The truth is that Europeans went through the Dark Ages knowing full well that the Earth is spherical. This knowledge was developed by the Pythagoreans, 1,400 years before the Quran, and was elaborated in a highly sophisticated scientific theory by Ptolemy, 450 years before the Quran. (Eratosthenes had even calculated the Earth’s circumference quite accurately, about 850 years before the Quran.) The early Christian church embraced Ptolemy’s theory. Early Christian proponents of a flat Earth were few and marginal. But it does appear that whoever composed the Quran supposed the Earth to be flat (18:47; 20:53; 71:19). Aside from this kind of carelessness, most of Ally’s ‘scientific’ examples are like Bucaille’s, in that they twist and contort some verse in the Quran to make it compatible with some aspect of modern scientific theory, then proclaim that the Quran anticipated that bit of science and therefore could only have been composed by God.

Muslims claim that as the Quran reveals superior knowledge, it must have come from God. As we have seen, this is false. The scientific knowledge in the Quran is backward compared with that of seventh-century Europe. Muslim scholars did rescue some of the ancient pagan knowledge, such as Aristotle and Archimedes, far superior intellectually to early Christianity or early Islam, which Christendom left to itself would probably have destroyed. But that came later.

Yet isn’t there something odd about this way of trying to prove the Quran’s Divine authorship? Muslims, like Christians, believe that we’re surrounded by teeming hordes of supernatural entities: angels, demons, jinns, and whatnot. From what Muslims and Christians tell us about these undetectable personages, it appears that some of them would know a lot of things unknown to ordinary humans and would have the capability to interfere in human affairs. In that case, you would expect some of them, in pursuit of who knows what demonic skullduggery, to have planted books among humans, containing information unknown to humans, thus giving these books tremendous credibility.

If the Quran had contained information unknown to humans fourteen hundred years ago, it would therefore not follow that the author was God; it could be some less exalted spirit being with less benign motives. However, the fact that nothing of this kind has ever occurred—that no book ever written contains information which could not have been acquired by mundane methods at the time of writing—corroborates the theory that there are no such spirit beings.

The Origin of the Quran

The Quran is just not good enough, as literature, as science, or as philosophy, to have been composed by an omniscient God, or even an outstanding human thinker. Indeed, any intelligent person reading the Quran with an open mind would conclude that it could not have had a single author, unless that author was afflicted by a serious thinking disorder. It gives the appearance of highly uneven, ill-assorted fragments gathered from different sources, overlaid with some incomplete later attempts at harmonization.

Everything about the Quran, like the New Testament and the Tanakh, reeks of a purely human, fallible, and ignorant origin, hemmed in by the cultural horizons of time, place, and prejudice. Like the New Testament, the Quran is uneven. It has some fine passages, as we expect from the accumulated and winnowed results of oral tradition. At its worst it is incoherent, contradictory, undistinguished, and just plain silly.

By the way, I have referred to what I have read in the Quran, though I have relied on English translations (for each text I have compared numerous translations). According to Muslim tradition, only the original Arabic Quran is truly the Quran. However, let’s bear in mind there are over a billion Muslims in the world, and the great majority of them do not know even modern Arabic. Furthermore, an Arabic-speaking Muslim today is no better able to understand the Quran in the original than a twenty-first-century citizen of Detroit is able to understand the Canterbury Tales.

But it’s worse, because Quranic Arabic is a long dead language, and there is little available in this language other than the Quran and writings derived from the Quran. Far less is known about the Arabic of the seventh century C.E. than, for example, the Greek of the first century. The language of the Quran is packed with obscurities, words and phrases which it is impossible for anyone to render precisely into any modern language (including Arabic) with any confidence. One scholar has stated:

The Koran 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—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. (Gerd-R. Puin, quoted in Lester 2002, p. 121)

Puin is not denying, of course, that traditional interpretations of the Quran have imposed clear meanings on many Quranic verses. But, as one of the handful of the world’s leading experts on Quranic language, Puin is able to make this judgment on the Quran in the original.

