Mistakes, Inconsistencies, and Imperfections in the Qu'ran
Any book making the claim to be God's Word ought therefore to be free from demonstratable error. The Bible has withstood every test of literary, logical, historical, archaeological, and scientific truth and accuracy brought against it by sceptics and unbelievers. Can the same be said for the Qu'ran?
The answer as can be shown is NO. Muslims claim the Qu'ran is preserved and inspired, and point to Surah 85:21-22 as proof, "Nay, this is a Glorious Qurán, (Inscribed) in a Tablet Preserved!" The Qu'ran is claimed, as an impregneable dogma, to be written in perfect Arabic, said to be "Allah's language", as a basis of its absence of error. This claim is made in Surah 13:37, "Thus have We revealed it to be a judgment of authority in Arabic. Wert thou to follow their (vain) desires after the knowledge which hath reached thee, then wouldst thou find neither protector nor defender against Allah." Surah 12:2 and Surah 41:41,44 are also often used to support this dogma, with the notion being that if Allah does something, it must be perfect, so his revelation of the Qu'ran in Arabic means that the text in Arabic must be perfect. However, study of the Quranic Arabic shows this to not be true. Critical Muslim scholar Ali Dashti makes this comment concerning the Quranic text,
"The Qor'an contains sentences which are incomplete and not fully intelligible without the aid of commentaries; foreign words, unfamiliar Arabic words, and words used with other than the normal meaning; adjectives and verbs inflected without observance of the concords of number and number; illogically and ungrammatically applied pronouns which sometimes have no referent; and predicates which in rhymed passaged are often remote from the subjects 16.....To sum up, more than one hundred Qor'anic aberrations from the normal rules and structure of Arabic have been noted 17."
The Qu'ran has many grammatical errors in the Arabic, a partial listing being errors in Surahs 2:177, 3:59, 4:162, 5:69, 7:160, and 63:10. A detailed exposition of the errors in the Arabic has been provided by Dr. Anis Shorrosh, a Palestinian Christian and native Arabic speaker 18. These errors demonstrate the fallability of the Arabic text of the Qu'ran.
Additionally, the Quranic Arabic cannot be considered "pure" because of the inclusion of many foreign words into the text. These words include "Pharaoh" (Egyptian, repeated 84 times), "Haroot, Maroot, sirat, hoor, tilmeeth, jinn, and firdaus" (Persian/Farsi words), "heber, sakinah, maoon, turat, and jehannim" (Hebrew words), "taboot, taghouth, zakat, and malakout" (Syraic words), and "injil", (Arabisation of 'eua[n]ggelion', Greek word for 'good news', referring to the Gospels) 19. If Arabic is the language of Allah, and therefore perfect, than why the need for the inclusion of words from other languages, when there are perfectly viable Arabic alternatives for each word listed above which could have been used?
The Qu'ran contains numerous scientific errors:
- In Surah 23:14, the embryo is said to be formed from a joining of the sperm with a clot of blood. This incorrect view entirely ignores the equally important presence of the female ova (egg), and the process of fertilisation which occurs between the egg and the sperm.
- In Surah 18:86, the Qu'ran says that a traveller sees the sun sets in a spring of murky water, and in 18:90 this same traveller finds the specific point at which the sun rises. We know, of course, that the sun does not set into a murky spring of water, and further that the earth is not flat, which is presupposed by the finding of specific places where it rises and sets.
- In Surah 51:49, the Qu'ran claims that Allah made everything in pairs. However, we know that there are several species of plants, animals, and monerons which reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis, and which have only one gender, or really no gender at all.
- Surahs 21:31 and 31:10 both seem to claim that mountains exist to prevent earthquakes, something which both science and simple observation demonstrate to be false.
The Qu'ran holds within its pages many historical inaccuracies, as well:
- In Surah 28:38, Pharaoh (the king of Egypt) orders Haman to begin making baked bricks in a kiln out of clay, this during the time of Moses. Historical evidence demonstrates that the Egyptians at this time built their buildings out of two materials: cut stone and sun-dried bricks. The Egyptians would not have baked their bricks (a practice not introduced to Egypt until the Roman era), but made them and dried them in the heat of the sun 20.
