Dear M. Khan,
How come you can claim that the Big Bang theory(!) was predicted in the Qur'an, while clearly the relevant ayah is very ambiguous at best. Furthermore, our understanding of the universe could change, so this is a very dangerous argument from a Muslim point of view.
Concerning the Elephant Surah,- traditional Muslims believe that a few year prior to the birth of Muhammed, Abraha and his army of elephant wanted to destroy Ka'ba, but Allah miraculously destroyed those elpehant by birds(abaabeel) who dropped stones on them. Although the details aren't in this sura, this point should be evident.

Haha, this topic clearly shows the laughable state in which the so-called liberal/freethinking Quraniyyun is in. Because, on the one hand they do try to get rid of racist/sexist/ignorant remarks as found in the hadith, - rejecting those hadiths NOT necesarrily because they are weak BUT because they defy common sense and logic.
Yet, the same approach isn't done when considering the Qur'an, instead they engage in an endless attempt to all conceal those inconvenient truths in the Qur'an like "it was only meant for them", "historical context", "wrongly translated" etc.
Qur'an is VERY clear on homosexuality, yet those clueless Quraniyyun here don't cease their desperate attempt to all talk it OK.

Whatever you tried to say,- Morals ARE "relative". Let me clarify What was acceptable a few centuries ago, might be totally immoral and unacceptable today. An example could be slavery,- sure Islam does tell us to be kind towards slaves etc, but the Qur'an doesn't have a problem with the the phenomenom of slavery. Ofcourse, because it was widespread practice back then 14 centuries ago, while ,no matter how good a slave could be treated, it is absolutely wrong today.
Another example could be clothing Some primitive tribes in the jungle are found not wearing any clothing(or just very little). However, they have a quite stable society in which the men don't really seem to get all horny by "boobs" of the opposite gender. It is just "normal" there, but unaccaptable here.

You also talk about the grave moral lacking of eternal punishment. Personally when i for the first time came into realisation of this fact i nearly cried, out of pure relief. Relief that there actually is JUSTICE and all the evil i had seen throughout my life and all the evil and corrupt disgusting people that i so helplessly watched go about their shi**y business out of the pure convinction that they would go unpunished or that they would only be punished for an insignificantly small amount of time compared to the everlasting eternity of their complete and eternal death.

Oh dear Halil, I admire your sincere attempts to tell me why I should consider taking religion more seriously, however so far you have not given a single argument. However, this quoted piece hereabove grabbed my interest(+the last line written in Turkish), as this more-or-less summarizes WHY religiosity exists in the first place ( and why religion is bound to stay ).
You know what this is called? - Wishfullthinking. Because you want there to be divine justice, you want there to be an everlasting life, a transcendental soul/spirit/ruh, independant of our low-ish earthly bodies.
All animals have an intrinsic desire to live and to proliferate. All animals fear death, all animals love to have lots of kids, all animals love to eat etc. Why? Because if that had not been the case we couldn't see them in the first place!.
Humans are no exception, and we have indeed great difficulty in accepting this life is finite. Everyone knows the immense grief at losing a beloved friend or relative. So the "pure relief" as you put it, comes with the belief that they still exist, but just in another world, or dimension if u will.(akhirat). However, modern science dealing with the human brains does not seem to support the idea that our emotions, our memories, i.e. the concept of "I" can exist without our brains. This is further exemplified by people who might, due to some illness or accident, become just "different" people, which indeed is very frightening for their relatives.

I don't fear death (though the way to it might suck) I have been dead(nonexistent) for billions of years and wasn't bothered by it for a second. Where were I before I was born? Or better Where were I before I got my consciousness(when I was a few years old?)
Where would I be if my parents hadn't decided to make me? You see the absurdness of this question?

So, although I would love to see eternall life, divine justice(I live my life pretty OK anyway, so nothing to fear I hope! ), I am pretty much agnostic concerning those things. However, I would LOVE to be surprised!
Respectfully,
Citizen

I have just finished NINETEEN God's Signature in Nature and Scripture and inshallah it will be available to public within 30-40 days.

I am looking forward to this book. Even though I don't (yet) agree with your views, I am curious about them. However, I have posted my objections, and I expect you to answer my arguments in detail. Anyway, it is an objective FACT that the Qur'an is a very ambigious piece of work, proven time and time again by the enormous amount of different explanations, interpretations and commentaries about the Qur'an. A work supposedly clear oughted to be debunked centuries ago when it became clear how such a simple verse like " cut their hands" could be read like "mark (?) their hands/let them repair the damage they caused" etc.
Kind regards,
Citizen

the guy CitizenDerCosmos seems to be a moron, he makes no sense, he is deeply inept in logic, as Edip points out, he has no grasp of reason at all, it is a pointless task presenting logical arguments to person incapable of rational thought.

