I beg to disagree, as this would contradict 2948, &c.

I'm not so sure. These verse contradicts the notion of the oral Quran only if we decide to use one specific interpretation of 2948. As I understand it the verse doesn't actually say that Muhammad wrote down a Quran with his own hand, only that he never had done anything of the kind before its revelation. You can argue that such a post-revelatory action is implicit, and I cannot disprove this, but I don't think it explicitly states what you claim it does? Also I could just as easily claim that the very same verse implicitly states that the Quran was recited!

Furthermore, even if we are to assume that the verse clearly states that Mohammed wrote the Quran down with his right hand (which arguably it doesn't), the question remains whether this was an "inscription" or a "transscription", i.e. if the written letters became the physical manifestation of the actual revelation sent down, or if they rather constituted a more or less arbitrary representation of the sounds forming the words.

Also, if we assume that Muhammed himself wrote down a text whose very letters were sent down by God, this begs the question; where is this text now?

Jupiter is very useful to us, since it swallows meteorites and comets that could otherwise collide with earth. If Venus was not present the size of the solar system could not have been calculated in the late 1700's. The precession of mercury illustrates that Einstein was right about relativity - those sort of things?

It is not my place to question God's motives.
All sciences related to physics work under the assumption that "what is true here is true anywhere".
Lately astronomers have found lots and lots of planets around suns other than our own, so planets orbiting stars seems to be a common occurrence in this universe.
Were I an atheist, I might assume that life is also a common feature of the universe where conditions suitable to life exist (water, energy, temperature, chemistry and so on). Now I am no atheist, and I think there is a distinct possibility that this particular place of the universe is in fact "special" because of the presence of life if nothing else. God is certainly capable of creating life wherever He choses, but we will never know if He has done so or not unless we find clear evidence that He has. Science will never be able to prove that He has not, since the immensity of the universe means there are simply too many and too distant places to look.

@Magnus
Salam. So all the colored things on the photo you published are galaxies? Al hamdulah, that's really wonderful. But how does it come that they never show this when they show images of the universe at television? Did they use a special filter?

I agree that the universe is wonderful.
Not all things seen are galaxies. There are a few nearby stars too, these are the bright spots that have the "+" and "X" lines emanating from the center.
I don't know what television programs you have watched, but I have seen deep field images from Hubble on TV more than once.
When looking into filters used, I realize that I misrepresented how the XDF image was produced, since apparently it comes from merging numerous exposures taken over a period of several years, using more than one of Hubble's various cameras sensitive to different wavelengths. From what I gather they used five different filters in the visible-light range and four additional filters in the near-infrared spectrum https//www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2oZ8xaICsg

Yes, what we can see, photograph and measure of this universe is mindblowingly big.
The Hubble telescope - which is essentially just a really big camera in low earth orbit - took a picture with an extremely slow shutter speed aimed at a tiny fraction of the sky (of the size represented by the rectangle in the image below with the moon inserted to give a sense of the scale) which was chosen because it has few nearby stars in it to obscure the view into deep space

http//i.imgur.com/q9wDy7g.jpg

Here's what the image shows; thousands of galaxies. This is what surrounds us in every direction, as far as we can tell. o

http//i.imgur.com/sTTn2M0.jpg?1
Link to high resolution http//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Hubble_Extreme_Deep_Field_%28full_resolution%29.png

What is even more mindblowing is that God's domain not only encompasses the very big but also the very small, and everything in between. This video is a bit dated but it still conveys a sense of scale that is awesome in the true sense of the word http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

The Andromeda galaxy is visible to the naked eye if the sky is dark enough, as are the Magellanic clouds. The Triangulum galaxy can also be made out if conditions are perfect and you have really good eyes. In this age of electric lights dark skies are hard to find for many of us, sadly. I have a reasonably powerful telescope but I rarely use it to look at anything other than bright objects nearby because of light pollution.

The 7 heavens are the 7 spaces above our planet

http//s21.postimg.org/8x9vyik6v/heaven.png

While I do not make any proposals of what is the truth in this case, I'm pretty sure your explanation is wrong. Strictly astronomically speaking, choosing the orbit of pluto has two obvious problems

• Pluto is by astronomers widely and increasingly held as being the innermost but not the largest body in a swarm of many such objects called the Kuiper belt. With this in mind, choosing Pluto as defining a "space" extending out to include the rest of the universe seems completely arbitrary.
  -Pluto's orbit is not only inclined from the rest of the plane of the ecliptic, it is also rather elliptical, so Pluto is actually inside the orbit of Neptune sometimes, which means that according to your hypothesis "space" #6 and #7 would have to switch places on occasion.

http//i.imgur.com/Pw1Ns2F.jpg

I have heard it said of Islam, over and over again and again, time after time that Islam just "makes sense" and is so clearly logical, etc. etc.

