A whole lot of issues have already been mentioned in this thread. I found a post from another thread in which I addressed some of them, and have simply resurrected it here, with a few additions.
Re: Paradise, virgins, etc. (in the original thread, jihad and suicide bombers were also mentioned, so I have simply kept the reference)—the Qur’an, Surah 78:31-34.
From Muhammad Asad’s translation:
Verily, for the God-conscious there is supreme fulfillment in store: luxuriant gardens and vineyards, and splendid companions well-matched, and a cup overflowing.
From Maulana Muhammad Ali’s translation:
Surely for those who keep their duty is achievement, gardens and vineyards, and youthful (companions), equals in age, and a pure cup.
Asad’s commentary says that kawa’ib means prominent, and although there was in the culture an idiomatic reference to breasts (kind of like: “Hey, look at those gigunda….!&rdquo😉, that is not in the word itself; Asad’s opinion is that, since both men and women are eligible for paradise, this would make little sense in the text—except, of course, for the men who want to read it in there. It is Asad’s opinion that such verses as these need to be taken allegorically; and somewhere else, the Qur’an specifically allows for such allegorical reading.
Ali affirms that the word is adjectival, and notes that there is no referent in the text (which is why he puts “companions” in parenthesis); however, Ali focuses on the word’s meaning as “youthful” rather than “prominent.”
Both Ahmed Ali and Yusuf Ali, in their translations, render the word as “maidens,” though I have no commentaries for these translations.
So: 1) No virgins so far in four prominent translations. 2) No mention of jihad, or suicide bombers in these verses or anywhere in the local context. Asad says the fulfillment is for “the God-conscious;” Maulana Ali says, “for those who keep their duty;” Ahmed Ali says, “for those who preserve themselves from evil and follow the straight path;” and Yusuf Ali says, “for the Righteous.”
As for hadith—the hadith are huge collections of purported sayings of the Prophet. I say purported because—and I think this is the case for all the collections—the deciding factor for keeping any hadith in the collection was an inability to prove that it couldn’t have been said by Muhammad, based on a chain, or isnad, of people by whom the stories were passed down. This would mean that no hadith is necessarily accurate, only that the compilers couldn’t prove it otherwise. Different Muslims give different weight to hadith; and they are probably just as prone to selectively quote them to support their own viewpoints as anyone else. This is the sum total of my understanding of hadith—except that there is some question as to whether a hadith can ever be used to “contradict” the Qur’an. As a general principle, I believe that the hadith stand “under” the Qur’an.
For a good read on the place of women in Islam and an analysis of the Qur’an and hadith on the subject, I recommend Fatima Mernissi’s The Veil and the Male Elite. Mernissi is a Muslim, a feminist and a Professor (emeritus, I think, now) of Sociology in Morocco.
It would take me some reading to find all the verses that state who does, and who does not, get into heaven, but here is an example from Surah 5:69, which I think gives the general tenor: “All those who believe, and the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians, in fact anyone who believes in God and the Last Day, and performs good deeds, will have nothing to fear or regret.” (trans. Ahmed Ali; Last Day means the Day of Judgment, or the Day of Reckoning.)
And, just another general verse on fighting: “And fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but be not aggressive. Surely Allah loves not the aggressors.” (trans. Maulana Muhammad Ali; According to a footnote by Ali, “It should be noted that it is this defensive fighting which is called fighting in the Way of Allah. Fighting for the propagation of the faith is not once mentioned in the whole of the Qur’an.&rdquo😉
NOTE: Allah is the Arabic word for God, the God of Abraham. When the Bible is translated into Arabic, that is the translation; when Arabic Christians pray, Allah is the word for God that they use. Now, a Christian, for example, may argue that the Islamic understanding of God is vastly different from the Christian understanding—but to say that Allah is some other god is simply silly and wrong.
That’s pretty much all I can offer, without doing a whole lot more reading through the Qur’an, or Islam in general, than I want to do right now. Except this—
It is disingenuous, at best, to critique any religion without having made an honest and fair-minded effort to study it (unfortunately, this takes time, work and diligence; as opposed to, say, clicking on a few internet links). It is disingenuous, at best, to conduct a merely half-hearted and biased study of another religion simply so that one can “prove” its inferiority to one’s own. It is disingenuous, at best, to claim to have studied a religion if all one does is to study it from the point of view of its critics. And it is disingenuous, at best, to claim to “know” another religion when one is simply—a student.
It is disingenuous, at best, to single out extreme “wings” of a religion and treat them as if they represented the whole religion (e.g., Wahhabists in Islam), rather than simply addressing the beliefs of that “wing.” It is disingenuous, at best, to wrench passages from the literature of a religion out of context in order to “skewer” them, without any diligence in trying to understand contextual hermeneutics (context in the Qur’an is particularly thorny, since it is not presented in a narrative form, but is in a sense “dialectical.” )
It is disingenuous, at best, to make declarations about what a “majority” of a religion’s adherents believe, without recognizing the diversity in the religion, or by limiting that diversity to a few “denominational” divisions (e.g., what do a majority of Christians understand about the Trinity? A majority of Roman Catholic Christians? A majority of Greek Orthodox Christians? A majority of Evangelical Protestant Christians? A majority of Lutherans, Anglicans, etc.? What do a majority of Jews believe about the (dual) Torah—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Hasidic, etc.?). In Islam, it is not just Sunnis, Shiites and Sufis—there is a wide range in each of those divisions.
And it is disingenuous, at best, to raise critical questions about a religion if one’s real intention is to cast that religion in a bad light by innuendo, rather than an honest effort to learn. Of course, debate can be one way of learning, and only the debater knows what his/her intention really is.
There is of course no requirement to learn about another (any) religion. One may simply not be interested; one may have other pursuits, including deepening their knowledge of their own religion.
do muslims go to heaven???
13 Oct '05 12:00
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