dimanche 3 juillet 2016

Basic layout & contents of the Quran

If I look through a list of books of the Bible, I generally know what's in them: I know which ones consist of old myths really heavy on the supernatural stuff... which ones have lists of laws... which ones depict mostly-plausible Bronze Age war stories through one particular tribe's filter with some supernatural embellishments... which ones are attributed to prophets and contain treatises on wisdom & righteousness or still more laws or acid trips posing as prophecies... which one is just a bunch of God-praise... which one was a long love poem from back when poets still admitted that lust is a big part of love... which ones tell parts of Jesus's alleged life... which ones are letters from one Christian to another trying to settle religious disputes among the sects...

So if you quote me a Biblical verse, I know generally what else is written around it nearby. But if you quote me a Quranic verse, I don't know what kind of context or framework to put it in because I don't know the book's structure.

It's not even clear to me that there are sub-books within it; I've seen the word "Sura" a lot with Quran verse quotes, which I thought at first might be the name of a book, but it seems to nearly always be there and I can't name an alternative that's appeared in its place, so now I suppose it might just mean "part" or "chapter" or "paragraph", in which case "Sura 12" means the twelfth sura, rather than the twelfth item within a thing named "Sura". And if so, then which sura numbers generally go with which kinds of subjects?


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/29j7lah

Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire