An Atheist Explores the Qur'an: Introduction

An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts – The Qur’an

Following on from my Bible Readthrough, I’ve now moved onto the Qur’an. Whereas with the Bible I was raised in at least a nominally Christian environment with lots of exposure to Biblical stories and imagery, my knowledge of the Qur’an and Islam is pretty limited. To that end, I’ve done a bit more background reading than I did with the Bible, but still the intent was always to find my own meaning as much as possible within the text.

A Note on Translation
Obviously, also, I don’t speak or read Arabic, so I’ve used a couple of translated websites. al-Quran.info was the first one I used, which blends Arabic text, transliterated and an English translation, as well as notes where interpretations vary.  Later on I also discovered Quran.com, which doesn’t have the transliterated version but does have a handy feature where you can mouseover the Arabic script and it gives you not only a translation of that section but you can get a audio version as well. Indeed some say that the Qur’an needs to be heard to be appreciated, and both sites have read versions as well; al-Quran.info has links to several different readers. Since these are all official sponsored sites to covey the Qur’an to those of us that understand English but not Arabic, hopefully that are about as good as it gets to get a sense of the script as many ways as possible.

A Note on Organisation
The Qur’an is divided into 114 surahs, each of which is divided into verses. Unlike the Bible there is not intermediate level of organisations; a surah is roughly equivalent to a Biblical Book, but generally shorter, closer to a chapter.

In my Biblical readthrough I broke the reading up into chunks of around five chapters per post; here I’m breaking the text into chunks of around twenty verses per section, and five of these per post, since on average a Biblical chapter is about 20 verses. I realise that this is an artificial division, and there will be times when verse 21 continues a theme from verse 20, but overall it seems to work out okay as a way of breaking up the text for analysis. The Qur’an is arranged in descending order of length of surah, so later on I’m basically looking at the surah as a whole in one post.

A Note on Convention.
As with the Bible Readthrough, it’s not my intent to “debunk” the book, nor to mock anyone for holding particular beliefs. The main difference is that I don’t approach these texts with the attitude that It Is All True and Must Not Be Questioned.  I use the terms Allah and God interchangeably, and God is the only figure to get capitalised pronouns. Sometimes if the text mentions Jesus Christ, I capitalise Him as well out of respect for Christian traditions, even though Islam considers Jesus to be a prophet but not the Son of God. Finally I use the convention “the Prophet” to refer to the Prophet Mohammed;  he doesn’t get capitalised pronouns and neither do I use any phraseology along the lines of “peace be upon him”. This is because, to me, it feels as wrong for a nonbeliever to say this as it would for me to cross myself in front of an altar. If you happen to be a believer reading this, feel free to insert whichever honorific phrase you like in your own mind as you read this.

The Bible didn’t make me Christian, will the Qur’an make me a Muslim? Or will I end up with a fatwa against me? Read on….

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