Defamation of Religion: The Daily Muslim Prayer Defames Both Judaism and Christianity

Robert Spencer is "blogging the Qur'an" on PJ Media starting with Sura 1, entitled, "The Opening." Below are some excerpts:

The Fatiha (Opening) is the first sura (chapter) of the Qur’an, and most common prayer of Islam. If you’re a pious Muslim who prays the five requisite daily prayers of Islam, you will recite the Fatiha seventeen times in the course of those prayers.

The final two verses of the Fatiha ask Allah:

Guide us to the straight path, the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of those who have evoked [Your] anger or of those who are astray.

The traditional Islamic understanding of this is that the “straight path” is Islam — cf. Islamic apologist John Esposito’s book Islam: The Straight Path — while the path “of those who have evoked Allah’s anger” are the Jews, and those who have gone “astray” are the Christians.

The classic Qur’anic commentator Ibn Kathir explains that “the two paths He described here are both misguided,” and that those “two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he avoids them. The path of the believers is knowledge of the truth and abiding by it. In comparison, the Jews abandoned practicing the religion, while the Christians lost the true knowledge. This is why ‘anger’ descended upon the Jews, while being described as ‘led astray’ is more appropriate of the Christians.”

Ibn Kathir’s understanding of this passage is not a lone “extremist” interpretation. In fact, most Muslim commentators believe that the Jews are those who have earned Allah’s wrath and the Christians are those who have gone astray.

Read the whole article here: Robert Spencer’s Blogging the Qur’an: Sura 1, ‘The Opening’.

The excerpts above are also posted on Inquiry Into Islam here.