My question to you (all of you) is that if you believe what you just said, and what I have read time and again from other Muslim missionaries, than how do you explain ONE SINGLE Muslim converting to Islam?!

I would hazard that matters of faith are not necessarily at all subject to logic or sense. Belief in something might "feel right" even though it is demonstrably absurd or untrue, and that is enough of an attraction for many, who are additionally often unwilling to critically examine those beliefs for fear of losing their faith, which they value.

Furthermore, it seems that most humans have a hard time believing in something unseen, incomparable and ultimately incomprehensible - people love to give divine attributes to humans, almost-humans or various statues or images of beings to which they can more easily relate.

Lastly, there seems to be a great attraction in the promise of guaranteed salvation through faith alone. Many denominations of christianity promise a "free pass" on judgement day for those who believe that Jesus will save them. Christians fervently cling to this conviction, possibly because it spares them the hard work of taking responsibility for their own actions and establishing an honest relationship with their Creator.

There are other verses on the same subject

612-3 O you who believe! why do you say that which you do not do? Most loathsome is it in the sight of God that you say what you do not do!

2177 True piety does not consist in turning your faces towards the east or the west - but truly pious is he who believes in God, and the Last Day; and the angels, and revelation, and the prophets; and spends his substance - however much he himself may cherish - it - upon his near of kin, and the orphans, and the needy, and the wayfarer, and the beggars, and for the freeing of human beings from bondage; and is constant in prayer, and renders the purifying dues; and they who keep their promises whenever they promise, and are patient in misfortune and hardship and in time of peril it is they that have proved themselves true, and it is they, they who are conscious of God.

1734 And do not touch the substance of an orphan, save to improve it, before he comes of age. And be true to every promise - for, verily, you will be called to account for every promise which you have made!

It is my opinion that a person of substance is someone who means what he says. If you don't take your own words seriously, how can anyone else? For me personally, learning to live up to this standard has required me to promise less and do more. I don't see this as a bad development at all.

Peace.

Here's a couple of old threads containing more or less well-reasoned speculative opinions on the subject

http//free-minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=9598383.0
http//free-minds.org/forum/index.php?topic=9604136.0

Sure, it would be nice to have a place where people confined themselves to expressing absolute truth, all the time. How would you go about achieving that though?

We're all seekers here, we are looking for something. Many of us are searching by ourselves, with nobody to guide us except God (when we deserve it) and with Satan whispering in our minds and hearts (when we deserve that). People will listen to different sources of inspiration, and give expression to their various conclusions in forums such as this.

My advice to you is to not take people here too seriously. Read threads that interest you, ignore posters you think are wrong, and realize that this is not a highly moderated forum - I sometimes wish for stricter moderation myself, but that approach taken to its logical extreme would stifle pretty much all discussion, since pretty much all topics have been examined thoroughly previously by posters who are no longer active here.

People feel the need to preach, either because they are genuinely onto something that needs telling, or (more likely) because they are in some state of confusion. I sometimes preach too, mainly about the need to confine ourselves to what we really know and refrain from expressing our speculations and untested/unproven ideas like they were gospel truth, at the risk of misleading others as well as ourselves.

If you manage to sort the grains from the chaff, this place isn't half bad. A place for truth exclusively it isn't, which is why God sent us the Quran, and why He guides some of us on a personal level, I guess - we are always free (and have the duty) to go back to the Source of all knowledge in order to try and make sense of it all. If we fail in doing so, this site and others like it are bound to cause frustration and confusion more than anything. It is what it is, and while we might wish it to be something better, that's a hard thing to achieve, people being the way they are.

I think you'll have to wait until the afterlife if you want to be entirely free from Satan's influences at all times. This worldly life is meant to be a challenge, apparently.

Magnus, you said that you begin your sallaat to Allah, with ?BismiAllah?. Now the question is What are you actually saying to Allah? Are you saying ?In the name of Allah? to Allah?

