American Illustrated Quran – an elaborate sham
By Louis Palme
The most elaborately decorated Quran of the 21st Century was published last November after nine years in preparation. Each of the Quran’s 77,000 words was hand-lettered and illustrated by Southern California artist Sandow Birk. (See all the pages at http://www.sandowbirk.com/paintings/recent-works/ ) Yale Religious Studies professor, Zareena Grewal, wrote the introduction to this massive, thirteen pound, table-top Quran. She expressed hope that Muslim and non-Muslim readers would see that this illustrated perspective on the Quran speaks to 21st Century Americans. I’m sure it will!
“a day when the sky will bring forth smoke which will overwhelm the people.” (Surah 44:10)
The Big Sham
The problem with this version of the Quran is that it is an elaborate sham. A sham is “something false or empty that is purported to be genuine.” You get a hint of this because the book’s preface is written by Reza Aslan, a creative writing professor at the University of California at Riverside. He asserts that Muslims are free to interpret the Quran as they wish: “Islam takes the shape of whatever culture it encounters.” Then he contradicts himself by saying that the Quran is the actual word of God containing spiritual power. It is unlikely that the Creator of the universe would hand down commands that he didn’t want mankind to follow to the letter – the way he intended.
When he first started his project, Birk chose a copyright-free translation of the Quran by an English clergyman named John Medows Rodwell (1861) for the text. Right away he had a problem. Said Birk, “Everyone is bummed that I used it, because it’s not very good and it was done by the British colonizers when they were in Egypt. It’s biased, and it has little quirky things.” Rodwell’s translation was the victim of Edward Said’s curse of “Orientalism.” To mollify Muslims, bits and pieces of more recent translations by Muhammad Asad (2003) and Thomas Cleary (1994) were melded into the Rodwell version.
Sandow Birk is a graduate of Otis School of Art, but as a long-ago lapsed Christian, his artistic interpretations of the verses of the Quran are questionable by Muslims and non-Muslms alike. For example, Birk’s text of Surah 37:40 describes Paradise as follows: “[God’s sincere servants] shall have a promised banquet of fruits, and shall be honored in the garden of delight, upon couches facing each other. A cup of pure springs shall be passed around between them: pure water, a delight to those who drink it, with no intoxicating effects, so they don’t become drunk from it. And with them there will be shy women with large beautiful eyes, delicate, as pure as if they had been hidden in eggs.” Here is Birk’s artistic rendering of that text:
I’m not sure if any mujahedeen would be willing to die for that!
Doctored Text
Words matter. Allah declares in the Quran, “My word cannot be changed, nor am I unjust to My servants.” (Surah 50:28) So why have the words of the American Quran been changed to soften Allah’s harsh commands?
It is evident that Surah 4:34, which commands wife beating, “beat them” was changed to “restrain them.” Note in the image below that the text has been altered. Two lines are darker than the rest, and they do not line up with the rest of the text. Furthermore, if you check the 50 or so English translations of the Quran at www.islamawakened.org/quran/4/34 not a single translation uses the word “restrain.” However, the word “beat” is used in over half of the translations. Other translations use “strike” (5), “hit” (3), and “chastise” (3).
The other problem with the hand-written text is that there is no “spell-check” to catch inadvertent errors. Here is one error I spotted in the American Quran: In Surah 47:22, it says, “Ask [the unbelievers]: ‘Would you rather turn away from Him to spread disorder across the land and severe blood ties?’” The word should be “sever.”
Are Muslims just like other Americans?
The only Muslims depicted in the American Quran can be identified by their activities – praying on a city sidewalk and wearing a hijab while shopping. Birk wanted to create the impression that, generally, American Muslims look just like other Americans. This, of course, is not true. Islamic Sharia Law (See Reliance of the Traveller) stipulates that Muslim women must hide all but their hands and face from unrelated males (m2.8(1)), that it is unbelief (kufr) to imitate non-Muslims, believing their ways to be superior (e4.1(2)), and that, in a city, group prayers must be held in public places such that the manifestations of obedience to Allah’s command are evident. (f12.1)
Left picture: “Those who are near the Lord disdain not to do Him worship. They celebrate His praises, and prostrate before Him.” (Surah 7:206)
Right picture: Believers, do not take My enemy and your enemy for friends. (Surah 60:1)
American Muslims are better assimilated and more productive than their counterparts in England, France, and Germany. Their most visible behavioral models, emanating from the Muslim Brotherhood and the sister organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), promote strict adherence to Sharia Law. The chilling quote from Ibrahim Hooper, the co-founder of CAIR, says it all: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Quran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” While Muslims may deny this agenda, it is all too apparent in their activities and statements that they have vastly different values and practices than their fellow Americans.
