Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Geographic Distances & Prophet's Teachings

Question: BTW how did a Native American, or an Inuit in past centuries get to the Prophet's teachings? How the illiterate Aborigines? Chinese-Japanese? Easy for the Arabic talking Mid-Easterners 

Answer: The Arabic Quran is not the only scripture, it is the last of the divinely revealed scriptures. We believe that all communities received guidance in the form of prophets, messengers and scriptures. Isn't it true that people all over the world and all throughout history have had some form of religion, and there are some common threads which are suspiciously similar across religions? Almost all religions, or at least their scriptures, start off with the belief in one God, yet eventually morph into a polytheistic religion. To believe in the unseen God, angels, scriptures, messengers, hereafter, good and evil, etc doesn't require an Arabic Quran or a Mid-Eastern background. There are many Arabs in the Middle East who do not believe / practice Islam, and there are many people all over the world who practice the virtues exhorted in the Quran without ever having read it. As a famous poet Iqbal wrote about a century ago, to paraphrase it: when I was in the West, I saw Islam without Muslims, when I was in the East, I saw Muslims without Islam. The advantage we have in this day and age is that we all have the Quran available at our fingertips on the internet, and we also have a whole range of scriptures, translations, lexicons, etc to do our own research. 

No comments: