Week 2

Everything is great when you think you are on track and think you can get everything you need done in the time you have allotted for it. You have to take into account time for eating, sleeping, spending time with your parents who think that having no classes during the third trimester means you are just asking for chores to do, and then time to complete those chores because you realize you do have a bit more time than usual since you don't have to do to school...you can probably guess what I'm trying to hint at...it seems like I am running a bit behind schedule.

Yup, this sums it up about right...

Well, this week, in an attempt to gather data, I decided that I would go through five different translations of the Quran and find any instance where violence or Jihad was mentioned to compare the truth in statements like: "Islam is a war religion and all Muslims are terrorists who desire the downfall of America." (Yes, not everyone thinks like that, but you get what I'm trying to say...how much is Islam based on war and how much has been blown out of proportion.)

So, I made a list of a whole bunch of words (ex:war, fight, jihad, violence, oppress battle, kill, murder, etc.) and used the amazing computer function Ctrl-F to find any instances of this kind of language in the Quran. Well, the Quran has 114 chapters. The first chapter only has 7 verses, the search wasn't too bad. The second chapter has 286 verses, the third has 200 and the fourth has 176...Well, by the fourth chapter, I was convinced this was going to take me a whole lot longer than a week, let alone a month, since I was getting so much data that was out of context like "don't fight with you wife."

I did find pretty good content (like, what is Jihad and in what instances is fighting okay as well as when its not) within these first four chapters which I will probably use in the questionnaire I will be developing, but I don't think it will be practical to continue this process for the whole Quran in the time I have.

The Quran was revealed 1300 years ago, and not all at once. In fact, verses (ayah--pronounced:eye-ah) and chapters (surah--pronounced: sooh-rah) were revealed gradually over 23 years to the Prophet Muhammed and not in the order the Quran is written today. Surahs and ayahs were revealed at certain events and problems occurred during the time of the Prophet Muhammed. Because of this. it is important to not only study what the Quran says and its meaning, but also the context in which it was revealed.

The Quran was revealed in Arabic and most Muslims learn to read the Quran in Arabic even if it isn't their native tongue. At a young age, I was taught how to read and write in Urdu (pronounced: oor-do) as well as Arabic. Lucky for me, Urdu and Arabic have the same fundamental alphabet (like English and Spanish) so once I could read, write and speak Urdu, I could read Arabic--I just had no idea what I was reading. By going through my Ctrl-F search, I had an opportunity to actually find what I believed in print by finding which surah and ayah numbers that were relevant to my search.

So now I see which verses, when taken out of context, make Islam seem like it is praising religious war, but now I also know where exactly in the Quran , with context in place, it refutes senseless killing and war making.

Maybe because people don't have the time to actually understand what they are reading, they are susceptible to believing whatever others tell them about their religion. Without fact checking and actually finding answers for themselves, people fall into the extremists categories. I mean, how much time do extremists actually take to reflect and read the Quran when they would rather be destroying their own places of worship--I don't know, but I'm guessing it's not a lot.

As you can see, extremists don't really have a complete grasp on their religion.