I noticed while reading Representing the Enemy: Musaylima in Muslim Literature that some of Musaylimah's "revelations" were of exceptionally high quality (I am fluent in Arabic), even though medieval sources ridiculed them quite strongly. I wanted to ask, then, what the Academic position is on their origin? Have they been identified as forgeries? Why did the other Prophets revelations get lost to time, even if reported?

This would seem logical to me if they were not originally Maslama's, given the emphasis on giving an example for the doctrine of "inimitability" and humans failing to "meet the challenge," a challenge which generally has no criteria defined to test it, just to be clear - not here to start any discussion on I'jaz! :)

I also wanted to ask those of you who are scholars if the reason for their negative evaluation was straightforwardly theological? For example, I got these examples from some Academic and Medieval sources:

سَمِعَ اللَّهُ لِمَنْ سَمِعَ

وَأَطْمَعَهُ بِالْخَيْرِ إِذَا طَمِعَ

وَلَأَزَالَ أَمْرُهُ فِي كُلِّ مَا سَرَّ نَفْسَهُ يَجْتَمِعُ

رَآكُمْ رَبُّكُمْ فَيُحْيِيكُمْ

وَمِنْ وَحْشَةٍ خَلَّاكُمْ

وَيَوْمَ دِينِهِ أَحْكَامُكُمْ

فَأَحْيَاكُمْ عَلَيْنَا مِنْ صَلَوَاتِ مَعْشَرِ أَبْرَارٍ

لَا أَشْقِيَاءَ وَلَا فُجَّارٍ

يَقُومُونَ اللَّيْلَ وَيَصُومُونَ النَّهَارَ

لِرَبِّكُمُ الْكُبَّارِ

رَبِّ الْغُيُومِ وَالْأَمْطَارِ

there's also a slightly different variant of this. What fascinated me about this one specifically is that it's quality is on a quantitatively different level (in my opinion, at least) from most of the rest, and that it even has the "Pyramid Figure" (saj' in pyramid formation) mentioned by Dr. Stewart, who gives the following example:

وَالضُّحَىٰ
وَاللَّيْلِ إِذَا سَجَىٰ
مَا وَدَّعَكَ رَبُّكَ وَمَا قَلَىٰ

I noticed that the way parallelism is used and something in the usage of the particles gets me as particularly archaic, sort of like Pre-Islamic poetry, the Qur'an, or other very early reports/inscriptions from around the 4th-8th centuries. Another example of Musaylimah:

أَذْكُرُوا نِعْمَتَ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكُمْ وَاشْكُرُوهَا

إِذْ جَعَلَ لَكُمُ الشَّمْسَ سِرَاجًا

وَالْغَيْثَ ثَجَّاجًا

وَجَعَلَ لَكُمْ كِبَاشًا وَنِعَاجًا

وَفِضَّةً وَزُجَاجًا

وَذَهَبًا وَدِيبَاجًا

مَا مِنْ نِعْمَتِهِ عَلَيْكُمْ أَنْ

أَخْرَجَ لَكُمْ مِنَ الْأَرْضِ رُمَّانًا

وَعِنَبًا وَرَيْحَانًا

وَحِنْطَةً وَزُؤَانًا

And another one:

وَالشَّمْسِ وَضُحَاهَا

فِي ضَوْئِهَا وَمُنِيرِهَا

وَاللَّيْلِ إِذَا جَادَلَهَا

يَطْلُبُهَا لَيَغْشَاهَا

فَأَدْرَكَهَا حَتَّى أَتَاهَا

وَأَطْفَأَ نُورَهَا فَمَحَاهَا

and another:

سَبِّحِ اسْمَ رَبِّكَ الْأَعْلَى

الَّذِي يَسَّرَ عَلَى الْحُبْلَى

فَأَخْرَجَ مِنْهَا نَسْمَةً تَسْعَى

مِنْ بَيْنِ أَحْشَا وَسَلَا

فَمِنْهُمْ مَنْ يَدُسُّ فِي الثَّرَى

وَمِنْهُمْ يَعِيشُ يَحْيَى

إِلَى أَجَلٍ وَمُنْتَهَى

وَاللَّهُ يَعْلَمُ السِّرَّ وَأَخْفَى

وَلَا يَخْفَى عَلَيْهِ أَمْرُ الْآخِرَةِ وَالْأُولَى

So my second question is: many of these sound very eloquent to me, so was the motivation of the medieval scholars here mostly a theological one? I don't know if any scholars would agree but these imo sound much better than some of the shorter surahs of the Qur'an, which sometimes have forced rhyme or much more choppy themes. I guess they could have also subjectively experienced them that way due to their theological assumptions.

I don't know though. This is really a random question, and I know there are experts on here - thought I'd come ask since there's no harm in doing so!

Sources:

Al-Makin, Representing the Enemy: Musaylima in Muslim Literature (Peter Lang, 2010).

Devin J. Stewart, “Sajʿ in the Qurʾān: Prosody and Structure,” Journal of Arabic Literature 21, no. 2 (1990), pp. 101–139.

