Inheritance Distribution Koran vs Awl

 

Tzortzis: 7 Reasons Why God is Worthy of Worship - my comment

A comment on a blog entry on https://www.hamzatzortzis.com/7-reasons-why-god-is-worthy-of-worship/

by

  Hamza Andreas Tzortzis (the indented sentences in italics)

God makes it very clear

There is very little in the Koran that is clear and nothing that would indicate it was authored by what I would consider and accept to be a god.

that the purpose of our lives is to worship Him, “And I did not create the jinn (spirit world) and mankind except to worship Me.”[1]

The Koran does not specify what worship is or what would be considered to be worship. People had to do that.

Hamza Tzortzis does not define worship either, so let me quickly do that for him:

1. “to be devoted to and full of admiration for, to have or express feelings of adoration”

Then you get a more religious oriented one:

2. “to have or show a strong feeling of respect and admiration for God or a god”

In a recent discussion with Muslims including Hamza Tzortzis btw, worship was described as utmost reverence, gratitude, praise, obedience, directions. So this would entail a display of worship towards Allah, Muhammad and Koran, the Islamic trinity.

Allegedly, if we accept the existence of the Islamic god as pre-supposed, the Islamic god is not in need of anything. It doesn’t need human beings. It doesn’t need worship. Then creates human beings it does not need to only do one thing, worship, which it also does not need.

But then why create something not needed? If worship is not needed, why create something solely for that purpose? That sounds quite weird and a bit creepy.

Tzortzis does not with a single word address the creation not only of humans, but of something called “Jinn”. What is this and where can it be found? Can this be detected? Someone, maybe the translator, has added “spirit world” in brackets, which does nothing to explain this in any way, especially since this “jinn” thing is supposed to worship the same way as humans.

So after just 2 sentences we already have open questions and huge claims without supplying any kind of justification let alone evidence.

The concept of worship in the Islamic tradition is profound.

No, it is not. It is primitive and childish, built on a narcissistic personality disorder coupled with an inferiority complex.

Worship entails that we must know, love and obey God, as well as single out and dedicate all acts of worship to Him alone. If we want to know, love and obey something other than God the most, including direct acts of worship (like ultimate gratitude) to something other than Him, then that is our object of worship. In this sense, human beings, including those who do not believe in God, cannot not worship. However, many misdirect their worship to things other than God; something this essay aims to address.

This is quite silly, word salad at best. You can’t know what doesn’t exist and can’t know something that is a sentient being that is not here, not detectable and not in direct contact. You can’t love or obey this “thing” for the same reasons. So all we are being confronted with is pre-suppositionalist mumbo-jumbo. What is weird is that God and words referring to this god are capitalised, as if it were a name. We are being confronted with a command to do something, commit an act, without any instructions on what that is, why we should do this and with what result.

What is outright bizarre, is the claim that I cannot not worship something non-existent.

Only to then say that I can do this. By worshipping something else. Which I don’t.

According to the Islamic spiritual tradition, acts of worship are accepted if they fulfil two conditions. The first is that the act of worship should be done purely for the sake of God. The second is that the action itself is prescribed by the Islamic source texts: the Qur’an and the authentic Prophetic traditions. So a natural question that follows from this is: What are these acts of worship?

Here  the reader is confronted with more silly claims, where now an act of worship – which in my eyes showing gratitude is not –  requires acceptance by the recipient. Because it, the act, must be for the recipient, duh, and determined by human beings, since this god is unable to articulate why it created human beings and what exactly they are supposed to do with what outcome.

The acts of worship are many. Any good action that is done to please God is an act of worship. However, there are some basic acts of worship which are essential to Islamic spiritual practice. These have been summarised by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as the five pillars of Islam. They include: affirming and recognising in one’s heart that there is no deity worthy of worship except God and that Muhammad ﷺ is God’s final messenger; praying five times a day; giving the obligatory charity if one can afford to; fasting in Ramadan (the 9^th month of the Islamic calendar) and performing the pilgrimage if one is able to do so. These acts of worship have profound meanings and inner dimensions. These are the basic pillars of Islam. However, in developing one’s spiritual practice one can engage in a plethora of additional spiritual activities. These include: reciting the Qur’an; remembrance of God; removing the spiritual diseases in one’s heart; voluntary charity; repentance; spiritual reflection; conveying the message of Islam to others; feeding the poor; spreading peace; taking care of animals; studying the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ; memorising the Qur’an; the night prayer; reflecting on natural phenomena and much more.

