Note to readers: Amazon had this as the top critical review until December 1, when it was removed. There had been six who had found it “helpful.” I can only speculate as to why it was removed, but, regardless, it is censorship.

Book review: “A Concise Guide to the Quran – Answering Thirty Critical Questions,” by Ayman S. Ibrahim, 2020, 176 pgs. $19 Amazon. Reviewed by Peter Burrows 10/4/2023 

Ibrahim was born in Egypt and raised in a Coptic Christian family. He grew up surrounded by Muslims in a society steeped in Islam.  His public schooling had heavy doses of Islamic history, Arabic and Quranic scripture.  He has two PhDs in Islamic Studies, one from Fuller Theological Seminary (USA) and the other from University of Haifa (Israel) He is Professor of Islamic Studies and director of the Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Bottom line: Professor Ibrahim is very knowledgeable, which makes him extremely dangerous because he teaches that Islam can be reformed into a nonmilitant, nonthreatening religion — and he is wrong! 

Initially, I thought this was probably a matter of economic necessity.  After all, I doubt there is a professor of religious studies in North America who is allowed to teach the truth about Islam. (I hope somebody proves me wrong. Hillsdale?) But then, on page 116, he reveals a distressing and dangerous misunderstanding of Islam: 

“In the spring of 2018, I led a group of American students on a teaching trip to Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn has the largest Muslim population in the United States. Many of my American students had never entered a mosque, so I decided to take them to a mosque in the city. I also wanted them to hear about Islam from a Muslim. I hoped to break their fear of the unknown, in this case, Islam and Muslims.” 

Two things are wrong here: (1) A proper understanding of Islam should INSTILL a fear of Islam and Muslims; (2) Learning about Islam from a Muslim, especially an imam, is the worst way to learn about Islam.  

I can only conclude that Professor Ibrahim either has huge holes in his knowledge about Islam, or else he is simply incapable of seeing the truth about Islam, for whatever reason. Islamic law, Sharia, dictates that Muslims must wage war, jihad, against unbelievers until the world is ruled by Islam. If it requires lying to the non-believers in order to achieve this goal, lying is obligatory. No Muslim can question this. 

Under penalty of apostasy, for which the divine punishment is death, no Muslim can befriend a non- Muslim. The fact that Dr Ibrahim has a dear childhood friend who is a Muslim only proves that this particular Muslim is probably a decent person. Probably. The fact that the Muslim friend hasn’t been killed for his friendship with a Christian could conceivably be because he has persuaded his would-be Muslim assassins that he is engaged in deceiving Dr Ibrahim and for proof, just look at what Ibrahim writes and teaches about Islam!   

Islamic law, sharia, is almost completely ignored by Ibrahim. He mentions sharia twice in the body of the text, and then only in passing, and once in the glossary. Sharia rules Islam and sharia dictates that any Muslim who has an opinion about anything in the Quran that differs from traditional scholarly opinion is an apostate, and apostates “deserve to die.” (Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manuel of Islamic Sacred Law, pg. 596)  

In addition, Muhammad warned: “Whoever speaks of the Book of Allah (the Koran) from his own opinion is in error” (Reliance of the Traveller, pg. 751.), and the Koran Verse 33:36 tells Muslims, “ it is not for a believer, man or woman, when Allah and his messenger have decreed a matter that they should have any option in their decision.” (Khan – Al-Hilali translation.)   

Therefore, it is delusional to contend, as Ibrahim repeatedly does, that individual Muslims can have opinions that differ from sharia and that these opinions can lead to fundamental changes in Islam. He refers to such Muslims as “modern,” “progressive,” “liberal,” and that these Muslims can “legitimately” practice their own versions of Islam.  Such Muslims are either apostates or propagandists engaged in deceiving gullible infidels. 

He writes, “— one should be thankful for the modernist Muslim thinkers of recent years, especially in the west. They swim against the tide in opposing traditional Muslim claims. Their interpretation seeks to advance values of mutual respect, peacebuilding and religious freedom between Muslims and non-Muslims. They read Quranic statements about fighting non-Muslims, jihad, and violence as merely remnants of the past. They believe these statements are descriptive not prescriptive.” 

