Hocine Drouiche is an “Islamologist specializing in political Islam. Former vice president of the Conference of Imams of France and candidate for the leadership of the Grand Mosque of Paris.”
He must know, therefore, that what he is saying is false. If anything, translations of the Qur’an into Western languages are milder than the Arabic original, and obfuscate verses that clearly call for violence. If what Drouiche claims were true, we would only see jihad violence from non-Arab Muslims, and not from native Arabic speakers. That is obviously not the case.
Anyway, if he is looking for an honest translation and commentary on the Qur’an, here it is.
“Imam of Nîmes: a faithful translation of the Koran against hatred and extremism,” by Hocine Drouiche, Asia News, November 19, 2021 (thanks to RB):
Nîmes (AsiaNews) – Today, an update of the “corpus” of Muslim doctrine appears ever more urgent. Moreover, a faithful translation of the Koran into French is even more indispensable and necessary. All the translations circulating today, the work of Islamic experts of the past and with a more radical imprint, do nothing but sow hatred among Muslims and non-Muslims.
These translations available today are not faithful to the original texts and have generated an inhuman Islam, full of rancor and aggression. While waiting for an urgent and important [translation] work, our Muslim elites continue to fight among themselves to organize the rise to power within the Council of Imams of France!
Thousands of hadiths [anecdotes about the Prophet Muhammad’s life] added later must be annulled and withdrawn from the original corpus of Islam, if we really want to change behaviors and fight the hatred generated by these texts, whose originality is false. To undertake this fight requires not only courage, but also a certain amount of humanity, objectivity and rectitude.
Thousands of people have been killed and massacred in the name of these texts marked by revenge. Not to undertake this project of immense magnitude is both a heavy betrayal and complicity with murderers and terrorists.
Extremist groups use these hateful and misleading hadiths to justify their terrorist acts, to torture and to sow death. Under no circumstances should we allow them to use these dangerous weapons to turn us against each other, and to spread terror.
This is the work that our Muslim institutions must undertake: that of opposing those who fight each other with the sole objective of gaining power, and while they do so, the terrorists have a free field to prepare for their sacred struggle aimed at sowing hatred, death and destruction among men….
jewdog says
The Koran itself is inhumane, a product of imperial hubris, having been concocted many years after the initial Arab conquests, which actually involved a coalition of people of various monotheistic faiths and were not a religious campaign. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig (apologies to pigs).
Dhimmi says
It was a muslim conquest but the christians of the eastern oriental church did not participate in significant numbers to the Byzatine response because they had a few theological differences to the Byzantines and because these oriental Christians deluded themselves that they could survive in a muslim world or were have been deceived to think that. They were passive thinking they could turn the other side but of course this can be done when they got a fist not when they got their throats cut
mortimer says
Agree with jd: ‘a product of imperial hubris’. I support the thesis that Arabs wanted to invade the Roman Empire and replace it with a Holy Arab Empire. To do that, they needed to invent their own religion, because Christianity was the religion of the Romans. The Arabs invented a religion that targeted the religion while justifying attacking Roman Christians because they were alleged to be ‘polytheists’.
Michael Copeland says
“Using deception to mask intended goals”, remember?
That is a stated aim in the Muslim Brotherhood secret Explanatory Memorandum.
Hatred?
“…between us and you enmity and hatred forever….”, says Koran 60:4.
Michael Copeland says
“an inhuman Islam, full of rancor and aggression”. This is what others have noticed and drawn attention to: Hocine Drouiche can now be quoted as authority and confirmation.
“Thousands of hadiths … added later must be annulled and withdrawn…”
This is a bold claim. There was an imam in Arizona who opined, after years of study, that two verses did not properly belong in the Koran. He was stabbed to death for that.
Bukhari, when sifting all the thousands of hadiths that he collected, rejected 98% of them, and a great many of those left are repetitions from different sources. The conclusion is that Arabs are 98% unreliable.
Robert Frankling says
This mullah is onto a good line of inquiry … since it is a line of inquiry which will take millions like him out jihadism, but also out of Islam for good!
Critical thought about the Koranic text is growing rapidly. Once you start pulling out threads from this Koranic mess, it is like a sweater which quickly unravels! The mullah will get into deep waters of scholarship which modern scholars like Luxenberg, Gerd Puin, Jay Smith, Odon Lafontaine, Robert Spencer and Sneakers Corner are delving into. The text of the Koran has not secular historical support in evidence from secular documents. EIther the Koran, hadiths and Sira are not what they seem to be or they have been badly rewritten by people living 200 years after the events..
One of world’s top experts on the Koranic text is Gerd Puid, PdD. He states: “The Qur’an claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or clear, but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Qur’anic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Qur’an is not comprehensible, if it can’t even be understood in Arabic, then it’s not translatable into any language.”
With so much outright OPACITY and INCOMPREHENSIBILITY in the original Arabic, no one can be certain to what it appertains.
A translation of the Koran into any language if not a complete paraphrase is a complete hash of sudden changes of topic and grammatical subject, words that are devoid of precise meanings and contradictions of the history, science, the Bible and the Koran contradicting itself. Hardly a worse ‘book’ could be imagined. The Koran appears to be a collection of SCRAPS of incomplete and obscure sermon notes from a preacher who is trying to motivate troops for battle. Whoever this preacher or spirit medium was, he is not discernible in the historical record.
Islam fails to convince a reasonable person because it has an incoherent, opaque text and a non-historical founder, thus positioning the origins of Islam in an obscure place somewhere in Greater Syria where all the ideas in the Koran were in books in Aramaic in libraries. Whoever wrote the Koran badly plagiarized these books.
Putting the Koranic text on the scholar’s microscope will convince millions of Muslims that the Koran is a flase, plagiarized and badly botched book (not divine) and that they may thus abandon Islam with confidence.
gregbeetham says
As I understand it the Koran loses credibility and relevance because at the time Arabic was still evolving and the diacritical marks hadn’t been invented yet so to make the text understandable at a later time those were added in but by that time the original plagiarisers reciters and story tellers had died so they just had to wing it which is probably why the Koran is such gibberish.
tim gallagher says
I’d say that any version of the Koran is bound to be an evil, hate filled, extremely nasty book. I read parts of it, but found it unreadable and boring, and my main impression of the Koran was that it was full of an obsessive hatred for non-believers. It is an evil book but also one of the most boring books that I have ever taken a look at. As for Muslims, they should just leave Islam and not talk about trying to make it more humane. Islam is way beyond saving. It is thoroughly barbaric and full of hatred and calls for endless violence.
Valhella says
Absolutely – there are no redeeming qualities to that evil text and no such thing as a reasonable mozlum. There is no hope for improvement in either and our world would be so much better without them.
tim gallagher says
Totally agree, Valhella. Yes, the world would be a far better place without Islam. Islam has brought nothing but murderous violence and suffering for 1400 years. It should have disappeared centuries ago.
Dano S. says
I don’t think there is a holy book in existence with more unfaithful translations than the commonly used KJV of the Holy Bible, yet it hasn’t resulted in “inhumane” religion with inhumane acts regularly carried out by its faithful. You end up with what you started out with.
donynam says
just like Muhammad was not faithful to his wives.