Claims that the Quran borrowed from Scripture were linguistically unserious

Evidence

Truths were essentially borrowed; it would always seem fitting that a reference to them should begin, ‘AIthough they agree with us in many things …’ — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 910 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Having discovered the historical Muhammad in 2000, in 2002 Ibn Warraq went on to tell his readers about what the Quran really says in a book by that title. He spends the Introduction trying to disguise the fact that he does not know Arabic. “Muslims in general,” he writes, “have a tendency to disarm any criticisms of Islam and in particular the Koran by asking if the critic has read the Koran in the original Arabic … ” He complains of their “almost mystical and rather irrational attitude to the untranslatability of the Koran.” (There are Muslims who have the same attitude toward Hamlet and the Bhagavad-Gita.) Hiding behind the irrelevant fact that for the majority of Muslims Arabic is the liturgical language of their faith (as Latin has been for Christians and Hebrew for Jews—who often do not speak it) rather than the functional language of their quotidian and literary lives, Ibn Warraq proceeds to deliver a phantasmagoric account of the “Afro-Asiatic, Semitic, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic” division of languages—only to hide his ignorance of Arabic, which is particularly embarrassing for someone publishing a book on What the Koran Really Says—not merely says, or nearly says, but really says. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 519 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mediaeval critics mocked the Qur’an’s chapter names as irrational; The contrast between Quranic literalism and Biblical critical reading is overstated; Medieval Christians viewed Qur’anic truths solely as borrowings from Scripture — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 910 (+1 more)

Related

• A critic of the Quran can publish on it without knowing Arabic (similarity 0.86)
• Medieval Christians viewed Qur’anic truths solely as borrowings from Scripture (similarity 0.86)
• Medieval attacks on the Qur’an obscured its evident piety to unlearned readers (similarity 0.82)
• The Quran’s identity is bound to Arabic, making translations non-scriptural (similarity 0.81)
• Mediaeval critics mocked the Qur’an’s chapter names as irrational (similarity 0.81)
• Christian polemicists deemed the Qur’an’s style itself inherently defective, not merely untranslatable (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval polemicists attacked the Qur’an with pedantic misreadings to prove Muhammad misunderstood truths (similarity 0.80)
• The contrast between Quranic literalism and Biblical critical reading is overstated (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval polemicists quoted the Qur’an inaccurately without scruple (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christians read the Qur’an as inadvertent testimony to Christian truth (similarity 0.80)
• Mediaeval Christian polemicists dismissed Quranic metaphors by misreading them as literal physics (similarity 0.80)
• Untranslatable Arabic aesthetics were read as proof of barbarism (similarity 0.79)
• Early Enlightenment scholars found only three Qur’anic texts genuinely borrowed from Scripture (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval Christian readers judged the Qur’an by its Christology (similarity 0.79)
• Early scholars inferred authorship of texts from assumed Muslim moral incapacity (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The contrast between Quranic literalism and Biblical critical reading is overstated #complicates (0.85)
• Medieval Christians viewed Qur’anic truths solely as borrowings from Scripture #complicates (0.78) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 910
• A critic of the Quran can publish on it without knowing Arabic #exemplifies (0.75) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 519