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Father Zakaria Botros and reading the Qur'an and Allah and Muslims and the angels pray to Muhammad

Reader comment on item: Islam in American Textbooks
in response to reader comment: dhimmi: hlep in translation

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Apr 14, 2009 at 08:06

Plato wrote

>Hello dhimmi,

Hi Plato

>I have always wondered about Allah praying/blessing Muhammad. In your post you say:>>4. You adore and venerate Muhammad and you and your Allah and his angels pray to him which is no more than pagansim and shirk<<

What brought my attention to this little aya was Father Zakaria Botros. I do not know if you know anything about him but he is a Coptic priest and his command of Arabic is excellent and his command of literary criticism is great and all he does is read the Islamic sources and get the dirt out in the open as in the case of the infamous hadith about "breast feeding of the adult" that was big news in the Middle East for weeks and everyone in the Middle East is watching his shaw on qanat al-haya al-fada'iya and what drives Muslims out of their minds is that he only uses islamic sources and he is always correct in his reading of such sources

Now in episode 97 of his hewar al-haq he mentioned this very aya and you will find his explanation that indeed Allah and his angels PRAY to Muhammad and so are all muslims by uttering the sala allahu 3alyhi wasalam

http://islamexplained.com/TruthTalkEpisode97/tabid/1255/Default.aspx

No wonder that al-Qa3ida is willing to pay 60M dollars for anyone who would kill him

Now you will find my explanations in

http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/139368

And

http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/151669

I urge you to double check the translation in Lisan al-Arab dictionary and in Hans Wehr if you can

>The translations I refer to has this about Allah praying/saluting Muhammad:

No saluting means tahiya

>033.056
YUSUFALI: Allah and His angels send blessings on the Prophet: O ye that believe! Send ye blessings on him, and salute him with all respect.
PICKTHAL: Lo! Allah and His angels shower blessings on the Prophet. O ye who believe! Ask blessings on him and salute him with a worthy salutation.
SHAKIR: Surely Allah and His angels bless the Prophet; O you who believe! call for (Divine) blessings on him and salute him with a (becoming) salutation.

No the word bless means either yubarak or yahmid and it does not mean yusali as you shall see in Lisan al-Arab the word yusali means to pray to and for the details see my above two blogs

>All these three translate the verse with '....send/shower blessings.....'

Send means yab3ath and shower yumatir and you will not find either word in the aya and the Arabs have two ways of telling us what the Qur'an says: al-ma3na aw al-lafz or the meaning (read this as tafseer or exegesis) or the word/syntax which is the masoretic (the word masora is a Hebrew word) exegesis of the word and not the sentence

And by the way: Yusuf Ali and Shakir translations are poor and tendentious translations and I wonder how can anyone translate the Qur'an when he has no command of Arabic or Syriac or Hebrew. You cannot read the Qur'an without knowing Syriac and Hebrew. Surprise surpirse Arabic is not enough and do you think for a minute that Shakir or Ali knew any Syriac or Hebrew?

>Were they trying to trick the unwary non-Arab reader?

May be but I think it is out of pure ignorance. And Shaji is an example of the ignorance of many muslims about what kutub al-turath al-islami or the muslim sources really tell us which I think is a combination of poor uncritical education, not knowing the languages and having to read poor translations and withful thinking

>regards Plato

I hope I helped


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Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".

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