Primary sources (for reference):

Tārīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, 2:498.

al-Kashshāf ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tanzīl

Thimār al-qulūb fī al-muḍāf wa-l-mansūb

Âyet-Berkenar is a calligraphic technique developed by the Ottoman calligrapher Kayışzâde Hâfız Osman Efendi. It uses the shortest surah, Surah Kawthar, as the standard for line length, and the longest verse, Ayat al-Mudayana (Baqarah 282), as the standard for page height. Using this method, each page was structured to contain exactly fifteen lines. In this system, each page of the Qur’an begins and ends with a complete verse (which is argued to be a miracle to some apologists).

I have very shallow knowledge of techniques of Quran writing. My question is how did Hafiz Osman achieve this. Did he just accidentally stumble upon it after setting the parameters for line length and page length or did he use techniques to make sure each page ended in a full verse.

If I am not mistaken the Medina Mushaf is similar or the same as the mushaf I was referring to in my post. I will paste a link to the full mushaf here for people to examin. I think the difference is the Medina mushaf is a digital one while the other one is handwritten but don’t take my word for it this isn’t my area of expertise.: https://app.quranflash.com/book/Medina1?en#/reader

Do the non-uthmanic codices / rasm‘s have any relationship to the non-canonical / irregular readings of the Quran.
As far as I know the irregular readings in the Quran tend to be almost 98-99% identical in their rasm to the uthmanic rasm, with some differences however. How did that come to be? Sometimes there seem to have been taken readings from Ibn Masud too?

Would this Hadith be interpreted literally? Could it perhaps be metaphoric?

This is an edited version of previous post that was removed, this is hopefully phrased in a more charitable tone.

Last week we arrived at my final notes for the Weekly Quranic Arabic Study Group. What a ride! 41 weeks straight of working on commentaries, answering questions etc.

I would like to thank everyone who engaged, asked amazing questions, or read along quietly. This post provides links to all the posts of the past year.

If anyone benefited from these lessons in the past 41 weeks, I would love it if you drop a comment, even if nothing else to say but that you benefited from it. Some people were really active, but it's difficult to tell how much impact you're making on the people who aren't active.

In the coming weeks I will probably make some final edits to the google doc with my comments, and I will likely publish this commentary as a pdf on my academia.edu page. Ideally I'd like to provide a key to all the exercises, but in that case I'll definitely have to run this study group a couple more years, so I can find the time to cover all the exercises (although some of the readers have been very helpful!).

So what's next? Next is a good long break. Probably by the beginning of 2027 I will start up a study group again. I'm thinking of reading through Allen Jones' Early Arabic Poetry. Mostly because my ability to parse and make sense of poetry is abysmal, and my hope is that it'll be better if I force myself to read through it.

Thanks everyone!

Weekly Quranic Arabic Study Group

• Lesson 1
• Lesson 2
• Lesson 3
• Lesson 4
• Lesson 5
• Lesson 6
• Lesson 7
• Lesson 8
• Lesson 9
• Lesson 10
• Lesson 11
• Lesson 12
• Lesson 13
• Lesson 14
• Lesson 15
• Lesson 16
• Lesson 17
• Lesson 18
• Lesson 19
• Lesson 20
• Lesson 21
• Lesson 22
• Lesson 23
• Lesson 24
• Lesson 25
• Lesson 26
• Lesson 27
• Lesson 28
• Lesson 29
• Lesson 30
• Lesson 31
• Lesson 32
• Lesson 33
• Lesson 34
• Lesson 35
• Lesson 36
• Lesson 37
• Lesson 38
• Lesson 39
• Lesson 40
• Appendices

“Ancient Chinese texts, specifically Journey to the West, record the Splitting of the Moon, witnessed by the Chinese King ‘Sun Wukong’ in 617 CE.”

If you know anything about Chinese literature, your brain probably just blue-screened. But the origin of this claim is a fun little comedy of errors, so let’s go through it.

1. Where the “moon” and the “split” came from

It seems to trace back to Anthony Yu’s standard academic translation (University of Chicago Press). Chapter 1 describes the magical rock on Flower-Fruit Mountain, nourished for ages by “the seeds of Heaven and Earth and by the essences of the sun and the moon,” until one day it split open and gave birth to a stone egg.

Look at the grammar. What split open? The stone.

Some creators apparently skimmed a one-line summary of Chapter 1, saw “moon” and “split open” in the same sentence, and attached the verb to the wrong noun.

Then AI made it worse. If you ask an LLM something vague like “does Journey to the West mention the moon splitting?”, the keywords get matched,

"Sun Wukong was born when a divine stone on Flower-Fruit Mountain—nourished for ages by the essences of the Sun and the Moon—split open."

the summary mashes them together, and the result gets pasted into a post as “evidence.” It’s a nice self-reinforcing loop of nonsense.