I am not trying to be overly critical, but this is pathetic. We are told we need to worship, but not how and why and this worship must be “good”. What is good? Is beating your wife, raping a slave or fighting non-believers being good? Was Muhammad himself good when he encouraged his men – according to Islamic source texts graded as authentic by Islamic scholars – to enjoy raping female captives to the fullest? Cutting off hands and feet and letting people bleed to death? Marrying a 6-year-old child?

Instead, we are confronted with yet another claim, that there are pillars which are considered to be essential. Who says so? Why? If these are indeed essential, why does this author/god not specify in the instruction manual: here are the 5 pillars that are essential? Instead, the pillars are mentioned by name, but all over the book and without any specification. Nothing.

Instead, we are told that worship is saying only this god is worthy of worship. Really?!

And that someone, a human being called Muhammad, is the last messenger. Why would saying this is worship, when we’ve just been told this worship thing must be for the sake of the god only? Why bring this Muhammad into this and Islamic source texts?

Acts of worship are said to include 5 things, insinuating there are more of these. All vague, ambiguous and unspecific, undefined, unexplained.

I consider these to be silly and old superstitions, remnants of Pagan origins we find everywhere in Islam. There is no “inner dimension” here. This is, again, useless mumbo-jumbo. What follows leaves me speechless. Anything and everything, every act or thought is now declared an act of worship.

Just as an example of how superficial and primitive this is: how can we humans take care of animals, if the creator/god built in animal cruelty? I can’t take care of an innocent caterpillar who has been injected by the larvae of a wasp that will eat this caterpillar inside out. I can – and I am sure even Hamza Tzortzis can – think of 100s of different ways a wasp can reproduce without harming other animals.

That is why Prof Richard Dawkins writes: “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease.”

That is nature. Unguided and not designed. If this were the result of design it would show an immensely cruel, malevolent and uncaring creator/god.

The Koran, the central doctrine and instruction manual for all Muslims tells them to fight, not to spread peace.

Since our reason for being is to worship the Divine, it is important to understand why we must dedicate all acts of worship to Him alone.

This is circular. The topic of the essay is why we must worship and the basis is: it’s our reason for being. It’s simply pre-supposed.

In this essay I will provide 7 reasons for why we must worship God and dedicate all acts of worship to Him alone.

A typical case of presenting a conclusion and then finding justification, no matter how silly.

These reasons include:

1. God is worthy of worship by virtue of who He is.
   Presupposing, nothing more
2. God has created and sustains everything.
   Why does that present a reason for worship?
3. God provides us with innumerable favours.
   Why does that present a reason for worship?
4. If we love ourselves, we must love God.
   Why?
5. God is The-Loving, and His love is the purest form of love.
   And? So what?
6. Worship is part of who we are.
   That is a false statement, bar of any evidence, just a silly claim.
7. Obeying God is the most rational thing to do.
   No, it’s not. The Islamic god figure is vicious, violent, divisive, misogynistic, judgmental, brutal, narcissistic, incompetent and thankfully non-existent.

The rest is simply a collection of emotions and unsubstantiated claims, consisting of ancient and long refuted arguments.

 

The claims are contradictory, illogical, false and the conclusions don’t follow from what was presented as premise.

 

The entire article is just a giant fail of a person who is desperately trying to make a point, abandoning all rational, logical and critical thinking, a failure. Just as a quick example, it talks about a god being the only god around and then saying that having other gods is the gravest sin. That’s childishly silly.

 

And that is the level of this article or essay.

It’s just useless apologetics.

Comments on the stream:

They try to pretend that they have this precise definition of worship and are never able to bring one

They talk about utmost reverence, gratitude, praise, obedience, directions

and about

reverence, gratitude, thanks,

all elements of the Muhammad-worship.

Abbas doesn’t understand that gratitude is towards a doctor or mechanic and does not result in worship or blind obedience resulting in executing immoral acts.

 

Sorry, this entire endeavour is a failure and not worth following up on, just the usual, tired and desperate attempt at justifying a silly belief.

