“I read the entire Quran, the hadith and the Sira”: 7 answers

Rosenthal credits the Quran on the oneness and majesty of God, on the care it demands for the poor, the orphan and the widow, and on the opening chapter, which a Muslim recites at least seventeen times a day in the obligatory prayers. He credits its honour of Jesus: the virgin birth, the miracles, the titles “His word” and “a spirit from Him.” He calls the science of hadith criticism “a genuine intellectual achievement.” All of that is fair, and a Muslim reader can say so.

He is also right that some hard texts are in the sources. “Whoever changes his religion, kill him” is in Sahih al-Bukhari (6922), and the classical schools made death the penalty for apostasy. The executions of the men of Qurayza are in the Sira and in Bukhari. The report of A’isha’s age is in Bukhari and Muslim. The killing of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf is in Bukhari. The site’s articles on apostasy, Qurayza, A’isha and Ka’b and the poets concede each of these and set out what the sources say around them.^[2]

The dispute lies elsewhere: in several of his statements about the classical scholars, and in the conclusions he draws.

On abrogation (naskh), the doctrine that a later ruling can replace an earlier one, he writes that “Al-Suyuti compiled lists of abrogated verses running to over two hundred entries.” Al-Suyuti did the reverse. In his work on the Quranic sciences he cut the long lists down to about twenty verses, and Shah Waliullah later cut them to five. Al-Tabari, whom Rosenthal also names, rejected the claim that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) was abrogated, and Ibn Kathir opens his comment on it with “Do not force anyone to enter the religion of Islam.”^[3]

On Qurayza, he writes that the Sira narrates the event “with approval by the companion who participated.” The Sira is the work of Ibn Ishaq, who was born about 85 AH, more than seventy years after the event. He was no companion and took part in nothing.^[4]

He writes that the Prophet “authorized assassinations of poets who mocked him.” Of the four names usually listed, two, Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf and Abu Rafi’, are in Bukhari, and the sources give the reason as war against Medina: Ka’b rode to Mecca after Badr and urged Quraysh to attack. The two poets killed for verse, Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak, appear only in reports that the hadith critics reject; al-Albani grades the first fabricated.^[5]

He sets “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) against “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191) as a contradiction. The verse before 2:191 sets its terms: “Fight in the way of God those who fight you, and do not transgress” (2:190), and the verses after it end the fighting “if they cease” (2:192-193). One passage concerns an enemy at war, the other concerns belief. Surah 9 is bounded the same way: it protects polytheists who kept their treaties (9:4, 9:7) and orders safe passage for any who ask for it (9:6).^[3]

Rosenthal finds the Quran disorienting because it is “organized roughly by length of chapter” and not by date. He is right about the arrangement and right that a reader needs outside help to place a passage in time.

The same is true of the book he prefers. The Bible is a library arranged by kind, not by date. Its prophets are not printed in the order in which they spoke, and a reader needs outside help to place Isaiah or Jeremiah in their century. Paul’s letters to churches are printed roughly from longest to shortest, Romans first, the method Rosenthal finds strange in the Quran.

The Quran was never meant to be read as a narrative. It is recited, in prayer and in full, and its chapters return to the same themes from different sides so that each recitation carries the whole message. Its changes of voice and person are part of that design, and the site’s article on why the Quran switches between He, We and I sets out what the Arab rhetoricians found in them.

This is the argument Rosenthal says changed everything. In Christianity, he writes, the church is measured against Jesus; in Islam, the founder himself is the measure, so whatever is troubling in his life is troubling in the faith.

