Customer Reviews

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Hi, I live in Turkey which is a Muslim country. I was looking for the truth in Quran, and try to find some answers for its contridicting parts. It was not an easy task. It took years to find answers, but at the end I found this book which is convering most of the gaps of my knowledge and most of the things UNTOLD to us by our Muslim leaders and teachers. This is such a religion that even asking such question is SIN.

It is amazing to see that how Arabs mixed the verses in Quran after the death of Propet Muhammed. Although they call Christians and Jews as the destroyer of the original Gospels and books. We have a Turkish saying "Clever thief overcomes the house owner when he is caught!"

As for this book, this is magnificent work and a MUST READ for evey Turkish Muslim, to open their eyes and hearts on the topics that is not told, this will help all of us how we have been lied! I am truly impressed about this courages work.
When I see the average rating for this book which is 3 stars, I suprised because it should be higher than that. Then when I checked the reviews I see the reaon. There are two groups of reviews first one with 5 stars and second with 1 and so the average becomes 3 stars.

Please read and check the readers reviews, this second group with one star is the one that blinded our beliefs and hearts, they are the ones in my country who take us away fom the absolute truth.

Since if we do not know anything, will not suspect anything or think but keep following and respecting them. We will become easier to control and lead! This is what they want!

I am just suprised to see that how they reach so far to this site and TRY to conveince the new buyers NOT TO BUY and READ this wonderful material! Unbelievable!

Please, specially, if you are a Muslim go on an read this book to see the untold truths and do not LET OTHERS THINK FOR YOURSELVES but think with your own heart!

It is true that this book contains essays that are not the newewst ones (why, do you think, does it say "Classic Essays" in the title, hm?). But it provides the layman with a good overview about the scientific research about the orgins of the koran of the past 150 years, and that is exactly what this book is supposed to do: to make classical knowledge of orientalists more known and widespread on a popular level. And this purpose it meets very well. Therefore I rate it five stars.

I fully agree with Rahman, the other Asian reviewer and give Warraq's book another 5 Stars. As is clearly evident from here, Muslims have litle of no sense of tolerance towards their detractors. That is no surprise because of the blind faith and acceptance with which the majority of them swallow the religion wholesale. Most of the non-arabic adherents manifest next to nothing in understanding when their scriptures are read in the original tongue, and most will never try questioning the text and its meanings critically. But when discrepencies, contradictions and factual errors glaringly evidence themselves, upon closer examination of their scriptures, as Warraq has done, they will be the first to cry 'foul' but to date have failed miserably to offer any rational explanations for these scriptural errors and contradictions,etc. But what Warraq has done is the honest and bold thing, that is to document the reasons why he cannot accept the tenets of his former beliefs and his reasons for rejecting them. Open-minded people will gain a lot from giving his reasons due consideration. Good work ibn Warraq-and for the other two Books as well!

I read these essays online and thought them excellent and eye-opening. Many reviewers complain of their age. But the reason for that is that the kind of secular, post-Enlightenment critique to which the Christian and Jewish traditions have been subject for over 200 years now, and was begun on the Islamic in the 19th and early 20th centuries, has had to be suspended, largely for political reasons.

Whereas now, in Christian and Jewish, or post-Christian and post-Jewish academic circles, this kind of secular critique is normative, it has yet to make any headway in the wider Islamic academic world, including Western or European Islamic studies departments, where such an approach has largely halted in favour of consideration of devout Muslim academic or student sensibilities.

Perhaps that is a good thing.

But it means those, especially non-specialists such as myself, interested in, say, the roots and origins of Islamic material, or Qur'anic sources -whence certain Arabic terms derive from Christian, Jewish or Zoroastrian Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew or Farsi terms, for instance, or whence the Qur'an derives its stories- have little alternative but to turn to older scholarship.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I have little to compare it with. I cannot give it less than 4 stars.

Muslims believe that an angel revealed the Koran to Mohammed and that it is an exact reporduction of a book kept in heaven. Warraq shows that this is nothing but a fairy tale believed by followers who often can't even read their own scriptures because of a lack of education. I have read the Koran and once was engaged with some Islamic university students who were trying to evangelize westerners to their faith. Incredibly, the student I talked to admitted he had memorized large portions of the Koran but that he had memorized them in the original language and had no idea what it meant as he didn't understand that language!! He could only talk about the faith he grew up with but not what the Koran actually said! What he grew up with was fit for the mind of a child. He actually believed in genies (something that the Koran teaches) and said that a genie had once stolen his rent money and that he was upset about it. I suggested that next time a "genie" steals his rent money that he call the police on his roommate.

This is a useful collection of articles on the historical origins of the Qur'an, many of which are hard, for the non-specialist, to track down. The very small number of similar publications available on the market makes this an important book. However, the material included is rather old, to say the least, with virtually nothing from the last fifty years of scholarship, when important advances have been made. It is a shame, for example, that we are not given any "classic" introductions dealing with some recent discoveries, such as the early variant forms of the Qur'an found in the 70s in Yemen. It is also rather sad that, given the enormous number of critical (in the best sense of the word) studies of Christian and Jewish religious texts, that the articles included here do not make use of the plethora of historical tools that these, comparable works, have made available to the modern scholar.

The product of Muslim can be viewed every time we turn on the television set. We are experiencing a myriad of problems here in Amsterdam - lawlessness, and the inability to accept democratic freedoms such as freedom of speech. When you turn on the television set, the news reveals their belief system - as we witness them avenging themselves each time they perceive something wrong has occurred. This book clearly outlines that belief system. Highly recommend.

This is a thoroughly and well researched book, drawing on contributions by some of the world's leading scholars in the field of Koranic studies. It helps to answer many of the questions that linger around the origins, linguistic and literally style, and it's sources for the text of the Koran. It will appeal to open minded Muslims eager to understand more about the Koran and the role of Muhammad in its origins and history. I highly recommend it to everyone eager to know more about the Koran.

While this volume was a collection of scholarly essays, most over seventy or eighty years old, some parts of the essays have a continued relevance in refuting fundamentalism, besides being a portrait of the state of textual criticism of the Qur'an in the earlier part of the 20th century. The essays taken as a whole provide sufficient evidence to doubt the orthodox account of the Qur'an's origins, even though each individual scholar's take on a sometimes murky subject is open to question. One self-evident shortcoming in the collection is a lack of modern essays (though I suppose the subtitle might have served as a disclaimer) to shed light on the current state of scholarship, but in the Introduction Ibn Warraq does make reference to some of the movers and shakers, so an interested reader can track down works by Cook and Crone, et al. (As I recall there was a Atlantic Monthly article which reported on developments, though I haven't had a chance or desire to seek out the seminal works for myself). But most of the material seems to be from the sources that Ibn Warraq drew upon in composing Why I am not a Muslim, a title echoing Bertrand Russell's enjoyable collection of essays in Why I am not a Christian. In terms of locating the source of some of the obscurer passages in the Qur'an in the Jewish midrash, Christian apocrypha, and even from Zoroastrianism, I found it useful, though not likely to appeal to a very wide audience. Distracting in the collection, however, is the numerous typographical errors that litter the pages, making me increasingly wary of the publisher Prometheus Books, though I have thought of approaching them with my book proposals due to the subject matter. I have further quarrels with the state of Ibn Warraq's Why I am not a Muslim, Fregosi's Jihad, and Taslima Nasreen's Shame- the urge to give air to a critique of Islam, just because it is a critique of Islam seems to have subverted quality control. But I got my vocab word of the day- Heilgeschichte- salvation history (or so I think, many of the German and French parts remaining untranslated)! So I suppose it wasn't a total loss, trudging through the sometimes onerous reconstructions of Qur'anic orthography and philology.

Some of the reviews of this book from muslims are quite laughable. The reason you dont know much about Ibn Warraq is that it is not his real name - if he reveiled his true identity he would more than likely be killed by some nutcase muslim in the name of Islam. Look at what Salman Rushdie went through after he published the book "The Satanic Verses". Well this book totally shows up Islam as a fraud, it highlights the deludedness of the followers of Islam, and their refusal to look at the facts. It's a great read, dont let the muslims put you off, you owe it to yourself to read this. (I'm an atheist by the way, I'm certainly not a Christian or a Jew out to score points, but Christianity and Judism have been revieled as false by many books, Islam is a more difficult one because of the way muslims react when their religion is critisised).