Silliness in the Quran

The Quran repeatedly challenges readers to produce verses of equal quality (2:23; 10:38; 17:88). Since much of the Quran is quite puerile, this is very easy, but when it has been done, the authors of these verses have met with death threats. However, people keep doing it—see http://suralikeit.com, evidently put out by Arabic-speaking Christians. Some passages in the Quran are undeniably silly. Muslims employ a lot of ingenuity to give these verses a respectable interpretation but in some cases this is difficult.

According to the Quran (72:1-15), some jinns (genies or fire-spirits) once flew up into Heaven to eavesdrop on the reading of the Quran taking place there (the Quran is supposed to be an exact copy of a book kept in Heaven). Meteorites (shooting stars) are flaming darts thrown by angels at jinns to keep them out of Heaven. These jinns overheard the message that Allah is one and has no wife or children. They were so bowled over by this news that they immediately converted to Islam. So some jinns have become good Muslims. Other jinns, however (presumably including those unfortunate enough not to have tried to illicitly eavesdrop on the doings in Heaven), will be used as fuel for the fires of Hell.

The Quran tells us that Solomon could understand the speech of birds and ants. He had an army of men, jinns, and birds. He used birds to drop clay bricks on opposing armies (105:3-4). When Solomon’s army came to a valley of ants, Solomon overheard one of the ants saying to the others: “Go home, before Solomon’s soldiers trample you.” Solomon took a roll call of the birds in his army and found that the Hoopoe bird was missing. Solomon threatened to punish the Hoopoe, but then the Hoopoe showed up and told Solomon about a woman ruler (27:1-23). (The chapter then goes into a garbled version of the story of Solomon and Sheba.) The Tanakh also has incredible folk tales about talking animals: the snake in Genesis 3:1-5 and the donkey in Numbers 22: 27-28).

The composers of the Quran take many stories from Jewish and Christian sources, and restate them, usually with significant differences. Many Old Testament stories re-appear in the Quran, such as the story of Noah’s ark. The Quran states that Jesus (whom Muslims call ‘Isa’) was a prophet of Islam, was born of a virgin (3:47), and even that the birth of his mother Mary was miraculous. Given that so many Christians no longer believe in the virgin birth, probably more Muslims than Christians now believe in it. According to the Quran, it was made to appear that Jesus had been executed by crucifixion, but in reality he was rescued (4:157).

If there’s a discrepancy between the Quran and the Jewish or Christian story which it reshapes, Muslims will claim that the Quran, being authored by God, has the story right, whereas the Jewish or Christian versions, though appearing earlier historically, must be incorrect if they diverge from the Quran (much as fundamentalist Jews and Christians deny that the yarn about Noah’s Ark was adapted from the earlier Sumerian version of the Flood). However, if you compare the different versions, it often becomes clear that the Quran is giving a garbled version of an earlier Jewish or Christian story.

Is the Standard Story True?

Many western writers, including Christians, Jews, and atheists, have accepted the standard story of the life of Muhammad as historical fact. It has been repeatedly stated that whereas the origins of Christianity are murky, those of Islam are historically attested.

A typical example is Karen Armstrong, in her popular narrative account of the development of the idea of God, The History of God. Armstrong skates over the life of Jesus with expressions of misgiving. Though she apparently believes more of the gospels than I do, she does not bother to summarize what they say, but emphasizes—quite correctly—how very little is really known about the life of Jesus. But when she comes to Muhammad, she tells the story of his life, with affection and gusto, citing numerous detailed incidents as unqualified fact. Perhaps this might be justified because most of her readers are more familiar with the traditional life of Jesus than with the traditional life of Muhammad. But the innocent reader might be forgiven for assuming that there is some contemporary corroboration for this tale, that, for instance, there are written records from Mecca or Medina from the time of Muhammad, or at least within a few generations. But there’s absolutely none.

