Letter to S H Nasr on his silence on Laleh Bakhtiar's Translation of the Holy Qur'an

To: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, University Professor, The George Washington University msirat@gwu.edu
From: Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Subject: Your silence when Laleh Bakhtiar is selling her ignorant translation of the Holy Qur'an by drawing association to your name is silent endorsement
Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 11:20 AM


Dear Dr. Nasr,
Assalaam Alekum,
The following letter was sent to Kazi Publications in Chicago, the distributors of Laleh Bakhtiar's translation of the Holy Qur'an titled The Sublime Quran. As you can glean in the letter, your evaluation of the translation is nowhere to be found. Your silence, and absence of challenge to the translation, is an endorsement by default in the mind of many people.
Therefore, I would like to request your public comment on her translation. As just an ordinary human being who has looked at the translation and found it not only wanting in fidelity to the original, but its author seemingly pursuing an agenda which by her own admission is to “bring reform to Islam”, what worldly considerations hold an expert back when the word of God perfected by the statement 5:3 of the Holy Qur'an and revered by 1.6 Billion Muslims, is targeted for "reform"? As you are well aware, that agenda is shared by Daniel Pipes, Bernard Lewis, and the late Samuel Huntington et. al., all circus clowns beating the Hegelian Dialectic "militant Islam" vs. "moderate Islam" to “bring reform to Islam”. The import of this shared message is deconstructed in my article: Hijacking the word 'Islam' for Mantra Creation.
Please review the following correspondence with Kazi Publishers and you will realize why your silence must be broken. When scholars of Islam remain silent, us poor plebeians have to take up their slack with limited or zero impact. As you are well aware, the world today bows before “experts” – even when they spew garbage. The Muslim condition today is the most deplorable of any time in history – our pulpits are today almost universally occupied by such “experts”. In that milieu, when genuine knowledgeable experts speak, their opinion carries far for people pay attention – just as they pay attention to useful idiots and mercenaries. When a genuine expert's name is used to draw associations and credibility to oneself, the expert's silence is aiding and abetting those who do so. And when such scholars also remain silent when the religion is being abused, they condemn themselves by their silence. The test of integrity is daily, constant, and al Furqan invites us to this test daily, constantly, by [inter alia] nahin anil munkar and amar bil maroof.
Most Sincerely,
Zahir Ebrahim
Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
California






Link fix November 11, 2016


Letter to S H Nasr on his silence on Laleh Bakhtiar's Translation of the Holy Qur'an By Zahir Ebrahim

Islam: Why is the Holy Qur'an so easy to hijack? TOC

 


Click to Download PDF: Hijacking The Holy Qur'an And Its Religion Islam 2015 Second Edition Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
“This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favour upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion.” (The Holy Qur'an, verse fragment from Surah Al-Maeda 5:3) This verse of completion and perfection implies that there is no room for addition or subtraction to the religion of Islam after “This day”, or the verse is falsified. What or when “This day” was, or what was the significance of events transpiring on “This day” that caused this verse to be revealed and inserted in what appears to be a random place, as a verse fragment of 5:3, is not stated in the Holy Qur'an. Indeed, many verses of great import are similarly contextless, or both open-ended as well as contextless, and therefore perennially ripe for self-interpretation. This makes possible a multiplicity of 'kosher' misinterpretations of the religion of Islam by the learned scholars imparting any meaning to the open-ended and contextless verses that suit their mental genius or their self-interest, interpreting individual verses in isolation to suit their socialized predisposition, but without altering the syntactic and overt structural composition of the text of the Holy Qur'an. This book, Hijacking The Holy Qur'an And Its Religion Islam, illustrates how much of the plurality of interpretations is in fact enabled by the Holy Qur'an itself – by design! (Click bookcover to download PDF, http://tinyurl.com/Book-Hijacking-Islam-2ed-2015 )

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Last Updated April 17, 2015 1538
Links fix November 4, 2016


TOC Islam: Why is the Holy Qur'an so easy to hijack? Zahir Ebrahim 10/10