The Scheme to Hide Jihad
To understand why apparently knowledgeable sources contradict each other you must understand the Quran and early Islam.
Muhammad lived in Mecca, which then, as now makes money primarily from religion. Now it’s exclusively Islam but, in Muhammad’s day there were dozens of religions and gods to follow, and religious tourists came from far and wide and spent their money at Mecca’s temples.
Muhammad wanted in on the scam, so he went out in the desert and hung out in a cave for awhile and came back with Allah the Great, who didn’t reveal himself but, sent his angel Gabriel to speak to Muhammad. But, Muhammad couldn’t read or write, so over the next nineteen years he dictated the words of the Holy Quran to others — loose leaf, in piles.
Remember that, Muhammad couldn’t read and he dictated the Quran in bits and pieces as it occurred to him in his course from Meccan preacher to guest of the Jews of Medina to murdering the Jews and conquering Mecca.
Then as now, if you want to succeed, you’ve got to advertise. For a religion to succeed in Mecca it had to be part of the religious community and the priest had to advertise other gods in order to get other priests to advertise his.
So, in the early years Muhammad proclaimed all religions good and the written record, the early Quran proclaimed the principle of tolerance.
However, after Muhammad’s wife died, something changed. Muhammad fell out with Mecca’s religious leaders and proclaimed Allah the one and only god and Muhammadism the one and only religion.
Instead of tolerance, the middle Quran became intolerant of the Meccan’s other religions and eventually the Meccans banished Muhammad.
Surrounded by hundred of miles of desert, with nowhere to go, Muhammad and his little band of followers traveled through a wasteland until they got to Yathrib, home to three Jewish tribes.
The early and middle Quran had nothing against Jews and Christians. They’d yet to offend Muhammad so, on the condition he keep his religion to himself, the Jews took Muhammad in.
Muhammad spent the next few years in Yathrib robbing caravans on the way to and from Mecca. After all, taking things from members of your tribe is stealing but, taking things from members of another tribe is just Allah’s way of redistributing wealth.
Eventually the Meccans got tired of this and attacked. Muhammad asked the Jews to help fight the Meccans but, they declined. They told him they had no argument with the Meccans, they weren’t the ones raiding caravans, so Muhammad would have to face them alone. Unfortunately, the Meccans didn’t bring a large enough army and Muhammad beat them in battle.
And, now that Muhammad didn’t need the Jews it appeared Allah didn’t need them either, and the Quran’s attitude toward the Jews changed.
Jews became evil, devils, to be killed at every opportunity. And, that’s what Muhammad did, killed the people who’d taken him in a few years earlier, and, never lacking in ego, now that they were gone, he renamed their town Medinat-al-Nabi, “City of the Prophet”, now known as Medina.
This pattern repeats itself over and over again in the Quran; when it serves Muhammad’s political or military purposes to be tolerant, the Quran is tolerant but, once Muhammad gains the might to defeat a group that has something he wants or stands in the way of his ambition, the Quran becomes intolerant of that group.
Thus, there are Quranic verses that preach tolerance toward Jews and verses that condemn them all. There are verses that preach tolerance toward other religions and verses that condemn them all. There are verses that preach peace and verses that demand war.
This pattern of early tolerance and later intolerance was obvious for those who read the Quran but, since Muhammad couldn’t read, it apparently hadn’t been obvious to him. It became an issue —
— one Muhammad solved by stating that Allah revealed the truth in stages and later revelations negated all earlier revelations. Muslims call this the principle of Abrogation.
It was Muhammad’s way of getting around his own contradictions. It is how he solved the problem of The Satanic Verses, early pacifistic verses that contradicted subsequent militaristic ones, which Muhammad later said were dictated to him by the devil instead of Gabriel — problem solved! The devil made me do it! Later verses, the real truth, abrogated the pacifistic verses that got Salman Rushdie in trouble.
Still, the pattern was obvious for anyone who read the Quran, Allah seemed to be tolerant whenever it served Muhammad’s purposes, and intolerant toward anyone who angered him or had things he wanted.
After Muhammad’s death, the Quran’s contradictions caused divisions within Islam. To hide the inconsistencies, the Quran was reordered (Muslims say Muhammad reordered the Quran but, remember, Muhammad couldn’t even read it.) and the new order wasn’t chronological. In fact, it’s as if someone threw the manuscript into the air and then gathered it up however it fell.
It effectively hides Islam’s evolution and allows devious Muslims to quote verses about tolerance to infidels, who have no idea Muhammad and all of Islam have formally renounced and rejected those same verses.
However, Islamic scholars, Imams know the correct chronological order so, they know which verses abrogate which. They know the militant, violent verses abrogate the peaceful, tolerant ones. They know the call to Jihad abrogates the call to coexist. They hide this from infidels, using the principle called taqiiya — strategic deceit. The Quran commands Muslims to hide their intentions from infidels until they are strong enough to conquer them.
Thus, Muslims hid the Quran’s truth by reordering it, so infidels couldn’t know which verses abrogated which.
To understand this subject you’re going to have to invest some time. You won’t get honest, informed answers on television or the radio. You’re going to have to do the reading yourself because the truth is too alarming, too unpleasant for anyone in the media to acknowledge. The truth means this just gets worse, until it becomes a full blown war, and either millions upon millions of people die and we win, or we lose and hundreds of millions of people die.
We are doomed to suffer Jihad, as we have so many times in the past, because we project our own reasonable, secular, peaceful world view onto 1.4 billion people who don’t hold that view. They believe in killing and enslaving us, as the Holy Quran COMMANDS them to do.
I have a regular Quran and a nearly complete chronological Quran. I also have an abridged Hadith. You need all these things to understand the truth about Islam. If you don’t want to spend hundreds of hours reading them, you can read my posts and save some time and trouble. I suggest you read these. Ending the Jihad is a bit long but, the last half is humorous and makes the first half worthwhile:
