also dietary and domestic taboos and a great deal of emphasis upon the clothes connected with the ritual:"

The Hums went on to introduce innovations for which they had no warrant. They thought it wrong to eat cheese made of sour milk or clarify butter while they were in a state of ritual taboo. They would not enter tents of camel-hair or seek shelter from the sun except in leather tents while they were in this state. They went further and refused to allow those outside the Haram to bring food in with them when they came on the great or little pilgrimage. Nor could they circumambulate the House except in the garment of the Hums. If they had no such garments they had to go round naked. If any man or woman felt scruples when they had no Hums garments, then they could go round in their ordinary clothes; but they had to throw them away afterwards so that neither they nor anyone else could make use of them. The Arabs called these clothes "the cast-off " They imposed all these restrictions on the Arabs, who accepted them and halted at Arafat, hastened from it, and circumambulated the House naked. The men at least went naked, while the women laid aside all their clothes except a shift wide open back and front. (Ibn Ishaq 1955: 87-88)

The Moon God

The Cult of the Moon-god was the most popular religion throughout ancient Mesopotamia. The Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Akkadians took the word Suen and transformed it into the word Sin as their favorite name for the Moon-god. In ancient Syria and Canna, the Moon-god Sin was usually represented by the moon in its crescent phase. At times the full moon in its crescent phase. At times the full moon was placed inside the crescent moon to emphasize all the phases of the moon. The sun-goddess was the wife of Sin and the stars were their daughters.

Mark Gabriel stated that before morning prayers Muhammad would have sex with several of his wives in various houses around the Kaba.

For example, Istar was a daughter of Sin. Sacrifices to the Moon-god are described in the Ras Shamra texts. In the Ugaritic texts, the Moon-god was sometimes called Kusuh. In Persia, as well as in Egypt, the Moon-god is depicted on wall murals and on the heads of statues. He was the Judge of men and gods. The Old Testament constantly rebuked the worship of the Moon-god (Deut. 4:19; 17:3;II Kings 21:3,5; 23:5; Jer. 8:2; 19:13; Zeph. 1:5). When Israel fell into idolatry, it was usually the cult of the Moon-god. As a matter of fact, everywhere in the ancient world, the symbol of the crescent moon can be found on seal impressions, steles, pottery, amulets, clay tablets, cylinders, weights, earrings, necklaces, wall murals, etc.

When the popularity of the Moon-god waned elsewhere, the Arabs remained true to their conviction that the Moon-god was the greatest ofall gods. While they worshipped 360 gods at the Kabah in Mecca was in fact built as a shrine for the Moon-god. This is what made it the most cacred site of Arabian paganism. The Moon-god was called Alilah, i.e. the god, which was shortened to Allah in pre-Islamic times. The pagan Arab s even used Allah in the names they gave to their children. For example, both Muhammad’s father and uncle had Allah as part of their names. The fact that they were given such names by their pagan parents proves that Allah was the title for the Moon-god even in Muhammad’s day. Why is Allah never defied in the Qur’an? Why did Muhammad assume that the pagan Arabs already knew who Allah was?

Muhammad was raised in the religion of the Moon-god Allah. Muhammad decided that Allah was not only the greatest god but the only god. Al-Kindi, one of the early Christian apologists against Islam, pointed out that Islam and its god Allah did not come from the Bible but from the paganism of the Sabeans. They did not worship the God of the Bible but the Moon-god and his daughters al-Uzza, al-Lat and Manat.

Is it any wonder then that the symbol of Islam is the crescent moon? That a crescent moon sits on top of their mosques and minarets? That a crescent moon is found on the flags of Islamic nations? That the Muslims fast during the month which begins and ends with the appearance of the crescent moon in the sky? The pagan Arabs worshipped the Moon-god Allah by praying toward Mecca several times a day; making pilgrimage to Mecca; running around the temple of the Moon-god called the Kabah; kissing the black stone; killing an animal in sacrifice to the Moon-god; throwing stones at the devil; fasting for the month which begins and ends with the crescent moon; givings alms to the poor, etc.

Correcting Muslim Misunderstandings

A servant's heart is the ability to see a person's need and then help them to satisfy it. When Jesus "saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd" (Matt. 9:36). This is the Muslim of today. They are like sheep without a shepherd, and if we are not moved with compassion to reach out to them, then we are out of touch with Christ, and out of touch with heaven. Jesus saw the spiritual needs of those He was called to serve. We need to be aware that the greatest need of the Muslim, and any non-Christian for that matter, is a relational one which only God can fill.

Jesus corrected her misunderstandings.

The woman asked the most natural question for a Samaritan. It revealed her ignorance of the nature of God and what He requires of her. Most Muslims have the same misunderstandings. We need to tell them the truth. We need to expose the differences and not simply try to find areas of agreement. Paul said, "that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough?" (I Cor. 5:6). And Jesus said, "Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?" "Then they understood that He did not say to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees" (Matt. 16:11-12). It doesn't take much poison to ruin the soup. Even though there may be lots of good wholesome vegetables in it, the poison will still kill us.

For years some missionaries have been telling us, "Don't say anything negative about Muhammad or the Qur'an." Paul was "pure from the blood of all Men" because as he put it, "I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God" (Acts 20:26-27). If the Galatian church was continuing to show deep and sacrificial love toward the Apostle Paul (4:14,15), how could he threaten them with such a horrible curse as that given in (1:6-9)? And why did Paul insist on telling them the truth, if it meant losing their warm friendship (4:16)?

John warns us "Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world...every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus (i.e. the Muslims who see Him as nothing more than one of 124,000 prophets) is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist," (I John 4:1-3).

Peter warns us, "But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. Many will follow their shameful ways (one billion Muslims) and will bring the truth into disrepute (they attack Scripture). In their greed these teachers will exploit you with stories they have made up (much of the Hadith and Qur'an). Their condemnation has long been hanging over them, and their destruction has not been sleeping." (II Pet. 2:1-3). THIS IS A PARTIAL LISTING OF SOME MISUNDERSTANDINGS MUSLIMS BELIEVE THAT:

1. All people are born Muslims, innocent, pure, and free. There was no original sin because Adam, being a prophet couldn't sin. Man is not sinful but imperfect and forgetful. Therefore he needs to constantly be reminded of the right path through the prophets and revelation.
2. God is not a person or a spirit for that would demean the exalted One.
3. The Devil was created from fire and angels from light.
4. Angels are inferior to human prophets, because they were commanded to prostrate themselves before Adam.

5. Every believer is attended by two recording angels, one of whom records his good actions, and the other his evil actions. These are kept in The Book of Deeds. In this book every spoken word and every action great or small is written down.

6. On the last day the body will be raised and united to its soul. One bone of the body will be preserved uncorrupted until the last day, at which time the rest of the body will grow from it. The last day will be preceded by three blasts of a trumpet. At the second blast all creatures in heaven and earth will die. At the last blast, forty years later, all will be raised again for judgment. This will be a general resurrection of men, angels, jinn, and animals.

When all are assembled for judgment the angels will keep them waiting for 40 years or up to 50,000 years depending on which commentary is read. After this God appears to judge them, and Muhammad intercedes for them after Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus have declined, feeling unqualified for such a great task. Each person will be examined from his own book of deeds. All the deeds or books will be weighed in a balance scale with one balance over paradise and the other over hell.

7. There are seven divisions of heaven, the highest called paradise, which is a garden with beautiful women, couches, and wine that does not intoxicate. God does not appear at all.
8. The Muslim hell as seven divisions. The Orthodox teaching is that all Muslims will go to hell. The degree and duration of punishment is dependent upon the seriousness of the sins committed. For Muslims who have committed no serious sins hell will be cool and pleasant. However, for us infidels who say God is plural, we will stay there forever, subjected to burning flames and icy cold.

9. The Muslims believe in the law of abrogation where later verses in the Qur'an cancel out earlier verses they contradict.
10. Muslims believe that during Ramadan the gates of Paradise are open and the gates of Hell closed, and that all who keep the Fast will be pardoned of all their past venial sins.
11. A pilgrimage to Mecca is required by every Muslim once in his life if he can afford it and is in good health. Among the many duties of the pilgrim are: to wash himself at the sacred Mosque, kiss the famous black stone, circle the Kaaba seven times, kissing the black stone each time he passes it, run between Mt. As Safa and Mt. Ak Marwa seven times repeating prayers on the top of each hill, and return to Mina where they cast seven stones at each of three pillars, the largest of which is called the Great Devil. According to Muhammad, "He who he makes the pilgrimage for God's sake and does not talk loosely nor act wickedly shall return as pure from sin as the day he was born."

12. Holy War is a duty for every male, free, adult Muslim who has the means to reach an army. This duty is on Muslims until the whole world is Islamized. The Holy War must be led by a Muslim leader or Imam, which means that since the Shiite Imam is invisible now, they cannot fight a holy war until he reappears. Muslims who die in fighting in a holy war are assured of going to Paradise and of having special privileges there.
13. The spirit known as Jibril would later give Muhammad many revelations, including the following — God has rejected and cursed the Jews and the Christians (Surah 2:89,105,213; 9:30); Yeshua is not God’s Son (Surah 4:171; 5:72-75; 19:88-93; cf. 1 John 2:18-23);

14. There is no Trinity (Surah 5:116-18); the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, has been deliberately distorted by Jews and Christians to the point where it is no longer the word of God (Surah 2:113,120,159; 4:46; 5:41; 57:27);
15. Yeshua never died on the cross (Surah 4:157); it is a ‘divine’ commandment to persecute Jews and Christians, to defeat them in battle and then to consign them either to slavery or to death (Surah 8:39; 9:5,29: 47:4).