Quranic vs. American Terrorism
The Quran contains numerous exhortations for Muslims to engage in jihad (fighting in the way of Allah) and terrorism. Despite efforts to scrub such words, some of these commands ended up in the text of the American Quran:
Surah 8:59: “Prepare what you can against them, including cavalry to strike terror into God’s enemy and yours and others whom you do not know but God knows.”
Surah 4:95: ‘Those who remain at home, except for the disabled, are not equal to those who struggle (mujahiduna) in the cause of God with their possessions and their lives.”
This Quranic terrorism, at the time of Muhammad, consisted primarily of raiding parties that captured caravans for booty and attacked settlements such as Khaybar. By 21st Century standards these acts of terrorism would be considered to be banditry and warmongering. However, the only evidence of Islamic terrorism is shown in the illustration at the beginning of this article – the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Instead, there are eight full-page illustrations of American military activities: Afghanistan (Surah 8), Guantanamo (Surah 8), Hiroshima (Surah 26), Iraq (Surah 27), Iraq (Surah 33), Iraq (Surah 47), Iraq (Surah 47), Iraq (Surah 105). Also, apparently to argue that terrorism is perpetuated by non-Muslims, there is a spread showing the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing (Surah 28) Here is just one example of these tu quoque diversions:
“How will [the unbelievers] fare when the angels gather them in death, striking their faces and their backs? (Surah 47:27)
A Religious or a Political Statement?
Early in the Quran project, Birk tried to get some Islamic scholars involved. None would respond. When asked about it, Usman Madha, the director of public relations at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, cautioned that many Muslims might find the project insulting to the Islamic faith. He said, “There is no such thing as an American Quran, or European Quran, or Asian Quran. If someone calls a work their own version of the Quran, they are misrepresenting the Quran as revealed to the prophet Muhammad by the angel Gabriel.” He also said, “If you look at Islamic history, we have never associated any revelations with imagery because then it becomes idol worship.” (None of BIrk’s images shows Muhammad, and only a few depict actual Muslims.)
According to Birk, “Given the global situation right now, the Quran may be the most important book on earth, but few Americans know anything about it. I’m attempting to create visual metaphors that go along with the text and hopefully make it more accessible to Americans, more relevant to American life.” There is irony to this goal, says Los Angeles Muslim journalist Tasbeeh Herwees: “Islam remains culturally relevant to the U.S. – not because it is welcomed here, but exactly because it is not. Consider this, and the very production of a Quran within a culture that wants to destroy it is rendered a political act.”
The reality is that the Quran is a diatribe against non-Muslims, women, and hypocrites beginning with the very first chapter. It is also a relentless incitement to wage war “for the cause of Allah” against non-Muslims. Rather than wanting to destroy the Quran, most Americans just want people to read it and visualize it for what it truly is – not a metaphor for the challenges of day-to-day American life.
A claim by Islamic scholars as well as jihadists is that no one can produce something as beautiful as the Quran in the way the words are arranged and thus it can only be of God. This claim should be answered.
First, all someone has to do is examine some of the great works of literature to fine much written beauty. Such as the Greek epic poet Homer with his Iliad and Odyssey and then Virgil who produced the Aeneid has beauty. Even one of the non-Bible books in the Apocrypha called The Song of Three Children is also very beautiful. Thus just because someone sees a work that is written in great beauty doesn’t mean it’s inspired by God.
Second, the scholar Edward Gibbon wrote after an examination of the Quran that it is an “incoherent jumble of fable and precept and declamation which seldom excites a sentiment or an idea, sometimes craws in the dust and is sometimes lost in the clouds…” The writer Thomas Carlyle wrote the Quran is “A wearisome jumble, crude, incondite [with] endless iterations [and] longwindedness…” Likewise, the philosopher David Hume was NOT favorably impressed after reading the Quran.
[Source of the three scholars mentioned – Secrets of The Koran: Revealing Insight Into Islam’s Holy Book .56,66, by Don Richardson]
Furthermore, the following should be taken into consideration.