That's not really what I said though, and most definitely not what I meant, sorry for being casual with my choice of wording, leading to you misunderstanding me (I usually begin the spoken part of any calling upon my Lord with "Lord" or "Rabbi" or "Herre" or somesuch word, not that this is really here nor there for the sake of the theme of this thread)
My general view of salaat is that it is some kind of re-establishing of contact between me and my Maker. My mostly experimental view is that I need to re-connect because I have lost something, that the connection is corrupted in some way. I find that my awareness of what needs to be kept in mind decays over time. Because of this decay, my understanding of whom the Lord is - and therefore my understanding of what I am saying when I say for example "oh Lord..." - is usually vastly different at the beginning of my attempt at re-establishing contact compared to how I understand the whole concept of God towards the end.

For contrast, consider your average internet user exclaiming "OMG!" in a casual, oblivious manner, and compare this to some hypothetical pious person using a similar phrase in calling upon his Creator, his soul trembling from the profound implications of the very concept, if you will.

Now, if I were drunk for some reason I'm highly likely to think and say all kinds of dumb things, because of my confused state of intoxication - therefore I'm forbidden to even try to re-connect to the Lord in such cases, I think.

Maybe you don't know what "sukara" means but I think you know what "until you know what you express" means.
So it is for us not even allowed to go to sallaat while we don't know what we express.

Peace Bender. I know we usually tend to agree, but the implications (for me personally) of this line of thought are just too bizarre; if you are right about this I would hardly ever be allowed to pray. Rarely if ever do I even begin to grasp the full implications of "bismillah", let alone whatever comes after. After drinking even a very small amount of alcohol though, I lose all ability I ever had of remembering or sensing the presence of God in any meaningful way. Without such drugs in my system, I can always try to increase my awareness of what I am saying, through prayer. In a certain way, one reason I keep praying regularly is in order to become aware of what I am saying, but certain drugs make it impossible and pointless to even try. I therefore think that trying to understand the verse in question by disregarding the "sukara" qualifier is a big mistake.

Mind you, as usual I'm speaking from experimental personal experience rather than from a Quranic scholarly perspective here. Take my personal anecdotes for what they're worth.

Ok I have been wondering and please brothers and sisters help me out because it is been a huge problem to me. Ok I don't know if you guy believe in waswas but whenever I pray I get alot of distracting thoughts. First, I keep getting images on my head about people. It's like the image is telling me to worship them. And I keep getting songs stuck on my head wether it's secular or not (nashed).
Now the images I can handle, since all I have to do is just focus on the words and read of my prayers. Meaning, If I'm going to perform my salah, Im just going to read of the words from my mind. But The song part is realy difficult. I tried not listening to music it failed. I tried to pray louder, it failed. I tried focusing on the words and echoing the words in my head but it still failed. I tried playing a nashed on my head but I heard your not suppose to do that. Now what am i going to do now I feel like im doom PLEAE ANY ADVICE?

Peace!

I can only speak from personal experience, and the subject is rather mystical. Nevertheless
What you describe very much mirrors my own experience in trying to master prayer. Having a piece of music looping over and over in my mind is the worst distraction I know of when trying to gather my wits for any task, and prayer is the one task that requires the most concentration of all the things I regularly attempt. I think snippets of music in essence work the same as any other distracting whispering, and can be successfully silenced in the same way as imagery, words or anything else. I am confident that praying "louder" or "harder" is not the way forward, but rather to practice the art of seeking refuge with God from these influences. This seeking of refuge is, I think, at the very heart of my own struggle to connect with God, and I think it's quite possible to get better at it with practice. Reciting words can help in doing it (the last two chapters are good reminders) but ultimately it is an action that needs to be carried out, rather than words that need to be spoken.

I find that it is ultimately an exercise in centering my attention, letting go, losing myself, being the most humble I can possibly be, surrendering. Satan used to successfully trick me into believing that this process was scary and bad, that I was losing my mind and going insane, or that I was about to hurt myself, even about to die. Now the process just feels cleansing and relaxing, whenever I can manage to do it well. It's not a binary "on" or "off"-thing, but rather an infinite scale between utter confusion/distraction on the one end and uncorrupted awareness of truth/God on the other. Increased awareness can only come at the expense of the whisperings, up to (and later beyond!) the point when the mind actually turns silent - the inner voice is no longer there, there are no images flashing on the "projection screen of the mind", the mind is still and the chest is soft and penetrable. It is only in this state of being that God, my own life, prayer, or the words of the Quran start to make any real sense to me.

TLDR; You can't fight Satan with strikes and blows, but you can turn away from him. The only place you can turn and not find Satan is in turning towards God. Look in the very middle of yourself. You can only find this place by relaxing/surrendering.