Salam Abdunnur,
Thanks for your compliments. yay We all need to be reminded how delusional and irrational we all can get, however as I have previously pointed out I have the same sort of doubts regarding your( and Edip's, and Dr. Khalifa's..) methods regarding interpreting the Qur'an. It shouldn't be a problem that we disagree with one and other, but we all must have the commitment to always seek the truth.
Let me illustrate what I said When you say that , contrary to the idea many Muslims aswell as non-Muslims get when they read the Qur'an, you claim that Jahannam is not a place of eternall torture and suffering, but a place where evil doers /criminals will be "rehabilitated" and in which they fully become aware of their sins, till they paid back , repaired the evil they did and fully understood the consequences. Sounds good! ! This is indeed what people would expect a civilized, mannered Lord would do. (Let alone the Lord, the sole Creator of the Universe and what more..)
However, when I, or countless others (non) Muslims read the Qur'an, (JUST the Qur'an, not the tafseers, or the ahadith or..), I can't escape the immense hatred and intolerance towards the "kuffaar" (deliberately not translating it as this is what the whole issue revolves around). Allah describes the immense torture and suffering those kuffaar will undergo, and any doubt about misinterpreting (it is already quite clear, but assume..) will be faded away by the ahadith and the many works of the former Ulama.

One of your most favourite arguments is the "hey! You appeal to authority, are you not aware of the maltreatment of Qur'an only Muslims in e.g. the Amawids of the Abbasids periods?&quot. You have a point there, we can't appeal to authority unconditionally BUT it DOES show something, namely that YOU as a "deviant" sect must show extraordinary evidences to support your highly metaphorical, non-mainstream translation of the Qur'an. In which you failed miserably With all due respect to the late Khalifa and his followers, I simply laughed at the desperate attempts by Khalifa to find some ''hidden" code/message in the Qur'an, of which the sole purpose was to prove it is from God (instead of giving answers to any questions..) All of those attempts can be dismissed if anyone has had some basic probability theory (endless manipulations of verse number, ayat number, sum of those, product, difference..) will almost surely give you some "hidden message". (c.f. the Moby Dick prophecies.)
It made my think of... The answer to life, the universe, . everything... is 42 yeah

Dear Edip, I feel honoured to get a reply from you, as you, being my (unfortunately self-exiled) countryman. I applaud your efforts to break through the thick barriers of dogma, intellectual laziness and bigotry, and I am with you in this struggle for freedom of speech and thought.
However, this is as for as our common values we share, as I go just one step further and also reject the Qur'an. I am an apostate, formerly a Sunni, and for more or less the same reasons I lost my faith in the ahadith , I also regard the Qur'an nothing more than a book with some advices, guidances and parables by and for seventh century Arabia. I have investigated some of your ( and other Quraniites) evidences of why we should take the Qur'an (and only that) as our basis of this life, however I was disappointed by your arguments.
For instance, the whole idea of "19" just doesn't make any sense. The late Khalifa sure was handy in using computers to find patterns, but for me this is just coincidence. There are lots of numbers(not just 19) and there are many ways to "see" 19 in some ayat/verse number etc. (the ayat number , surah number, sum of those, product of those, juxtaposing them, add this sura to that sura subtract ... ). No,- it's certainly not convincing.
In one of your articles you tell us how sometimes you have had the same struggles,- I am very sure you too have struggled(are struggling?) with the most fundamental question regarding the Qur'an Is it divine or is it written by men? Regarding this question I am on the different side.
I don't think you use Occam's Razor when you project your own views on the Qur'an, instead of going with the most straightforward meaning (For examples Translation of "beat your wives"," cut their hands", "they will be in hell for ever", "their skin will be replaces and this torture will go on for ever" etc).

I took a look at it, but was disappointed. Many of the so-called similarities between , e.g., English and Arabic don't go further than mere coincidence, or the author of this book just takes a certain word and takes an Arabic synonym and present those as being true cognates. Dishonest at best. (You can find literally dozens of synonyms, or words with similar meaning.)This should be clear by the vast difference in grammar, phonology, and the vocabulary of those two languages. They are indeed totally unrelated( arguably very distantly related).
I rather go with the mainstream theory on language evolution, which classifies English as an Indo-European language(together with Urdu, Farsi, Latin, Greek, Dutch, French..) belonging to the Germanic branch(just like Dutch and German and..). , while Arabic is Afro-Asiatic language (together with some tribal languages spoken in North Africa like Amazigh) , belonging to the Semitic branch( together with Hebrew). Indeed, linguistically speaking Hebrew is the closest language to Arabic, although languages from the region which belong to very difference language families(thus sharing no ancestor with Arabic) have quite some lexical similarity, due to massive word borrowings from Arabic to Persian, Urdu and Turkish.
Just my 2 cents.

