"Not Even a Single Letter of the Quran Has Changed? - Imam Answered! @uticamasjid
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If the Quran is universal, why doesn't it talk about the prophets that came to other nations other than the Middle East? What proof do you have that the Quran is the Word of God? When we look at medieval Europe, we can see how much the religion affected them in a bad way. When that is the case, how can we link salvation to a holy book? Do you think the book you are talking about is civilized? Imam Tom Facchine, welcome back to our cross-examination concept. This time we have prepared harder questions about the Quran. - Are you ready? - Yes. How do you know that the Quran that we have now is the same as it was revealed? Couldn't it have been changed in 1400 years?
There are several ways that we know that the Quran that we have now is exactly the same that the Prophet Muhammad (saw) was given. First of all, the way in which it was taught to the Prophet Muhammad (saw) by the Angel Jibreel. It was recited to him during Ramadan in its proper order and entirety, and the Prophet Muhammad (saw) would lead the Companions in prayer, and so they were able to see, sort of, the latest update as to the fullness of the Quran. And in the final Ramadan before He (saw) passed away He went over the entire Quran with Jibreel two times. Okay, so there were many Companions who were witness to this and who memorized it in its entirety. What did they do?
They continued to pass down this memorization to their students and then to their students. So we have this oral chain. That's the first way, it's this oral chain. And it's true that oral chains of transmission can be extremely unreliable if you don't take the proper precaution in verifying who are those people that make up that chain and how reliable are they. And so Alhamdulillah in our tradition, we have that rigor where we're looking at people. We know their biographies, right? These aren't just names, right? Who were they? Where did they go? Did they actually meet this person who they claim to have taught, et cetera, et cetera.
So we actually verify all of that as opposed to just taking it at face value. The second thing is through writing it down, okay? So within two years of the death of the Prophet Muhammad (saw) the entire Quran in its final form was written down and it was held for safekeeping. If you compare this to any other document, such as you take the Bible, you know, either the Old Testament or the New Testament. The New Testament wasn't written down until maybe 75 years at the earliest, from the time of Isa (as). So we're talking about very, very, very close to the actual event that had eyewitnesses, the Companions who knew it, participate. Nobody has any problem with the process.
Nobody has any problem with the results. No controversies. Nobody saying it's like, "Oh no, it's not actually like that," or whatever. Okay, and so we have manuscripts and there's other, there's researchers, anthropologists, and others who researched this and actually can trace all of the manuscripts that we have in existence today and date them to the time period, or at least close to the time period of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). And so if you were to go, let's say, within a 100 years, manuscripts that were produced that can be dated to within 100 years of the time of the Prophet Muhammad (saw), you have over 50 actual manuscripts that exist in various places of the world.
How much of the Quran do they represent, these manuscripts? And we're not talking about the oral transmission. We're not even talking about the ones that Uthman sent. Outside of that, these manuscripts, they represent over 96% of the Quran that we still have, okay? So that's extremely significant. If you compare that to the New Testament, okay, if you go 100 years from the time of Isa (as), there is only one single manuscript that exists, okay, that has anything to do with the New Testament. You know how much of the New Testament it represents? It's the size of a business card. One single verse from the Gospel of John.
You don't get anything significant when it comes to the manuscripts representing the New Testament, until you get to 200, 300 years after the time of Isa. So that's to give you a sense of how significant it is, okay? Are there any differences between those manuscripts and the Quran as we have today? No. Absolutely zero. It lives in the hearts of people. It lives on the tongues of the people who have memorized it, and it lives in the books that have been written and passed down. And so we have multiple ways of assuring that it is the same thing that was given to the Prophet Muhammad (saw). There are different sacred texts like the Bible, the Torah and Hindu texts.
Can they give me peace as well? Why should I believe only in the Quran and not in any of them? The issue is not believing in one book versus another, or in one text versus another. The issue is finding out what your Creator said to you. That's the issue. Because the only way you're going to get peace, real peace, is identifying what your Creator said to you and following it. And so the question then becomes, "Well, how do I tell what's from my Creator and what's not?" And so you need to do that work for yourself. There are Hindu texts, okay. Who wrote them? When did they write them? Have they changed since they were first written down? Who's the author? Who's the person who held the pen?
