Since its inception, I have been following -- uh, religiously -- the Sunday-morning "Blogging the Qur'an" series, a lead-by-the- hand tour through Allah's unchangeable word, from start to finish. The last installment is coming this Sunday, and quoted below is a little preview and comment from the imam.
The quote is taken from http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/023987.php#comments , whose following comments are even more interesting, covering topics including - What concepts are absent from the Qur'an? - Which is more boring, the Qur'an, or the Book of Mormon? (That's one contest I don't want to adjudicate, even if they paid me as much as Simon Cowell. And who knew that Mark Twain weighed in on this subject?) - How not to deal with "door-to-door bicycle da'wah [=伝道]". Even with handheld guidance, plowing through the Qur'an is a real bore-a-thon. Reading it, you'll think: Who the hell wrote this crap? He has no sense of sequential narrative, senilely repeats himself, doesn't explain basic concepts (like jinns and Judgment Day), and speaks like a petulant, self-centered illeist. -- Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) ==QUOTE== My exclusive reliance on Islamic commentaries has, I'm afraid, often made the series as "wrist-slittingly boring" [I laughed at this phrase: how true it is!] as John Derbyshire once termed the Qur'an itself, despite my best efforts. The Qur'an itself is extremely repetitive, and so any chapter-by-chapter overview will inevitably be repetitive also. In any case, I intended it all along to stand as a reference source for any and all interested parties, and it will remain here at Jihad Watch as a resource as long as there is a Jihad Watch. The ongoing translations of the series into Italian, German, Czech, and Danish [yay, Denmark!] indicate that some people have found it helpful, and I thank them for that. Whatever else it may be, this Blogging the Qur'an series is certainly unique. Ziauddin Sardar's [Ziauddin Sardar? That's the man who made me a Muslim!] series of the same name at The Guardian, which began a few months after mine, stopped going through the Qur'an passage-by-passage in June (after completing just the first two suras), and appears to have petered out altogether in October after 41 segments. Sardar complained that "the exercise turned out to be much harder than I expected" and that "by far the hardest thing for me to do was to answer all the questions raised by Madeleine [Bunting] and other bloggers." Yet the questions at The Guardian were always screened and controlled. Questions on this series have always been open and free, and I always took care to answer every one that I saw. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