Hi there, thanks again for your precious comments and advice..
The issue is that I've been told(you can call it brainwashed) that MY and ONLY my version of Islam( i.e. some branch of Sunnism) is right, and all the others are wrong. I remember being told about the "73 factions" hadith,- 73 different (Islamic) factions/denominations etc will emerge, but only 1 will lead to real success , only one is the best path to the Lord. (Some Sunnis, though, reject this hadith as being weak.)
One of the most cited examples of one of those factions which went astray was of the Mu'tazilah (I saw your post hereabove, that reminds me..).
Mu'tazilah is known to pay more attention to logic and reason, and , although I am not that well-informed, I think that Qur'an-only does have quite some characteristics in common with the Mu'tazilah, and related sects who give reason+logic more importance than the traditionalists.

Anyway, I will be hanging around this site for some more time, who knows perhaps I will begin to understand what this is all about and why I should (re)consider taking the Qur'an more seriously in my life. Because I know there is something in me which wants to believe,- living with the knowledge that this wordly life is everything and that Divine Justice and an hereafter doesn't exist freaks the hell out of me.

I will adress those points later(I am sleeping now),- however even if it is indeed as you claim not cutting of hands but some minor sanction, it is STILL laughable, as all those Muslims had it wrong, and not a little bit wrong, but TOTALLY wrong. (Anyway, traditional Muslims won't even try to respond to those 4 points u made, as they have the hadith in which these, and other penalties, are explained in detail. )
Yet, this book claims to be absolutely clear.. So we'd still be left with something uncomfortable and nagging..
I mean.. It is just pathetic that ALL those thousands of ulemaa all had it completely wrong... And here we are back at one of the strongest arguments of traditional Muslims.. Appeal to authority.

If you read The Quran and reject it, and then you do acts against what it says, this confirms your belief-position as a "kuffar".

Oh sure I've read the Qur'an from cover to cover. In arabic, and in my native language, Turkish.
Oh well, I pretty much live according to the book as many of the advices of the Qur'an apply nowadays too. Anyway, just a few rules are left when we discard the ahadith. Anyway, even though I don't really believe the Qur'an to be the holy book of God, I applaud the Qur'an-only movement as you are breaching through the thick barriers of statusquo, dogmatism and intellectual laziness. I repeat my point about you cherry picking those verses which seem to support your point,- I laughed out loud at their bizarre way they interpreted the "cut off their hands" verse as meaning something totally different, while it really IS clear.... I mean.. rotfl

Hi Citizen,

I'm disappointed by your reply, but I will respond once again.

Hi Wakas, I am sorry to have disappointed you, but I tried to be honest. Look, you say that Quran-only is on the rise, but I don't know, - numbers don't prove the veracity anyway.
Indeed, I am already labelled an "atheist" here, which I find offensive due to the connotations associated with this word. My mindset can be summarized as being confused,- confused and disappointed about the problems of mainstream (Sunni) Islam, while Quran-only seems like an attempt to fix the incurable problems...And the method is quite effective I have to admit Just throw away(almost literally) those problems..!(=Hadith, Sunni understanding)
Now, I can begin rambling and start listing the commong objections like " How can u know how to pray without hadith?", because you are obviously not in the mood of answering those over-answered questions. But yet, the problems of basing a whole religion on just, solely a single book , a book about which I have adressed a few problems with it, just seems insurmountable. In fact, this naked Islam with which you are left with doesn't differ that much from Deism.

Concerning the site you gave(misconceptions about Islam)
It can't be said that I was impressed by the arguments presented on that site, at least for the few articles I glimpsed at. Take for instance
http//misconceptions-about-islam.com/muslim-or-hell.htm
.. in which only the few verses are taken which appear to be in favor. However, there are tons of verses which very clearly talk about the severe punishments which awaits kuffaar. And that they will dwell therein for ever(ebedan).

You know, I don't think Qur'anists are being honest when they keep interpreting verses to mean something different, while there is a clear meaning (the meaning as given by mainstream Islam)
For instance "khalideenaa feehaa ebedan" is , I guess, translated by Qur'an only to mean "for very long", instead of the more straighforward "for ever, till eternity".
Or take the word "k-f-r". Literally meaning "to cover up", but used for people, while well-read about Islam, still reject it. This would include apostates. Would this make me a kafir? Because literally speaking I (nor the majority of other non-Muslims) don't conceal the truth, I am just pretty much agnostic about a personal God, hence also about the scriptures.