Precisely what we “should be thankful for” escapes me since the only thing these so-called Muslims have accomplished is to promote the deception that Islam is in fact peaceful or that Islam can be changed. Islam cannot be changed; it must be rejected. What these people are describing is not the religion of Islam. Perhaps some of them, such as Zuhdi Jasser, are sincere, but most are knowingly deceiving non-Muslims into accepting the cancer of Islam into their societies. 

In a couple of areas, Ibrahim’s scholarship appears to be severely lacking. He contends, for example, that the Satanic Verses were abrogated when they were eliminated. There’s a big difference between eliminating a verse in the Quran because it was not a revelation from Allah and abrogating it because Allah had a “better” revelation at a later date.  

He also seems to think that the doctrine of abrogation is debatable, which it isn’t. The Reliance of the Traveller on page 626 has as a requirement for being an Islamic judge a knowledge of both abrogated and abrogating verses. On page 752 the layman is warned not to interpret the Koran without such knowledge. 

To question, deny or ignore abrogation is a standard tactic of those who defend Islam. At least twice, Ibrahim cites abrogated verses without mentioning they are abrogated and therefore invalid, which is inexcusable. (2:190 which authorizes jihad only in self-defense, abrogated by 9:36 or 9:5; and 29:46, which says use only peaceful persuasion with People of the Scripture, abrogated by 9:29 which says to strive against them until they are “utterly subdued.”)   

He even claims some Muslims think that Chapter 9 may not belong in the Quran because it lacks the introduction that other chapters have. I have never read of such a doubt.  Chapter 9 is the penultimate and most militaristic chapter in the Quran, and for a Muslim to assert it may not belong in the Quran is apostasy on steroids.  

An especially distressing example of poor scholarship is his description on page 91 of verse 9:30: “The Jews say, Uzayr is the son of Allah, while Christians say, the Christ is the son of Allah —.” Ibrahim then writes: “Of course, no one knows who this Uzayr is.”   

When I read this I said to myself, “Which version of the Quran has this guy actually read?” One of the Qurans he mentions is the Khan-Hilal translation, a 1990’s translation published in Saudi Arabia, in which verse 9:30 reads, “And the Jews say: Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah —.” Another translation he mentions is the 1930 Pickthall translation in which 9:30 simply reads: “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah–” 

One translation he doesn’t mention is my personal favorite, “Towards Understanding the Quran,’ a translation completed in 1973 by the Pakistani scholar Sayyid Mawdudi. In it, 9:30 reads: “The Jews say Ezra (‘Uzayr) is Allah’s son —.” Of my four Qurans, only the 1934 Yusif Ali translation fails to identify “Uzair” as the Jewish prophet Ezra – who was NEVER worshipped as a son of God by the Jews, another proof that the all-knowing “Allah” needed an editor. 

In spite of these puzzling gaps in the author’s knowledge, there are some parts of the book which are outstanding. I give Five stars to Part 1 in which he effectively refutes the standard Islamic narrative concerning the history of the Quran. He ends this section by writing, “Without a doubt, the traditional Muslim claims about an unchanged and unchanging Quran will eventually come back to hurt the Muslim cause.”  

Unfortunately, he doesn’t reach the same conclusion when answering his question number 26: “What does the Quran say about Jihad and fighting?” While he concedes the Quran ordains fighting, he dismisses the importance of this by claiming it’s only the literalists, such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, who act on those verses: “But Muslims are not all the same. How do Muslims usually treat versus like these related to fighting non-Muslims?” 

How Muslims “usually” treat the militant verses in the Quran is irrelevant. They have a religious obligation to obey those verses and in Muslim-ruled nations this is unquestioned. The only reason those nations are not in open warfare with non-Muslim nations is because they know they couldn’t win such a war — yet. 

There’s much more I could criticize in detail, e.g., his attempt to deflect the reality of jihad by noting it can also mean an internal struggle for salvation, which is true but hardly relevant, or his contention that Muslims who advocate following only the Quran, “People of the Quran,” offer a glimmer of hope, as though the Quran isn’t bad enough.    

Bottom line: this is not a concise guide to the Quran but more a concise guide to wishful thinking about Islam. For a truly concise guide to the Koran and Islam as it really is, spend 20 minutes or so, Introduction to Conclusion (Appendices extra): https://wordpress.com/post/silvercityburro.com/749