Of course the Muslim who reads the Quran will see great beauty in the way the words are arranged. This is, in part, because of the power of suggestion after being told so many times that the Quran is so beautifully written. That’s an old brainwashing method, repeating and being told that same thing again and again. Since he or she is always being told the same lie will end up believing that lie. In addition to that, the Imams try to discourage their people from reading other works, such as the Bible, so then they don’t have much or anything to compare or contrast the Quran with. Of course there are some Muslim’s that do read other works, but they are exceptions and they read other things only after they were already brainwashed by the Imams. In short, the Muslims can’t read the Quran objectively because their Imams have programmed them to have a strong bias towards it.
An important question: “Is the Quran the Word of God or is it a fabrication of a man. Thus, is the Quran the truth or a fiction and a hoax ?” The jihadists use many verses from the Quran as the main source of justification for their violence, mayhem and murders. As found in For example, 4:89. 5:33. 9:5,111,123. 47:4. There, the question is clearly given on pages 145 through 157 in THE ISLAMIC INVASION by Robert Morey in which he wrote a section on the Quran with its self-contradictions. Just two of the many he cited are the following “The Quran differs on whether a day is a thousand years or fifty thousand years in God’s sight’ and “Who was first to believe? Abraham or Moses [Sura 6:14 versus 7:143]? The above is inconsistent and illogical. Further, Morey wrote about “The fact that Judaism and Christianity broke up into different sects was used in the Quran to prove that they are not of God [Suras 30:20-32. 42:13, 14]. Yet Islam has broken up into many warring sects and therefore cannot be true if the Quran is right.” Moreover, Morey in his book shows many more contradictions and absurdities in the Quran, there are and how Muhammad incorporated extra Biblical and Jewish folklore along with pre-Islamic Arabian myth and parts of Zoroastrian and Hindu stories into the Quran. Furthermore, the Muslims claim that “the Quran is the direct, literal word of God unmodified in any way by the Prophet who uttered them at the bidding of God.” Nevertheless, in the book UNVEILING ISLAM by Ergun Mehmet and Eethi Caner has shown that the Quran was modified in the following account on pages 45. “Muhammad felt the need to improve on the words of Allah, since he changed Allah’s wisdom for his own on several occasions. A hadith tells of the nonchalant emendations of Muhammad:’ On a number of occasions he [a scribe] had, with the Prophet’s consent changed the closing words of verses. For example, when the prophet had said ‘God is mighty and wise ‘ Adbollah b. Abi Sarh suggested writing down ‘Knowing and wise’ and the Prophet answered that there was no objection. Having observed a succession of changes of this type, Adbollah renounced Islam on the grounds that revelations, if from God could not be changed at the prompting of a scribe such as himself. After his apostasy he went to Mecca and joined the Qorayshites.’ Other writers reveal that later Muhammad and his people did go war with the Qorayshites and he personally killed Abdollah. Obviously Abdollah knew too much and Muhammad wanted Abdollah’s knowledge to die with him.” In conclusion, the Quran is not only a fiction, it’s also a hoax.
For a more full understanding of the actual nature of the Koran a person need to look back in time before the coming of Muhammad and then the Koran. Back to the First Century AD which was the time of early Christian church. For the Early Christian Church had and now in modern times the Christian church still has the Gospel of Christ, First Corinthians 15:1-4. Much later, in time, came Muhammad and he gave much information, that many believe to be divine, some of which is said to have been obtained from an angle from heaven. This information was written down on different objects and things Those written words in different objects was then compiled together and then eventually went into the composition of what is now called the Koran, As some also call it the Qur’an. The Koran is actually, that is in reality, another gospel, apart and greatly different from the Gospel of the Christian Church. Such a thing was predicted in the Bible. For the Bible does warn about those who will come and offer to people another gospel other than the one shown above, First Corinthians 15:1-4. For it is warned about any other “gospel” in the Bible. For it is written in the Bible “Though we or an angle from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so I say now again, if any man preaches any other gospel unto you than ye have received, let him be accursed.” Galatians 1:8, 9. [K.J.V.] Therefore, the Koran is the result of the deception of a false prophet, Mathew 7:15., who may have come in contact with a fallen angle, a demon, So the imams and mullahs who preach it a truth to other are accused of and by God.