Most of the time, people don't know. Same thing with the Bible, okay? Is this actually the Word of my Lord? Is this actually the Word of God, the word of the Sustainer? Who wrote them? You'll find that the original manuscripts for the Gospels, they didn't have the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on them. Those were added later. Just to give them sort of credibility. Matthew didn't write the Gospel of Matthew. Mark didn't write the Gospel of Mark. These were sort of inventions of the Church later on. And so who wrote them? We don't know. When did they write them? Several generations after Isa was alive. Are there any inconsistencies in them? Yes, there's quite a few, right?
The Gospel of John ends twice, just like the Book of Genesis begins twice. You know some of the parts of the Old Testament that are supposedly written by Musa (as), by Moses, continue after Moses dies. So, you know, is this authentic? Is this the Word of God? No, it's not. And actually the Catholic Church recognizes this. They don't call the Bible the actual Word of God. They call it the inspired Word of God. But even if that's your position you would have to ask, well, is there something better out there? Is there something that's going to get me closer to what my Creator wants? And just the possibility that that might exist means that you have a moral duty to find out. Right?
And a moral duty to kind of sift through. Us Muslims, we're standing here and we're claiming this book is the actual, literal Word of God, replaces everything that came before it, way more authentic than any other book out there. So now everybody has the duty to find out if that's true. If the Quran is universal, why doesn't it talk about the prophets that came to other nations other than the Middle East? Because the purpose of a book of revelation is to convince, okay? Allah (swt) the Creator, He is attempting to convince His audience that what He is telling them is true, so that they submit. It's a moral injunction. If I'm trying to convince you, you're a doctor, right?
If I try to convince you by giving you examples about bricklaying, would that be very relevant to you? No, it wouldn't. You wouldn't have any idea what I'm talking about, really. And so it would actually impact the effectiveness of the message that I'm trying to deliver. I have to speak to you with what you know, if I speak to you with what you know, you're going to be able to follow and you're going to be able to make a sound decision, because I don't want to give you any room to escape. I want your decision to either reflect a moral triumph that you are sincere or a moral failure that you're not sincere.
If I jeopardize my message by giving you language or examples or metaphors that you don't understand, then you might reject my message sincerely. You might reject it, but because you misunderstood it. And that's not what is the purpose of a divine revealed text. So what would be the purpose of mentioning prophets, potential prophets sent to China, or sent to North America, or South America, or the Amazon, or anywhere, to a bunch of desert-living Arabs in the 600? It would only confuse them, and it would let them off the hook. They'd be able to easily say, "We're not going to believe in this. We never heard of any of this stuff.
What are you talking about?" Rather, the things that are universal are not necessarily the examples or the identities of the prophets or the stories that are brought up. It is the morality and the moral system and the tawhid, the theology that is undergirding all of those stories and all of those examples. What proof do you have that the Quran is the Word of God? The proof is that if something tells you things that are impossible to know, or impossible for any human to know, then it's a non-human source.
If I've never been to Ankara and I start telling you about Ankara, not just normal things that I can look up on Wikipedia, I start telling you about the streets and the people who sell simit, and the people who sell this, and what it smells like and what it feels like. And then there's this alley and that alley. Very soon you have to deal with the fact that I'm not... This thing isn't coming from me. This thing is coming from a source beyond me. And so the Quran tells you things that are impossible for anyone to know. Some of those things are historical, like the battle that was going on between the Byzantines and the Sassanids at the time. The Byzantines were losing horribly.
And Allah (swt) told us in the Quran that in a short amount of years they're going to turn it around and they're going to win. And that's exactly what happened. It was impossible to tell. There are other things that are scientific. Allah (swt) describes the universe is expanding. He says, "And certainly we are the expander of it." Something that people at the time, who knows what they thought? But it becomes clearer and clearer as we live, maybe sort of what was being referred to there. And there's things about our own selves that we can't possibly know.
So it defies explanations, something that comes from beyond, something that comes from beyond the attempts or abilities of a normal human being or even an abnormal human being. Something that comes from supernatural, from beyond humanity, something that is divine. When we look at medieval Europe, we can see how much the religion affected them in a bad way. When that is the case, how can we link salvation to a holy book? To the question, two part answer. First of all, that brings us to the importance of having genuine revelation to base our society around and not revelation or fake revelation or something that's mixed up.
Because the Bible that we have today, and the Bible that we've had since medieval times, is not the same thing as what the Creator sent to Prophet Jesus. It was changed. It was played around with, the Catholic Church did a lot of things with it. So did, you know, the Romans when they adopted Christianity. A lot of it was lost in the first 100, 150 years before it was really put down to paper in a way that was lasting. So the document that we have and that we call "The Bible" is certainly not 100% authentic, genuine revelation from the Creator. So then, if you are going to base society off of that, you've basically built your house on sand.
