Questions about Muslims and Islam. Please help..

[zollen]

Re: Questions about Muslims and Islam. Please help..

What you said about how one should seek the holy teachings makes perfect sense. I totally agree with you about how we should learn the holy texts.

If I understand you correctly… We should do our very best to understand Quran as a general approach of seeking the holy teachings. But when we encounter scriptures that we do not understand. We should memorize only the texts that we do not understand and then hopefully someday when we are older and wiser, or perhaps with helps, we will finally understand the texts.

You also made a valid point that scriptures that we thought we understood may turn out to have a much deeper meaning and therefore we should not assume we understood completely. Is this a good enough reason to memorize the entire Quran?

To sum it up..
Understand Quran as much as we could, then memorize only the texts we have not yet understand.

Here are my questions

1. Is this how young Muslims across the globe learning Quran today?
2. Would you consider memorizing/reciting Quran, spiritual enlightenment?
3. You claimed that by memorizing/reciting Quran, it would help others from altering/corrupting the holy texts. Is it working?
4. Are there any other approach for better protecting the holy texts? For example, establishing a global centralized Islamic Authority for determining the authenticity of the holy text and the interpretation of the texts. Would you think this idea would be more effective comparing to memorize Quran?
5. Would you think books/computers/technologies would be better for documenting/recording Quran, than human memory?

I have absolutely no problem with the “ideals” of Islam, which is what most of you have been preaching me.
However I do have problem with the actual practices of Islam in our world and some of these practices may not reflect the “ideals” of Islam at all. If we do not change some of the “not-so-good” Islamic traditions, how could our children ever benefited from better Islamic traditions?

Perhaps in the last 500 years if modern Muslims had been focusing on reasoning and logic, today Islamic thinkings and practices would have been much more aligned with the** “ideals”** of Islam.

@psyah

Peace zollen

For the Qur’an to be memorised is an important thing indeed. Not for everyone, but everyone is supposed to memorise some part of it. Why?

Well the first reason is based on the methodology of Islamic practice. We do utilise our brains to reason things out, but if we reach areas that our reasons evade us then we simply accept as a slave would accept the wishes of his master without question without asking why … because perhaps the answer to the question is beyond our understanding.

We acknowledge truth to be different from understanding … that it is possible for us to have the truth and yet be unable to understand it. We believe that every state is possible … the state of knowing what we know, the state of not knowing what we know, the state of knowing what we don’t know and the state of not knowing what we don’t know.

So our pious predecessors memorised the Qur’an and so do we or we try … and that is the condition of the Muslim some of Islamic outlook is “'aqal” reason and wisdom, but some of it is “naqal” tradition and following …

Now the wisdom that we can extract for memorising the words is that say we one day write down the meaning of the Qur’an and then that becomes the basis for our learning, then years go by people forget about the original script and focus on the translation. Languages develop and move based on the day and age and hence we need to render more editions of the translations to make them fit … for example not so long ago we could write “gay” and it would mean “joyful” but today most places will not use this word to mean that thing.

Since languages develop then in order to preserve the meaning the translations also need to develop … and we get what have in the Bible … many editions and problematic verses which have been relegated to metaphor or meaninglessness … on the other hand by preserving the “text” people can always go back to the source and derive a meaning which is applicable to that day and age without worrying about translational drift … i.e. translating from a translation from a translation so that the last meaning is completely unlike the first …

In fact this is part of the miracle of the Qur’an not only is it’s text preserved due to people memorising it, but also the words don’t change but the meanings do - only they become more and more profound as time moves on … That is why we don’t discover science in the Qur’an, but when science makes a discovery it appears in the Qur’an as though it has just appeared … what I am saying is that since the Qur’an is the Word of God … the words are so precisely calculated in it, that time compounds its verses.