Interesting article by Khaled Ahmed..has anyone read anything about this?
Daily Times WORD FOR WORD: —Khaled Ahmed
The Holy Quran mentions a prophet named Z’al-Kifl in Sura Anbiya. Some scholars think that Kifl was Buddha. Kifl is supposed to refer to Kapila (Vastu) the kingdom of Budhha. Arabic has no ‘p’ sound, hence Kifl, just as Farsi replaced Parsi
The Holy Quran mentions a prophet named Z’al-Kifl in Sura Anbiya. No detail is given about his message or his people. Who was Kifl? Different theories have been advanced. But what is not revealed must remain a mystery.
QTV (June 2, 2005) showed Dr Israr Ahmad’s learned explanation of the Quran. When it came to the account of Z’al Kifl, he said no one knows who the prophet was but people had advanced theories, and he himself favoured the theory that Kifl was Buddha.
Kifl is supposed to refer to Kapila Vastu the country where Buddha’s ancestors ruled and where he was born. Since Arabic doesn’t have the ‘p’ sound it converts it to ‘f’ sound. The prime example is Farsi for Parsi.
Some scholars also thought that Kifl in the Quran was actually a reference to Prophet Ezekiel of the Old Testament. Ezekiel was a prophet of the first exile in the land of the Chaldeans. The expression ‘wheels within wheels’ belongs to him. He was into the zodiac system he learned in Syria.
Kapila is a famous name. Kapila was probably the greatest Hindu rishi thought to be an incarnation of Vishnu. But the word comes from kapi meaning monkey. Some dictionaries say kap means to shake and monkeys tend to shake all the time because of their hyperactivity.
The derived meaning is brown because monkeys are usually brown. Monkeys tend to be holy. Hanuman the monkey hero was the big champion of Lord Rama. In China the monkey legend is dominant.
Vastu is from the root ‘vs’ meaning to live or settle. It also has a ‘bs’ variant, which is what we find in the Urdu for basti for settlement or habitation. Thus Kapila Vastu means the city of Kapila. Vastu also means property or something shining.
If you accept that the Quran referred to Lord Buddha as a prophet, then it points to the kingdom of Buddha rather than Buddha himself. Dr Israr did not say from where he had taken his ‘preference’ for Buddha.
The reference is in Ghulam Ahmad Parwez’s Lughaat al-Quran, probably the greatest living work on the etymology of the Quranic words. Maybe it is not fashionable or even safe to acknowledge the work of the great man today.