You've built something that you want to last forever, but the foundations are very, very shaky. And we're still living actually in the consequences of that attempt to build society around such shaky foundations. But the second thing is that the European experience of religion is not everybody's experience of religion. It's not universal. We have an entirely different thing. Just to to say that Europe struggled in the medieval times, living under the Bible does not have any bearing on living under the Quran or living according to the Quran because they're two completely different books. They're two completely different sets of instructions.
Even if they are overlapping in some sorts of ways, one is authentic, one is not. And we have very different historical experiences. The Quran is said to be a book that brings peace and tranquility. But what about the concept of jihad in the Quran? How can killing someone be related to peace? Nobody wants to kill people, and actually Allah says that Himself. He says that "Jihad has been prescribed for you even though you dislike it." But Allah also says in a different part of the Quran that if we didn't have this thing, if it didn't exist, then every single mosque and church and synagogue and monastery would be destroyed.
And I find it very interesting that Allah (swt) actually uses the words for these different institutions. He doesn't just say "religious house", or "house of worship", or "mosques". He mentions the religious houses of other faiths as well. And the point is that there are people in this world that would wipe you out if they had the chance. That's just a fact. And so jihad then becomes necessary to stop these people's harm. You have to use force sometimes to stop the harm of others. And so jihad has to exist. If not, then there would be no good. There would be no justice. There would be no peace, right? These things aren't always conflicting.
Sometimes in order to achieve peace, we have to stop those who are threatening peace. Many non-Muslims think that Muslims want to kill them because there's a verse in the Quran, "Kill them wherever you find them." How can you explain this? These verses are taken out of context. So one of those verses is in Surah Al-Baqara, Allah (swt), when He's talking about jihad, says He said that, yeah, "Kill them wherever you find them." The question is who? Anybody, any random non-Muslim or random Christian or random whatever? No, Allah's talking about a very specific situation and a specific group of people.
And then after that time period, whoever takes the ruling or is in the exact same situation as this particular group of people. But people don't include the very next verse which Allah (swt) says, Meaning that, "If they stop fighting you, then you stop fighting too. Allah is forgiving and merciful." So in this particular verse, as in the other verses, fighting has a purpose. And that purpose is not just because somebody doesn't share the same faith as us. That purpose has to do with people who want to harm us.
In fact, in that particular verse, if you go back to it, it talks about "And turn them out of their homes as they have turned you out of your homes." So there's a context here where we are reciprocating the harm that other people have aggressively done to us, okay? And even then, once they stop fighting us, they prove that they don't want to harm us anymore, then we also stop because we don't want to be fighting necessarily. The other verse that's famously referred to is verse five of Surah At-Tawbah, where Allah says something similar. Right?
"So now you kill the idolaters or the idol worshippers wherever you find them." And again, is Allah talking about every single idol worshipper, every single idolater on the face of the earth? Or is He talking about a very specific group of people who were guilty of a very particular thing? And then throughout history, whoever meets that description? The answer is the latter. There's a context. Again, because the very next verse, Allah talks about a different group of idolaters that are actually eligible for a peace treaty. He says, He says if any of, there's a an idol worshipper who is trying to do business with you, right? He doesn't want to harm you. He's not trying to kill you.
He's not trying to kick you out of your home. He wants to do business. Then let him do business. Let him in among you with the Muslims. Maybe he'll hear the Quran and maybe he'll end up, if not accepting Islam, then feeling positively about Islam. So if you actually look at the context, not just lift things you know, out of context in the Quran you see that these are addressing very, very specific situations. Do you think the book you are talking about is civilized? There is no such thing, or there's no way to measure being civilized if we don't have an objective tool. Right, so if we look at what we're doing today in society, is it civilized or not?
Okay, maybe we assume that it's civilized. Maybe in five years or ten years, we'll come to the conclusion that it's not, okay? The things that people were doing 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we look back and past and we say, "Ah, these people, they're so misguided," right? So if you don't have something objective, something outside of yourself, something from a third party, someone who's not subject to a conflict of interest, then the idea of what's good and what's civilized is always going to be liquid. It's always going to shift, always going to change.
But if you derive your expectations of what is good and what's bad from a universal source, from the Creator, then it's going to be anchored and you're going to have sort of guidance forever, and in any sort of situation. In the Quran, there's a law of inheritance which says there is two shares for men, one share for women. How is that fair? First of all, that's not what it says. It says that within brothers and sisters, okay, that brothers inherit twice as much as their sisters do. But if you look in other scenarios, it's not broken down about male versus female. So, for example, the largest fixed share of inheritance that exists is two or more females, two or more daughters.
