At 03:49 PM 12/7/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
10 for effort there spinmiester, self-appointed physics expert who
do not have a physics degree or any degree for that matter; and now
self-appointed arabic etymology expert.
Well, in physics I state the obvious, and I do as well so with
respect to Arabic etymology. Generally, when I'm in the company of
experts, literally or on a mailing list, they correct me when I'm
wrong, and they can tell me exactly where I err. Now, Jojo Jaro might
think he has a better physics education than I, though I did sit with
Richard P. Feymnan for two years at Caltech. He is correct that I
don't have a degree. However, it's totally irrelevant. I don't assert
authority from degrees or "superior knowledge." I just say what I see
and understand.
I do the same with everything, including the behavior of writers on
mailing lists. And I cite evidence, I don't just make accusations,
when it's important.
Last week I spoke frequently at a conference of cold fusion experts,
including physicists, and was able to make positive contributions;
mostly that was about "interpreting" what physicists and other
researchers were saying, for businesspeople who were there and who
might have misinterpreted some of it. I'm quite sure that if I'd
erred, the physicists would have corrected me, it was their work I
was explaining, and this was important, much of this is ultimately
about funding for research.
As to Arabic, I do read the Qur'an in that language, and, again, I've
often discussed matters with real experts. I'm not wrong very often,
though it happens. As to "al-ilah" as the source of the personal name
"Allah," that was obvious, but it also is supported in sources. I
also mentioned that there is argument against this, which amounts to
"Allah is a personal name and etymology is irrelevant," which is
*also* reasonable.
I did review sources, including Lane's Lexicon -- which is one heavy
dictionary -- for Jaro's Al-Ilyah, which allegedly means "moon god."
I found no support for it. Again, maybe I missed something.
I can see that you've taken up Wikipedia as your authoritative
research material. When I said, "study" I did not mean wikipedia. LOL....
Wikipedia is a double-edged sword. But it's often good for finding
sources. In this case I cited Wikipedia because it, right out,
attributes this "moon god" theory to "Evangelical Christians."
Wikipedia will not normally do that unless there is a basis for it.
Realize, and notice, that Jojo Jaro does not cite actual sources for
his claims. Instead he claims that anyone saying anything different
is lying. For that to be true, as a reasonable accusation, the
evidence would certainly need to be well-known, but I haven't been
able to find it in anything approaching a reliable source. Except:
From the Wikipedia article:
In 2009 anthropologist Gregory Starrett wrote, "a recent survey by
the Council for American Islamic Relations reports that as many as
10% of Americans believe Muslims are pagans who worship a moon god
or goddess, a belief energetically disseminated by some Christian activists."
I also looked back at history. This is a fairly recent article, the
orignal version was
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allah_as_Moon-god&oldid=469092937
This version does not support "Al-Ilyah," but "Al-ilah." It ascribes
the shortening to "pre-Islamic times." The article, though,
originally, seemed fairly naive about the point that "ilah" does
carry the meaning of "god," even though it mentions El.
I found a source which examines some of the "research" behind the
moon-god idea, it was cited in the original Wikipedia article, but
this kind of source is not generally allowed on Wikipedia,
self-published.
http://www.islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Sources/Allah/moongods.html
It's useful if one wants to look behind the claims. Note that I'm not
confirming the author's scholarship, but he's quoting original
sources, if this really mattered, it could be researched. But it
doesn't. Muslims do not "worship a moon-god," no matter what the
etymology of "Allah" might be as to the past. That is to confuse the
names of things with things.
Jajo Jaro purports to believe many such tropes, such as the belief
that President Obama was not born in the United States, which then
necessarily becomes a story of conspiracy and forgery involving many
allegedly corrupt officials, and reliance on discredited image
analysis that supposedly "proves" this or that. I wasted days of
research tracking down Jojo Jaro's claims earlier this year. Waste of
time, except I did learn about what "birthers" believe and precisely
how some of them have been led astray.
Like by assuming that repeated exact patterns of pixels in images
proves that parts of the image were copied to other parts, i.e., to
alter letters. Yes. The coincident pixels prove that parts were
copied, all right, but this is a normal artifact of image
compression. That is exactly what compression algorithms do to reduce
image file size. They search for close matches and then represent all
these matches with a single pattern.