The premise needs correcting first. In Islam the standard is the revelation of God, and the Prophet is its first follower. The Quran tells him to say, “I am only a man like you; it is revealed to me that your God is one God” (18:110). It corrects him by name: for turning from a blind man who came to learn (80:1-10), for the decision on the captives of Badr (8:67-68), for a permission he gave too readily (9:43), and for a vow that forbade himself something lawful (66:1). A founder who is the standard is not corrected in his own scripture. Al-Faruqi put the principle in one line: “No man or being is one iota nearer to God than any other.”^[6]

The comparison also sets a prophet who governed a city at war beside one who never held power. A fair comparison is with the prophets who led peoples, Moses, Joshua and David, and the Bible records harder commands in their wars than any in the Sira: the command in Deuteronomy 20:16-17 to leave nothing alive in the cities of Canaan, or the order against Amalek in 1 Samuel 15:3. The site’s article on holy war in the Bible sets these out. Rosenthal also holds that Jesus is God, and on that belief Jesus is the God who gave those commands. The contrast between a gentle founder and a warlike one does not survive his own theology.

None of this makes the hard texts easy. It means that they have to be read one by one, with their circumstances, as the site’s articles do, and not as a single verdict on a whole religion.

Rosenthal writes that “the Quran states explicitly that he was sinless”, and that the Quran tells Muhammad to seek forgiveness for his sins (47:19; 48:2). The second is in the text. The first is stronger than the text. The angel tells Mary that she will be given “a pure son” (19:19), and the same Arabic root describes the purity of John the Baptist in the same chapter (19:13). A hadith in Bukhari says that Satan touches every child at birth except Mary and her son (3431).^[7]

Islam holds that every prophet was protected from grave sin. The Prophet’s prayers for forgiveness were worship. When A’isha asked why he stood in prayer until his feet swelled, though he had been forgiven, he answered, “Should I not be a grateful servant?” (Bukhari 4837).^[7]

And purity does not make anyone divine. A pure creature is still a creature; Creator and creature are two orders that never merge, which is the first principle of al-Faruqi’s reading of tawhid.^[6] In the Gospels Jesus refuses even the word “good”: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18).

Rosenthal writes that in the Quran God loves those who fight in His cause, purify themselves and repent, does not love the disbelievers and the arrogant, and is never “described as God pursuing people who have not yet qualified.”

The Quran names God al-Wadud, the Loving (85:14; 11:90). It says, “My mercy encompasses all things” (7:156), and, “My servants who have wronged yourselves, do not despair of the mercy of God; God forgives all sins” (39:53). A hadith in Bukhari answers the charge that God waits for people to qualify: “If he draws near to Me by a span, I draw near to him by a cubit; and if he comes to Me walking, I come to him running” (7405). God sent a messenger to every people (16:36) before any of them had earned it.^[8]

The Bible also speaks of God’s hatred and wrath: “You hate all evildoers” (Psalm 5:5); “Esau I hated” (Romans 9:13); “whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (John 3:36). A reader who calls the Quran’s love conditional on such verses would have to say the same of the Bible. What the Quran says God does not love is wrongdoing and those who persist in it. The way back stays open to the end. The site’s article on a relationship with God takes this further.

Rosenthal calls the relationship in Islam “essentially contractual”, obedience exchanged for reward, in which “even sustained obedience does not yield certainty of salvation.” Against it he sets the cross, where God closes the gap from His side.

The Prophet said the opposite of a contract: “None of you will enter Paradise by his deeds alone.” When asked, “Not even you?”, he said, “Not even me, unless God covers me with His mercy” (Bukhari 6467). Deeds matter, and mercy decides. Hope without presumption is not a defect of Islam. The New Testament asks the same: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12), and Jesus describes the judgement of the nations by what each did for the hungry and the stranger (Matthew 25:31-46).^[9]

The cross answers a problem the Quran does not accept. Man, in al-Faruqi’s words, begins “ethically sane and sound, not weighed down by any original sin”, and needs no one to pay his debt. “No soul bears the burden of another” (6:164; 53:38), as Ezekiel had said: “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father” (Ezekiel 18:20).^[6][9]

Rosenthal ends by saying that he found his answers “in the book the Quran told me to read.” The Quran honours the Torah and the Injil that God revealed to Moses and to Jesus (5:44-47). It does not point to the canon of sixty-six books as the churches later fixed it, and it says that the earlier communities lost part of what they were given (5:13-14). The site’s articles on the Islamic dilemma and where the Injil is take that claim in full.