Two or more daughters inherit two thirds of the deceased's estate. And so that is the most compared to a father, compared to an uncle, compared to a grandfather, right, would. And depending on, everybody who's left would inherit less. So it's not a simple male-female breakdown. There are actually many, many situations in which females inherit more than males in the inheritance. However, there are situations where males inherit more than females. So you have to ask why? What's the purpose then? And the reason is because the Sharia is not neutral as to what type of family arrangements we have.
It actually tries to encourage a certain type of family relationship and a certain type of family dynamic. People these days in the modern urban world feel like it's unfair because they imagine somebody flying in, like the sister, okay, their parents pass away or one of their parents passes away. The sister flies in from New York and the brother flies in from California, and they both show up and get their chunk of cash and go back home and live separate lives, right? Maybe they call each other once a year. That's not family according to the Sharia, okay? The Sharia wants the family to be more interdependent than that and more thick than that, and more reliant on each other than that.
And so the type of family that the Sharia wants us to have is a family in which people rely on each other, and that some people have responsibility and some people have duty, and that duty comes with privileges. So the brother, for example, is financially responsible for his sister. If his sister gets divorced, if his sister becomes a widow, if his sister falls on hard times, if they don't have the parents, where can she go? The brother's there. That's what the Sharia says. And if the brother's going to be there, then he also has to have something to defray the cost. He has to have the financial ability to provide for her. We don't want him to have any reason to say no.
And so in inheritance situations, he's going to get more because he's expected to do more. Every privilege comes with responsibility. Every privilege comes with duty, and you can't separate the two. So it's not simply, now some people say, "Well, okay, well, now we don't live like that. So why don't we change the inheritance laws?" No, no, no, that's for your own good that society is built that way. That's for your own good that your family is built that way. And if our families and societies don't reflect that reality, then actually what has to change is not the Sharia and not the inheritance law. It's actually our families and our society.
We know that in Islam Allah is one, but in the Quran Allah refers to Him as "We". So how do we explain this? In language study, this is called the royal "we". So even if you go to English, if you talk about the Queen or if the Queen issues a decree, she doesn't say "I". She says "We". Even in Arabic today, you know, if I come to somebody who is older than me, more learned than me, maybe a sheikh or a scholar or something like that, I'm not going to use and refer to them in the singular. I'm going to refer to them in the plural. I say, "How are you all?" even though it's just one person, right? The reason we do this in language, this is very well known, is that we're giving honor, right?
So you pluralize something that's singular, not literally, in order to give it honor. And so when Allah (swt) refers to Himself "Certainly we have sent down the Quran." This is something that gives honor to Him. And it doesn't imply at all that Allah is more than one. But there are places that He refers to Him as "I". Why is that? Because that can be extra, extra emphasis, okay? So just like I'll give you an example of something else Allah does. Allah (swt), sometimes in the Quran, He speaks directly to a person, and sometimes He's addressing somebody, but He uses the third person. Like take for example, in the 80th chapter of the Quran, Abasa.
The literal meaning of that phrase is "He turned, He frowned and turned away." Allah (swt) is talking to the Prophet Muhammad. And yet He's talking about Him in the third person. Imagine this scenario, your child. You're in with your friends, maybe some business colleagues, maybe your boss. Okay, and they're over for dinner. Your child comes up to you and says something that's very embarrassing to you. How do you respond? One way you can respond is you can talk directly to your child. Say, "Hey, that wasn't appropriate. I don't want you to say that right now." The other thing you can do is you can turn to your friends and say, "He's still young. He's learning.
He doesn't understand." You see the differences in the style there. So there's somewhat of blame in this style. Okay, so when Allah (swt) says describing what He did, there's blame in that. Because He's not even saying "You turned and you frowned and you turned away." He's saying, "He frowned and He turned away." So Allah does all of these things stylistically, depending on the type of message that He's trying to send. So sometimes when He's trying to indicate His Majesty, He's going to use the plural.
Say "We." "We have done this," and "We have done this." And sometimes when Allah (swt) is trying to communicate His closeness, His immediacy, the ability for you to have an intimate relationship with him, it's much more suitable to use the singular. An Allah. Right? He says with Musa. He has the sign, the burning bush with Musa, and then He uses the first person. It's a very intimate sort of situation and sometimes it can be anger as well. There's many different sort of purposes. But the thing is to notice how all of these things, and this is part of the miracle of the Quran, that how Allah (swt) uses these things as devices in order to achieve some sort of stylistic result.
