Iram

Ali Sina

Another “miracle of the Quran” claimed by Muslims is the verse 89.7

It reads:

"Of the (city of) Iram, with lofty pillars,"

What is so miraculous about this? Muslims say it is the mentioning of the name Iram in this verse that is a miracle. Why?… Because, as they say, Iram was a city of Arabia that was destroyed in an earthquake and no one knew about it except Muhammad and it was only in the second half of the 20th century that it was discovered by archeologists. So they ask, “how Muhammad knew this when no other text mentions the name Iram.?

Muslims love to live in self-delusion. How come a city was destroyed and no one knew about it? Isn’t this an absurdity? The destruction of a city is a big event. It is obvious that people will talk about it and tell its tales to their children. Write poetries about it and it enters in their legends and folklore. Pompeii , Sodom and Gomorrah had similar fates. Although the actual cities were lost, they remained in people's lore. Who said no books prior to Muhammad mentioned Iram? It makes no sense that Arabs forget completely about a city destroyed thus. 

The fact is however, that Muhammad and his followers destroyed all the books that belonged to the pre Islamic era that they decried as “jahiliyyah”. If no other book prior to Muhammad mentions this city it is because Muslims destroyed those books. The tales of Iram with its lofty pillars must have been in the lore of the Arabs and the way Muhammad casually mentions it with no further explanation is clear that his audience already knew what he is taking about.

Muhammad gives no hint as to the whereabouts of that city. Had he given the geographic coordinates or some indication as to where is that city and if this was unknown to everyone in his time then one could make such claim that he had access to some hidden knowledge. But mere stating a name of the city and its lofty pillars is no miracle at all. It is obvious that people of his time knew what Iram is and had heard the sale tales that Muhammad had heard. The question is what happened to the books mentioning Iram?   

From the time of the pre-Islam very little books are left. The Egyptian scholar Taha Hussain, in his book Fi al-Adab al-Jaheli contended that:

The vast quantity of what is called pre-Islamic poetry has nothing to do with the pre-Islamic literature, but it is fabricated after Islam. ... Thus our research will lead us to a very strange conclusion; that this poetry can not be used in interpreting the Qur'an. http://debate.domini.org/newton/inventions.html

Paul Newton the Christian scholar on Islam states:
"Need is the mother of invention" is a saying that is true in many areas but in particuler it is true to what is called the science of the Qur'an.

“When the Muslims found themselves in the need to protect what they believed to be the miraculous nature of the Qur'an they invented:

1 Pre-Islamic poetry. And
2.They invented non-Hijazi and foreign words
3.They invented grammatical rules. And it goes without saying that
4.They invented a huge amount of Hadith.

He proves each and every one of his claims in an article available here:

According to Taha Hussain Muslims destroyed all pre Islamic books and then fabricated poetries and words to justify the errors of the grammar of the Quran. The proof is convincing. One evidence presented by Taha Hussain is that all those poetries are in Quraysh dialect when in reality the Arabs spoke many different dialects and it is highly unlikely that these Arabs who were so tribalists would compose poetries in the dialect of the Quraysh instead of their own. Muslims went even as far as to compose poetries and attributed them to Adam.

More Miracles in the Quran