Jesus was the friend of sinners. Are we not bound by his example to be friends with ones He died to save no matter how unreasonable they might seem to us? If Jesus would come so far would He not answer a sincere prayer of a Muslim who does not believe but is willing to ask the Lord to help his unbelief if Jesus really is the One we must come to for salvation? How far did Jesus have to come to reach out to the Samaritan women? He had to come from heaven. He had to reach down through sin, confusion, and unbelief. Yet He did this for her as an example of how we should be willing to go the mosque down the street or the Muslim country on the other side of the Atlantic.

Muslim Countries

Algeria

has been reeling from a war between GIA (Armed Islamic Group – radical Muslim terrorists) and its established government (a more secular Muslim military dictatorship) since 1992. Gruesome reports of entire villages having their throats slit, famous pop singers assassinated for singing Western influenced music, government instigated massacres of regions whose loyalties are suspect – these have left more than 70,000 murdered over the past 9 years. GIA cells are believed to have cooperated in Bin Laden’s September 11 attacks.

Sudan

is considered one of world terrorism’s main centers. Osama Bin Laden has a strong network in that country. According to the US Grand Jury indictment against Osama Bin Laden, the bombers of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania were trained and sent out from that country. The Islamic dictatorship ‘National Islamic Front’ ruling Sudan has been overseeing the massacre, enslavement, rape and murder of the Christian and animist inhabitants of Southern Sudan, forcibly converting survivors and prisoners to Islam. Years ago the NIF proclaimed a jihad against its ‘domestic enemy’, and since 1983 more than 1.9 million people have been murdered or have been caused to die as a result of the actions of the NIF in southern Sudan and the Nuba mountains.

Libya

is an Islamic dictatorship under Muammar al-Qaddafi. It has been one of the chief training centers for world terrorism, and has executed many attacks such as the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in March 1986 where US solders were murdered, as well as the terrorist bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. It has cooperated with Pakistan in the funding and development of an Islamic nuclear bomb, as well as developing chemical warfare abilities. Libya has been a main supporter of such terrorist groups as the Columbian M-19, Red Brigades, IRA, Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP, Arafat’s PLO etc. In the 1970’s Qaddafi awarded Yasir Arafat $5 million in recognition of his terror operation at the 1972 Munich Olympics which led to the massacre of Israeli athletes.

Egypt’s

President Sadat was assassinated by terrorists associated with Egyptian Islamic Jihad in October 1981. This group was later co-planner of the World Trade Center bombings in 1993 and seems to have been involved in the September 2001 attack as well. Its top leader was Ayman al-Zawahiri (one of the planners of Sadat’s assassination) who now functions as Osama Bin Laden’s top deputy for military operations. In the 1950s Egypt originally financed, trained and ran the first terrorist raids of the fedayin, and in 1964 helped establish the PLO as a terrorist organization. Egypt was also the first Islamic country to use poison gas against fellow Muslims in the North Yemen war of 1962-67. The Christian Copts of the Egyptian Nile Valley have been subject to decades of torture, murder, raping and destruction of property on a regular basis, with a blind eye being turned by Muslim authorities.

Syria

and Lebanon are also a world center of terrorism, as well as of opium and hashish cultivation. Between 1975-82 over 100,000 Lebanese were killed in the Lebanese civil war between the PLO, the Shiite and Sunni Muslims, the Druze and the Maronite Christians. In the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley the Hezbollah terrorist groups train and send out forces to attack Israel. According to the US State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counter-terrorism’s 2000 report, Syria oversees the following terrorist networks operating and training in Lebanon’s Bekaa: Hezbollah, Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida (Arabic, ‘The Base’) network, Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, George Habash’s PFLP-GC, Asbat al-Ansar, and several local Sunni extremist organizations. Other sources would add the names of the Japanese Red Army and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Syria not only controls Lebanon’s terrorist training camps, but allows Islamic terrorists to base out of Damascus. In February 1982 the Syrian city of Hama was subject to a 27 day siege. The Syrian Army under the command of Rifa’at Assad surrounded the city and trapped possibly 100 members of the Muslim Brotherhood who were opposed to President Assad’s regime. Artillery shelling of that city caused between 10,000 and 38,000 civilian casualties. Fifteen thousand people were untraceable as a result of the massacre. In September 2001 two PFLP terrorist were arrested crossing into Israel from Jordan, having been trained in Syria to blow up the two towers of Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Center.

Jordan

became a base of PLO terror operations against Israel between 1964 and 1970. When the PLO tried to overthrow King Hussein’s government in September 1970 to set up a terrorist dictatorship in its stead, the king responded by unleashing his Bedouin Legionnaires against the PLO. Approximately 3,500 were killed during those weeks in ‘Black September’, with many terrorists actually escaping to Israel to request asylum.

The Palestinian Authority

continues to engage in open terrorism. Of the 176 Jewish terror victims in the past year, 71 of them were committed by members of the PA security forces. Calls for a jihad against the Jewish people and for the destruction of the State of Israel are regularly broadcast on PA controlled radio and television. On September 11, the day of the World Trade Center bombing, the PA controlled newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida declared, “The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of the Lebanese bombers, who taught the US Marines a tough lesson. These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history. They are among the most honorable people among us.” The PA appointed Mufti Ekrima Sabri gave a sermon at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in late August 2001, in which he called on Allah “to destroy the United States and Great Britain, as well as those who help the two countries”. Saudi Arabia

continues to bankroll many terrorist groups, though the funding mostly comes through private individuals. Many terrorist organizations receive substantial chunks of their funding through the government-tolerated generosity of the Saudis. Jews are forbidden to set foot in Saudi Arabia, and anti-Jewish literature is readily available. Christian houses of worship are illegal, and Christians who are discovered practicing their faith are often arrested, tortured and sometimes beheaded.

Iran

is the center of Shi’ite Islam, and a world leader in exporting terrorism. It is a haven for many terrorist organizations, and funds Hezbollah’s and Islamic Jihad’s activities against Israel. Iran also supports and offers safe haven to Algeria’s GIA, Egypt’s Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, Hamas, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, PFLP-GC, Kurdistan Worker’s Party, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, etc. Iran’s government held US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days in 1979-80, and has been linked to many top terror attacks around the world. It has continually called for the destruction of the Great Satan (USA) and the Little Satan (Israel) through jihad. Hezbollah’s former leader is Imad Mugniyeh, the planner and mastermind of Hezbollah kidnappings, suicide bombings and many especially violent airplane hijackings. He is also the man who oversaw the torture to death of William Buckley (the CIA station chief in Beirut) and the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aries in 1992. At present he resides in Iran and in recent months has had significant contact with Bin Laden’s top leadership, including Ayman al-Zawahari. The September 11 hijackings show strikingly similar tradecraft to Mugniyeh’s methods.

Iraq

is perhaps the most well known country which both exports terrorism and murders its own citizens. In March 1988 Sadaam Hussein launched a chemical warfare attack against the town of Halabja in northern Iraq. Mustard gas and nerve gases were deployed. Between 5,000 and 12,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed immediately, and an estimated minimum of 40,000 were injured. His brutality against the Kurds, the Iranians and the Kuwaitis have earned him the Arabic title ‘the butcher of Baghdad’. Sadaam has stirred up riots across the Muslim world by his declarations that he is leading a jihad against the forces of the godless West and of Israel. His drive to obtain non-conventional weapons (atomic, biological and chemical) coupled with his cruel invasion of Kuwait, triggered the Gulf War of 1991. Sadaam was one of the few world leaders who publicly applauded the recent attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.

Afghanistan

’s non-Arab country is ruled by the Islamic Taliban dictatorship. It is a center for training some of the most radical and violent Islamic terrorists, and the center of Bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida network. The cruelty of this Islamic regime against its own people is internationally known and documented. Eight Christians working for the humanitarian aid organization “Shelter” are facing the death penalty for the alleged crime of sharing their faith with Afghanis. Pakistan

is a non-Arab Muslim country. Christians accused of sharing their faith in Pakistan have been jailed, tortured and lynched. Osama Bin Laden has many contacts with Pakistan’s intelligence community and has received active support from many sources in Pakistan. Over 30,000 Pakistanis fought as jihad warriors against Russian forces in Afghanistan. Recent violent anti-American riots and calls for jihad against the West show the volatile nature of many Pakistani Muslims. Recently President Musharraf publicly accused Hindus and Jews of plotting against Pakistan. This was partially done in an effort to divert Muslim anger away from Pakistan’s leaders, who are cooperating with America against fellow Muslims in Afghanistan and the mujahid Bin Laden.

Indonesia

, a non-Arab Muslim country, has recently seen horrendous Muslim instigated riots against Indonesian and immigrant Chinese Christians. A campaign of targeted rapes, murders and church burnings throughout Indonesia has garnered world media attention. Islamic Terms

1. Adhan - The call to prayer.
2. Ahmad - Another name for Muhammad.
3. Allah - The Arabic word for "god." It is often used as a name for God in Islam.
4. Badr - The place of the first significant battle between and the pagans of the Quraish. It is located in Saudi Arabia.
5. Caliph - A Muslim ruler.
6. Dajjal - Antichrist.
7. Dawah - The proliferation of Islamic teachings through word and deed.
8. Din - Obedience to the revelation of Allah's Qur'an (Koran). It involves total submission.