 

Are Mosques in early Islamic History aligned with Mecca and the Kaaba?

 

“And from where you go out, then turn your  face  towards  the  Inviolable  Mosque,  and  wherever you are, then turn your faces towards it, lest that mankind should have an argument against you, excepting (the ones of)  them  that  do  injustice.  So  do  not  be  apprehensive  of them,  and  be  apprehensive  of  Me,  and  that  I  may  perfect My favor on you and that possibly you would be guided”.

Al Baqarah 2:150

Wikipedia:

The qibla (Arabic: قِبْلَة‎, romanized: qiblah, lit. 'direction') is the direction towards the Kaaba in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, which is used by Muslims in various religious contexts, particularly the direction of prayer for the salah. In Islam the Kaaba is believed to be a sacred site built by the prophets Abraham and Ishmael, and that its use as the qibla was ordained by God in several verses of the Quran revealed to Muhammad in the second Hijri year. Prior to this revelation, Muhammad and his followers in Medina faced Jerusalem for prayers. Most mosques contain a mihrab (a wall niche) that indicates the direction of the qibla.

Britannica Text :

 Qiblah, also spelled qibla or kiblah, the direction of the sacred shrine of the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, toward which Muslims turn five times each day when performing the salat (daily ritual prayer).

The qiblah is used not only for prayer but also for burial; the dead, including slaughtered animals, are interred facing Mecca. In a mosque the qiblah is indicated by the mihrab, a niche in the building’s interior wall facing Mecca.

Architecture is closely tied to religion, even in our modern age (De Wildt et al. 2019). For thousands of years, faithful Sunni Muslims have dutifully prayed toward the holy city of Mecca five times a day (Shia, three times a day). Ilci et al. (2018) have reported that “Facing towards the qibla … is one of the six conditions or requisites of the prayer for being valid. In other words, if a person does not turn his/her face to the qibla direction within an acceptable declination, his/her prayer is invalid according to scholarly consensus” (p. 1642).

How Accurately Could Early (622-900 C.E.) Muslims Determine the Direction of Prayers (Qibla)? by Walter R. Schumm, 25.Feb 2020

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/3/102/htm

 

 This is what we find in reality:

Line from Mecca to Mosque in Cordoba

In the case of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, it was a suburban Roman street-plan, revealed by excavations only some 20 years ago, which defined the qibla-axis of the Mosque, and this happened to be one of the several qibla-directions favoured in al-Andalus. So in medieval terms the Mosque could indeed have been thought to be facing the Kaʿba.

The enigmatic orientation  of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, David A. King

I find this to be weird brain contortionism.

 

Line from 2 Samarkand mosques to Mecca

SAMARQAND: The legal scholar Abu ‘l-Yusr al-Bazdawî (d. 1089) reported these qib­las as being used for mosque orientation in Samarqand: 270°, due west, used by the Hanafite school of law and corresponding to the direction in which the road to Makka left the city; 240°, winter sunset, as used for the Great Mosque; 230°, a value underlying a table for the altitude of the sun in the azimuth of the qibla, presented by al-Bazdawî but lifted from some earlier source; 225°, south-west, a compromise between the Hanafite and Shâfi’ite qiblas; and 180°, due south, used by the Shâf’iite legal school, intended to correspond to the qibla of the Prophet in Medina.”

 

 

Line from Baghdad Haydar Khana mosque

 

Line from Baghdad Historic Marjan Mosque - Al-Rashed St, Baghdad, Iraq

After the death of Murjan in 1353, he was buried in the madrasa and the dome was erected on top of his tomb. However, the madrasa and dome were later demolished in 1946 to expand the Al Rasheed Street.

 

 

Line from Mecca to the Al-Khulafa Mosque - Oldest existing mosque in Baghdad, although renovated for numerous times. The minaret dates back to the Abbasid era.

None of these mosques are directed towards Mecca. 

They don't point towards Mecca. 

They are not aligned with Mecca. 

They don't face Mecca.

The Qiblah is not in the direction of Mecca.

 

George Bernard Shaw and Genuine Islam

 

The claim is that Sir George Bernard Shaw wrote something about Islam and Muhammad in 'The Genuine Islam,' Vol. 1, No. 8, 1936:

"If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam."

