When Jason Caywood asked me to read and comment on his 'Summary of Islam', I took the issue so seriously. Jason is an assistant pastor at a Protestant Church, and a dear friend of mine who has always proved to be honest and deep both in his perosnal relations and academic enedevours.
Jason wrote that the fact that prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, was mentioned in the Qur'an only after Muhammad immigrated to Medina could, according to some scholars, mean that Muhammad sought to be friends with the Jews of Medina, and it was thus necessary for the Qur'an to establish the basis of this friendship in terms of a common ancestor that is revered by Muslims and Jews alike.
After a short discussion Jason and I agreed that there is no evidence for this point of view, which most Wester readers would interpret that Muhammad wrote the qur'an, because if you believe that the Qur'an was revealed by God, then it's very reasonable that Ibrahim should be mentioned only at the right time and in the rigt context, that is the context of addressing the people of the book in Medina.
A few days after all this was over, I realized that there was a serious problem with the discussion. We kept discussing the ramifications of the fact, but never really addressed the problem of whether the fact is factual. I did some research, and not surprisigly, found that Ibrahm was mentioned at least 4 times in the Makki Qur'an, that which dates back to the period in which Muhammad was in Makka, before he immigrated to Medina.
I checked with a friend of mine who told me that these ideas were first raised by a Dutch orientalist who was discredited by his fellow Dutch orientalists, but the ideas crept into many of the Western books while the discrediting somehow did not make it.
The story above is a daily incident, we listen to many facts, and start discussing the consequences of the fact without first establishing how factual this fact might be. And this seems to a human thing. Back in Egypt, when a few friends of mine and I, all with a strong background in Islam and Arabic, began discussing the false facts in our books, Friday sermons, and the speeches by many so-called scholars, we were confronted by the fact that the more you know, the less welcome you become.
It seems to me that the problem is that the concept of establishing evidence is not so evidently established in our educational systems. We take almost everyting for granted, and get deterred once we start asking how or why. I cannot forget it when a friend of mine was termed 'the enemy of Islam' because he corrected the popular sheikh. The people who called him 'kafir', or disbeliever, may not have noticed that we had just finished the prayer together.
It seems that mollycoddling the sheikhs is much more important the the truth. The is the BITTER TRUTH.
P.S. Thank you Jason for expressing your willingness to go back and check.