- In Surah 20:87 and 20:95, the Jews are said to have made the golden calf idol at the behest of the Samaritans, a group of people who did not exist until around the time of the Hellenistic period, nearly a thousand years after the Exodus.
- In Surah 18:89-98, the orthodox Islamic interpretation states that this passage refers to Alexander the Great, and that he was a Muslim who lived to an old age. Historical records tell us, however, that Alexander was a pagan homosexual idol-worshipper who died at the age of 32, and who lived nearly a thousand years before Mohammed introduced Islam.
The Qu'ran in several points also makes mistakes regarding the beliefs of non-Muslims groups with whom Mohammed had contact. One example which was discussed above is the Qu'ran's erroneous teaching on the Trinity, or more properly, what Christian beliefs about the Trinity supposedly are. The Qu'ran says that Christians join two gods with Allah, and that the Trinity is composed of God, Jesus, and Mary. This composition is not the historic Trinity which was accepted by the vast bulk of Christendom. Instead, this "Trinity" which Mohammed railed against in the Qu'ran was a heretical construction of a group of Arabian pseudo-Christians who were known as Collyridians, and who were steeped in Mariolatry. The historical trinitarian understanding of the Trinity (as was later defined in the Athanasian Creed) was quite broadly established throughout the church at least two centuries before Mohammed, and evidence for the trinitarian belief exists from the very start of the church. However, Allah somehow missed the teaching of the vast bulk of the early church, which was that the Trinity is God being ONE in essence while THREE in persons, and instead revealed to Mohammed that Christians believed the Trinity to be God, Jesus, and Mary. In other words, Allah apparently made a mistake, and didn't understand what was the true teaching of the church, and what was the false teaching of heretics.
Further, we note that in Surah 9:30, the Qu'ran attributes to the Jews the belief that Ezra (Uzair) was the son of God. This is not a belief which has been expounded by Jewish theologians and teachers, however, and is thus another error which Allah purportedly makes concerning the beliefs of a non-Muslim group.
Also, we must note the Quranic fascination with referring to Jesus as "Isa". Muslims maintain, based upon the authority of the Qu'ran, that Isa is the true name for Jesus in the Arabic language. However, this is not the case. Instead, "Yasu" is the Arabic form of Jesus, (itself a Hellenisation of the Hebrew "Yeshua"). The Arabic form of Jesus is clearly shown to us to have been "Yasu" among Arabians who lived even before Mohammed's time:
"Mr. G. Lankaster Harding, Chief Curator of Antiquities Hashimite Kingdom of Jordan, kindly sent me copies of a little more than five hundred Thamudic inscriptions....It is the inscription [Harding No. 476] that interests us here....Below the circle there are four letters: a y, a sh, a c, and again a y. These letters are so placed that they can be read from right to left or from left to right y-sh- c, probably pronounced Yashûc, and this name is the same as Yêshûac, the Hebrew form of the name of Christ. It is known that Yêshûac, is the later pronunciation of Yêhôshûac or Joshua; it was used after the Exile in order to avoid the immediate sequence of two dark vowels (o and u). Of course, it is well known that the Christians whose language is Arabic commonly use the form Yasûc." 21
Further, in page 18 of this article, Littman says that the form "Yasuc" represents "the ancient Arabic name of Jesus", and "Inscription Harding No. 476 is the oldest native document of Christianity of Northern Arabia known so far." 22
What this means to us is that this form, "Yasuc", is the name by which Jesus was known in the most ancient inscriptions in the Arabic language, of which Thamudic is an archaic form. This construction appears amazingly similar to the Hebrew "Yeshua" or "Yehoshua", and the Aramiac "Yeshua" (seen in Ezra 5:1, a passage written in Aramiac, which appears in the English Bible as Jeshua, and is the same name with the same meaning "Jehovah saves"). Hence, initially, the Arabs appear to have referred to Jesus with the name Yasu, not Isa as Muslims and the Qu'ran claim.