2. The timeline is off by about a millennium

The claim puts this “event” around 617 CE, shortly before the Hijra. But using the novel’s own internal chronology:

• In Chapter 13, the hunter Liu Boqin tells Xuanzang that the monkey was pinned under the mountain during Wang Mang’s usurpation of the Han (8-23 CE). That makes Wukong roughly a contemporary of Jesus.
• Before that, he spent 300-400 years as Monkey King, decades seeking immortality and went through two stints in Heaven before the Great Rebellion.
• Count backward and the stone cracked open somewhere around the Qin or early Han, roughly 200-300 BCE, 800+ years before Islam existed.

So in 617 CE Wukong wasn’t a “king watching the sky.” He’d been stuck under a mountain for 600 years.

And here’s the funny part. He’s finally rescued by the monk Xuanzang in 639 CE (Zhenguan 13 in the novel). That’s suspiciously close to the Hijri timeframe, so I can see how someone might get excited. But the Prophet ﷺ had already passed away in 632, so even the closest date in the book doesn’t work.

3. The novel has zero moon-splitting

I’ve read all 100 chapters. Wukong fights heavenly armies, trashes the Dragon King’s palace, and wipes his name from the Book of Life and Death, but he never splits the moon. To “prove” a moon-splitting miracle with this book, you’d have to invent a plot point that isn’t there.

TL;DR

• Sun Wukong is a fictional monkey, not a “King of China.”
• The stone split, not the moon.
• The timeline is off by ~900 years, and even the 639 CE rescue date comes after the Prophet’s passing.
• The whole thing is bad reading comprehension, amplified by AI summaries.

Reading comprehension really is a miracle of its own. (The Lion-Camel Kingdom in Chapter 74 might actually preserve some memory of the Kara-Khanid invasion of Xinjiang. Arslan = lion, Bughra = camel. )

وَلَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ مِن سُلَـٰلَةٍ مِّن طِينٍ ١٢

And indeed, We created humankind from an extract of clay,

ثُمَّ جَعَلْنَـٰهُ نُطْفَةً فِى قَرَارٍ مَّكِينٍ ١٣

then placed each ˹human˺ as a sperm-drop in a secure place,

@ Marijn van Putten

according to verses 3:59 and a bunch of other verses, adam was made from clay and had no parents meaning at no point was he ever a sperm-drop. So does al-insan here mean adam, or the humankind? the humankind as in "god created the humankind from clay (god began the creation of the human species/kind from adam), then made it (humankind) as a sperm-drop."

what does al-insan mean here exactly, and the pronoun referring back to it in verse 13?

The Philosophy of the Kalam, by Harry Austryn Wolfson

In „Encyclopedia of the Quran“

Sorry for the bad quality (and for seeing my hands)

I started a B.A. degree in islamic studies recently and have to do a group presentation (we are three people) until next week.

The presentation is supposed to be around 20-30 minutes.

We were able to choose out of a pool of different topics including: (1) Muhammad and the Sira (Prophetic biography); (2) The Qur'an as a Late Antique text; (3) The Sunnah and Hadith-Science; (4) Islamic Law and Shariah; (5) Sufism and some other topics.

My group chose (2) the Qur'an as a Late Antique Text.

Under the headline "The Qur'an as a Late Antique Text" on the handout we were given it also specifies the topic. It is expected to cover the "Structure and most important themes", the Qurans "History", as well as questions surrounding the redaction and codification of the Qur'an.

I wanted to ask if anyone had any ideas/tips or any literature they could give us / point us to.

Thank you

I'm curious if there is any academic research regarding this nasheed from the seerah. Especially curious if the lyrics contain obvious anachronisms. I was surprised to learn recently that its isnad is daif given its popularity.

I think the suggestion of Harut and Marut being sent down to punish Babylon by confusing their languages to cause separation form people(Zawj) makes a lot of sense in lot of 2:104 which refuted a mistranslation of Hebrew into Arabic which refutes religious exclusion and divine favoritism and 2:105 emphasizing that Allah sends down to whomever he wills his revelation and further in the Surah refutes Christian and Jewish exclusivism.

What do you guys think?

Bonjour à tous,

Je sollicite votre aide et vos retours sur une traduction française intégrale du Kitāb Ādāb al-Kasb wa'l-Maʿāsh (Le Livre des convenances de l'acquisition et de la subsistance), un extrait de l'Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn de l'imam al-Ghazālī.

• Lien vers le document (PDF libre d'accès) : archive.org https://archive.org/details/ghazali_kasb_fr_v14
• Le contexte : Le texte a été traduit à l'aide d'un outil d'intelligence artificielle sur la base de l'édition arabe de référence du Caire (1937). Le document de 44 pages intègre un appareil critique complet (notes de bas de page, indexation et vérification du sourçage de 49 hadiths et des renvois coraniques).
• Le problème : Cette version n'a pas encore fait l'objet d'une relecture approfondie par un arabisant ou un spécialiste du droit musulman (fiqh) et de l'éthique économique islamique.

Si des arabisants, étudiants en sciences islamiques ou passionnés de philosophie médiévale ont le temps d'y jeter un œil, toute remarque sur la pertinence, la fluidité et l'exactitude de la terminologie utilisée me serait extrêmement précieuse !

Le document est publié sous licence libre (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0).

Un grand merci d'avance pour votre temps et vos retours !