Greetings, Muhammad,
It was closed for good reason, as this thread is proving.
You are of course free to close whatever you like on this forum. However, I can't help wondering why you seem so keen to shut down interfaith dialogues like this on the merest pretext. Why wouldn't you want Muslims and non-Muslims to discuss issues like the present one openly?
I see. So those same atheists who apparently 'have made a sincere attempt to understand [Islam] over a number of years on this forum' now know no better than to purport 'common ideas'.
The common ideas I refer to are to do with the atheist position, which a potential
da'ee might not be familiar with, not to do with understanding Islam. Given this, I am afraid I can't see what point you are trying to make here.
You described your presence in this thread as a 'sincere attempt to help' in the context of inviting people to Islam. Obviously that can be understood in different ways. Now you give a clarification, but that doesn't mean I deliberately misrepresented what you said earlier.
No, you got the wrong end of the stick and made an assumption that was not warranted by my words. Which, I have to say, is becoming rather a common occurrence.
I'm glad if that is the case. Earlier you seemed to think there was a contradiction.
I still do. The idea of preaching Islam seems simple enough by itself; the contradiction arises when it is juxtaposed with the idea that Allah "guides whom he wills".
I think a misunderstanding (again, not a deliberate misrepresentation) has occurred somewhere here. Perhaps it is the outcome of focusing on individual sentences rather than viewing them in the context in which they were said. This part of the post is stemming from what you said earlier: 'Don't start with the Qur'an or any other arguments that are specific to Islam, because an atheist will see through them and immediately notice that they are all entirely dependent on prior belief in god.' What I understood from this is that you believe the Qur'an can only be appreciated by someone who already believes in God. I was saying that the Qur'an can be appreciated by anyone, even atheists who don't believe in God, and is a means for them to find belief.
Perhaps I could have been clearer, so I apologise; I can see how you may have misunderstood this. I was thinking of the common situation where a Muslim attempts to convince an atheist that a Muslim belief is justified, and uses Qur'anic evidence to support it, forgetting that the atheist sees no special value in the Qur'an above any other book.
As before, this is simply pedantry.
No, we're back to more of your hasty assumptions.
I didn't claim you were affirming a miracle of the Qur'an. The main thing I was highlighting was an appreciation of an aspect of the Qur'an, by the same person who seems to be implying it is a text of no or little significance,
I don't claim this at all. The Qur'an is easily one of the most significant books ever written. Please understand that you are presenting a grossly simplified version of my position, here and elsewhere.
and that it is only appreciable by those already believing in God
To believe in its truth, a person would have to believe in God already. That is my claim. However, an atheist might well appreciate it on purely literary grounds, for example.
The discovery of the oldest Qur'an fragments, amongst other things, naturally points to the preservation of the Qur'an.
Yes, and finding such fragments is an impressive discovery. The preservation of the text, though, is no more extraordinary than the preservation of countless other ancient texts.
If you didn't intend to make such a positive statement about the Qur'an, I'm sorry for assuming so.
Well, that is very fair of you and I thank you.
It should be added, though, the preservation of the Qur'an is something that is very easy to appreciate as unique. Muslims everywhere memorize the Qur'an, many millions memorizing the entire Qur'an from cover to cover, If all the books in the entire world were to be lost or destroyed, only the Qur'an would be recovered letter for letter as it is preserved in the hearts of so many millions.
While the widespread memorisation of the Qur'an is impressive in some ways, there is no way to test your claim here without actually destroying all the books and trying it. In that situation, though, I believe the worldwide acting and academic communities would be able to make a strong effort to restore many of the works of Shakespeare, for example. Many other regularly performed plays would also be able to be rescued in such a way, and I think it's reasonable to suppose it would be possible to amass a body of texts far larger than the Qur'an.
In other words, this mass memorisation doesn't really demonstrate anything other than the ability of people to memorise text. This doesn't stop Muslim preachers from repeating the claim as you have done here.
Peace