Imam Tom Facchine, thank you for your answers. We'll challenge you with harder questions next time. I look forward to it.
There are several ways that we know that the Quran that we have now is exactly the same that the Prophet Muhammad (saw) was given. First of all, the way in which it was taught to the Prophet Muhammad (saw) by the Angel Jibreel. It was recited to him during Ramadan in its proper order and entirety, and the Prophet Muhammad (saw) would lead the Companions in prayer, and so they were able to see, sort of, the latest update as to the fullness of the Quran. And in the final Ramadan before He (saw) passed away He went over the entire Quran with Jibreel two times. Okay, so there were many Companions who were witness to this and who memorized it in its entirety. What did they do?
They continued to pass down this memorization to their students and then to their students. So we have this oral chain. That's the first way, it's this oral chain. And it's true that oral chains of transmission can be extremely unreliable if you don't take the proper precaution in verifying who are those people that make up that chain and how reliable are they. And so Alhamdulillah in our tradition, we have that rigor where we're looking at people. We know their biographies, right? These aren't just names, right? Who were they? Where did they go? Did they actually meet this person who they claim to have taught, et cetera, et cetera.
So we actually verify all of that as opposed to just taking it at face value. The second thing is through writing it down, okay? So within two years of the death of the Prophet Muhammad (saw) the entire Quran in its final form was written down and it was held for safekeeping. If you compare this to any other document, such as you take the Bible, you know, either the Old Testament or the New Testament. The New Testament wasn't written down until maybe 75 years at the earliest, from the time of Isa (as). So we're talking about very, very, very close to the actual event that had eyewitnesses, the Companions who knew it, participate. Nobody has any problem with the process.
Nobody has any problem with the results. No controversies. Nobody saying it's like, "Oh no, it's not actually like that," or whatever. Okay, and so we have manuscripts and there's other, there's researchers, anthropologists, and others who researched this and actually can trace all of the manuscripts that we have in existence today and date them to the time period, or at least close to the time period of the Prophet Muhammad (saw). And so if you were to go, let's say, within a 100 years, manuscripts that were produced that can be dated to within 100 years of the time of the Prophet Muhammad (saw), you have over 50 actual manuscripts that exist in various places of the world.
How much of the Quran do they represent, these manuscripts? And we're not talking about the oral transmission. We're not even talking about the ones that Uthman sent. Outside of that, these manuscripts, they represent over 96% of the Quran that we still have, okay? So that's extremely significant. If you compare that to the New Testament, okay, if you go 100 years from the time of Isa (as), there is only one single manuscript that exists, okay, that has anything to do with the New Testament. You know how much of the New Testament it represents? It's the size of a business card. One single verse from the Gospel of John.
You don't get anything significant when it comes to the manuscripts representing the New Testament, until you get to 200, 300 years after the time of Isa. So that's to give you a sense of how significant it is, okay? Are there any differences between those manuscripts and the Quran as we have today? No. Absolutely zero. It lives in the hearts of people. It lives on the tongues of the people who have memorized it, and it lives in the books that have been written and passed down. And so we have multiple ways of assuring that it is the same thing that was given to the Prophet Muhammad (saw). There are different sacred texts like the Bible, the Torah and Hindu texts.
Can they give me peace as well? Why should I believe only in the Quran and not in any of them? The issue is not believing in one book versus another, or in one text versus another. The issue is finding out what your Creator said to you. That's the issue. Because the only way you're going to get peace, real peace, is identifying what your Creator said to you and following it. And so the question then becomes, "Well, how do I tell what's from my Creator and what's not?" And so you need to do that work for yourself. There are Hindu texts, okay. Who wrote them? When did they write them? Have they changed since they were first written down? Who's the author? Who's the person who held the pen?
Most of the time, people don't know. Same thing with the Bible, okay? Is this actually the Word of my Lord? Is this actually the Word of God, the word of the Sustainer? Who wrote them? You'll find that the original manuscripts for the Gospels, they didn't have the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on them. Those were added later. Just to give them sort of credibility. Matthew didn't write the Gospel of Matthew. Mark didn't write the Gospel of Mark. These were sort of inventions of the Church later on. And so who wrote them? We don't know. When did they write them? Several generations after Isa was alive. Are there any inconsistencies in them? Yes, there's quite a few, right?
