Proofs that Quran is a Revelation from Allah
by Sheikh Abdur-Raheem Green
All praise is due to Allah, we praise Him and we seek his help and ask His
forgiveness. We seek refuge with Allah from the evil of our selves and from
the evil results of our actions. I testify that Allah alone is worthy of worship
and that Muhammad is His slave and final Messenger. May Allah's salawat (peace
and blessings) be upon the last and final messenger Muhammad, his family and
his followers. Ameen!
To begin: The best discourse is the book of Allah, and the best way is the
way of Muhammad, and the worst of the matters in the religion are those newly
introduced innovations, for every innovation in the religion is misguidance,
and every misguidance is going astray and every going astray is in the Hellfire.
I have embarked on my commentary on the The Economist magazine's survey "Islam
and the West" (large insert in the August 6, 1994 issue) after some considerable
deliberation, and find myself confronted with a considerable task, and indeed
Allah is the best of helpers. Brian Beedham is able to rely on what Noam Chomskey
calls "manufactured consent". While dictatorships use force in order to achieve
consent from the people and prevent opposition, "democracies" manufacture
consent through the media by using it to providing a particular world view
which conforms to the interests, by and large, of the ruling elite. He is
able to get away with a short, condensed, article because he doesn't need
to prove much of what he is saying, he only has to repeat the prefabricated
conventional platitudes. For example, when he talks the Algerian Muslims as
"a singularly intransigent bunch of Islamic rebels, fundamentalists of the
most bloody minded sort" he doesn't have to prove it, because the establishment
has already ensured that people believe this is the case. In fact the statement
in not at all true. The Algerian fundamentalists proved willing to go to elections
and seek a peaceful way re-establish the Islamic Shari'ah. Recent events,
such as the meeting of the opposition groups, including the "rebel fundamentalists",
in Rome, calling for talks and a return to free elections - which was even
supported by the French government and was rejected by the Algerian government
- shows that it is the Algerian government that has proved bloody minded.
In spite of such obvious discrepancies Mr. Beedham is able to get away with
it because consent has already been manufactured that the fundamentalists
are rebellious and bloody minded.
Similarly he never feels he has to prove that democracy is an advantage, it
is taken almost completely for granted, knowing his audience is already "captive"
so as to speak. In the age of the "sound-bite" (or perhaps in this case "word-bite"),
opposing the conventional wisdom is not easy, for what the likes of Mr. Beedham
can say in a sentence opposing it would take a book. Even then it would be
of doubtful effectiveness, for opposing the norms of society is perhaps one
of the hardest paths to take for an instinctively societal creature like ourselves.
Thus I shall be writing a series of letters, and not just one, thus enabling
me to break down the commentary into more manageable pieces. I shall also
refer certain topics to appendices, which may include video and audio tapes.