The Islamic Dialema.
I wanted to be muslim. There’s nothing better than the feeling of putting your head on the ground and worshiping God in arabic. That might sound strange to some. But to me, there were some moments in prostration where I literally felt so much peace, that if I died in those moements I would have died happily.
I wanted to share this peace and give people a view of Islam from the inside without having to convert so I decided to start writing a book. Testament. It’s fiction. A Chrisitan mans journey to Islam and the struggles he faces afterwards as well as the strength he finds in his new faith and how even after losing essentialy everything, he still chooses to keep his faith.
I wanted to use the book as a way to call people to Islam through fiction because I felt that few people were doing this. I started writhing it. I started enjoying the process.
But then, when I was researching arguments for the two religions so that I could make the arguments of the characters more realistic I came across something that stopped me in my tracks.
The Islamic dialema.
This, single argument pushed me unwillingly out of Islam. Why? How?
Firstly, a warning. If you care more about religion than truth then close this tab and continue on with your life.
But if you care more about Allah, than Islam. More about God and Truth, which are one and the same than you care about religion, carry on reading.
When I first heard about this I didn’t actually know what the word dialema meant so just incase some of you don’t, a dialema is an argument that forces an opponent to choose one of two unfavourable alternatives.
For example, you’ve probably heard of the thought experiment about a train and a man tied to the tracks. You have a lever that you can pull to reroute the train but if you do you will kill 5 other people that are tied to the other tracks.
This is probably one of the most common examples.
The Islamic dialemma is just as damaging for Islam as the train is for the people on the tracks.
If you ask the mainstream islamic media and the most popular youtube personalities, they will tell you that the bible has been corrupted over time and that it has therefore not been preserved. However this is the opposite of what the Islamic sources say. The Quran and the Sunnah.
The islamic dialemma states that the Quran and the Sunnah, or in other words, Allah and Muhammad both claim that the bible has been preserved and has remained uncorrupted. However the bible fundamentally dissarees with Islam on key topics such as the nature of God, the divinity of Christ and the means by which a person can attain salvation.
This means that:
- Either the Quran and Muhammad where correct in stating that the bible is preserved in which case Islam is false because the bible dissagrees with Islam as stated above. Or…
- The bible was not preserved and has been corrupted in which case Islam is false because it claims that the bible has been preserved.
To be clear we are talking about textual corruption here. The Quran and Muhammad both affirm that the bible of Muhammads time was intact and uncorrupted. There are places in the Quran where Muhammad is told that f he doubts his mission that he should go to the Jews or the Christians to see that their scriptures agree with the message that has been brought to him. Muhhamad also mentions in hadith that the Jews and the Christians have their scriptures but it does not benefit them because they distort it’s meaning.
Narrated Jubair bin Nufair: from Abu Ad-Darda who said: “We were with the Prophet (ﷺ) when he raised his sight to the sky, then he said: ‘This is the time when knowledge is to be taken from the people, until what remains of it shall not amount to anything.” So Ziyad bin Labid Al-Ansari said: ‘How will it be taken from us while we recite the Qur’an. By Allah we recite it, and our women and children recite it?’ He (ﷺ) said: ‘May you be bereaved of your mother O Ziyad! I used to consider you among the Fuqaha of the people of Al-Madinah. The Tawrah and Injil are with the Jews and Christians, but what do they avail of them?’" Jubair said: “So I met ‘Ubadah bin As-Samit and said to him: ‘Have you not heard what your brother Abu Ad-Darda said?’ Then I informed him of what Abu Ad-Darda said. He said: ‘Abu Ad-Darda spoke the truth. If you wish, we shall narrated to you about the first knowledge to be removed from the people: It is Khushu’, soon you will enter the congregational Masjid, but not see any man in it with Khushu’.’”
Looking into this further the only responses I’ve seen to the dialemma seem to be ignoring the main point of the issue. People talk about interprative distortions and not texual ones but the Quran and Muhammad both refer to the Bible being textually intact.
Others claim that there may have been intact bibles at the time of the Prophet but that it has been corrupted since then. THis is also not true as there are complete manuscripts of the bible that go back three centuries before the Prophet was around.
I have yet to see a solution that resolves this dialema. That’s not to say that one couldn’t exist. If it does, then the most famous minds in modern Islam havent managed to find it yet.
THis is why, despite not wanting to, I am forced, because I care more about truth than I do about religion, to say that Islam is untrue. And There’s no way I can call myself a muslim while believing Islam is not true.
THis is why I cannot call myself a muslim right now until a solution to this dialemma is found. However, I don’t know that one will be.
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