Hi all! Thanks for all your posts, I will try to respond to some of the questions posed, but let me first make it clearer peace
Offtopic (I don't speak german in my daily life, but I speak the closely related Dutch).
I reject/don't believe it anymore Sunni Islam. Probably due to the same reasons as the Qur'anists here reject Sunni(or perhaps Shia) Islam.(Contradicting, downward stupid/racist hadiths, the extreme dogmatism and relying on appeal to authority etc etc ). So, let's try to look at Qur'an only, - in which case we are (literally) left with just this book, the Qur'an.
Now, the problem is that I can't see anything divine in this book.Really. Sure, there is good poetry in it, there might be usefull guidances and advices, but really nothing divine or special, while it is supposed to be a very special book.. (A side note, I know some Arabic..)

I can write a book,- anyone can, - and in it I can include lots of usefull guidance about how to live a happy life, how to make this world a better place, I can even include some hints and tips on how to discover the beauties, the mysteries of this universe we live in etc etc, but whatever good advice which it might contain it won't be divine ..
Well, "extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence" as said by the legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, and I would like to concurr with it.
There isn't any. Not a single shred of "evidence" that this book is divine. (I am sorry, I am not that well informed about Quran-only, but I presume you also reject the miracles like inshiqaq-i qamer (splitting of the moon?).)
Just a book.. By and for seventh century arabia.

Now, I know about the works of Edip Yuksel and the whole hype about nineteen. But really, numerology is so fake, not at all convincing. Sorry, but I couldn't get convinced by the whole 19 thing either. Neither by "scientific miracles" ( Not sure whether you ever appeal to such evidences, though) Big bang was in the Qur'an, and many many related "miracles". No need to explain, you all have heared about it I suppose.

Anyway, to come back to my openingsquestion Quran-only movement won't hold it out,- indeed by almost all other Muslims you are considered apostates. Quran-only is the last chance to "rationalize" Islam,- a major blow to Islam in which >99% of Islamic literature is all rejected/deemed unreliable.

... I regard Qur'an-only as the last stop before total apostasy..
PS I am here on this forum as you guys are MUCH more kind and welcoming regarding apposing views contrary to dogmatic Muslims.

Addition I have the impression that Quranists( I know it sounds deragatory, but you get the point) desperately want to hold on to their idealized view of Muhammed as being a very kind, civilized, smart person, also by now era's standards. As a consequence, they consider all hadiths which says that, e.g. , he ordered a stoning, he ordered the killing of 900 Jews of Banu Qurayza, he made racist/sexist remarks about women, he married a nine year old girl, etc etc, as being unreliable. Indeed, a true prophet of God would never do those.
However, don't you ever think of the possibility that he might have done those things..!

Dear all,
This is my first post. I have been pondering about religion in general,- I would like to identify myself with being a skeptic. My parents/environment are all Sunnis, and quite devout. Ofcourse, the same nuances are also present in Sunnism(There are certain hadiths which are accepted by some, but seen fabricated by others.). Islam as I was taught by my parents was Sunni/Hanefi/Naqshbandi Islam, - the doctrines of a certain Naqshbandiyya , quite orthodox, religious tariqat(=sect, nearly cult I would say) originating in Turkey..

In other words Extremely conservative, and all others are destined for Hell. (Quranists are seen even worse than Kuffaar(=non Muslims) as you consider yourself Muslim, while clearly(to many) you are not.)

Anyway, my problem as mentioned in the topictitel is the following Without seerah/hadiths/authority-of-ulema(madhap etc), there is just nothing left of Islam..! Hadiths contain lots of BS, but the same is true for the Qur'an. The following are just simpel observations I made about the Qur'an

• Many ayats are repetitions.
• Many ayats are about the kuffaar(What's ur interpretation of "KFR"?) , and the grave punishment which awaits them. Certainly doesn't make a good case in convincing me that it is divine(Why so many threats?)
• Many ayats are about fairy tales ( Contrary to "ordinary" Muslims, I don't expect you to be easily offended, but I mean the stories of the "former prophets".. (cf Surahi Fil(Elephant), the destruction of former tribes, Noahs flood.. No different than the Greek mythology for me..)
• Many surahs are about shariah(laws). But here again Just a few compared to the vast collection of do's and dont's of Sunnism. And many of those laws don't make sense nowadays. (CUtting of hands ISS in the Qur'an,- don't try to find a loophole by endless "re"interpreting !)
  ------ and I could go on.

As I can't see myself believing in the tenets of Islam,- even the most naked version of it, I have even lost the possibilty of becoming a "Qur'anist".
Kind regards,