Whereas the New Testament gives us an accurate, if spotty and selective, picture of what some groups of Christians believed from between twenty and one hundred years after the traditional date for the death of Christ, we can only speculate as to what Muslims believed twenty or a hundred years after the traditional date for the death of Muhammad. One significant difference between the origins of Christianity and those of Islam is that the Christian canon was substantially developed before Christianity attained state power, whereas the Islamic canon was developed after Islam had attained state power. We must therefore expect it to be more ruthlessly shaped in the interests of a ruling class.

The earliest surviving account of the life of Muhammad is by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834 C.E., 202 years after the standard date for the death of Muhammad. Ibn Hisham’s biography incorporates edited material from an earlier biography, now lost, by Ibn Ishaq, written around 750. So we may charitably say we have access to an account of Muhammad’s life from 118 years after the date given by legend for his death. None of the dates of events in Muhammad’s life were given by Ibn Ishaq—they are all later elaborations.

Prior to modern times, it was customary to associate traditional sayings with an outstanding teacher or leader of the past. All kinds of sayings would be ascribed to some great figure, because this was the conventional way of thinking. At some point, a scribe would commit these sayings to writing, and this would reinforce the impression that there was a document ‘written’ by such and such an illustrious personage. The same applies to large-scale works, put together by the successive efforts of long-forgotten scribes. The Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh) was attributed to Moses—even though it includes an account of the death of Moses and of events that happened later. The Analects attributed to Confucius is now thought by scholars to be a product of successive accretions over centuries, not the work of a single author.⁶⁴ The Daodejing, the fundamental scripture of Daoism, was for long attributed to the individual Laozi, but is now known to have been built up by additions over centuries—it has been called an ‘ancient hypertext’.⁶⁵ The Old Testament book of Psalms became attributed to the legendary King David, though these songs were most likely written much later, during the Babylonian exile, by several different poets. Another example is Mark, which bears the marks of its origin as a collection of sayings, probably originating from several different sources.

Even in our day, when printed and electronic records abound, it’s very common to ascribe traditional sayings to famous figures who were not in fact responsible for them. Every few years some writer makes a splash by producing an article, or even a book, ‘revealing’ what scholars already know: that familiar quotations frequently imputed to famous people were not in fact uttered by those people.⁶⁶

Muslim tradition depicts the Quran as something that was set on the death of Muhammad. Only its writing down and placing in a specific order came later. But this seems to be incorrect. Variant readings survived for centuries, though Muslims often had the conscious aim of trying to achieve a single canon. It’s possible that what became the Quran was standardized only centuries after the supposed time of Muhammad, and the life of Muhammad was also assembled centuries later, from the sira, or scraps of tradition about Muhammad. Scholarly opinions differ on whether the sira were largely generated to explain the Quran, or whether they genuinely do give us independent information about Muhammad.

The most radical critic of the Quran was the brilliant scholar John Wansbrough, who argued that the Quran did not exist as a stable canon for at least two centuries after the death of Muhammad, and that the sources for the Quran came not from Arabia but from Syria and Iraq. The writings of Michael Cook and Patricia Crone are not quite as radical as Wansbrough’s, but similarly give us an Arab military expansion which concocted Islam instead of resulting from it. In opposition to these theories, an important recent book by Fred M. Donner takes the arguments of Wansbrough, Crone, and Cook seriously, but argues for an early dating of the material which became embodied in the Quran.

The scholarly debate over the next few decades may make some progress in resolving these issues. Atheists shouldn’t assume that the most radical theories of origin are always best. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of Christianity often tended to suppose that the New Testament consists largely of fourth-century forgeries. We now know that parts of it were written as early as the 50s C.E., while most of it is either very late first-century or early second-century. Quranic criticism may possibly take a similar course, though in this case there are far fewer relevant documents to be found, so there may always be greater uncertainty.