Of course, anyone with access to the original document, or the
original images, could immediately detect a forgery like that, which
is why this would require some extended conspiracy, i.e., the
officials in Hawaii somehow don't notice that the public images have
been drastically altered, in spite of all the public flap, or they
are in on the fraud.
Let me put it this way: if sources show what Jojo claims about this
"moon god," it's remarkably difficult to find. I did search for
"Al-Ilyah." The number one hit was this mailing list. Jojo Jaro
claims that a "simple study" will come up with this name. It does not.
Now on to correcting your disinformation again. Tell me one thing
spinmiester, what is the name of the moon god of muhammed's bebuin tribe.
Well, gods often had many names, and, as pointed out, any one of them
might be called "al-ilah," "the god," by followers. Al-ilah literally
means that, "ilah" is the word used for a god, an object of worship
-- closely related to the old Hebrew El --, then with with al- at the
beginning as the definite article, indicating specificity or
uniqueness. In any case, the name I know about is Hubal, though that
Hubal was a "moon-god" is speculative. Hubal was apparently
worshipped or "consulted" by Muhammad's grandfather. But these were
polytheists.
Wadd is mentioned in Qur'an as an old god, and is supposedly a lunar
deity. A temple of Wadd was reported as destroyed on the order of Muhammad.
I look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Allah_as_Moon-god, for
one can often find minority positions expressed on Talk pages. I
don't find support there for Jojo's position, and certainly the idea
that "Al-Ilyah" was the name of the "moon-god" supposedly worshipped
by "Muhammad's bedouin tribe" isn't there at all. If it is, I missed it.
Anybody can find that out from multiple non-Christian sources.
If it is so easy, point to a few.
If you believe this spinmeister's spin, you only have yourself to
blame for being ignorant. Al-Ilyah or al-ilah or allah never was
and still is not the same as the Universal Jewish God or Christian God.
ilah, without the definite article has a very clear and easily
recognizable meaning, and it's found in the Qur'an (with three pages
of entries for ilah in the Kassis Concordance). (That this word is
not found with the definite article in the Qur'an, but as Allah, is a
clue that the Al- in Allah is, in fact, the definite article.) The
connection between ilah and El is well-known, and El, in case you
don't know, is one of the common Hebrew names for God. The plural of
El would be "Elohim," which is a bit better known.
The Christian God is not "the god"? Actually, he's right. God does
not belong to any sect. As soon as we indicate a sectarian
affiliation, this is not "the God," it's referring to a human
concept. There are Christians who worship "the God," and those who
worship their own ideas. And the same is true for anyone. Including
Muslims. To me, "God" is a synonym for Reality (which is clear in
Islamic usage), and the map is not the territory, the names are not
the thing named.
So when I say that I trust in Allah, I mean, "I trust in Reality."
And if Jojo wants to assert that his God is something else, he's
free. It simply means to me that he's worshipping something *other
than Reality*. That's where his line of attack takes him, he throws
himself off the cliff, and divorces himself from reality.
Allah has always been the second rate moon god of muhammed's
tribe aspiring to be like the Most High God. Study it up. (I mean
study, not wikipedia. LOL...)
Definitely second rate if it's as obscure as it seems to be.
But "Allah" and "Al-Ilyah" would not be pronounced alike in Arabic.
This is a trope that appeals to people completely clueless about the
language. "Al-ilah" could easily become "Allah," but "al-Ilyah" has
that ya in the middle, which is a letter that would not disappear
like this, as I mentioned before.
And the whole approach is *fundamentally insulting.* That is, take
something that people believe, redefine the words according to
whatever you like, or think that the words *now* mean what they meant
over a thousand years ago, and then assert that *this* is what people
*actually believe.*
Which is what Jojo's claims amount to. They are actually deep
insults, and are designed as such.
Now to your spinning of the definition of marriage.
I don't recall specifically defining it. Again, Jojo frequently does
not quote what others have actually said, but reinterprets and states
his reinterpretation as what the other said. The topic here was his
claim that Muhammad had "dozens" of wives. For this to be true, we'd
have to think that he had at least two dozen wives, so someone could
get away with *almost* 24 with merely a small amount of incaution.
