An Unvowelled Qur'an...With Vowels!

Well sometimes you just have to laugh at the incompetence of these Islamophobic clowns—especially the ones who author books while remaining not only painfully ignorant of their subject matter, but horribly bigoted. Well lucky for me (and my readers), I've found an example of this that's easy enough to demonstrate. The other day, I was in a local bookstore flipping through a copy of Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief, by Rodney Stark, when this claim on page 361 caught my eye:

"A page from the Qur'an. For all that it is beautiful, this traditional Arabic script lacks short vowels, which often causes confusion as to which of several possible words actually is intended."

Unfortunately for this obviously ignorant author, the Qur'anic text pictured in the book is clearly vowelled! Yes, indeed, the image shows a portion of Surah As-Saffat (Qur'an 37) which includes most of ayah 35, all of ayah 36, and most of ayah 37, and there are many a fatha, damma and kisra (i.e. Arabic "short vowels") clearly visible in the text—as well as many occurrences of other diacritical marks (i.e. sukun and shadda) as well.

Admittedly, the Qur'anic manuscript in question is written in Maghribi script, which is mostly used in North and West Africa, thus the vowels are written as horizontal slashes rather than the more common slanted ones...but any Arabic reader can see that they are very plainly there. The fact that other idiosyncrasies of the Maghribi script can also be seen in this image (i.e. no dot over a terminal nun, one dot instead of two over a qaf, and no dots over a terminal qaf), does not take away from the fact that it is very much a vowelled text.

And let me make it clear: I am not disputing Stark's claim (page 362) that "there are no short vowels and no diacritics in the earliest surviving texts" but only demonstrating that the author was so inept that he chose for his example a text which has both short vowels and diacritics. For a brief discussion of the vowelling of the earliest Qur'anic manuscripts, please see The Qur'anic Manuscripts page at Islamic-Awareness.org—which clearly demonstrates that Qur'anic manuscripts from the first century of Islam exist in much more abundance (and are much more accurate!) than New Testament manuscripts from the first century of Christianity. Needless to say, Mr. Stark's attempts to defend the integrity and reliability of the New Testament text in the book in question are both vacuous and laughable. Reading such material makes it ominously clear that Rodney Stark is not a disinterested scholar, but rather a religions propagandist. One wonders where the commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" fits into all of this...

A glaring mistake as described above is much easier to understand once one actually reads what the author writes about Islam in the main text of the book. Suffice it to say, in spite of the fact that the Wikipedia entry on Rodney Stark says that one of his "hallmarks is writing with respect about the religions he studies", it becomes quickly apparent that he is more than willing to twist historical material to fit his pre-conceived and bigoted notions. I will let two examples suffice: 1) On the same page of Discovering God that shows the Qur'anic image we've just discussed, he writes: "When Muhammad died unexpectedly in 632, apparently there was no written Qur'an"; and 2) he has a book entitled The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success—which seems to indicate that Mr. Stark could very well be reading history with one eye closed and a crack pipe in hand.

If you want to see the copyrighted Qur'anic image from the book in question, just do the following: 1) Login to Amazon.com; 2) go to the main page for Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief, by Rodney Stark; 3) click on Search inside this book; 4) enter "vowels" in the blank search field; 5) click on the Go button; and 6) once the results appear, click "on Page 361".

Maybe I can be faulted for picking on an easy target—and Islamophobic troglodytes like Stark seem to be a dime a dozen these days, but such activist authors just bring it upon themselves. When I get time, I might post more examples of the egregious errors and blatant distortions in the writings of Rodney Stark. For now, however, this will have to suffice as an exposé of his sheer buffoonery...