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  Javed Ahmad Ghamidi vs. Ali Sina Part IV

Dear Mr. Ali Sina

I am responding to your message dated October 10. I had the opportunity of
talking to Mr Ghamidi directly this time to get his response on your last
message. This is what we have to say on the points you have raised.

Our discussion is for the moment concentrating itself on the contents of the
message of Islam in general and the Qur’an in particular. Your view is that
the Qur’an is not God’s book and therefore Islam is not His message. Our
belief is just the opposite of it. We don’t endorse many of the things which
the contemporary Muslims are doing in the name of Islam. In fact, we both
are concerned, for very different reasons though, that the present-day
Muslim attitude should change. You seem to hold the opinion that the fanatic
Muslim attitude can only change if they give up Islam; we believe that
Muslims can only behave properly if they understand and follow the true
Islam. However, for the purpose of making this discussion truly purposeful,
we would suggest that we be very clear that we are trying to understand
whether Qur’an is the word of God or not. For the sake of that purpose, we
would request that we focus our attention on this single point and not allow
any amount of external circumstances to distract us from it.

In your first message to us you raised these two points against our claim
that the Qur’an was the word of God: i) The Qur’anic understanding regarding
intercession contains contradictions and ii) the policy for usage of
pronouns in the Qur’an for God seems to be inconsistent. We responded by
presenting our understanding on both. In your second message you disagreed
with the points we had mentioned to defend the Qur’anic presentation, to
which we responded in our second response. In your third message (dated
October 10) you have urged us to move on and leave it to the readers to
conclude from what the two of us have mentioned in our respective messages
on the two topics. We are now doing exactly that, assuming that you have
nothing more to say in response to what we have mentioned in defense of the
Qur’anic teachings on intercession and its usage of pronouns for God.

Your third criticism on the Qur’anic presentation is that there doesn’t seem
to be any consistency in the manner the Qur’an presents the idea of who
should guide whom. At times it seems that it is only men who can guide men;
on other occasions we are given to understand that angels can come to guide
men, and on still other occasions we get the impression that jinn can also
get guided by men. The most prominent part of your comment appears when you
present a passage from the Qur’an that mentions the fact that the Qur’an has
informed us that at a certain stage an animal would also come to play a role
in guiding men. There is thus, according to you, a complete absence of
consistency in the manner the Qur’an presents its methodology of guidance.

Before responding to the point raised by you, we would want to emphasize
that when one tries to understand the contents of a book as a sincere
student who is not out there to pick faults in it but is involved in the
serious business of understanding the text, it is important that one
appreciates how the book itself presents its arguments and the premises on
which those arguments are based. If we were not interested in sincerely
understanding your messages and were bent upon picking faults in them, we
could have pointed out several contradictions in what you have written to us
as yet. However, that would have been a sheer waste of time and an exercise
in futility. It is only after you have sincerely understood a text by
appreciating the methodology of presentation which the author of the text
himself is suggesting that you have a right to criticize the text or else it
would come under the category of non-serious criticism. After you understand
the scheme of presentation of a text, you have a right to criticize both
that scheme as well as the text on the basis of your observation that the
text is violating the principles stated by itself.

Now let us briefly mention the scheme presented by the Qur’an regarding the
delivery of God’s message. We have been informed in the Qur’an that the
message of God Almighty comes to the messengers through angels. It is these
messenger men who then deliver the message to their fellow humans for the
purpose of ensuring that the addressees receive it in the most effective
manner. When the message is communicated to humans through fellow men, they
are in no position to present any excuse in their defense for denying them.
The Qur’an is very clear in its claim that it is only men who can deliver
the message of God to their fellow men for the latter to receive it in a
manner that its claim to divine origins becomes unmistakable. The reference
to the fact that jinn also hear the Qur’an and get guided by it is in the
context that since some jinn could hear Qur’an and understand it, they too
accepted its claim of divine origins. Had men been able to hear and see
jinn, they too would have been obliged to acknowledge the truthfulness of
genuine messages of God delivered to that category of God’s creation.

As for the mention of the animal, the Qur’an clarifies on several occasions
the fact that after people refuse to accept God’s message through the normal
process of its presentation, He can use any of His signs to let such people
know that their denial was not based on any evidence. For instance, on the
day of judgment, it is mentioned that the limbs of human body would play the
role of witnessing against the perpetrators of crimes. The reference to an
animal in a Qur’anic passage is of similar nature. In our opinion, the
following is the correct translation of the relevant passage: “You (O
prophet) cannot force the dead to listen to your message nor can you force
the deaf to hear the call even when they are turning their backs in
disinterest. Likewise you can’t guide the blind in their misguidance. You
can only guide those who are willing to believe in our signs and in
submitting themselves to the message. And once the message will be delivered
in an undeniable form to them, we might bring out a beast from the land to
confirm that these men were not willing to believe in our signs.” (Qur’an;
27:80-82) The passage is mentioning that the appearance of a beast, if at
all it happens, would only be meant to reinforce the earlier process of
communication from the prophet as a final measure confirmation that the
deniers were indeed guilty of rejecting a message that was so obvious that a
beast could also confirm its divine origins. In other words, the evidence of
the beast will not be meant to convince any of the humans to accept the
message. Instead, it will be used as a final measure to expose the
indefensible stubbornness of the deniers of the message of God.

We would be glad to know if the above presentation doesn’t make sense to
you. We would also like to know the reasons why you think this presentation
is suggesting that the Qur’an is inconsistent in the manner it suggests its
message should be communicated to men.

Khalid Zaheer

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