Jojo actually screwed up massively there, but Jojo *always" "fights
back." He just ignores his error and keeps going, with attacks and
innuendo, like "spinning."
(Here, what he is actually doing, it turns out, is to state stretched
speculation as if it were established and proven fact.)
Marriage is an institution started by the Jewish God.
Really? There were no marriages before ... what? Obviously not before
there were humans, though even that isn't totally clear, but before
the time of the Jews, was there a "Jewish God"? Perhaps the "Jewish
God" refers to the "God of the Torah," which would then reach back to
the creation (as a description). Really, though, all this statement
would then mean is that marriage existed when it began. It does not
state when it began. Were Adam and Eve married?
The Qur'an says "Praise be to the one who created you from a single
soul, and from her, her mate, and, from the two of them, so many men
and women." This is usually glossed as referring to Adam as the
"single soul," but nafs, translated here as "soul" -- it more
directly means "self" -- is feminine, so I translated it that way.
The word "mate" is zawj, and the plural of zawj is azwaaj, which is
routinely translated as "wives." But the root is (one of) a pair. Mate.
Hence, we need to study how God defines a marriage and a
"wife". Not some spin from the moon god bible. Gen 24 contains the
definition of what constitutes a wife. Look at verse 67.
There is no "moon god bible."
And a description of a specific usage is not a definition, and what
Jojo cites does not establish what he claims. "She became his wife"
does not specify *how* she became his wife. It seems to precede "he
loved her." I'd need to pull out my Hebrew Torah to look at the
actual words used here, I've found that I cannot trust naive
Christian glosses, they are frequently back-interpreting from what
they already believe, and then claim it's in the text.
I have always understood this difference between marriage and
non-marriage: marriage is declared, it's a social affair. That is how
and why it carries obligations and why marriage contracts are
enforced socially. If adultery is to be prohibited, it must be known
who is available and who is not. Thus, in Islam, "secret marriage" is
generally prohibited, and there are some interesting stories about
Abrahan and Sarah, did he conceal his marriage to her, thus leading
to some kind of "adultery"? If it did, who was responsible for it?
All of which matters little to us now. Some people love to argue
about this stuff, because they love to disagree.
Muhammad's marriages were certainly known. And that is the core of
marriage. It legitimates intimacy, it allows for known parentage.
(Which may be one reason why polyandry is so disapproved. Polyandry
was a pre-Islamic custom in Arabia, and also in some other places,
all sharing a certain characteristic: a need to limit population
growth. That was true of pre-Islamic Mecca, they had apparently hit
resource limits. Going with this custom was, apparently, female
infanticide. Why females? Well, you don't limit the size of the next
generation by eliminating boys. Biology.)
That was swept away by Islam, both polyandry and infanticide.
"And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took
Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her; and Isaac was
comforted after his mother's death."
This tells me practically nothing about "marriage." It says that
Rebekah became his wife. Notice, "into his mother's tent" means that
she lived with his mother. I looked up alternate translations of the
passage, and what came before it. This was a marriage, it was clear,
and it is a narrow reading that implies that consummation came first,
i.e. that "took" means "had intercourse with."
Confusing all this, the word "to marry" can also mean "to have
intercourse with," certainly in Arabic and probably, then, in Hebrew.
But, again, I haven't checked the original language here. The
translations show nothing that clearly makes it mean "have
intercourse," and one was explicitly "took her to wife," and others
"took her and made her his wife," or the like, where "took" can
simply mean "accept." After all, it was a servant who brought
Rebekah, so it was up to Isaac to accept or not.
You will notice that there was no ceremony or anything to make
Rebekah Isaac's wife. The mere act of taking her into his tent (his
bed) and "knowing" her (sex) automatically made Rebekah his wife.
It doesn't say "into his tent," it says, "into his mother's tent."
But, yes, in tribal society, intercourse and marriage were considered
practically identical. And so? In Islamic marriage, if a marriage is
not consummated, it remains nullifiable, at half the agreed dowry.