9. Fatwa - Legal verdict given based on the Qur'an (Koran) and the Sunnah which are the recorded sayings and deeds of Muhammad.
10. Fiqh - Religious law.
11. Hadith - The sayings and deeds of the prophet Muhammad recorded by his followers.

Considered authoritative and perfect . A saying is called a Sunnah.

12. Hajar - The Black Stone set into the corner of the Ka'aba in Mecca. Tradition states it fell from heaven.
13. Hajj - The pilgrimage to Mecca which takes place in the last month of the Islamic calendar. One of the five pillars of Islam.
14. Hawijah - The sixth level of hell which is the place for Christians. Hegirah - Muhammad's immigration to Medina.

It begins the Muslim calendar .

15. Hijrah - Moving from a land where a Muslim cannot practice his faith to a land where he can.

16. Ibadah - All the words and deeds with which Allah is pleased. These deeds could be prayer and charity.
17. Iblis - Satan, a fallen Jinn.
18. Iman - The political head of an Islamic state.
19. Injil - The inspired sayings of Jesus. The message of Jesus.
20. Islam - Submission, the religion of all the prophets of Allah culminating in Muhammad.
21. Jannah - The heavenly garden, Paradise. The place of the faithful in the afterlife.
22. Jihad - Striving. Fighting against one's own sinful self. Also, a physical fight for the truth of Islam, not allowing anyone to steal the ability to worship. It also can mean "holy war."

23. Jinn - Supernatural, invisible beings race of beings, below angels.

They were made from fire and are capable of looking like humans or animals.

Some may dwell in rocks, trees, etc, and may possess black dogs, and black cats.

There are good and bad Jinn and all will be judged on Judgment Day.

24. Ka’ba - A cube shaped building in Mecca containing a stone laid there by Abraham and Ishmael. All Muslims face this cube when praying.
25. Qur’an - The holy book of Islam given to Muhammad by Allah through the Archangel Gabriel. Koran literally means "the recital." It is the final revelation of Allah given to the prophet Muhammad. It has 114 surahs, or chapters.
26. Kufr - Disbelief
27. Khutbah - A sermon given in a Mosque, usually on Friday.
28. Maksiat - Sinful act A center for Muslim activity.

It is like a local mosque.

29. Mecca - The Holy City of Islam. It is the birthplace of Muhammad.
30. Medina - The city, then called Yathrib, that Muhammad fled to after announcing Islam.
31. Mosque - A Muslim house of worship.
32. Muhajir - Immigrant, one who leaves his home town to join a Muslim community.
33. Muhammad - the final messenger/prophet of God whose message abrogated all previous revelations. He received the Koran through the angel Gabriel over a 23 year period.
34. Muhammad ibn Abd Allah - the full name of Muhammad.

35. Muslim - Someone who holds to the religion of Islam.
36. Nas - The multitude of people who are not dedicated to Allah and sway to and fro to various teachings.
37. Nasara - A word used in the Koran to designate those who are Christians.
38. P.B.U.H. - A shortened designation for "Peace be upon him" which is placed in writing or said after the word "Muhammad" is used.
39. Paradise - Another word for heaven. A garden (79:41) of bliss and fruit (69:21-24), has rivers (3:198), with maidens pure and holy (4:57), and carpets and cushions, (88:8-16). It is the hope of all Muslims.

40. Qadar - Preordainment is the teaching that all things, good and bad, are preordained to occur.

41. Qatl – Murder
42. Qibla - The direction which Muslims turn for daily prayers, towards Mecca.
43. Quraish - An ancient Arab tribe to which Muhammad once belonged.
44. Rakat (rak'ah) - One complete cycle of sacred words and gestures during the ritual prayer.
45. Ramadhan - The ninth month of the Islamic calendar which is the month of the fast.
46. Salat - Prayers
47. Sawm – Fasting
48. Shi'ites - A sect of Islam that teaches that leaders should be political rulers.
49. Shirk - Associating another god with Allah.

Associating anything with Allah that is not true and revealed in the Koran.

50. Sirq - Theft
51. Sufi - A sect of Islam. It is very mystical and teaches strong self denial with the hope of union with God.
52. Sunnah - The life, practices, and sayings of Muhammad recorded as examples of perfect conduct in society, religion, action, etc.

They contain the Hadith.

53. Sunnis - One of the sects of Islam
54. Surah - A chapter of the Koran.
55. Taghut - Everything that is worshipped or followed other than Allah.
56. Taiyib - Pure, clean, wholesome.
57. Taqwah - Proper fear and veneration of Allah.

A divine spark that enables the person to understand God.

58. Tauhid - Monotheism in Islam is the teaching that there is only one God who alone is worthy of worship.
59. Tauhid-ar-Rububiyah - Declaring that God is one, the sovereign who performs all his will.
60. Tauhid-al-Uluhiyah - Declaring that God is the only one worthy of worship.
61. Ummah - A religious community, usually referring to an Islamic one.
62. Umrah - A Minor form of pilgrimage to Mecca.
63. Wa Alaikum Assalam - The Arabic way of saying "peace be upon him."
64. Zaboor - The Psalms

65. Zakat - The third pillar of Islam. Alms giving, charity that is given to the poor.
66. Zinah - Fornication and adultery.

Chronology of Islam

Notice how closely Islam's inception is associated with war. From 623 to 777, a
span of 154 years, there are 83 military conflicts involving the Muslims...and that
is just what I have recorded here. Is Islam a religion of peace? Muslims tell me it
is. But....
570 - Birth of Muhammad in Mecca into the tribe of Quraish.
577 - Muhammad's mother dies
580 - Death of Abdul Muttalib, Muhammad's grandfather.
583 - First journey to Syria with a trading Caravan
595 - Muhammad marries Khadijah a rich widow several years older than him.

595 - Second journey to Syra
598 - His son, Qasim, is born
600 - His daughter, Zainab, is born
603 - His daughter, Um-e-Kalthum, is born
604 - His daughter, Ruqayya, is born
605 - Placement of Black Stone in Ka'aba.
605 - His daughter, Fatima, is born
610 - Mohammed, in a cave on Mt. Hira, hears the angel Gabriel tell him that
Allah is the only true God.

613 - Muhammad's first public preaching of Islam at Mt. Hira. Gets few converts.
615 - Muslims persecuted by the Quraish.
619 - Marries Sau'da and Aisha
620 - Institution of five daily prayers
622 - Muhammad immigrates from Mecca to Medina, which was then called

Yathrib, gets more converts.
623 - Battle of Waddan
623 - Battle of
Safwan

623 - Battle of Dul-'Ashir
624 - Muhammad and converts begin raids on caravans to fund the
movement.

624 - Zakat becomes mandatory
624 - Battle of
Badr

624 - Battle of Bani Salim

624 - Battle of Eid-ul-Fitr and Zakat-ul- Fitr

624 - Battle of Bani Qainuqa'

624 - Battle of Sawiq

624 - Battle of Ghatfan

624 - Battle of Bahran 625 - Battle of Uhud. 70 Muslims are killed.

625 - Battle of Humra-ul- Asad

625 - Battle of Banu Nudair

625 - Battle of Dhatur-Riqa
626 - Battle of Badru-
Ukhra

626 - Battle of Dumatul- Jandal

626 - Battle of Banu Mustalaq Nikah
627 - Battle of the Trench
627 - Battle of
Ahzab

Battle of Bani Quraiza

627 - Battle of Bani Lahyan

627 - Battle of Ghaiba

627 - Battle of Khaibar
628 - Muhammad signs treaty with
Quraish.

630 - Muhammad conquers Mecca.

630 - Battle of Hunsin.

630 - Battle of Tabuk 632 - Muhammad dies.

632 - Abu-Bakr, Muhammad's father-in-law, along with Umar, begin a military

move to enforce Islam in Arabia.
633 - Battle at Oman
633 - Battle at
Hadramaut.

633 - Battle of Kazima

633 - Battle of Walaja
633 - Battle of Ulleis
633 - Battle of Anbar
634 - Battle of
Basra,

634 - Battle of Damascus
634 - Battle of
Ajnadin.

634 - Death of Hadrat Abu Bakr. Hadrat Umar Farooq becomes the Caliph.

634 - Battle of Namaraq
634 - Battle of Saqatia.
635 - Battle of
Bridge.

635 - Battle of Buwaib.

635 - Conquest of Damascus.

635 - Battle of Fahl.
636 - Battle of
Yermuk.

636 - Battle of Qadsiyia.

636 - Conquest of Madain.
637 - Battle of Jalula.
638 - Battle of
Yarmouk.

638 - The Muslims defeat the Romans and enter Jerusalem
638 - Conquest of Jazirah.
639 - Conquest of Khuizistan and movement into Egypt.
641 - Battle of Nihawand
642 - Battle of Rayy in Persia
643 - Conquest of Azarbaijan
644 - Conquest of Fars
644 - Conquest of
Kharan.

