Write your own surah!

[Sargon The Grape]

The Koran makes the following challenge:

"And if ye are in doubt concerning that which We reveal unto Our slave Muhammad), then produce a surah of the like thereof..."
Quran 2:23

So, write your own surah and prove that the Koran is bullshit!


Secretly a Warsie.

[josephpalazzo]

Verse 1: Islam is bullshit

Verse 2: Now go and enjoy life.

[stromboli]

Can I cut/paste something from the Lord of the Rings? Get me some elf love. Something something Hermione legal age something...

[Baruch]

This is a claim made by native Arabic speakers.  The poetry is said to be other-worldly.  This might not be uncommon in autonomic behavior (spontaneous writing like Ouija or oracles like Muhammad).  Not being a native Arabic speaker, I can't vouch for it.

[stromboli]

This is a claim made by native Arabic speakers.  The poetry is said to be other-worldly.  This might not be uncommon in autonomic behavior (spontaneous writing like Ouija or oracles like Muhammad).  Not being a native Arabic speaker, I can't vouch for it.

I was going to reference Omar's Rubaiyat, but the translation(s) have been referred to as "dubious" and I didn't spend much time with it. I can recite shit in Old English, but the Rubaiyat? No doubt you know more about it than I do.

[Baruch]

Alas the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam isn't what we have in the West.  We have Edward Fitzgerald's free take on verses borrowed from Khayyam.  And the Rubiyat is in Persian, not Arabic.  But I like Fitzgerald's creation.  Poetry is notoriously hard to translate anyway.  My Farsi book has a few verses of the original, but I haven't learned enough Farsi to appreciate it.  Medieval Persian would be different than modern Farsi ... like Shakespeare vs Obama.

[stromboli]

True enough, but the time frame puts it in the realm of Islam. Not going to track that down to specifics, but Persians are Muslims as well. Iran is modern Persia. I know they are big on making the distinction between the two.

[Baruch]

True enough, but the time frame puts it in the realm of Islam. Not going to track that down to specifics, but Persians are Muslims as well. Iran is modern Persia. I know they are big on making the distinction between the two.

Quite right ... since around 1000 CE, most Persians are Muslim.  Some are Jewish, others Zoroastrian.  Back in the day, when the Arab armies first arrived, Christianity was the second religion in Persia after the Zoroastrians.  Khayyam was a Persian Sufi/Muslim.

[stromboli]

Btw, if you haven't read Beowulf- I highly recommend it for content; it is considered one of, if not the oldest, work in the English language. Seamus Heaney, Nobel prize winning poet's version is considered the best because he retained the verse and alliterative content of the original. Other efforts- JRR Tolkien also did a translation, but I've not read it. Other translations, such as Kemble's, are prosaic and lose the poetic content, which to me is a big mistake.

[Baruch]

Btw, if you haven't read Beowulf- I highly recommend it for content; it is considered one of, if not the oldest, work in the English language. Seamus Heaney, Nobel prize winning poet's version is considered the best because he retained the verse and alliterative content of the original. Other efforts- JRR Tolkien also did a translation, but I've not read it. Other translations, such as Kemble's, are prosaic and lose the poetic content, which to me is a big mistake.

I have a copy of the Seamus Heaney version.  Anglo-Saxon poetry has peculiar qualities that he did well to retain.  It is such a disappointment in translations of poetry, if they convert it to prose.  This is why I like the Robert Fitzgerald version of the Odyssey.  Great minds think alike ;-)

So how did you like the CGI movie version of Beowulf?  I thought it was an interesting take, but a new story ... like the Rubiyyat of Edward Fitzgerald is a new creation inspired by another.  The screen writer definitely has not love for egotism ;-)

[stromboli]

Saw the CGI version, didn't care for it. I'm a lover of classics. I'll take the book and the poetic interpretation over the movie in every instance, from Middle Earth to Asgard to Hogwart's.

[SGOS]

"And if ye are in doubt concerning that which We reveal unto Our slave Muhammad), then produce a surah of the like thereof..."
Quran 2:23

I don't know what that means.

[Shiranu]

I don't know what that means.

I (on low sleep so may be dead wrong) am interpreting it as saying "Muhammad's word is so brilliant and divine that nothing you could ever write could stand in comparison to the words he has spoken... they will appear as pathetic attempts at copying when compared."

[Sargon The Grape]

Saw the CGI version, didn't care for it.

Really? I quite like the direction they took with it. Working the dragon into a movie version is pretty difficult, and often film adaptations will just leave it out entirely.

[SGOS]

I (on low sleep so may be dead wrong) am interpreting it as saying "Muhammad's word is so brilliant and divine that nothing you could ever write could stand in comparison to the words he has spoken... they will appear as pathetic attempts at copying when compared."

OK, I did suspect it might be something along those lines.  It's like why waste your time reading Shakespeare, when nothing is more wonderful than the Bible.