Interesting Tidbits about Islam

My normal routine online consists of me vigorously checking various news sources for interesting material. Today, I came across this interview with a former-Muslim, now Atheist Mohammad Asghar. The full interview is located here.

Arabic and Muslims

“…there are over 1.565 billion Muslims in the world today. Out of these Muslims, only about 300 million understand and speak Arabic. Since a good part of the Quran is written in colloquial Arabic, spoken by the tribe of Quraish of the 7th century Mecca, understanding it even by many modern-day Arabic speaking Muslims is not an easy task.”

Lets think about that for a second. The majority of Muslims actually follow word for word a book that they themselves don’t understand whatsoever. They rely on others to tell them what exactly it says in there, and most of them never read the translations.  If only these people could actually read what is inside there, maybe they would be more likely to leave their faith.

Education in the Muslim World

“There are 57 member-countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and all of them put together have around 500 universities; one university for every three million Muslims. The United States has 5,758 universities and India has 8,407. In 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University compiled an ‘Academic Ranking of World Universities, and intriguingly, not one university from the Muslim-majority states was in the top-500.”

Now consider this, not a single one of these universities is in the top 500. Bad education and religion closely related? Coincidence? I think not.

The Daily Prayers

Before the advent of Islam, the Pagans of the Arabian Peninsula prayed three times each day; about sunrise, at noon and about sunset, turning their faces towards the Ka’aba (Washington Irving, Mahomet & his Associates, p. 31). Muhammad retained this pagan ritual in Islam and, in some unguarded moments, he told his followers to pray twice, thrice or four times in a day. Since the norms to be followed while saying these prayers were well known to his followers, he did not mention them in the Qur’an. For want of clarity on the number of prayers that Muslims must offer everyday to Allah, Sunnis believe it to be five; Shias, by and large, consider it to be three (Dr. Rafiq Zakaria; Muhammad and the Quran, p. 74).

The Prophet of Islam, retained daily prayers in Islam for a specific reason: being militarily and economically weak, he needed to tell the Pagans of Mecca that the religion he was preaching was not drastically different from the one they themselves were practicing and, as such, they should accept it without resistance. He continued to follow his policy of appeasement even after his arrival in Medina, where the Jews vehemently opposed most of the precepts of his religion. In order to win them over, he changed the direction of the Muslim prayer from Ka’aba in Mecca to Jerusalem. When the Jews refused to budge, he expressed his mild displeasure by asking his followers to face Ka’aba at the time of saying their prayer.

All of these Abrahamic religions are just plagiarisms of former myths and gods. This provides the historical background of the daily prayers by Muslims. If everything inside Islam has already been uttered or practiced  by someone else before it, then how much of a stretch is it to believe that all of it is man-made.

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