when his circumstances so dictated, “Mohammad did not hesitate to assert that Allah had rescinded His former revelation and had substituted another. This principle is made clear in Sura 2, v. 100, which dates from the early period in Medina: ‘whatever verses we cancel or cause thee to forget, we bring a better or its like. Knowest thou not that God (Allah) hath power over all things?’ But apparently Mohammad had already used this method of changing earlier revelations, or of giving them a new content by means of explanatory or restrictive additions (compare 16, 103).” Accordingly, it appears that the Muslim Allah moves gradually toward excellence and perfection. The eternal perfections of Deity are not embedded characteristics of his nature. Thus, he is not the Creator of perfection, for he himself is short of perfection. He must try more than once in order to do something right, to arrive at a better revelation, to speak his mind on a significant topic, all during Muhammad’s short prophetic life span. Thus, Allah cannot be held to a word which he once has spoken, for he is liable to change his mind; an eternally reserved prerogative of Muslim deity. Accordingly, one never can know for sure in which mood is the Muslim Allah today. He is a variable, not a reliable or trustworthy constant. Therefore, it is only logical to conclude that a god whose nature is changeable, his mind also must be changeable. He is thus totally unreliable. He must never be taken seriously. Perhaps he is so much feared by Muslims because he is much unpredictable. And, since Allah’s mind is frequently changeable, who is to say that in the last thirteen centuries (a long time indeed for Allah to keep the same mind about any significant matter) he has not certainly changed his mind about Muhammad, about a particular revelation given to Muhammad, or about all of the revelations he gave to Muhammad; or even about Islam, Muslims and the Muslim Qur’ān altogether? We do not have a modern Muhammad to tell us whether Allah has recently declared Muslims as infidels worthy of every bit of his fury. Indeed, the Muslim doctrine of abrogation frequently practiced and applied to the Quranic text by Muslim theologians for many centuries, speaks of the fact that the Qur’ān represents Allah changing his mind about a considerable number of topics. There is a huge number of self-contradicting statements in the Arabic Qur’ān. Thus, the questionable doctrine of abrogation constitutes a major defect in Muslim theology, and certainly it should be a source of much embarrassment to thinking Muslims.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 00:34:11 +0000
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