The Gospel of John ends twice, just like the Book of Genesis begins twice. You know some of the parts of the Old Testament that are supposedly written by Musa (as), by Moses, continue after Moses dies. So, you know, is this authentic? Is this the Word of God? No, it's not. And actually the Catholic Church recognizes this. They don't call the Bible the actual Word of God. They call it the inspired Word of God. But even if that's your position you would have to ask, well, is there something better out there? Is there something that's going to get me closer to what my Creator wants? And just the possibility that that might exist means that you have a moral duty to find out. Right?
And a moral duty to kind of sift through. Us Muslims, we're standing here and we're claiming this book is the actual, literal Word of God, replaces everything that came before it, way more authentic than any other book out there. So now everybody has the duty to find out if that's true. If the Quran is universal, why doesn't it talk about the prophets that came to other nations other than the Middle East? Because the purpose of a book of revelation is to convince, okay? Allah (swt) the Creator, He is attempting to convince His audience that what He is telling them is true, so that they submit. It's a moral injunction. If I'm trying to convince you, you're a doctor, right?
If I try to convince you by giving you examples about bricklaying, would that be very relevant to you? No, it wouldn't. You wouldn't have any idea what I'm talking about, really. And so it would actually impact the effectiveness of the message that I'm trying to deliver. I have to speak to you with what you know, if I speak to you with what you know, you're going to be able to follow and you're going to be able to make a sound decision, because I don't want to give you any room to escape. I want your decision to either reflect a moral triumph that you are sincere or a moral failure that you're not sincere.
If I jeopardize my message by giving you language or examples or metaphors that you don't understand, then you might reject my message sincerely. You might reject it, but because you misunderstood it. And that's not what is the purpose of a divine revealed text. So what would be the purpose of mentioning prophets, potential prophets sent to China, or sent to North America, or South America, or the Amazon, or anywhere, to a bunch of desert-living Arabs in the 600? It would only confuse them, and it would let them off the hook. They'd be able to easily say, "We're not going to believe in this. We never heard of any of this stuff.
What are you talking about?" Rather, the things that are universal are not necessarily the examples or the identities of the prophets or the stories that are brought up. It is the morality and the moral system and the tawhid, the theology that is undergirding all of those stories and all of those examples. What proof do you have that the Quran is the Word of God? The proof is that if something tells you things that are impossible to know, or impossible for any human to know, then it's a non-human source.
If I've never been to Ankara and I start telling you about Ankara, not just normal things that I can look up on Wikipedia, I start telling you about the streets and the people who sell simit, and the people who sell this, and what it smells like and what it feels like. And then there's this alley and that alley. Very soon you have to deal with the fact that I'm not... This thing isn't coming from me. This thing is coming from a source beyond me. And so the Quran tells you things that are impossible for anyone to know. Some of those things are historical, like the battle that was going on between the Byzantines and the Sassanids at the time. The Byzantines were losing horribly.
And Allah (swt) told us in the Quran that in a short amount of years they're going to turn it around and they're going to win. And that's exactly what happened. It was impossible to tell. There are other things that are scientific. Allah (swt) describes the universe is expanding. He says, "And certainly we are the expander of it." Something that people at the time, who knows what they thought? But it becomes clearer and clearer as we live, maybe sort of what was being referred to there. And there's things about our own selves that we can't possibly know.
So it defies explanations, something that comes from beyond, something that comes from beyond the attempts or abilities of a normal human being or even an abnormal human being. Something that comes from supernatural, from beyond humanity, something that is divine. When we look at medieval Europe, we can see how much the religion affected them in a bad way. When that is the case, how can we link salvation to a holy book? To the question, two part answer. First of all, that brings us to the importance of having genuine revelation to base our society around and not revelation or fake revelation or something that's mixed up.
Because the Bible that we have today, and the Bible that we've had since medieval times, is not the same thing as what the Creator sent to Prophet Jesus. It was changed. It was played around with, the Catholic Church did a lot of things with it. So did, you know, the Romans when they adopted Christianity. A lot of it was lost in the first 100, 150 years before it was really put down to paper in a way that was lasting. So the document that we have and that we call "The Bible" is certainly not 100% authentic, genuine revelation from the Creator. So then, if you are going to base society off of that, you've basically built your house on sand.
You've built something that you want to last forever, but the foundations are very, very shaky. And we're still living actually in the consequences of that attempt to build society around such shaky foundations. But the second thing is that the European experience of religion is not everybody's experience of religion. It's not universal. We have an entirely different thing. Just to to say that Europe struggled in the medieval times, living under the Bible does not have any bearing on living under the Quran or living according to the Quran because they're two completely different books. They're two completely different sets of instructions.