May God lead us closer to truth and give us peace of mind.

Not to derail the thread, but I wanted to mention a different view, which I am increasingly leaning towards
The actual Quran was never a written document, but is and has been from the very beginning an oral tradition. It is a series of syllables forming words forming sentences conveying meaning, not a series of written letters. Any series of letters written down are to be considered nothing more than a memory aid for the recitation of the syllables that form the words, which in turn form the actual Quran. God sent down words, but no set instructions for how they should be spelled or where the dots should be, if any, I think. As long as the words remain, the Quran is preserved, and how people choose to write the words down or mass-produce them in print in order to remember them have no immediate bearing on what has actually been sent down and preserved by the grace of God.

Or something like that. I could be completely wrong of course, but this is the only way I can make any real sense of what the Quran actually is...

Gonna need a source for that.

I think the passage 540-50 establishes the principle of proportionality rather clearly, with 545 being translatable thus

And We have decreed for them in it that a life for a life, and an eye for an eye, and a nose for a nose, and an ear for an ear, and a tooth for a tooth, and wounds to be similar; and whoever remits anything of it, then it will cancel sins for him. And whoever does not judge with what God has sent down, then these are the wicked.

Some people like the idea of having guidance and the feeling of self-righteousness.

It is my experience that self-righteousness is incompatible with humility, which in turn is a prerequisite for guidance, which we indeed pray and strive for, God willing.

Peace to all,

Thank you Magnus for demonstrating once again, just like you did with Edip, that you allow yourself to formulate critics about things you don't even examine. The most disgusting thing is that you use the mask of reason and logic. yuck You want to be seen as a good thinker while, in fact, you're not. You're just an agitator and polemist. How sorry is your condition...

Did you watch the documentary I've sent ?

I think that no, Magnus, you did not watch it when you answered, because if you had watched it, you would have noticed, like Godsubmitter wrote, that "If you watched this video which @Kamzo19 kindly posted, you'd have heard that it says that they believe people landed on the moon, but the official footage was not the authentic one!". Are you not ashamed of yourself? If you did not watch it, why don't you just remain silent ? I'm beginning to think that something is attached to you and is nourrishing itself from this bad energy, just like astral parasites nourrish themselves from the bad energy of evildoers. When will you change this bad behavior, Magnus?

Anyway, I'm like you, Magnus, I believe, without any real evidence except those provided by NASA and that are not evidences because more than once, hairbrushing has been shown on them thanks to graphical filters, and because we cannot verify it, I believe that they went to the Moon. So you see, Scribbler, I'm not saying this is new. You can see it in the title of my thread "New insight...", this shows that I recognize and know that other insights about the authenticity of the Apollo moon landing have been brought during the past two decades.

I think, just like the documentary shows, that the images we all saw are fake images, and that the real footage of the landing I believe it happened, is for reasons I don't know, kept hidden from the public.

I just wanted it to be clearer. If I find something else, I'll try to keep you informed. Anyway, thank you for answering.

Peace peace

Peace!

Please refrain from strawmanning my position.
I never watched the video, and I never claimed I did. Without even having watched it, I dismiss it's central claim, if it makes one. I have heard Kubrick's name mentioned by lunar-conspiratorial nuts before, and I figured it is probably safe to assume that the youtube clip in question is most likely a repeated variant of the same nonsensical claims I have heard before. May God forgive me if I'm wrong in doing so.
I don't aspire to be seen as a great thinker, but I hope I am using my reason to discern truth from falsehood as best I can, under the circumstances.
If you want to talk about real stuff like rocket science or orbital mechanics or for that matter technichal aspects of photography I will do my best to answer any questions and learn what I need to know in order to do that. If you want to chase conspiratorial whisperings then you are free to continue on your own down that path, though I can tell you in parting and entirely from personal experience it's not the path a true believer wants to be on.

How do you know that? What is the proof of your claim? You've been there? With what authority you write those words? ???

I obviously haven't been to the moon myself, but I have have looked at the evidence available - there's quite a lot of it supporting my position, and it's rather convincing on the whole. I speak with the authority of reason.

As I said earlier, anyone can bounce a laser beam off the reflectors the Americans left up there, which is pretty good evidence - after all, the laser beams wouldn't bounce like they do if nobody had placed any reflectors up there.

Then there are boatloads of recent pictures such as this one, taken from a satellite orbiting low around the moon

http//cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2011/09/584392main_m168000580lr_ap17_area.jpg