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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Islam requires one simple belief:  "There is no god but God and Mohammed is His prophet."  (Then you are supposed to faithfully do a couple of practices: praying five times a day, fasting in Ramadan, giving zakat to the poor and making the pilgrimage to Mekka (if you can).  If you believe in that one statement and do the practices then you are a religious Muslim in good standing.

Islam emphatically is not a gnostic religion that requires special knowledge available only to the properly initiated to understand.  PP's insistence that you can't possibly understand Islam without knowing Arabic or without recourse to scholars borders on heresy.[/quote]
I disagree, because the belief in Muhammad as a messenger requires belief in his message, i.e. the Quran. There is no such thing as a devout Muslim who doesn't believe the Quran or rejects parts of it.

I agree that the tafsir industry in its present form was born out of the desire for job security for the unemployable.[/quote]

But there is such a thing as a devout Muslim who has only the most passing knowledge of the Koran.  This pretty much suffices--one doesn't have to have recourse to Arabic or learned scholars or have a really deep understanding of what is in the Koran; I maintain that to say so borders on heresy.

Further, you don't have to have any knowledge of the Koran to convert.  All that conversion to Islam requires is a recitation of "there is no god but God...." in front of witnesses.  It does not require that you demonstrate knowledge of the Koran.[/quote]

If you do not trust others to translate the Quran, then you must learn Quranic Arabic yourself. [/quote]
It's not me who doesn't trust others. It's an article of faith for the Muslim discourse that the Quran is untranslatable and all translations are too feeble to convey the glory of the holy book.  That's why, when reasonable people express doubts about something in the Quran, they are told to sit down and shut up because "you don't understand Arabic, and you have to."[/quote]

Meh... Not an article of faith.  The Quran is poetry and like most poetry the beauty of the original is extremely challenging to replicate in translation.  But this is really an aesthetic matter--not that aesthetics don't matter to worship (see the Messiah, for example).

But it is a commonly held view, which explains all those Indonesian school children doing Koran recital contests in a language they don't understand at all.

Do you think the fact they can recite it from memory without understanding a word of the Arabic makes them better Muslims than those who can only read the Koran in their native tongue? Or than those who cannot read it at all because they are illiterate and in fact have little to no exposure to the Koran except for perhaps the prayers their elders have taught them because they are nomadic?  Likewise, there are plenty of Muslim girls in the Middle East and Africa who have never gone to school, have never have gone to mosque, but learn their prayers from their mother and that's about it for their Islamic education.  All are still considered good Muslims.

Besides to really understand the Arabic, you have to have very deep knowledge of Arabic as it existed in the seventh century--the language has moved on and the meanings of words has changed.   So you could be very literate in Arabic, but if you are not steeped in 7th century linguistics you still may not really understand large bits of the Koran.  (That is why PP keeps referring to various scholars--they are providing their modern Arabic translations of passages written in archaic Koranic Arabic.)

Really very silly to tell someone to shut up because they don't speak Arabic.  The PPs don't speak seventh century Arabic either.  If they are diligent and want to get at the true meaning of words in sentences, they look them up--reams of websites more than willing to tell you what the words meant in seventh century Arabia (not all really passing a scholarship test, though).  And, in the age of the internet, all this linguistic wisdom is just as available in English, that being the most common written language in Pakistan, a really large Muslim country full of people who don't speak Arabic but are quite serious about their religion.[/quote]

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