“I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him - the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Savior of Humanity."

"I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.”

This essay explains why this is a dishonest and quite desperate claim.

I will start off with this:

Jean Rafenski Reynolds, Published 11 books and numerous articles
Answered March 4, 2018
I’m a Shaw scholar with a Ph.D. I’ve published two books about Shaw with a university press, and I’m on the editorial board of a scholarly journal. This claim has been thoroughly researched. 

IT’S A HOAX.


Only Collect
By Rachel
This should be a fledgling historian’s maxim & I wish someone had told me this earlier. When you start out studying history — when you begin as a graduate historian, you are nothing; you are not even the history books you’ve already read, because you’ve probably misunderstood or not appreciated some fundamental aspect of them. You are an infant: the first eighteen or twenty years of your life were spent stumbling, coming to terms with living, with the world and with yourself. By the time you get to my age (23) you’ve had maybe four or five years of actual consciousness, self-awareness and self-understanding. You are now about five years old. Then, and only then, the real work begins.
 

And the work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof. That is to say, you should be able to look back on it six months for now and not be completely stymied as to why you’ve organized things that way. (The present versions of ourselves are invariably the biggest idiots, and six months will make that clear).
 

What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important.
Here, there’s one more point I could make: time fine-tunes your collecting habits. You are a predator of sources. Over time, things will start to jump out at you. For a lionness in the savannah on the hunt, the merest movement in the grass is a stimulus to action, but she has learned to distinguish between the random twitches of the landscape and the presence of prey. In the library and the archive, the hunt is as much a matter of skill as of instinct. In short, until you’re an adult lion, jump at everything — even if it turns out just to be a falling leaf, or a totally bizarre interview between George Bernard Shaw and a Saudi Muslim mystic in Mombasa in 1936, which I discovered amidst some otherwise entirely unremarkable magazine articles on the nature of Islam in Southeast Asia.

Being an Unforgivably Protracted Debunking of George Bernard Shaw’s Views of Islam
By Rachel
 

I mentioned in the passing, in an earlier post, that I had come across a bizarre interview between George Bernard Shaw and a Saudi mystic. Firstly, a correction: the mystic in question is not Saudi as I had initially thought, but was born in Meerut, India; he was a Sufi Sheikh by the name of His Eminence Maulana Mohammed Abdul Aleem Siddiqui and was born in 1892. Here he is, looking splendid, and there is Mr Shaw himself, also looking quite splendid. In fact, when the two met, His Eminence would have been 43, while Shaw himself would have been a ripe old 79.
 
I wanted to write something on this interview because it has really a rather curious legacy on the internet…. Googling “george bernard shaw islam” will, in fact, bring you right to the very interview that I came across in the archive, which is faithfully reproduced in full right here. The interview, to set the record straight, is in a periodical published by the All Malaya Muslim Missionary Society in Singapore called the Genuine Islam; the interview itself was conducted while George Bernard Shaw was in Mombasa sometime between the 10th and 20th of April, 1935, and the interview was published in the January number of Vol. 1 (1936) of the periodical, which is, as far as I can ascertain, the only volume that was ever published. So far, so good.
 

Being The Part Where The Muslim Websites Love Bernard Shaw
However, you’ll quickly find that the most quoted part of that interview is not, in fact, any part of the interview itself, which consists for the most part of His Eminence burbling amicably on about finer points of Islamic theology (read for yourself), while Mr Shaw listens and interjects with the occasional question. It is rather from a paragraph that is excerpted out of the main body of the interview into its own quote box — except that this paragraph appears nowhere in the interview itself. It is this same paragraph that has been quoted, in all the links I provided above and more, roughly in the following few ways, labelled for convenient reference. In its most popular form:

[A] I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him – the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world, he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.

Also:
[B] If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe, within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.

I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess the assimilating capacity to changing phase of existence, which can make itself appeal to every age.

Being The Part Where Truer Things Prevail

As you might ascertain from the way the quote appears and the sites it appears on, Muslims seem rather gleeful about the thumbs-up from such a prominent Western infidel as GBS. I would like, however, to give you the full, unabridged version of this quote, as it appears in the periodical itself, and it is as follows:

[C] I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age.
 