Where did the name "Isa" come from then? Isa is the Arabic form of the name "Esau". That this is true is even admitted by Muslim apologists:
"The Holy Quran refers to Jesus as "Eesa", and this name is used more times than any other title, because this was his "Christian" name. Actually, his proper name was "Eesa" (Arabic), or "Esau". (Hebrew); classical "Yeheshua", which the Christian nations of the West Latinised as Jesus. Neither the "J" nor the second "s" in the name Jesus is to be found in the original tongue - they are not found in the Semitic language....The word is very simply - "E S A U" - a very common Jewish name, used more than sixty times in the very first booklet alone of the Bible, in the part called "Genesis". There was at least one "Jesus" sitting on the "bench" at the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin. Josephus the Jewish historian mentions some twenty five Jesus' in his "Book of Antiquities". The New Testament speaks of "Bar-Jesus"- a magician and a sorcerer, a false prophet (Act 13:6); and also "Jesus-Justus" - a Christian missionary, a contemporary of Paul (Colossians 4:11). These are distinct from Jesus the son of Mary. Transforming "Esau" to (J)esu(s) - Jesus - makes it unique. This unique (?) name has gone out of currency among the Jews and the Christians from the 2nd century after Christ. Among the Jews, because it came to be the proper name of their God(?) - their God incarnate. The Muslim will not hesitate to name his son - "Eesa" - because it is an honoured name, the name of a righteous servant of the Lord." 23
While Deedat makes some mistakes in his analysis above (such as claiming that Esau is a "common Jewish name", the sixty times which the name is used in the Old Testament all refer to one individual, the brother of Jacob), the essential point of his writing is evident -- Isa is the name for Esau. The rest of his analysis is inaccurate, as he is trying to show that the name "Esau" was the name which Jesus came from in the New Testament. Both the Greek "Jesus" and the Hebrew/Aramaic "Yeshua" mean "Jehovah saves", while Esau means "hairy". However, his admission to the truth of Isa equalling Esau speaks volumes.
What was the source of Isa being applied to Jesus in the Qu'ran? Nobody knows for sure, though the most plausible explanation to date is that certain Jews with whom Mohammed had contact, in an effort to insult the Lord Jesus, told Mohammed that the Son of God worshipped by Christians was "Isa", thereby applying the name of Jacob's hated brother Esau to the hated Christian Saviour. This claim, however, rests on much hearsay and tradition, and thus should be taken with a grain of salt. Perhaps Mohammed simply misunderstood the hearing or reading of the name, and began to refer to Jesus as "Isa" out of simple mistaken understanding. What should be clear to us, though, is that the Quranic use of "Isa" rests upon a name for Christ which was NOT His name, even in the Arabic. Is it really likely that an omnipotent, omniscient deity such as Allah is claimed to be would make such a simple error as to misname one of his prophets?
The Qu'ran also contains many internal self-contradictions:
- The heavens and the earth were created by Allah in six days, according to Surahs 7:54, 10:3, 11:7, and 25:59; but it took eight days, according to Surah 41:9-12.
- In Surah 22:47, Allah's day equals 1000 human years, but in Surah 70:4, a day to Allah is reckoned as 50,000 human years.
- Evil that befalls human beings is alternatively viewed to be from Allah (Surah 4:7, from ourselves (Surah 4:79), and from Satan (Surah 38:41), with two of these contradictions occurring side by side!
- The punishment for adultery is flogging with 100 stripes for both sexes in Surah 24:2, versus lifelong house arrest for the woman and no punishment upon repentance for the man in Surah 4:15-16.
- Satan is viewed as misleading and misguiding people in Surah 4:119-120, but Allah is said to perform this in Surah 16:93.
- Surah 2:256 claims that there must be no compulsion in religion, yet Surah 8:38-39 commands Muslims to fight until all religion but Islam is done away with. Similarly, Surah 45:14 tells Muslims to forgive unbelievers, while Surah 9:29 commands them to fight unbelievers.
In addition to this short list, there are literally dozens of other contradictions which point to the Qu'ran as being a flawed book. See a more complete listing here.
In conclusion, we see that the Qu'ran cannot legitimately claim divine inspiration and/or preservation. It has many errors, inconsistencies, and a history of corruptions. The Qu'ran is an imperfect book, and cannot be claimed as the work of a perfect and complete God. The same charges cannot be made against the Bible, however, which has withstood every attack upon it made by unbelievers.
Timothy W. Dunkin 10 Myths About Islam 2nd edition.