Kelly
Gilbert
HUMN 220
Professor B.
Akmen
2/5/13
The Bible vs. The Qur’an
After
reading parts of The Qur’an, I felt as though it was very complex and hard to
understand, making it much less interesting than The Bible. I feel that The
Bible uses much simpler terms and puts concepts in clearer meanings than the
Qur’an. The Qur’an is also not put in chronological order. The events are
somewhat jumbled around, unlike in The Bible where they are put in specific
order from when they occurred.
I personally did not like how events
and characters were different in The Qur’an as compared to in The Bible. I feel
that important things like the story of Adam and Eve and the creature known as
Satan and events that occurred involving them should not be changed. They
should stay consistent in every book that they’re included in. I realize some people
may find it interesting that over time, these characters and their stories
slightly change in books, I find it unethical. Our past is important and people
shouldn’t go writing books that infringe on what really happened. It’s almost
the same idea as someone just changing the laws that congress enacts. That is
wrong and it should not happen. This is basically the same as people changing
the ideas of what happened in The Bible and putting them in The Qur’an. Whether
it’s a different belief or not, those are huge events that occurred in our past
and they should stay the way they were originally put down onto paper.
After reading parts of both The Bible
and The Qur’an, I’ve found that The Bible is much more interesting and easier
to understand. I do not recommend The Qur’an to someone who would like to learn
about the creation of the Earth with Adam and Eve and the idea of Satan,
although Satan was much more typical in The Qur’an than in The Bible because he
wasn’t referred to as a serpent. This may be a racist view, but I feel that only Christians should read and understand The Bible as their sacred text, and only the Muslims should consider The Qur'an their sacred and holy text. Being a Christian myself, I would much rather read The Bible than The Qur'an, but that's just my opinion, of course.
I didn't feel as if the people we were reading WERE different in the Bible or the Qu'ran. There's Moses in the Qu'ran and in the Bible, there's Job, there's Adam, there's Eve.
ReplyDeleteThe Bible itself has changed. That's what happened as languages themselves change and die and shift. The stories have changed. The meanings have changed. Translations have made certain stories completely different from what we read now than what
Christianity has built upon Jewish texts after all. Is that not allowed?
I'm also quite unsure as to what you mean by feeling 'racist' as Muslims nor Christianity is not a race but a religious viewpoint. Muslims and Christians come in a variety of ethnicities! A Muslim can be white and a Christian can be born in the Middle East. Perhaps you meant Islamophobic.
Of course you are entitled to enjoy the Bible more than the Qu'ran and find more enjoyment
Emma Liberman
I say this with as much respect as possible, but I think you've fundamentally failed to read the Qur'an. You approached the text with deeply engrained presuppositions, and as such you were incapable of reading it in an unbiased and objective manner. You shouldn't feel the least bit surprised that you didn't enjoy the Qur'an, because you approached the text from a Christian standpoint. Now it's absolutely fine that you read the Qur'an from this very specific standpoint, but again I'm saying this with as much respect for your viewpoint as possible, but that standpoint is a completely useless one, and it has nothing to do with what we're doing in this class. You should be able to, no matter what your personal convictions/beliefs, read the Qur'an as a text outside of the presuppositions you had before you read it; this is the only way to truly judge a text fairly, and the comments you made in this blog entry show that you've not managed to do this. I was also very confused by your comments in the second paragraph. A) how can changing something in a text be unethical, if you've managed to figure out how to judge re-writing works of art on ethical grounds then Kant scholars all across the world are dying to hear from you I promise. Of course the past is 'important,' but the whole notion of oral histories and things like 'creation' stories are that they change, and that they instill new and specific cultural values, not just the ones of one specific group. If we act as though one is more 'true' than another (again, how can we call these texts true/false? seriously, I don't get it, they're fiction. Kant would be very angry right now) then we're just being racist in the sense that we're creating ethical/aesthetic hierachies based on our pre-instilled beliefs.
ReplyDelete