[1] The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. The medieval ecclesiastics, either through ignorance or bigotry, painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man, and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness. But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle, Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad, and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam.
 

[2] But the Europe of the present century is far advanced. It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad.
Being The Part In Which Uncomfortable Questions Are Asked
Firstly, it’s very clear that all online incarnations of this paragraph are hopelessly mashed up. Then there’s the line in [B] — “If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe, within the next hundred years, it could be Islam” — which seems to be a tremendous exaggeration and total restating of the line at [C:2]. Secondly, there’s already the fact I mentioned earlier, which is that this particular quote appears absolutely nowhere in the main body of the interview itself. Where did it come from? Did the interviewers specially solicit a statement from Shaw? Under what conditions? Or did they cite it from some hitherto unknown-to-me book that Shaw has written on Islam? Did they simply cobble it together out of things he said later on, over post-interview tea and smokes? Did they…write it themselves?
 

I have no answers to these questions, and perhaps more qualified scholars of Shaw might be able to point me in the right direction. I don’t really think the interviewers wrote the quote entirely themselves, though, for reasons that involve the line at [C:1]. The internet citations generally cut off right before this line, and looking at it, it’s easy to see why the first person who quoted it might not have wanted to include it. “The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me — that sounds like the sardonic, humorous Bernard Shaw I’m familiar with, but might have sounded a little too much like mockery to his enthusiastic Muslim stenographer. And perhaps it was mockery — why not? Shaw was famously irreverent; just a few years previously he had published a short story on religion which had utterly scandalized even his closest friends. It appears to have involved, among other scandalous things, an actual drawing of Muhammad (which Shaw irreverently exhorts his publisher, John Farleigh, to “keep as handsome as you can, [for] he was a princely genius…By the way, he abhorred images, and took the second commandment au pied de la lettre.”

Being A Recounting Of The Subject’s Religious Views
Shaw nourished his fascination with religion around the early 1930s with a series of trips around the world, seemingly undertaken in large part to inspect religions in different societies — in Egypt, in Africa, in India, the Far East and Southeast Asia, North America, and at one point even to New Zealand. In 1933 he had this to say about Hinduism and Islam in a letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters:
[In Egypt and India] the apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods…Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
 

Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes [that] they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley….
 

There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.2
 

Shaw was to go on to observe that “before Mahomet and the founder of the Jains were dead in their graves”, the religions they had founded had already begun to ‘backslide’ into polytheism, and “all the Gods and no Gods became hopelessly mixed up, exactly as the Apostles backslid when Jesus was killed”. A decade later, his views on Islam did not seem to have changed in essence from this; and furthermore, his remarks in 1947 show that he had not in fact taken seriously any of what His Eminence had explained to him about the nature of Heaven and Hell in Islam. In the interview, Shaw had asked the Maulana: “[How can you] possibly present the picture of Heaven and Hell, which is portrayed in the Qur’an, in a manner convincing to persons conversant with science, whose minds are inured to accept nothing without visible or palpable proof?” to which His Eminence reeled off a long explanation, relying largely on the usual argument of metaphor, as well as some cutting edge mangling of atomic theory. Shaw largely ignored this, and retained his conviction right up to his 1947 letter to Mabel Annie Stobart that Muslim Hell was something “reinvented by Mohammad”, “a very frightful hell, of disgusting diseases and no houris; [but] the sort of place that the Arabs could understand and believe in; and it put the fear of God into them”.3 

Incidentally, he seems also to have retained his deep respect for Jainism.
 

Given his views on the tendency of religion to ‘backslide’ once deprived of the strong authority figure (and in this one discerns traces of his peculiar respect for Stalin and other fascist dictators) it’s no wonder that in the interview he persistently asks the Maulana whether or not he can be so sure that this is in fact what the Qur’an says, or whether he can be sure that other ‘more orthodox’ or ‘present day’ Muslims would share his balanced views (he asks this at least twice). This probing, despite the genial tone of the whole conversation, is what stays with me, and what makes [C] for me, along with its slightly dubious origins, something I would at the very least hesitate to cite so freely, let alone with such unscholarly wantonness as has been exhibited in its proliferation all over the internet.
 