Even if they are overlapping in some sorts of ways, one is authentic, one is not. And we have very different historical experiences. The Quran is said to be a book that brings peace and tranquility. But what about the concept of jihad in the Quran? How can killing someone be related to peace? Nobody wants to kill people, and actually Allah says that Himself. He says that "Jihad has been prescribed for you even though you dislike it." But Allah also says in a different part of the Quran that if we didn't have this thing, if it didn't exist, then every single mosque and church and synagogue and monastery would be destroyed.
And I find it very interesting that Allah (swt) actually uses the words for these different institutions. He doesn't just say "religious house", or "house of worship", or "mosques". He mentions the religious houses of other faiths as well. And the point is that there are people in this world that would wipe you out if they had the chance. That's just a fact. And so jihad then becomes necessary to stop these people's harm. You have to use force sometimes to stop the harm of others. And so jihad has to exist. If not, then there would be no good. There would be no justice. There would be no peace, right? These things aren't always conflicting.
Sometimes in order to achieve peace, we have to stop those who are threatening peace. Many non-Muslims think that Muslims want to kill them because there's a verse in the Quran, "Kill them wherever you find them." How can you explain this? These verses are taken out of context. So one of those verses is in Surah Al-Baqara, Allah (swt), when He's talking about jihad, says He said that, yeah, "Kill them wherever you find them." The question is who? Anybody, any random non-Muslim or random Christian or random whatever? No, Allah's talking about a very specific situation and a specific group of people.
And then after that time period, whoever takes the ruling or is in the exact same situation as this particular group of people. But people don't include the very next verse which Allah (swt) says, Meaning that, "If they stop fighting you, then you stop fighting too. Allah is forgiving and merciful." So in this particular verse, as in the other verses, fighting has a purpose. And that purpose is not just because somebody doesn't share the same faith as us. That purpose has to do with people who want to harm us.
In fact, in that particular verse, if you go back to it, it talks about "And turn them out of their homes as they have turned you out of your homes." So there's a context here where we are reciprocating the harm that other people have aggressively done to us, okay? And even then, once they stop fighting us, they prove that they don't want to harm us anymore, then we also stop because we don't want to be fighting necessarily. The other verse that's famously referred to is verse five of Surah At-Tawbah, where Allah says something similar. Right?
"So now you kill the idolaters or the idol worshippers wherever you find them." And again, is Allah talking about every single idol worshipper, every single idolater on the face of the earth? Or is He talking about a very specific group of people who were guilty of a very particular thing? And then throughout history, whoever meets that description? The answer is the latter. There's a context. Again, because the very next verse, Allah talks about a different group of idolaters that are actually eligible for a peace treaty. He says, He says if any of, there's a an idol worshipper who is trying to do business with you, right? He doesn't want to harm you. He's not trying to kill you.
He's not trying to kick you out of your home. He wants to do business. Then let him do business. Let him in among you with the Muslims. Maybe he'll hear the Quran and maybe he'll end up, if not accepting Islam, then feeling positively about Islam. So if you actually look at the context, not just lift things you know, out of context in the Quran you see that these are addressing very, very specific situations. Do you think the book you are talking about is civilized? There is no such thing, or there's no way to measure being civilized if we don't have an objective tool. Right, so if we look at what we're doing today in society, is it civilized or not?
Okay, maybe we assume that it's civilized. Maybe in five years or ten years, we'll come to the conclusion that it's not, okay? The things that people were doing 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we look back and past and we say, "Ah, these people, they're so misguided," right? So if you don't have something objective, something outside of yourself, something from a third party, someone who's not subject to a conflict of interest, then the idea of what's good and what's civilized is always going to be liquid. It's always going to shift, always going to change.
But if you derive your expectations of what is good and what's bad from a universal source, from the Creator, then it's going to be anchored and you're going to have sort of guidance forever, and in any sort of situation. In the Quran, there's a law of inheritance which says there is two shares for men, one share for women. How is that fair? First of all, that's not what it says. It says that within brothers and sisters, okay, that brothers inherit twice as much as their sisters do. But if you look in other scenarios, it's not broken down about male versus female. So, for example, the largest fixed share of inheritance that exists is two or more females, two or more daughters.
