Hello.

I thank you both. That will be enough.

Hello.

So to confirm what you are saying the translation that you are referring to as "the Message" is the one you can find at www.free-minds.org, and this translation was the basis for the "Reformist Translation". Am I correct?

If I'm not reading your quote wrong, then there has been some arguments over the project as they were writing "a Reformist Translation". Your quote says

"Where the translation of a certain word or concept was not agreed, it was then modified to move the project along."

Thank you.

Hello all.

I'm currently reading the Quran. I have reached sura four.

A question has come to my mind, a question that I don't think further reading will answer (but correct me if I'm wrong).

Throughout my text here below, I will use quote-marks ("...&quot to emphasize words from the Quran. No sarcasm is intended; my questions are fully serious!

I'm guessing that you who are reading this is a "special kind" of muslim, which only means that you don't regard yourself as Shia or Sunni. You think yourself as a Monotheist. This makes me to guess that people like you live a little bit all over the planet, and are all from different origins. Some of you may not even be of middle eastern origin.

As diverse group as you may be, I'm guessing that your friends make an even more diverse group!

We should be able to find a lot of people among your frineds, ranging from muslims to christians, jews, hindus, buddhists, simply idealists, atheists, materialists, sympathizer of political ideologies leaning slightly to the left/right, capitalists, communists, evolutionists, well you name it!

A lot of these fall directly under the category of being "disbelievers/rejecters/wicked" according to the Quran, and you probably consider some of these as your very very close and dear friends.

So my question boils down to this how do you cope with the fact that if these friends of yours continue on this path, then they will for sure "be the fuel of the Fire", in straight words burn in hell?

I'm guessing that some of you would say "only God knows who WILL burn in hell and who will enter Paradise", meaning that perhaps your friends will convert in the future.

Well then I ask you to consider friends or relatives that have passed away, and who said that they did not believe in God or any such entity until their moment of death came and passed.

All of these people have two thing in common You loved them very much and they will begin to burn in hell on the day of resurrection.

To extend this question with a follow-up the Quran assures us that if we continue on the path of the righteous (believe in God, believe in the day of Resurrection, and do good and no evil) then we "have nothing to fear, nor will they grieve".

That doesn't feel right if you got a good friend or two (already dead or alive) that will burn in hell because they did not believe in God? I think that is something pretty big to grieve and to definitely fear, even in the "Paradise" of the "Hereafter"!?

The few possibilities that I can see are as follows either the human consciousness is not the same in the hereafter, meaning that you will not be able to remember your friends or feel sorrow for their destiny, or either you will burn in hell too just because you were a friend of such people (the latter is extremely unlikely, since pure logic would state that more or less all of us would burn in hell).

Thank you for any response.

-- Concerned student of the Quran.

Hello.

I'm currently studying the Quran. Since I can not read Arabic, I have to rely on the available translations of the Quran. I settled with the one offered by the Monotheist Group (one can find the translation at www.free-minds.org), since I liked what one can find in the preface of their translation. In it, they specify how important it is that one reads this scripture alone, using only your own mind. They also say that they do not agree with how other translations have footnotes and (notes) in most of the verses.

However, as I have been reading (I'm taking my time and I have reached sura four), I discovered how similar this translation is to the one of Edip Yuksel (you can find it at ww.quranix.net). These two translations use mostly exact the same word for most of the verses. In fact, some verses are exact duplicates of one another.

Could someone step forward and explain this? I can't say that this is because of both the authors using modern English.

Thank you.