644 - Umar is murdered. Othman becomes the Caliph.
647 - Conquest of the island of Cypress
644 - Uman dies and is succeeded by Caliph Uthman.
648 - Campaign against the Byzantines.
651 - Naval battle against the Byzantines.
654 - Islam spreads into North Africa
656 - Uthman is murdered. Ali become Caliph.
658 - Battle of Nahrawan.
659 - Conquest of Egypt
661 - Ali is murdered.
662 - Egypt falls to Islam rule.
666 - Sicily is attacked by Muslims
677 - Siege of Constantinople
687 - Battle of Kufa
691 - Battle of Deir ul Jaliq
700 - Sufism takes root as a sect of Islam
700 - Military campaigns in North Africa
702 - Battle of Deir ul Jamira
711 - Muslims invade Gibraltar
711 - Conquest of Spain
713 - Conquest of Multan
716 - Invasion of Constantinople
732 - Battle of Tours in France.
740 - Battle of the Nobles.
741 - Battle of Bagdoura in North Africa
744 - Battle of Ain al Jurr.
746 - Battle of Rupar Thutha
748 - Battle of Rayy.
749 - Battle of lsfahan
749 - Battle of Nihawand
750 - Battle of Zab
772 - Battle of Janbi in North Africa
777 - Battle of Saragossa in Spain
Divisions within Islam

Because of Islam's great growth geographically in the first two centuries of its inception, there needed to be a larger set of Islamic laws capable of handling the different needs of Muslims throughout the Empire.

The Qur'an and the Hadith were not detailed enough to provide all the answers. Therefore, in the 8th century A.D., there arose a school of legal experts who interpreted and applied Islamic principles to different situations throughout the Empire. However, different scholars disagreed with these experts in various areas.

This led to a variety of legal schools of thought within Islam .

These different schools became different sects within Islam. The largest of the sects is the Sunni which comprises about 90% of all Muslims. The next two largest are the Shi'i and Sufi. After these, there are numerous splinter groups which are often named after the individual scholars who began them: Hanifa, after Abu Hanifa; Maliki, after Malik ibn Anas; Shafi'i, after Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i; Zaydi, after Zayd ibn Ali; the Nusayri, Ismaili, Murji'ah, etc. Sunni Muslims Sunni Muslims

These are followers of the Hanifa, Shafi, Hanibal and Malik schools. They constitute a 90% majority of the believers, and are considered to be main stream traditionalists. Because they are comfortable pursuing their faith within secular societies, they have been able to adapt to a variety of national cultures, while following their three sources of law: the Qur'an, Hadith and consensus of Muslims.

The Sunni emphasize the power and sovereignty of Allah and his right to do whatever he wants with his creation.

Strict determinism is taught.

Its rulership is through the Caliphate, the office of Muslim ruler who is considered the successor to Muhammad.

This successor is not through hereditary lineage .

The Shi’ites

The Shi'ites (also known as the Ja'firi school) split with the Sunni over the issue of the successor to Muhammad. This split occurred after the assassination of the fourth caliph in 661. Shi'ites believe that the successor to Muhammad should have been Ali, his son in law, and that subsequent successors should have been through his lineage through his wife Fatima.

Shi'ism is broken into three main sects: the Twelve-Imam; Persia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Syria), the Zaydis (Yemen), and the Ismailis (India, Iran, Syria, and East Africa). Each group, of course, has differences of doctrine.

"Shi'ite theology includes a doctrine known as the five supports:

these are Divine Unity (tawhid), prophecy (nubuwwah), resurrection of the soul and body at the Judgment (ma'ad), the Imamate1 (imamah), and justice ('adl).

The first three are found in Sunni Islam, albeit with some differences of emphasis; the Imamate, however , is the essence of Shi'ism, and the last, justice, is an inheritance from the Mu'tazilites, or rationalists, whose system is in many ways perpetuated in Shi'ite theology..."1 The Imamate, from the word "Imam", in the Shi'ite traditions is the political and religious leader of the Shi'ite sect. This person possess great power and influence. According to Shi'ite doctrine, the Imam must be a biological successor of Ali. The Imam is also sinless and infallible on all matters of Islamic doctrine and will intercede for Muslims in the afterlife. The Shi'i and the Sunni differ in some interpretations of the Qur'an and Hadith and even have a different canon of Hadith and the Sunni.

The Sufis

The Sufi are a mystical tradition where the followers seek inner mystical knowledge of God. This sect "officially" developed around the 10th century and has since fragmented into different orders:

Ahmadiyya, Qadariyya, Tijaniyya, etc. Of course, the Sufi believe their roots can be traced back to the inception of Islam in the early 7th century.

The Sufi mystic must follow a path of deprivation and meditation. There are various forms of abstinence and poverty.

Worldly things are renounced and a complete trust in God's will is taught.

The goal is to attain to a higher knowledge and experience of Allah.

The mystical focus meant that the Qur'an could be interpreted in different ways and so Sufism taught that the Qur'an had mystical meanings hidden within its pages.

Out of this mysticism a type of pantheism developed among some Sufi believers. Pantheism is the teaching that God and the universe are one.

Of course, the orthodox Muslims, called the Sunni, reject this idea since they claim that Allah is the creator of the universe and distinct from it.

In part, Sufism arose as a reaction to the growing Islamic materialism that had developed in the Empire at that time. Islam had achieved great power and geographical scope and with it, the material gain was great.

The Folk Muslim

Bill Musk has probably
the best work done on
Folk Islam.

Philistine by Ramon Bennet An extremely insightful book on the brutality, psychology, and history of the greatest threat to civilization ever known. Written by a Christian Jew. A must read for anyone concerned with the problem of Islam.

American Jihad by Steven Emerson

Unholy War by Randall Price

Islam – Religion of Peace?

1. The Qur'an tells muslims to kill and go to war to fight for Islam:

Quran, chapters (Surahs) 9:5; 2:191; 2:193; 3:118; 4:75,76; 5:33, 8:12; 8:65; 9:73,123; 33:60-62.

2. Fight for Allah: "And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers, (Quran 2:191).
3. Muslims are to battle for Allah: "Those who believe do battle for the cause of Allah; and those who disbelieve do battle for the cause of idols. So fight the minions of the devil. Lo! The devil's strategy is ever weak," (Quran 4:76).

4. Kill those against Islam: "The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter," (Quran 5:33). `
5. Beheading: "When thy Lord inspired the angels, (saying): I am with you. So make those who believe stand firm. I will throw fear into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Then smite the necks and smite of them each finger. That is because they opposed Allah and His messenger. Whoso opposeth Allah and His messenger, (for him) lo! Allah is severe in punishment," (Quran 8:12).

6. Allah urges war: "O Prophet! urge the believers to war; if there are twenty patient ones of you they shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred of you they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve, because they are a people who do not understand," (Quran 8:65).
7. Slay non-muslims: "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful," (Quran 9:5).

8. Allah urges war: "O Prophet! Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the destination," (Quran 9:73).
9. Allah urges war: "O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil)," (Quran 9:123).
10. Allah urges killing: "...the hypocrites and those in whose hearts is a disease and the agitators in the city do not desist... Cursed: wherever they are found they shall be seized and murdered, a (horrible) murdering. (Such has been) the course of Allah with respect to those who have gone before; and you shall not find any change in the course of Allah, (Quran 33:60-62).

11. Beheading: "Now when ye meet in battle those who disbelieve, then it is smiting of the necks until, when ye have routed them, then making fast of bonds; and afterward either grace or ransom till the war lay down its burdens..." (Quran 47:4).

12. Allah loves those who fight for him. "Truly Allah loves those who fight in His Cause in battle array, as if they were a solid cemented structure," (Quran 61:4).

The Structure of the Qur’an

The Scottish scholar Thomas Carlyle once said: “it is a toilsome reading as I ever undertook a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite. Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.”

The German scholar Salomon Reinach has stated: “From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and the millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it.”

The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam comments: The Koran was collected from the chance surfaces on which it had been inscribed: “from pieces of papyrus, flat stones, palm leaves, shoulder blades and ribs of animals, pieces of leather, wooden boards, and the hearts of men.”

This created difficulties. Some of the tree bark crumbled or broke and some of the stones were lost. Ali Dashti notes that animals at times ate the palm leaves or mats on which the Suras had been recorded. Some of those who were the only ones who remembered certain Suras died in battle before they had the opportunity to commit in writing what they had heard.

Endless Repetition: One frequently encounters the same stories over and over again in the Qur’an.

No Beginning or End: There is no logical connection from one Sura to the next because of its disordered condition. For example, one Sura will deal with some pedestrian matter such as Allah wanting Muhammad’s wives to stop arguing and bickering in his presence while the next Sura attacks the idols of the Arabians. Not Perfect Arabic: Ali Dashti comments: “The Qur’an contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal

Mark Gabriel was a former professor at Al- Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt and department head of Islam Culture and Religion. His insights into the true nature of Islam are quite valiable.

Serge Trifkovic has a powerful guide on the history, theology and impact Islam has and will have on the world. meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of gender and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passages are often remote from the subjects.”

Many Variant Readings. Arthur Jeffery has demonstrated in his book, Material for the History of the Text of the Qur’an, that there are 90 pages of variant readings on the text.

Uthman’s Text:

Why did he have to standardize a common text if a standard text was already in existence?

 Why did he try to destroy all the other manuscripts if there were no other conflicting manuscripts?

 Why did hw have to use the threat of death to force people to accept his text if everyone had the same text?

Why did many people reject his text in favor of their own texts?

The Fingerprints of Muhammad

: Since Muslims claim that eh Qur’an was “handed down” from heaven, and that Muhammad cannot be viewed as its human author, it is interesting to point out that, according to the Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, the Arabic of the Qur’an is in the dialect and vocabulary of someone who was a member of the Quraysh tribe living in the city of Mecca.

Bucaille’s Book

: Maurice Bucaille’s book, The Bible, the Qur’an and Science, claims that the Bible is corrupt and contradictory, but that any criticism of the Qur’an is rude, offensive and racist.