Once consummated, normal divorce is required. I.e., full payment of
dowry to the woman. And this was often a very considerable sum. Or
with some marriages, particularly of the poor, it was small.
And what does this have to do with how many wives Muhammad had?
Remember, Jojo wrote "dozens," and it was just that to which I
objected, because it is apparently false. Or at least unclear, an
assertion without proof, but he wants, as usual, to claim that any
difference on this is "lying" or "spin." And what he says, without
proof, is "truth." And, of course, he is going to be persecuted for
saying "the truth."
What this means my friends, is that every woman you've ever had
sex with is considered in God's eyes to be your wife.
I wish. However, they seem to have something to say about that.
Indeed, that position can be taken. But the passage doesn't mean
that. This is an *interpretation* that is not found clearly in the
original. And, again, what does that have to do with Muhammad's "wives"?
And this includes all the sex toys concubines of muhammed whether
there was a ceremony or not; they were all "wives".
Jojo is making mincemeat out of language, he will make it mean
whatever he wants. He has no concern that he might be distorting
God's Word, saying about it what he does not know. He has no fear of
God. He's angry, and he's going to retaliate, and doesn't care.
Most of all, he wants to be Right.
"Sex toys of Muhammad"? He's making that up. Below, concubines will
be mentioned. A concubine is a slave. "Concubine" does not mean "sex
partner." In Islamic law, the position of slaves is a special case,
and slavery is generally disapproved, but also allowed under some
conditions; the majority intepretation of this requires a man to
marry a woman to have sex with her, to be righteous. But sex with a
slave was not considered *illegal,* the key would be the exclusivity
presumed to exist in the relationship. It was illegal to have sex,
for example, with a wife's slave, unless she gives the slave to her
husband. As, of course, happened with Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Uh,
what does Jojo's "Christian God" have to say about that?
And none of this is any kind of aspersion cast against Abraham,
Sarah, or Hagar, or their children. It's about "honi soit qui mal y
pense," those who readily cry "sin!" about what others have done, and
who don't look at themselves. Didn't Jesus say something about that?
Wikipedia has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad%27s_wives It says
"eleven or thirteen." For the purposes of this discussion, I've been
accepting 13. I.e., 12 after Khadijah died. And I don't know how many
he had at one time, and it appears that some of the marriages may not
have been consummated.
I did a great deal more research on this, and this is the bottom
line: to come up with "two dozen" wives, it's necessary to collect
together and assume to be accurate *all* the reports that so-and-so
was married to the Prophet, and one of these is even about an unamed
woman, who might or might not be identical to another, and there were
apparently divorces involving unconsummated marriages, so it all gets
really complicated.
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Wives_and_Concubines_of_Muhammad
seems to rely largely on a single source:
http://www.muslimhope.com/WhyDidMohammedGetSoManyWives.htm which is a
Christian web site, the "Hope" is that Muslims will accept Jesus as
Messiah, which is a bit really weird, because we do. But the hope is
also that we will "leave Islam," which means, if we use the word
literally, that we will leave off "accepting" God. In my extended
discussions with a well-known Christian apologist (and critic of
Islam), he told me privately that, "Of course, with what the word
"muslim" means, I am muslim."
We, of course, still had a difference of opinion on *theology,* but
my opinion is that we are not saved by theology, and, in fact,
theology is a bit of a nuisance. Faith is not about theology, it's a
condition of the heart.
The MuslimHope source gives this statement:
Mohammed married 15 women and consummated his marriages with 13.
(al-Tabari vol.9 p.126-127)
Bukhari vol.1 Book 5 ch.25 no.282 p.172-173 said that [at one time]
Mohammed had nine wives.
Yes, it goes over greater number of alleged wives, as well as alleged
concubines. The 13 figure would be Khadija, his only wife until she
died -- according to a common tribal marriage pattern -- after which
he took multiple wives, again common at the time, as many as a dozen
more. This does not conflict with Bukhari, because that would be a
different number: the peak number of wives at one time.
And I could write a great deal more on this, but won't. Because all
this is *completely irrelevant here*, and I looked into this again
(after many years not even thinking about the issue) because of
Jojo's trolling.
