comment by Jerry Gordon

The Medinan Koran chronicles the exact history of the rise of Islamic political power. The Koran is both a religious text and a political/historical text. The Koran contains an intimate and exact view of Arabian history. As a political/historical text, the Koran can be viewed as a biography of Mohammed.


SUMMARY: The Koran can made to be simple to understand by using:

Chronology—putting the verses in the original historical order.

Category—the method of grouping verses around the same subject. There can be discussion about which categories to use, but the Koranic Argument method of categorization produces the simplest text.

Context—using Mohammed’s life to give the circumstances and environment of the text.

With the analytic tools of Chronology, Category and Context, the Koran becomes a clear and simple text. The CCC analytic method most closely duplicates the historical words spoken by Mohammed.

Where my buddy Andy Bostom in his historiographic and sacral text analyses of Islam has demonstrated The Legacies of Jihad and fundamental Antisemitism, Warner applying scientific principals of content analysis has eviscerated the core message of hatred and violence towards all unbelievers of Political Islam. They are, in my view two important ‘book ends’ and represent an important body of work for reference. In that ‘book shelf, should also be put the ground breaking work of Stephen Coughlin on the Islamic Law doctrine of Jihad - the military doctrine of Jihadis and Salafists - that constitute a threat to our troops in the field and us at home via acts of terrorism and ‘cultural’ Jihad.

by Bill Warner, New English Review, June, 2008

Have you ever heard someone say: “What we need is a new translation of the Koran.” What they really mean is that we need a Koran we can read and understand. The difficulties of reading the Koran are notorious and common.

The Koran is repetitious and chaotic. Who do you know who has read the Koran and says that they understand it? The muddled chaos is passed off as profoundness. The confusion is proof of the Koran’s deep wisdom. Right. But, if the Koran were handed to an English teacher, it would receive an F as a grade. And as it turns out, the translation has almost nothing to do with the problem.

CHRONOLOGY: Imagine that you are an English teacher or an editor and the Koran manuscript landed on your desk. You would not ask for a better translation.

Your first step would be to put the document in order. That turns out to be almost trivial. Your Koran from the bookstore has the long chapters up front and the short chapters at the end. The correct time order of the chapters is well known to scholars. Anybody with access to the Web can download a version of the Koran and use any word processor to produce a Koran in the right time order.

This is the crucial first step. When you turn the page of the Koran, you advance in time. The first step produces a chronological Koran.

CATEGORIES: The next problem you face in preparing a readable Koran is deciding how to break up the suras (chapters) into topics and paragraphs.

How do you break it up into topics and paragraphs? The Koran is filled with stories that allow easy categorization. The story of Moses is easily recognized as a topic. Then there are the endless repetitive Arabic stories of Thamud and others. But there remains a lot of verbiage that is not a story. How should it be arranged into topics?

The stream of violence that runs throughout the Koran gives insight into its structure. The violence is not random, but turns out to have a internal order to it. Take Hell, for instance. If you highlight the violent references to the unbelievers, you will find that there are five elements that accompany the violence:

A description of the threat or violence
Whom is threatened
What they did to deserve the violence
How they are wrong
Words from Allah to support his messenger, Mohammed

I call this structure the Koranic Argument. The argument is that the kafirs are wrong, Mohammed is right and violence will come to those who deny him.

The Koranic Argument is a natural organizational element of the Koran. The verse is useful but it does not allow analysis of ideas and thought. After all, a verse is usually just a sentence. People who use individual verses to prove anything about the Koran would never turn around and analyze Kant or Marx on the basis of sentences. No, you want to analyze thoughts, and a sentence is too small a unit for critical, systemic thought. The Koranic Argument allows easy textual analysis of thought, ideas and theme. (Continue Reading this Article)