By criticizing the Bible it doesn’t mean that the Qur’an and Hadith are correct.

The Qur’an and Hadith both uphold the Bible as the inspired Word of God and frequently appeal to it as the authority for what Muhammad taught and did. Thus if the Bible is brought down, then the Qur’an and Hadith will fall as well.

Circular Reasoning when it comes to the Qur’an. The Qur’an is true, therefore Muhammad is a prophet of God. Whys is this true? Because the Qur’an says so. But why is the Qur’an true? The Qur’an is without error.

The Bible vs. the Qur’an

: In Suras 2-13, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 34, 35, 39-48, 53, 54, 61, 62, 66, 74, 80, 87, 98, etc. Muhammad would appeal the Old and New Testament Scriptures as the basis and standard by which his teachings should be judged.

Free from error

: Since the Qur’an claims to be free from all error as proff of its inspiration in Sura 85:21,22, the presence of just one error in the Qur’an is enough to cast serious doubt on that claim.

Qur’an must agree with the older revelation

: If the Muslim rejects the Bible, he must also reject the Qur’an because it appeals to the Bible as God’s Word. Days of Creation: Sura 41 has 8 days, Suras 7:51 and 10:3 says there were 6 days of creation.

Noah, the Flood, and his Sons

: the Qur’an in Sura 11:32-48 says that one of the sons refused to go into the ark and was drowned in the flood. Sura 11:44 claims that the Ark came to rest on the top of Mount Judi while the Bible says Mount Ararat.

The Qur’an says that Abraham’s father’s name was Azar (Sura 6:74)

The Qur’an says that Abraham lived and worshiped in the valley of Mecca not in Hebron (Sura 14:37).

It was his son Isaac that he went to sacrifice and not Ishmael as the Qur’an says (Sura 37:100-112).

He had eight sons and not just two as the Qur’an says.

He did not build the Kabah, even though the Qur’an says so in Sura 2:125-127).
He was not thrown into a fire by Nimrod as the Qur’an claims in Suras 21:68,69
and 9:69).
Nimrod lived many centuries before Abraham.
Mistakes About Moses

The Encyclopedia Britannica states: “The deviations from the biblical narratives are very marked, and can in most cases be traced back to the legendary anecdotes of the Jewish Haggada and the Apocryphal Gospels. Much has been written concerning the sources from which Mohammed derived this information; there is no evidence that he was able to read, and his dependence on oral communication may explain some of his misconceptions e.g., the confusion of Haman, the minister of Ahasuerus, with the minister of Pharoah (xl,38), and the identification of Miriam, the sister of Moses, with Mary (Miryam), the mother of Jesus.” The Qur’an states that is was Pharoah’s wife who adopted Moses as the not Pharoah’s daughter (Exodus 2:5 vs. Sura 28:8,9).

Noah’s flood did not take place in Moses’ day (Sura 7:136).

The Qur’an says that Haman lived in Egypt during the time of Moses and worked for Pharoah building the tower of babel (Suras 27:4-6; 28:38; 29:39; 40:23,24,36,37). But Haman actually lived in Persia and was in the service of King Ahasuerus.

Crucifixion was not used in the time of Pharoah although the Qur’an says so in
Sura 7:124).
Mistakes About Mary
Her father’s name was not Imram (Sura 66:12).

She did not give birth to Jesus under a palm tree but in a stable (Sura 19:22 vs. Luke 2:1-20).

Muhammad confused the mother of Jesus with the Mary who was the sister of Moses and Aaron (Sura 19:28).

Muhammad clearly made up fraudulent speeches and miracles for her in Sura 19:23-26).

Zacharias could not speak the entire time until his son was born, not just for three days as the Qur’an claims (Sura 19:10 vs. Luke 1:20).

Secular History Mistakes

Sura 105 claims that the elephant army of Abrah was defeated by birds dropping stones of baked clay upon them. According to the historical record, Abrah’s army withdrew their attack on Mecca after smallpox broke out among the troops.

The Kabah was not built by Adam and then rebuilt by Abraham. It was built by pagans to worship a black rock which fell out of the sky. Abraham never lived at Mecca.

In Sura 20:87,95 we are told that the Jews made the golden calf in the wilderness at the suggestion of “the Samaritan.”

Alexander the Great (Zul-qarnain) was a Muslim who worshipped Allah and lived to an old age (Sura 18:89-98).

Arabian Sources

The story of the she-camel who leapt out of a rock and became a prohet was known long before Muhammad (Suras 7:73-77, 85; 91:14; 54:29).

The story of an entire village of people who were turned into apes because they broke the sabbath by fishing was a popular legend in Muhammad’s day (Suras 2:65; 7:163-166).

The gushing 12 springs story found in Sura 2:60 comes from pre-Islamic legends. The Seven men and their animals who slept for 309 years in a cave and then woke up perfectly fine (Sura 18:9-26) is found in Greek and Christian fables as well as Arabian lore.

The fable of the pieces of four dead, cut-up birds getting up and flying was well known in Muhammad’s time (Sura 2:260).

Jewish Sources
The source of Sura 87:19 is the Testament of Abraham
The source of Sura 27:17-44 is the Second Targum of Ester.

The tale that God mad a man “die for a hundred years” with no ill effects on his food, drink, or donkey was a Jewish fabel (Sura 2:259).

The idea that Moses was resurrected and other material came from the Jewish Talmud (Sura 2:55, 56, 67).

The story in Sura 5:30:31 can also be found in pre-Islamic works from Pirke Rabbi Eleazer, the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziah and the Targum of Jerusalem. The tale of Abraham being delivered from Nimrod’s fire came from the Midrash Rabbah (Suras 21:51-71; 29:16,17; 37:97,98).

The non-biblical visit of the Queen of Sheba (Saba) in Sura 27:20-44 came from the Second Targum of the Book of Ester.

The source of Sura 2:102 is from the Midrash Yalkut chapter 44.

The story found in Sura 7:171 of God lifting up Mount Sinai and holding it over the head of the Jews as a threat to squash them if they rejected the law came from the Jewish book Abodah Sarah.

The story of the making of the golden calf in the wilderness, in which the image jumped out of the fire fully formed and actually mooed (Suras 7:148; 20:88), came from Pirke Rabbi Eleazer.

The seven heavens and hell described in the Qur’an came from the Zohar and the Hagigah.

Muhammad utilized the Testament of Abraham to teach that a scale or balance will be used on the day of judgment to weigh good and bad deeds in order to determine whether one goes to heaven or hell (Suras 42:17; 101:6-9).

Heretical Christian Sources

Suras 3:49 and 100:110, the baby Jesus speaks from the cradle. Later on, the Qur’an has Jesus making birds come alive. The Bible tells us that the first miracle Jesus did was at the wedding at Cana (John 2:11).

The Encyclopedia Britannica comments: “The gospel was known to Muhammad
chiefly through apocryphal and heretical sources.
Sabean Sources
Muhammad adopted such pagan rituals as:
Worshipping at the Kabah
Praying five times a day toward Mecca. Muhammad chose five of the
same times the Sabeans prayed.
Fasting for part of a day for an entire month.
The Hajj Pilgrimage.
Eastern Religious Sources
Many of the stories came from Zoroastrianism and Hinduism
The story of a flying trip through the through the 7 heavens
The houries of paradise
Azazil and other spirits coming up from hades.
The “light” of Muhammad
The bridge of Sirat
The Paradise with its wine, women, and song (from the Persians).
The king of death
The peacock story
Arab Racism

According to the literal Arabic translation of Sura 3:106,107, on Judgment Day, only people with white faces will be saved. People with black faces will be damned. As Victor And Deborah Khalil point out in their article on Islam: “American blacks have been widely wooed by Islam, but through misinformation. They hear, “Christianity is the white man’s religion.” They are told that Allah and Mohammed are black. In reality, Muslims in the Middle East still regard blacks as slaves. It would be worse than blasphemy for them to believe that either Allah or Muhammad were black.”

Jihad

The third factor deals with how Islam has fared in history. Islam has undergone political and theological changes since its inception. At Islam’s birth, Muhammad defined jihad as holy war, and for at least a century that is how Islam’s leaders understood the call. Islam spread from Mecca to Mesopotamia, from Persia to the Pyrenees, from India to Israel – all through wars of conquest. At one point in history Islam had nearly conquered the known world at the point of a scimitar. But eventually Islamic forces were stopped. In France Charles Martel broke the wave of Muslim conquest at the Battle of Poitiers in 732. Alfonso VIII of Castile broke the Almohad (Moorish) hold on Spain in the Battle of Las Navos de Tolosa in 1212, leading to the emigration of one million Moors back to Morocco. The Byzantine kings kept up a barrier against the Islamic onslaught from the 600’s until 1453, when their city of Constantinople was overrun by the Turks. Three days of murder, rape and robbery were permitted to the Islamic jihad victors. Austria and Hungary held firm against the green banner of Islam, preventing them from battering down the very gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1566. Finally in 1683 Islam’s throttling grasp on the nations of Europe began to be broken, with the defeat of the Ottoman forces of Kara Mustafa by John III of Poland at the Battle of Vienna. Over one thousand years of Islamic jihad conquest and rule was now beginning to be reversed.

