Islam the First and Last Religion: Lecture 4 Part A, Characteristics of the Universal and Everlasting Religion

Author: Sheikh Mansour Leghaei Australia

Characteristics of the Universal and Everlasting Religion

In order for a religion to meet the needs of the people of all times and places, and to guide them to the Right Path, it is imperative that it enjoys some characteristics without which it fails to serve the purpose. In the following I shall share with you some of these characteristics:

 

1. The Word of God

 For it is only the Word of God which is perfect and timeless. We agree with our Christian brethren that “the Word of God endures for ever” [I Peter 1:25] The question, however, is which Scripture today is the Word of God alone.

 

Some Facts About the Bible

a) The Bible: The present Bible is a collection of writings which the Church of God has solemnly recognized as inspired. (Encarta)

 

b) The Original Bible:

 Thus, the Bible educators talk about ‘inspiration of scriptures'. That means the compilers of the Bible claim to have been inspired about the scriptures after the original texts have been lost.

 

c) The Language and the earliest Bible:

 We have been told that the Bible was originally written in Greek and Hebrew. However, no one can actually prove that they were so written. The reason being that there is no original text of the Bible. The first five books could have been written in Egyptian, the language in which Moses was educated and the country wherein the Israelites had lived for many years.

 

Conversations in the gospel were certainly not spoken in Greek even though the oldest manuscripts of the Bible are in Greek or Aramaic. There is an ongoing debate as to whether the earliest Gospels were written in Aramaic or Greek. Some scholars have proposed that they were written in Aramaic. But then again, no one has ever seen an Aramaic Gospel predating the fourth century which had to be translated from Greek to Aramaic.

 

To this date scholars are still debating as to what language that Jesus spoke? For many years it was believed and still there are many adherers to that, that the language of Jesus was Aramaic. But recently, the majority of the scholars tend more to believe that it was Hebrew. However, the oldest texts of the Gospels available to us today are in Greek. Thus our Christian brethren do not even know the language in which their lord spoke.

 

The oldest Bible was compiled six years after the Council of Nicea in the year 331AD. Constantine the Great, a pagan solar worshipper who was the first Roman Emperor who converted to Christianity destroyed all earlier copies of the Gospels and the fifty copies of the Gospels they produced are the basis for all Christian belief today. Ironically these fifty copies are considered ‘originals'.

 

The Old Testament and most of its contents were gradually written within the nine centuries which is a long time after Prophet Moses. Thus the Bible both the Old and New Testaments is by no means a unified book in terms of authorship, date composition or literary type.

 

d) Different Versions of the Bible. The Bible of Judaism and the Bible of Christianity are different.

 Not to mention the various versions of the Bible, Jehovah Witness, Mormons and many, many others claim to be the original.

e) Fragmentary: The present Bible is fragmentary in its literature style, i.e. made up of the remains of a larger literature. These and many other reasons will make the present Bible nothing more than a expired history book of the past legends. Unless you are a faithful Christian or Muslim, historically, up until the present time there is no concrete proof about the existence of Jesus son of Mary.

None of the abovementioned problems of the Bible exists in the holy Quran. The holy Quran is the actual verbatim word of God revealed word by word to Prophet Muhammad (saww) through the Arch Angel Gabriel. Let us take a closer look at the wordings of the Quran.

 

When a teacher tells his student to read a particular paragraph it is not expected that the pupil will say: “Read this..” and then start reading the sentence! Nonetheless, as the holy Quran is composed of none other than the Words of Allah, then its style is different. According to the majority of narrators the first Ayaat revealed to the Prophet of Islam was in Chapter 96 ( Sura Al-alaq) in which the Almighty God addresses His messenger:

 If the holy Quran were not the actual verbatim word of God the present format of the above Ayaah would have been ‘in the name of my Lord Who created'! Similarly, in many instances the Almighty God is addressing His messenger to say something. Interestingly even the word ‘SAY' is mentioned in the Quran such as:

It is an indisputable fact that the Quran was revealed to the Prophet of Islam in Arabic. The Quran is the unique and original scripture of all Muslims of the world irrespective of the different sects amongst Muslims.

 

Reverend Bosworth Smith in Muhammad and Muhammadanism ( London 1874) writes about the Quran,

Therefore, we agree with our Christian brethren that ‘the Word of God endures forever'. But we add that there is no actual and original Scripture which contains only the word of God other than the holy Quran.

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Other Related Links:

Islam the First and Last Religion: Lecture 1

Islam the First and Last Religion: Lecture 2

Islam the First and Last Religion: Lecture 3

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Source: www.ihic.org.au

Author: Sheikh Mansour Leghaei