Two or more daughters inherit two thirds of the deceased's estate. And so that is the most compared to a father, compared to an uncle, compared to a grandfather, right, would. And depending on, everybody who's left would inherit less. So it's not a simple male-female breakdown. There are actually many, many situations in which females inherit more than males in the inheritance. However, there are situations where males inherit more than females. So you have to ask why? What's the purpose then? And the reason is because the Sharia is not neutral as to what type of family arrangements we have.
It actually tries to encourage a certain type of family relationship and a certain type of family dynamic. People these days in the modern urban world feel like it's unfair because they imagine somebody flying in, like the sister, okay, their parents pass away or one of their parents passes away. The sister flies in from New York and the brother flies in from California, and they both show up and get their chunk of cash and go back home and live separate lives, right? Maybe they call each other once a year. That's not family according to the Sharia, okay? The Sharia wants the family to be more interdependent than that and more thick than that, and more reliant on each other than that.
And so the type of family that the Sharia wants us to have is a family in which people rely on each other, and that some people have responsibility and some people have duty, and that duty comes with privileges. So the brother, for example, is financially responsible for his sister. If his sister gets divorced, if his sister becomes a widow, if his sister falls on hard times, if they don't have the parents, where can she go? The brother's there. That's what the Sharia says. And if the brother's going to be there, then he also has to have something to defray the cost. He has to have the financial ability to provide for her. We don't want him to have any reason to say no.
And so in inheritance situations, he's going to get more because he's expected to do more. Every privilege comes with responsibility. Every privilege comes with duty, and you can't separate the two. So it's not simply, now some people say, "Well, okay, well, now we don't live like that. So why don't we change the inheritance laws?" No, no, no, that's for your own good that society is built that way. That's for your own good that your family is built that way. And if our families and societies don't reflect that reality, then actually what has to change is not the Sharia and not the inheritance law. It's actually our families and our society.
We know that in Islam Allah is one, but in the Quran Allah refers to Him as "We". So how do we explain this? In language study, this is called the royal "we". So even if you go to English, if you talk about the Queen or if the Queen issues a decree, she doesn't say "I". She says "We". Even in Arabic today, you know, if I come to somebody who is older than me, more learned than me, maybe a sheikh or a scholar or something like that, I'm not going to use and refer to them in the singular. I'm going to refer to them in the plural. I say, "How are you all?" even though it's just one person, right? The reason we do this in language, this is very well known, is that we're giving honor, right?
So you pluralize something that's singular, not literally, in order to give it honor. And so when Allah (swt) refers to Himself "Certainly we have sent down the Quran." This is something that gives honor to Him. And it doesn't imply at all that Allah is more than one. But there are places that He refers to Him as "I". Why is that? Because that can be extra, extra emphasis, okay? So just like I'll give you an example of something else Allah does. Allah (swt), sometimes in the Quran, He speaks directly to a person, and sometimes He's addressing somebody, but He uses the third person. Like take for example, in the 80th chapter of the Quran, Abasa.
The literal meaning of that phrase is "He turned, He frowned and turned away." Allah (swt) is talking to the Prophet Muhammad. And yet He's talking about Him in the third person. Imagine this scenario, your child. You're in with your friends, maybe some business colleagues, maybe your boss. Okay, and they're over for dinner. Your child comes up to you and says something that's very embarrassing to you. How do you respond? One way you can respond is you can talk directly to your child. Say, "Hey, that wasn't appropriate. I don't want you to say that right now." The other thing you can do is you can turn to your friends and say, "He's still young. He's learning.
He doesn't understand." You see the differences in the style there. So there's somewhat of blame in this style. Okay, so when Allah (swt) says describing what He did, there's blame in that. Because He's not even saying "You turned and you frowned and you turned away." He's saying, "He frowned and He turned away." So Allah does all of these things stylistically, depending on the type of message that He's trying to send. So sometimes when He's trying to indicate His Majesty, He's going to use the plural.
Say "We." "We have done this," and "We have done this." And sometimes when Allah (swt) is trying to communicate His closeness, His immediacy, the ability for you to have an intimate relationship with him, it's much more suitable to use the singular. An Allah. Right? He says with Musa. He has the sign, the burning bush with Musa, and then He uses the first person. It's a very intimate sort of situation and sometimes it can be anger as well. There's many different sort of purposes. But the thing is to notice how all of these things, and this is part of the miracle of the Quran, that how Allah (swt) uses these things as devices in order to achieve some sort of stylistic result.
Imam Tom Facchine, thank you for your answers. We'll challenge you with harder questions next time. I look forward to it.