At the dawn of Islam in the seventh century AD, when Islam’s Bedouin armies had been sweeping across the known world and conquering at the point of the sword, Muhammad’s teachings on jihad were not disputed by Muslims. They were incorporated into the Koran and the Hadith, and formed a bedrock of Islamic teaching and practice. But when the Muslim momentum of conquest began to be blunted, the theology of jihad began to metamorphose. Temporary treaties were allowed with the enemy, in order to allow Islamic forces time to consolidate forces and then to attack again.

Occasionally the nearly slave status granted to Jews and Christians (the dhimmi status granted to Dar al-Kitab, the ‘people of the Book’) was relaxed because Islam was in need of their professional services. In certain cases pagans were granted improved conditions for the same reasons.

Islamic jurists began to develop new theological terms. At first the world was to be divided into two sectors – Dar al-Islam (the zone or abode of Islam, where Islamic law is rigorously carried out) and Dar al-Harb (the zone of the sword/warfare, where unbelievers lived who needed to be conquered and converted or slain).

This view of the world implied that perpetual warfare would exist between Muslims and non-Muslims, until Islam would absorb or conquer Dar al-Harb. Other jurists would later suggest a third possibility (after Islamic military advances were stalled and cease-fire treaties were signed) – Dar al-Sulh (the zone of peace treaty) or Dar al-Ahd (the zone of covenant). Non-stop war would not have to be immediately waged. Treaties afforded Muslim governments time to rearm and then renew jihad at a later and more auspicious date.

As corruption began to predominate in many Islamic leaders, and as succession wars and murderous rivalries began to characterize Muslim rulers, a new wave of zealous Islamic preachers and teachers arose. These called for the overthrow of all Islamic leaders who were comfortable with the status quo standoff, or who had abandoned jihad in favor of accommodation with pagans or Christians. These new Islamic firebrands declared that Muslim leaders who failed to enforce Muslim religious law (the Shari’a) rigorously (including the necessity of jihad) had forfeited the right to rule. Led by the teachings of Ibn Taymiya (1268-1328), they now redefined jihad to include the overthrow of established Islamic governments who had abandoned Muhammad’s original zeal for conquest. They also declared that professing Muslims who do not live strictly according to the Shari’a are unbelievers, and that jihad must be waged against them as well. Other Muslim groups who came to the same conclusions included the Kharijis/Khawarij in the 600’s and the Assassins/Hashishin in the 1000’s AD.

Finally another major development in the evolution of jihad came through the Sufi movement. Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059-1111) taught that there is a distinction between lesser jihad (al-jihad al-asghar) and greater jihad (aljihad al-akbar). What was now called ‘lesser jihad’ still meant holy war and it still involved the conquest of pagans, Jews and Christians at the point of the sword.

But now the term ‘greater jihad’ would be understood to refer to personal struggle against inner evil. Al-Ghazali envisioned the body as a city governed by the human soul yet also under attack by evil desires. A purported tradition which is hotly disputed in Islam and not found in the Koran or the more authoritative hadiths, describes how Muhammad supposedly came back from a jihad battle and declared, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.” When asked, “What is the greater jihad?” he replied, “It is the struggle against oneself.” Many Muslims have been influenced by this Sufi form of Islam, and think of jihad more as a personal struggle against evil, rather than as holy war for the sake of Allah. Yet al-Ghazali’s teaching provoked charges of heresy from Ibn Taymiya and his follower Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziya (1292-1350), who declared that al- Ghazali’s hadith quoted above was a deliberate fabrication and a violation of Muhammad’s teachings on jihad in the Koran.

Today modern Muslims have various definitions of jihad that they can choose from. Some use the term jihad in good faith to mean totally non-violent behavior. Many others, especially in the Middle East and Asia, understand jihad to be armed conflict. It is important to point out that an honest examination of classical Islam forces one to conclude: Muhammad taught and practiced jihad as holy war; that is how Islam’s first leaders and theologians understood the term; that is exactly how Islamic terrorists define their own actions. Other more esoteric Muslim understandings of jihad do not erase the fact that ‘armed conquest and conversion or murder of unbelievers’ is Islam’s original understanding of the term.

List of Terrorist Attacks

This list, of over 3,000 terrorist attacks committed by Muslims since 9/11/01 (a rate better than two per day), is incomplete because only a small percentage of attacks were picked up by international news sources, even those involving multiple loss of life. We included an attack if it was committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, and usually only if loss of life occurred (with a handful of exceptions where there were a very large number of injuries). In several cases, the victims are undercounted because deaths from trauma caused by the Islamists may occur in later days, despite the best efforts of medical personnel to keep the victims alive.

Unfortunately, this list of Muslim terrorist attacks barely scratches the surface of atrocities committed in the name of Islam that occur world-wide each day. For that reason, we don't tally up the dead and dismembered.

As an example, most news articles on the violence in southern Thailand note that about 900 people have been killed over the past year. We estimate that 150 of these deaths are of the Islamic militants themselves, which means they have killed some 750 people. But TROP has only recorded the deaths of 214. We underreported more than two-thirds in a country with a decent news infrastructure. Imagine what we don't catch in the Sudan where the toll runs into the tens of thousands!

The ridiculous level of violence that Islam serves up to the world makes it impossible to compile a complete list.

Interestingly, people often respond to the list by disparaging other religions, as if pulling everyone down to the same level satisfies some sort of moral preconception about religion and culture in general. Since no other religion inspires the sort of terrorism that Islam produces, the critic invariably finds it necessary to change the rules of comparison for one side of the equation in order to contrive preferred results.

Typically, this will take the form of reaching far back into a religion's history to find the worst one that can be found, even if it is in a time of war or is in utter contradiction to the teachings of the faith.

In a fit of self-congratulation, the critic then holds their straw man up against our list of attacks - which are bound to a particular timeframe and constrained by the rules of non-warfare and overt religious motivation - failing to realize the extent to which they have mitigated their own argument.

Rewards in Heaven

Jihad has its own rewards. “Let those who barter the life of this world for that which is to come, fight in the cause of Allah (do jihad); for whoever fights on Allah’s path, whether he is killed or triumphs, we will give him a handsome reward” (Surah 4:74). That reward amounts to 80% of the booty of war, which includes women and children.

“And know that whatever thing you gain, a fifth of it is for Allah and for the apostle and for the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer – if you believe in Allah and in that which we revealed to our servant (Muhammad), on the day of distinction, the day on which the two parties met; and Allah has power over all things” (Surah 8:41). “Abu Hurairah reported that the messenger of Allah said, ‘To whichever village you go and settle therein, there is your share therein, and whichever village disobeys Allah and his messenger, its one-fifth is for Allah and his messenger, and the remainder is for you’” (Mishkat 2:412). “Samurah bin Jundub reported the apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) as saying, ‘Kill the old men who are polytheists, but spare their children’” (Sunan Abu Dawud, Kitab al-Jihad 2664).

The Hadith teaches: “After the Battle of Badr, the verse dealing with the booties was first revealed. The verse introduced the rule for the first time that the spoils of war would be the property of the soldiers who actually take part in the battle. Previously it went either to the coffers of the victorious king or commander even though he did not join in the actual fight. That is one of the reasons why the soldiers of Islam fought tooth and nail. They would get Paradise in case of death in holy war, and booties in case of conquest. Jihad is therefore the best source of all acquisitions” (Mishkat II:406).

Jihad privileges extended to raping women captives. “In the actual war-field in the midst of hostilities, according to some jurists, some concessions were sometimes given to soldiers for recreation. Captive virgin girls in war were once made lawful for the soldiers for copulation” (Mishkat II:440). “Abdullah (b.Masud) reported, ‘We were on an expedition with Allah’s messenger (may peace be upon him) and we had no women with us . . . (Muhammad) ... then granted us permission that we should contract temporary marriage for a stipulated period giving her a garment, and Abdullah then recited this verse, “Those who believe do not make unlawful the good things which Allah has made lawful for you, and do not transgress. Allah does not like transgressors” (Sahih Muslim, II:705).

Another Islamic teaching promises paradise pleasures for the jihad warrior who dies in battle. Seventy perpetual virgin houris (dark-eyed beautiful young women) who don’t sweat or complain await him, and will be always available for the inexhaustible mujahid. “In Paradise (al-Jannat) there are palaces made of pearl, in each palace are seventy abodes made of rubies, in each abode there are seventy houses of green emerald. In every house is a couch, on every couch are seventy beds of every color, on every bed a spouse from the houris . . . In each house there are seventy slave-girls, and every morning when he is anxious for food the Muslim is given all that he desires besides. And verily ... their beauty shall be as that of the moon on the night when it is full . . .Their vessels and their combs shall be of gold and silver, and their perspiration of musk . . . And verily every man among the people of Paradise shall surely wed 500 houris and 4,000 virgins (Sahih al-Bukhari; Mishkat al-Masabih under the title “Descriptions of the Garden”; see also Mizan al-Haqq). These are the visions which pass in front of the eyes of Islamic mujahidin – whether they be World Trade Center hijackers, young Iranian Shi’ite men running across Iraqi minefields, or Hamas suicide bombers striding into the crowds of Jewish shoppers in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or Netanya.

Friendship with Jews & Christians

Muslims are told not to accept offers of friendship from Jews and Christians, since the latter are probably trying to get them to reject Islam. Offers of friendship should be met with a jihad response. “They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they flee (their homes) in Allah’s cause; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper” (Surah 4:89).

Since the Koran sees mujahidin as the army of Allah, those who reject the Koran are to be considered an anti-Islamic demonic army under the control of Shaitan (Satan and his demons). The Koranic response to unbelievers is one dimensional – engage in jihad and destroy the infidels! “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah (do jihad), and those who disbelieve fight in the cause of the Shaitan.

Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak” (Surah 4:76).

Jihad is not an optional choice for Muslims; it is a commandment. Later generations of Muslims would argue about whether jihad is a group or individual responsibility, but the Koran makes it clear: “Fighting is prescribed for you, though it be hateful to you” (Surah 2:216). “And strive hard (do jihad) in the cause of Allah, a striving that is due to him; he has chosen you and has not laid upon you a hardship in religion – (but he has given you) the faith of your father Ibrahim (Abraham) . . ” (Surah 22:78).

Slaves of Allah

The Koran’s perspective is that all Muslims are slaves of Allah. Everything they are and all that they have belongs to him, including their lives. And Allah grants jihad warriors paradise upon martyrdom. “Truly Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties; for theirs (in return) is Paradise. They fight in his cause, so they kill (others) and are killed … (al-Bukhari 51:1). “So narrated Al-Mughira bin Shu’ba, ‘Our prophet told us about the message of Allah that “… whoever amongst us is killed will go to Paradise” (al-Bukhari 51:2). The focus on martyrdom through jihad sounds strange to Western ears. Yet the suicide bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Bin Laden have drawn the world’s attention to this basic Islamic truth. Martyrdom in combat is to be greatly desired, according to Muhammad. “So narrated Anas bin Malik, “The prophet said, “Nobody who dies and finds good from Allah …would wish to come back to this world even if he were given the whole world and whatever is in it – except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would like to come back to the world and get killed again” (al-Bukhari 51:6).

According to the Koran, to avoid the physical dangers of jihad is cowardice and a dishonor to all Muslims. It is liable to lead to damnation for the shirkers of jihad. “If you do not fight, he will punish you severely, and put others in your place” (Surah 9:39; see also 8:15-17). “Say to those of the dwellers of the desert who were left behind: ‘You shall soon be invited (to fight) against a people possessing mighty prowess; you will fight against them until they submit; then if you obey, Allah will grant you a good reward; and if you turn back as you turned back before, he will punish you with a painful punishment’” (Surah 48:16).

Rewards of Jihad

It seems that some Muslims were slow to join in the jihad journeys, and Muhammad rebukes them quite forcefully: “O you who believe! What (excuse) have you that, when it is said to you: ‘Go forth in Allah’s way (in jihad)!’, you should incline heavily to earth (ed. stay at home)? Are you contented with this world’s life instead of the hereafter? But the provision of this world’s life compared with the hereafter is but little. If you do not go forth, he will chastise you with a painful chastisement and bring in your place a people other than you, and you will do him no harm; and Allah has power over all things” (Surah 9:38-39).

Jihad is to continue until the sway of Islam is over all the earth and all mankind bows before Muhammad. The first region for Muslims to conquer through jihad was Arabia. After that, they were commanded to conquer the rest of the world for

Allah: “Make war on them until idolatry does not exist any longer and Allah’s religion reigns universally” (Surah 8:39).

Jihad has its own rewards. “Let those who barter the life of this world for that which is to come, fight in the cause of Allah (do jihad); for whoever fights on Allah’s path, whether he is killed or triumphs, we will give him a handsome reward” (Surah 4:74). That reward amounts to 80% of the booty of war, which includes women and children.

“And know that whatever thing you gain, a fifth of it is for Allah and for the apostle and for the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer – if you believe in Allah and in that which we revealed to our servant (Muhammad), on the day of distinction, the day on which the two parties met; and Allah has power over all things” (Surah 8:41). “Abu Hurairah reported that the messenger of Allah said, ‘To whichever village you go and settle therein, there is your share therein, and whichever village disobeys Allah and his messenger, its one-fifth is for Allah and his messenger, and the remainder is for you’” (Mishkat 2:412). “Samurah bin Jundub reported the apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) as saying, ‘Kill the old men who are polytheists, but spare their children’” (Sunan Abu Dawud, Kitab al-Jihad 2664).

The Hadith teaches: “After the Battle of Badr, the verse dealing with the booties was first revealed. The verse introduced the rule for the first time that the spoils of war would be the property of the soldiers who actually take part in the battle. Previously it went either to the coffers of the victorious king or commander even though he did not join in the actual fight. That is one of the reasons why the soldiers of Islam fought tooth and nail. They would get Paradise in case of death in holy war, and booties in case of conquest. Jihad is therefore the best source of all acquisitions” (Mishkat II:406).

Jihad privileges extended to raping women captives. “In the actual war-field in the midst of hostilities, according to some jurists, some concessions were sometimes given to soldiers for recreation. Captive virgin girls in war were once made lawful for the soldiers for copulation” (Mishkat II:440). “Abdullah (b.Masud) reported, ‘We were on an expedition with Allah’s messenger (may peace be upon him) and we had no women with us . . . (Muhammad) ... then granted us permission that we should contract temporary marriage for a stipulated period giving her a garment, and Abdullah then recited this verse, “Those who believe do not make unlawful the good things which Allah has made lawful for you, and do not transgress. Allah does not like transgressors” (Sahih Muslim, II:705).

Contradictions in the Qur’an

1. What was man created from, blood, clay, dust, or nothing? A. "Created man, out of a (mere) clot of congealed blood," (96:2).

B. “We created man from sounding clay, from mud moulded into shape, (15:26). C. "The similitude of Jesus before Allah is as that of Adam; He created him from dust, then said to him: "Be". And he was," (3:59).

D. "But does not man call to mind that We created him before out of nothing?" (19:67, Yusuf Ali). Also, 52:35).

E. “He has created man from a sperm-drop; and behold this same (man) becomes an open disputer! (16:4).

2. Is there or is there not compulsion in religion according to the Qur'an?

A. "Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And Allah heareth and knoweth all things," (2:256).

B. “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful," (9:5).

3. Does Allah forgive or not forgive those who worship false gods?

A. Allah forgiveth not that partners should be set up with Him ; but He forgiveth anything else, to whom He pleaseth; to set up partners with Allah is to devise a sin Most heinous indeed," (4:48). Also 4:116 B. The people of the Book ask thee to cause a book to descend to them from heaven: Indeed they asked Moses for an even greater (miracle), for they said: "Show us Allah in public," but they were dazed for their presumption, with thunder and lightning. Yet they worshipped the calf even after clear signs had come to them; even so we forgave them; and gave Moses manifest proofs of authority," (4:153).

4. Are Allah's decrees changed or not?

A. "Rejected were the messengers before thee: with patience and constancy they bore their rejection and their wrongs, until Our aid did reach them: there is none that can alter the words (and decrees) of Allah. Already hast thou received some account of those messengers," (6:34).

B. “The word of thy Lord doth find its fulfillment in truth and in justice: None can change His words: for He is the one who heareth and knoweth all, (6:115). C. When We substitute one revelation for another,- and Allah knows best what He reveals (in stages),- they say, "Thou art but a forger": but most of them understand not," (16:101).

The Gospel of Barnabas

Muslims often cite The Gospel of Barnabas in defense of Islamic teaching. In fact, it is a best seller in Muslim countries. Yusuf Ali refers to it in his commentary on the Qur'an. Suzanne Haneef, in her annotated bibliography on Islam, highly recommends it, saying, "Within it one finds the living Jesus portrayed far more vividly and in character with the mission with which he was entrusted than any other of the four New Testament Gospels has been able to portray him." It is called "essential reading for any seeker of the truth."

Typical of Muslim claims is that of Muhammad Ata ur-Rahim, who insisted that "The Gospel of Barnabas is the only known surviving Gospel written by a disciple of Jesus.... [It] was accepted as a Canonical Gospel in the churches of Alexandria up until 325 A.D." Another Muslim author, M. A. Yusseff, argues confidently that "in antiquity and authenticity, no other gospel can come close to The Gospel of Barnabas."

Our concern here is about the authenticity of this alleged gospel. That is, is it a first-century gospel, written by a disciple of Christ? The evidence is overwhelmingly negative.

First of all, the earliest reference to it comes from a fifth-century work, Decretum Gelasianum (Gelasian Decree, by Pope Gelasius, A.D. 492-95). But even this reference is in doubt. However there is no original language manuscript evidence for its existence! Slomp says flatly, "There is no text tradition whatsoever of the G. B. V." [Gospel of Barnabas Vienna ms. By contrast, the New Testament books are verified by over 5,300 Greek manuscripts that begin in the second and third centuries A.D. (see Chapter 10).

Second, L. Bevan Jones notes that "the earliest form of it known to us is in an Italian manuscript. This has been closely analyzed by scholars and is judged to belong to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, i.e., 1400 years after the time of Barnabas.'' Even Muslim defenders of it, like Muhammad ur-Rahim, admit that they have no manuscripts of it before the 1500s.

Third, this gospel is widely used by Muslim apologists today, yet there is no reference to it by any Muslim writer before the fifteenth or sixteenth century. But surely they would have used it if it had been in existence. As Ragg observes,

These are strange statements in view of the fact that reputable scholars have carefully examined The Gospel of Barnabas and find absolutely no basis for its authenticity. After reviewing the evidence in an article in Islamochristiana, J. Slomp concluded: "in my opinion scholarly research has proved absolutely that this 'gospel' is a fake. This opinion is also held by a number of Muslim scholars." In their introduction to the Oxford edition of The Gospel of Barnabas, Longsdale and Ragg conclude that "the true date lies ... nearer to the sixteenth century than to the first." Likewise, in his classic work "Jomier proved his point by showing beyond any doubt that the G. B. V. contains an islamicised late medieval gospel forgery."

