War in Camp

Thank you, Pack, for the kind and generous invitation to contribute to your wonderful web log. My tactical objective is to maximize the dissemination of accurate and useful information about the enemy which is assailing and infiltrating us.

It is with good reason that Moe said "Do not take the Qur'an on a journey with you, for I am afraid lost it should fall into the hands of the enemy.". [Sahih Muslim 20.4609] We have seized it and will use it against its adherents.

The Qur'an is given and accepted as Allah's ordinance written before the creation and kept sealed and protected. It was transmitted to Moe by Gabriel. How, you ask?

Sahih BukhariVolume 4, Book 54, Number 438:

Narrated Aisha:

Al Harith bin Hisham asked the Prophet, "How does the divine inspiration come to you?" He replied, "In all these ways: The Angel sometimes comes to me with a voice which resembles the sound of a ringing bell, and when this state abandons me, I remember what the Angel has said, and this type of Divine Inspiration is the hardest on me; and sometimes the Angel comes to me in the shape of a man and talks to me, and I understand and remember what he says."

Only the Qur'an is widely accepted by Muslims as Allah's authentic word. There is a small subset of hadith which are considered holy by some.

There are many translations of the Qur'an. Some are polemic, others strive for accuracy. Hilali & Khan were commissioned by the King of Saudi Arabia. They used Abdullah Yusuf Ali's translation as a base and included parenthetical exegeses from three tafsirs. I generally use their translation for reference. I generally link to ten parallel translations at www.quranbrowser.com. To my knowledge, only the King Fahd Complex publishes the translator's notes on the web. I sometimes have trouble with their site; when it is working, it is very useful. Try this link and scroll down to the footnotes for 2:190, where you will find an interesting definition of Jihad.

Hadith are sayings, oral tradition passed down from mouth to ear. They were codified more than 100 years after Moe died. Those considered most authentic are collected by Bukhari & Muslim. While there is considerably redundancy, the on line collections are not complete and there are efforts under way to censor them.

Hadith fill in many of the gaps left by the Qur'an. Since Muslims are commanded to obey Moe, they need the hadith to discover what he did; how and why he did it. His sunnah is to be emulated. Qur'an & hadith are the chief sources of Islamic law. Most of the hadith collections available on line are derived from the database at USC-MSA, which you can access through the links in the quotations above. The Hadith search at USC is not easy to use. I prefer the search engine at Islaam Net.

Reliance of the Traveller is the most accessible canon of Sharia. The Hedaya is another, but the chapter which contains the laws of Jihad was not included in the translation offered by Google Books. It is a 92MB pdf file, with no way to search its contents. Reliance is available as a large text file. You can search its 22 books by pressing the Ctrl f key combination. Scribid has a scanned image of the book. By some magic beyond my knowledge, they created a search engine that works with it. Allah.com displays a text file, so you can copy & paste. That will facilitate using quotes in blog posts. Unfortunately, they renamed and rearranged the books, and added a half dozen. Two columns are displayed, on the left, a list of the books and a code for deciphering the original names. Book O is transmuted to Book 9. Links to the entry points are in the right hand column.

Tafsir are explanations of the Qur'an. Exegetes compare verses to other verses and hadith to form their opinions. Ibn Kathir's Tafsir is the most known and accepted. I link to www.tafsir.com, which lacks a functioning search engine. www.qtafsir.com has a search engine so you can look up any verse that has been explained in the text.