Tag Archives: basmala

The Basmala in the Qur’an

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The Basmala as it is known in English as, “In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful” is one of the proofs of the preservation of the Qur’an. Allow me to explain.

For every Surah except one it is included at the start, it’s excluded in only one Surah. Everyone knows this. There is no Qira’ah (recitation of the Qur’an) that deviates from this and places it at the start of Surah 9. This is peculiar because in the written tradition, if a scribe is monotonously writing the Basmala for every Surah and they have no knowledge or a little knowledge of the Qur’an, it would seem abnormal to leave it out, so from this standard we should expect to see at least one Qira’ah that includes it, yet none do. We see the opposite with the New Testament as doxologies were commonly added because of their oral use in gatherings, we find no such equivalence in the Qur’an.

All the Qira’at have the Basmala as the same. A scribe with little to no knowledge of the Qur’an could have assumed that “Raheem” was mistakenly repeated and omitted it because of “Rahman” being similar. We find no such instance of this in any of the Qira’at. However, according to scribal habits and trends observed with the New Testament, this happened all the time and is known as haplography.

Or they could have assumed another word was meant beside “Raheem” and changed it to “Razaq” to make the phraseology more diverse and “more meaningful” according to their own reasoning, yet we find no instance of this is any Qira’at.

What this teaches us is that had the Qur’an been changed like the New Testament was, we should expect to see the kind of changes I mentioned above. These deviations should have occurred at some point and became their own Qira’at or found their way into one. Yet we find no instance of this and so we must ask ourselves how the untrained and unlettered Muslim world achieved this feat, when the literate and powerful Graeco-Roman peoples had not.

One verse bears with it so much greatness that I can only use the Qur’an to describe itself, “It is not possible for this Qur’an to have been produced by anyone other than God.” – Qur’an 10:37 (translation by Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran).

and Allah knows best.

What is the Name of God in Islam?

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After posting our video, Do Christians Know the True Name of God, we received quite a few strange responses from our missionary friends. One such response is as follows:

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Apparently, missionaries do not understand what, “In the Name of Allah,” means. I honestly do not know what is difficult about that sentence. It literally tells you what the name of God is. There’s no way anyone can be confused about it, but here we are looking at a screenshot with that exact problem. The funny thing is, the Christian was educated enough to know about the 99 names of Allah, but not to the point he knew that those names are referred to as the names and attributes (asma wa sifat) of God. Even the Qur’an says:

And to Allah belong the best names, so invoke Him by them. And leave [the company of] those who practice deviation concerning His names. They will be recompensed for what they have been doing. – Qur’an 7:180.

If there’s any missionary out there willing to fill me in on what the source of confusion is, I’d really appreciate it.

and Allah knows best.