Being The Part Where The Fruits Of Wantonness Are Reaped
With such wantonness, unsurprisingly, confusion has arisen. This guy quotes that awfully exaggerated first line in [B] and wonders why Shaw, an atheist, would say that (he didn’t). This reader asks on Yahoo! Answers what Shaw has actually said about Islam, and receives [B] in response, which is voted ‘Best Answer’. This one brazenly claims that Shaw promotes the takeover of England by Islam. This one tries to hunt down a book entitled ‘The Genuine Islam’ by George Bernard Shaw, and is told that the book is probably not a GBS book and is an urban legend. Even Wikiquote is slightly confused.
 

I hope this post, despite my total lack of Shaw expertise, will go some small way towards helping untangle the confusions, in particular the confusions that arose out of a genuinely critical spirit, but also the confusions amongst so many Muslim websites who have so eagerly adopted him as some kind of speaker for their faith. At the very least, let this be a cautionary tale about poor citation practices. I’m only too pleased to stand corrected by anyone who knows better about Shaw and such things than I do. For those interested, and if you don’t believe me, the periodical is held in the National Library in Singapore and at the New York Public Library. Possibly elsewhere, too.
________________________________________
References
[1] Laurence, Dan H., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1926-1950 (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1988), pp. 305-6.
[2] Ibid., pp. 323-3.
[3] Ibid., p. 789.



https://idlethink.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/being-an-unforgivably-protracted-debunking-of-george-bernard-shaws-views-of-islam/

