Talk:People of the Book

It is quite interesting to note the focus on 'contradictions' in scripture (here and elsewhere). I would like to point out that per the definition of 'people of The Book' in the page under discussion (which does indeed include those who call themselves "Muslims"), the material following the heading 'The Quran' is itself a gross contradiction. (Remember: "Muslims" are also the people of The Book.)

To have any hope of understanding The Qur'an, one must always remember who it is addressed to:

  2:1
  In the name of ALLAH The Gracious The Merciful.

  2:2
  Alif Lam Mim

  2:3
  This is a perfect Book

     There is no doubt in it

  It is a Guidance for the Righteous

  2:4
     Who believe in the unseen
     and observe prayer
     and spend out of what WE have provided for them

  2:5
     And who believe
        in that which has been Revealed to thee (i.e. The Qur'an)
        and that which was Revealed before thee (i.e. Torah, Pslams, Gospels)

     And they have firm faith in the hereafter

  2:6

  It is they who follow the Guidance from their LORD
  and it is they who shall prosper

So we note that the Book is addressed to 'believers'. And we further reason that not all those who have inherited (a portion of) The Book -- i.e. Jews, Christians, and (yes) Muslims -- are 'believers' in the strict sense defined above. Thus, any claim that the Qur'an enjoins "Muslims" to do x, y, or z (good or bad) to 'people of The Book' is simply a misunderstanding of the Scripture. - Kabir

Article claims:

All others are considered idolators?, who are to be either murdered or converted.

Excuse me? Where does the Koran say that idolators are to be "murdered"?

I've removed the statement for now, as I suspect many Muslims would dispute it. --Stephen Gilbert

Yeppers. Especially given that many PotB were neither murdered nor killed for many years while in Islamic states. The whole point of dhimmi is that unlike other religions, PotB are tolerated. Martin

Tolerated, as long as they remain dhimmis. But if a Jew or Christian demands to be treated as an equal, the all bets are off. RK

RK, you've added a long para here on the status of dhimmi - but we have an article on dhimmi, so surely we should rely on that to provide the details? I think we should only summarise the key points of dhimmi here.

Second point - do the later parts of the Qu'ran actively rescind the earlier parts? Or do they merely contradict? Martin

The answer depends on whether you ask a religious Muslim, or a historian. Religious Muslims (like religious Jews and Christians) will deny that any contradictions exist in their scripture at all! They hold that all contradictions are only "apparent", and they produce complicated apologetics to prove that contradictory passages don't contradict each other at all. As a Jew, I am well familiar with this phenomenon, having seen this from the inside: Orthodox Jews hold that there are no contradictions at all in the Torah, and that all contradictions are only "apparent". During my reading on Christianity a few years ago I found precisely the same phenomenon in much of the American Protestant Christian community. (Liberal religious Jews, Muslims and Christians usually reject this approach, and admit that contradictions exist.) Historians usually hold that when contradictions exist, they are evidence of historical development. Sometimes the original author changes his mind in his later years; sometimes a contradiction is the result of a passage that was added many years after the death of the author. This is much easier for Wikipedians to talk about when it comes to the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. Many of us here are familiar with higher biblical criticism on these books. For Islam, however, this is a tougher issue since so few people are familiar with higher Koranic criticism (in the academic sense of the word) and text study. RK