On comparison of Quran with pre-Quranic texts: First, we can’t judge texts of different religious traditions from an Islamic perspective. The definition of prophecy & divine revelations are different in each tradition. You’ve got to study each of them on their own terms. > https://twitter.com/daxhingdebonair/status/1272727979492335619

> Usually what we’ve observed is that poetic & hymn texts turn out to be older than narrative ones, that is the case with Vedas, Gathas, Buddhist sutras, & sections of Bible. Quran is also mainly a text of hymns with some history. OTOH Torah & gospels are mainly historical >

> texts. Within Torah are prophetic books, like the Book of Ezekiel who claimed that God directly spoke to him & many scholars believe it does date to his lifetime, 8th century BC. We even have the tradition of Yajuj Majuj thanks to him. Quran, compiled in 650s, is of course >

> the youngest among almost all major religious texts & came at a time when manuscript tradition was becoming well established, & in a hundred years, thanks to China, we even had paper. Yet we know that there were variant readings among different sahabas, & Uthman & after him >

> Hajjaj bin Yousuf had to burn & discard the readings they didn’t consider valid, yet we still have had at least 7 different canonical readings of Quran. Torah was compiled & is dated to be around 2500 years ago; there are hymns within Torah that are considered even older, but >

> beyond that it’s hard to ascertain the precise dates, i.e. academically. Jewish traditions believe it to be direct authorship of Moses himself. Jesus of course didn’t write any texts, gospels were written by his apostles who were writing, according to the Christian tradition, >

> under the influence of God via the Holy Spirit. There were many pseudepigraphic Biblical texts, & there is a lot of academic literature that shows that Quran & Hadith texts were more influenced by them, along with Midrash & Talmud, than canonical Bible & Torah. Buddha afaik >

> didn’t compose texts, his history is academically murky, but the earliest surviving Buddhist texts date to 100 BCE. The earliest Vedas are RigVedas, they are considered 3500 years old, & were transmitted orally so meticulously that linguists now use them to construct >

> ancient Indo-Aryan languages. Zoroastrian tradition considers Gathas to be directly from Zoroaster, we of course have no means to ascertain that, what linguists do say is that the earliest Gathas date to around 1000 BCE, & they have a unity in theme & language, along with the >

> literary use of chiastic pattern (also used in sections of Quran & many other ancient oral texts), that seems to show a single author. If we go earlier then we have texts, law codes, hymns of gods, prophetic texts, literature as old as 5000 years ago from Sumer, Babylon, >

> Egypt, Hittites, etc. etc. & thanks to cuneiform they are well preserved. We even have hymns from Babylonian prophets that they claimed were directly revealed to them from god. Then of course countless ancient well preserved Greek, Latin, Syriac secular texts. We’ve got to >

> realize that the temporal distance b/w these Babylonian texts, Vedas, Gathas, & Qur’an is greater than the distance b/w Quran & us. They were composed at a time when writing wasn’t as common & thus memory was emphasized. Islam didn’t begin the tradition of memorizing texts, >

> it had been prevalent among Indians, Buddhists, Jews, Zoroastrians & others for more than a thousand years before Quran & it still is. Heck the Babylonian lamentation hymns are about 5000 years old & up till about 3000 years ago they were read during annual lament rituals, >

> that’s a period of 2000 years. Last words: instead of insisting on a unique supremacy, we’d be better off heeding to the words of Syed Hossein Nasr, who says, "No one religion can ever be the only truth because God's mercy and justice can never allow majority of >

> His creation to follow a path that does not lead to Him. All religions are conduits to God and each religion is complete unto itself. All beings are manifestations of aspects of God."

https://twitter.com/gypsy_heart6/status/1272824226806972416?s=21 https://twitter.com/gypsy_heart6/status/1272824226806972416

https://twitter.com/gypsy_heart6/status/1273419832826957825?s=21 https://twitter.com/gypsy_heart6/status/1273419832826957825