All Chapters Koran with Sentence numbers and city

#	Anglicized title	English title	Number of verses	City
1	Al-Fatiha	The Opening	7	Makkah
2	Al-Baqarah	The Cow	286	Madinah
3	Al Imran	The Family of Imraan	200	Madinah
4	An-Nisa	The Women	176	Madinah
5	Al-Ma'idah	The Food	120	Madinah
6	Al-An'am	The Cattle	165	Makkah
7	Al-A'raf	The Heights	206	Makkah
8	Al-Anfal	The Spoils of War	75	Madinah
9	At-Tawbah	The Repentance	129	Madinah
10	Yunus	Jonah	109	Makkah
11	Hud	Hud	123	Makkah
12	Yusuf	Joseph	111	Makkah
13	Ar-Ra'd	The Thunder	43	Madinah
14	Ibrahim	Abraham	52	Makkah
15	Al-Hijr	The Rocky Tract	99	Makkah
16	An-Nahl	The Honey Bees	128	Makkah
17	Al-Isra	The Night Journey	111	Makkah
18	Al-Kahf	The Cave	110	Makkah
19	Maryam	Mary	98	Makkah
20	Ta-Ha	Ṭāʾ Hāʾ	135	Makkah
21	Al-Anbiya	The Prophets	112	Makkah
22	Al-Hajj	The Pilgrimage	78	Madinah
23	Al-Mu'minun	The Believers	118	Makkah
24	An-Nur	The Light	64	Madinah
25	Al-Furqan	The Criterion	77	Makkah
26	Ash-Shu'ara	The Poets	227	Makkah
27	An-Naml	The Ant, The Ants	93	Makkah
28	Al-Qasas	The Narrations	88	Makkah
29	Al-Ankabut	The Spider	69	Makkah
30	Ar-Rum	Rome, Byzantium	60	Makkah
31	Luqmaan	Luqman	34	Makkah
32	As-Sajda	The Prostration	30	Makkah
33	Al-Ahzaab	The Clans	73	Madinah
34	Saba	Sheba	54	Makkah
35	Faatir	The Originator	45	Makkah
36	Yaseen	Yāʾ Sīn	83	Makkah
37	As-Saaffaat	Those Who Set The Ranks	182	Makkah
38	Saad	Ṣād	88	Makkah
39	Az-Zumar	The Crowds	75	Makkah
40	Ghafir	The Forgiver	85	Makkah
41	Fussilat	Explained	54	Makkah
42	Ash_Shooraa	The Consultation	53	Makkah
43	Az-Zukhruf	The Gold Ornaments	89	Makkah
44	Ad-Dukhaan	The Smoke	59	Makkah
45	Al-Jaathiyah	The Kneeling Down	37	Makkah
46	Al-Ahqaaf	The Dunes	35	Makkah
47	Muhammad	Muhammad	38	Madinah
48	Al-Fath	The Victory	29	Madinah
49	Al-Hujuraat	The Private Apartments	18	Madinah
50	Qaaf	Q̈āf	45	Makkah
51	Adh-Dhaariyaat	The Wind That Scatter	60	Makkah
52	At-Toor	The Mount	49	Makkah
53	An-Najm	The Star	62	Makkah
54	Al-Qamar	The Moon	55	Makkah
55	Ar-Rahman	The Most Merciful	78	Madinah
56	Al-Waqi'a	The Inevitable	96	Makkah
57	Al-Hadeed	The Iron	29	Madinah
58	Al-Mujadila	The Pleading	22	Madinah
59	Al-Hashr	The Gathering	24	Madinah
60	Al-Mumtahanah	The Examined One	13	Madinah
61	As-Saff	The Ranks	14	Madinah
62	Al-Jumu'ah	Congregation	11	Madinah
63	Al-Munafiqoon	The Hypocrites	11	Madinah
64	At-Taghabun	The Cheating	18	Madinah
65	At-Talaq	Divorce	12	Madinah
66	At-Tahreem	The Prohibition	12	Madinah
67	Al-Mulk	The Dominion	30	Makkah
68	Al-Qalam	The Pen	52	Makkah
69	Al-Haaqqa	The Sure Reality	52	Makkah
70	Al-Ma'aarij	The Ways of Ascent	44	Makkah
71	Nooh	Noah	28	Makkah
72	Al-Jinn	The Jinn	28	Makkah
73	Al-Muzzammil	The Enshrouded One	20	Makkah
74	Al-Muddaththir	The One Wrapped Up	56	Makkah
75	Al-Qiyamah	Resurrection	40	Makkah
76	Al-Insaan	The Human	31	Madinah
77	Al-Mursalaat	Those Sent Forth	50	Makkah
78	An-Naba'	The Great News	40	Makkah
79	An-Naazi'aat	Those Who Tear Out	46	Makkah
80	Abasa	He Frowned	42	Makkah
81	At-Takweer	The Folding Up	29	Makkah
82	Al-Infitar	The Cleaving Asunder	19	Makkah
83	Al-Mutaffifeen	The Dealers in Fraud	36	Makkah
84	Al-Inshiqaaq	The Rending Asunder	25	Makkah
85	Al-Burooj	The Mansions Of The Stars	22	Makkah
86	At-Taariq	The Night-Visitant	17	Makkah
87	Al-A'laa	The Most High	19	Makkah
88	Al-Ghaashiyah	The Overwhelming Event	26	Makkah
89	Al-Fajr	The Daybreak	30	Makkah
90	Al-Balad	The City	20	Makkah
91	Ash-Shams	The Sun	15	Makkah
92	Al-Layl	The Night	21	Makkah
93	Ad-Dhuha	Glorious Morning Light	11	Makkah
94	Ash-Sharh	The Expansion of Breast	8	Makkah
95	At-Teen	The Fig Tree	8	Makkah
96	Al-'Alaq	The Clinging Clot	19	Makkah
97	Al-Qadr	The Night of Honor	5	Makkah
98	Al-Bayyinahh	The Clear Evidence	8	Madinah
99	Az-Zalzalah	The Earthquake	8	Madinah
100	Al-'Aadiyaat	The Chargers	11	Makkah
101	Al-Qaari'ah	The Striking Hour	11	Makkah
102	At-Takaathur	The Piling Up	8	Makkah
103	Al-'Asr	The Time	3	Makkah
104	Al-Humazah	The Slanderer	9	Makkah
105	Al-Feel	The Elephant	5	Makkah
106	Quraysh	The Quraysh	4	Makkah
107	Al-Maa'oon	Neighbourly Assistance	7	Makkah
108	Al-Kawthar	Abundance	3	Makkah
109	Al-Kaafiroon	The Disbelievers	6	Makkah
110	An-Nasr	The Help	3	Madinah
111	Al-Masad	The Plaited Rope	5	Makkah
112	Al-Ikhlaas	Purity of Faith	4	Makkah
113	Al-Falaq	The Daybreak	5	Makkah
114	Al-Naas	Mankind	6	Makkah