For Abdul Rahman: is the word kaffir offensive?
Reader comment on item: Muslim-Controlled Governments Subsidize Conversions of Kafirs
in response to reader comment: Kaffirs reference offensive

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jul 1, 2006 at 07:41

A kaffir is a non-Muslim and this is what the word means, and nothing more and nothing less. As a matter of fact I call myself a proud kaffir and a proud dhimmi no more. But Islam is full of and you must pardon me silly ideas and doctrines that makes it the laughing stock of us infidels including: fatwa, jihad, taqiya, zawaj mut'a etc... and as I say Islam is the worst enemy of Islam and not us the infidels.

Now if the question is: why is the Qur'an, and therefore Muslim discourse, full of polemics including calling non-Muslims kuffar? One must read Wansbrough's book "Sectarian Milieu" (now available again at amazon.com). Wansbrough's thesis is as follows:

1. There is no reason for us to believe the Islamic history as transmitted to us by the Islamic historical tradition and this is based on literary examination of the very early Muslim literary sources.

2. The Arab polity invaded the Middle East in 635 CE. However, Islam as we know just did not exist at that time, and if you can produce to me an _extant_ copy of the Qur'an that can be dated to 632 CE and is an exact replica of the standard 1923-1024 copy of the Egyptian Qur'an, I will believe you, but there is no such copy.

3. Islam is the product of the sectarian debates between major religions in the area of Syria, palestine, Mesopotamia and Iran that has been taking place for a very long time before the Arab invasion took place.

4. For reasons that we still do not understand the invading Arab polity elected the emerging Islam as the religion of such polity. And then and only then the 'ulama had to look back and find a prophet in the same mould as the great prophets of the Jews and Christians and that was Muhammad the same person we hear about in early Syriac sources as the: King of the Arabs or Mlk tayayye.

4. The hadith (Let us not forget that Bukhari who was a non-Arab was the father of the hadith), sira (ibn Ishaq was the grandson of a Christian who was a Syriac speaker, and Ibn Hisham was born and lived all his life in Egypt and most likely his first language was Coptic) , tarikh (Tabari was an Iranian man who most likey never ventured beyond Iran), akhbar , tafseer (the tafseer is the ulitmate test that the 'Ulama who had no clue about Arabia in general or how the qur'an was revealed to Muhammad, and in-order to conver their confusion and discrepancies and ignorance about asbab al-nuzul (reasons for revelations) came up with the tafsser vs. ta'weel concept and for this see Wansbrough). All of this literature is the product of the non-Arab 'Ulama in the 3rd century of Islam and in places very far from Arabia, and Islam as we know it now was born in the 3rd century and was not the product of Arabia. 70% of these 'Ulama were Iranians (see Ali Dashti) which translates as: the contribution of the Arabs to their Muslim civilization was marginal at best. Imagine if the history of the British Empire was written by an Indian who has never been to England and had no access to written records, and in the process the same person wrote the grammar and introduced the vowels of the english language. You would agree with me that we would have had a different history and a different language of England.

5. To add insult to injury the Arabic language of the 3 rd century of Islam is the product of non-Arabs. Case in point: Sibawayhe the father of the Arabic grammar was an Afghani. The inventor of the short vowels of the Arabic language was a Syriac speaker and a Christian (gasp!!!): Hunein ibn Ishaq. And when translating the Greek learning at Dar al-Hikma in Baghdad to Syriac and then to Arabic he had to invent new Arabic words (eg: tuhal, safra, balgham) using Sibawayhe Fi'l. These words would have had no meaning to Muhammad or his generation but you would find them included in Ibn Manzur's Lisan al-Arab. So much for the Arabs and their civilization, and so much for the Arabic language.

So Muslims and Islam are stuck for ever and ever by the fatal flaw in Islam and that is: Islam is the by-product of sectarian debates. So you see abdul Rahman you are the victim of poor theology that is stuck at a point in time and there is no way out.

No I do not find the word kaffir as an insult. It is a badge of honor.

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