A central idea in this work is in accord with a basic Muslim claim, namely, that Jesus did not die on the cross. Instead, this book contends that Judas Iscariot was substituted for Jesus (sect. 217). This view has been adopted by many Muslims, since the vast majority of them believe that someone else was substituted on the cross for Jesus.

"Against the supposition that the Gospel of Barnabas ever existed in Arabic we must set the argument from the total silence about such a Gospel in the polemical literature of the Moslems. This has been admirably catalogued by Steinschneider in his monograph on the subject.''

Ragg goes on to note the many Muslim writers who wrote books who would no doubt have referred to such a work - had it been in existence - such as Ibn Hasm (d. 456 A.H.), Ibn Taimiyyah (d. 728 A.H.), Abu'l-Fadl al-Su'udi (wrote 942 A.H.), and Hajji Khalifah (d. 1067 A.H.). But not one of them, or anyone else, ever refers to it between the seventh and fifteenth centuries when Muslims and Christians were in heated debate.

Fourth, no father or teacher of the Christian church ever quoted it from the first to the fifteenth century. If The Gospel of Barnabas had been considered authentic, it more surely would have been cited many times by some Christian teacher during this long period of time, as were all the other canonical books of Scripture. What is more, had this gospel even been in existence, authentic or not, certainly it would have been cited by someone. But no father cited it during its supposed existence for over 1,500 years!

Fifth, sometimes it is confused with the first-century Epistle of [Pseudo] Barnabas (c. A.D. 70-90), which is an entirely different book. In this way Muslim scholars falsely allege there is support for an early date. Muhammad Ata ur- Rahim confuses the two books, thus wrongly claiming that it was in circulation in the second and third centuries A.D. This is a strange error since he admits that they are listed as different books in the "Sixty Books" as "Serial No. 18 Epistle of Barnabas.... Serial No. 24. Gospel of Barnabas.'' In one place Rahim even cites by name the "Epistle of Barnabas" as evidence of the existence of the Gospel of Barnabas!

Some have mistakenly assumed that the reference to a gospel used by Barnabas referred to in the apocryphal Acts of Barnabas (before c. A.D. 478) was The Gospel of Barnabas. However, this is clearly false, as the quotation reveals: "Barnabas, having unrolled the Gospel, which we have received from Matthew his fellow-labourer, began to teach the Jews.'' By deliberately omitting this emphasized phrase, the impression is given that there is a Gospel of Barnabas! Sixth, the message of the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas is completely refuted by eyewitness first-century documents that possess over five thousand manuscripts to support their authenticity, namely, the New Testament. For example, its teaching that Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah and that he did not die on the cross are thoroughly refuted by eyewitness, first-century documents (see our Chapters 10 and 11) .

Seventh, no Muslim should accept the authenticity of The Gospel of Barnabas since it clearly contradicts the Qur'an's claim that Jesus was the Messiah. It claims, "Jesus confessed, and said the truth; 'I am not the Messiah ... I am indeed sent to the house of Israel as a prophet of salvation; but after me shall come the Messiah" (sects. 42, 48). This is flatly contradictory to the Qur'an, which repeatedly calls Jesus the "Messiah" [the "Christ"] (cf.5:19,75).

Eighth, even Muslim scholars like Suzanne Haneef, who highly recommends it, have to admit that "the authenticity of this book has not been unquestionably established" and that "it is believed to be an apocryphal account of the life of Jesus. Other Muslim scholars doubt its authenticity too. For the book contains anachronisms and descriptions of medieval life in western Europe that reveal that it was not written before the fourteenth century. For example, it refers to the year of Jubilee coming every one hundred years, instead of fifty as it was practiced before this time (The Gospel of Barnabas, 82) . The papal declaration to change it to every one hundred years was made by the church in A.D. 1343. John Gilchrist, in his work titled Origins and Sources of the Gospel of Barnabas, concludes that "only one solution can account for this remarkable coincidence. The author of the Gospel of Barnabas only quoted Jesus as speaking of the jubilee year as coming 'every hundred years' because he knew of the decree of Pope Boniface. " He added, "but how could he know of this decree unless he lived at the same time as the Pope or sometime afterwards? This is a clear anachronism that compels us to conclude that the Gospel of Barnabas could not have been written earlier than the fourteenth century after Christ.''

One significant anachronism is the fact that The Gospel of Barnabas uses the text from the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible (fourth century A.D.), even though Barnabas supposedly wrote it in the first century A.D. Other examples of anachronisms include a vassal who owes a share of his crop to his lord (The Gospel of Barnabas, 122), an illustration of medieval feudalism; a reference to wooden wine casks (ibid., 152), rather than wine skins as were used in Palestine; and a medieval court procedure (ibid.,121).

Ninth, Jomier provides a list of many mistakes and exaggerations in The Gospel of Barnabas. There are historical mistakes, such as, "Jesus was born when Pilate was governor, though he did not become governor until 26 or 27 A.D." There are also geographical mistakes. For example, Chapter 20 "stated that Jesus sailed to Nazareth," even though it is not on the seashore. Likewise, The Gospel of Barnabas contains exaggerations, such as Chapter 17's mention of 144,000 prophets and 10,000 prophets being slain by Jizebel (in Chapter 18). Tenth, according to Slomp, "Jomier's study showed many Islamic elements throughout the text that prove beyond any doubt that a Muslim author, probably a convert, worked on the book." Fourteen such influences are noted. For example, Jomier notes that the word "pinnacle" of the temple, where Jesus is said to have preached - hardly a good place! - was translated into arabic by dikka, a platform used in mosques. Also, Jesus is represented as coming only for Israel but Muhammad "for the salvation of the whole world" (Chapter 11). Finally, the denial of Jesus to be the Son of God is Qur'anic, as is the fact that Jesus' sermon is modeled after a Muslim hutba that begins with praising God and his holy Prophet (Chapter 12).

In summation, the Muslim use of The Gospel of Barnabas to support their teaching is devoid of evidence to support it. Indeed, its teachings even contradict the Qur'an. This work, far from being an authentic first-century account of the facts about Jesus, is actually a late medieval fabrication. The only authentic first-century records we have of the life of Christ are found in the New Testament, and it categorically contradicts the teaching of the Gospel of Barnabas. For a further critique of this "gospel" the reader should consult David Sox's excellent book titled, The Gospel of Barnabas.

Muhammad in the Bible?

Muhammed is not mentioned anywhere in the Old Testament or New Testament of the Bible. Muhammed lived from 570-629 A.D. All of the books comprising the Bible were written over four centuries before Muhammed was born. Islamic tradition traces Arab ancestry back to Ishmael, Abraham's and Hagar's son. According to Genesis 21:18, God said to Hagar regarding Ishmael, "I will make a great nation out of his descendants."

I have read excerpts of a book titled, Muhammed in the Bible, by Abdul-Ahad Dawud. The author contends that Muhammed was prophesied in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. That is clearly an opinion that he holds that is not shared by Jews or Christians.

Islam claims that Allah is the same God who was revealed in the Bible. . . . then if the Bible and the Qur'an have differing views of God, then Islam's claim is false. Don't forget that Muhammad claimed in Suras 2:87, 29:46, 32:23, 5:44, 6:154, 6:155 that Allah confirmed the Torah (Taurat) and Christian Gospel (Injeel) (Sura 2:87, 5:46, 5:68, 29:46 and 43:63). So, if the Torah and Gospel are correct, all the errors in the Qur'an shown below make the Qur'an false.

The Ahmadiyya are a controversial messianic sect that began in India during the British reign. The movement was begun in 1899 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmand of Oadian, a Muslim who rejected many of the conventional Islamic teachings and according to some declared himself a 'true prophet of Islam'. The Ahmadiyya movement has been rejected by 'mainstream' Muslims, and an official law was passed in Pakistan in 1974 declaring Ahmidiyyans 'non-Muslim's and forbidding them to call their places of worship 'mosques' or to use the traditional Muslim call to prayer in their worship.

The Ahmadiyya Muslims, who claim more than 90 million adherents worldwide - a figure disputed by other Muslim organizations - met in Tilford, Surrey, yesterday for the ceremony. The renewal of their initiation vows marked the start of a three-day festival. The sect has centers in 74 towns and cities in this country, as well as a mosque in Putney, southwest London.

Their views about Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad, and their own founder, whom they regard as the Messiah, have placed them at odds with the rest of the Muslim world. They have been barred from membership of Britain's Muslim Parliament and of the Muslim Council. Iqbal Sacranie, of the council, said that the Muslim world saw the group as ''a cult operating outside the fold of Islam. The most serious point is that this cult does not recognize the finality of the Prophet Muhammad as the last and final messenger.''

Ahmadiyya Muslims believe that Ghulam Ahmed, who founded the sect in 1889, was the fulfillment of the messianic expectations of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other religions. In other words, they believe that this was the Second Coming of Christ. They believe that Jesus survived the Crucifixion and that His tomb can be found in Kashmir.

Religions Based on Islam

The following groups consider themselves Muslims, but are not considered
Islamic by the majority of Muslims or Muslim authorities:
The Nation of Islam (based in the United States)
The Zikris
The following consider themselves Muslims but acceptance by the larger Muslim
community varies:
The Druze
The Alawites (Alnusairiya)
The Ahmadiyya Movement (Also called Qadiani)

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