The Simple Religion

[Faith-Hope_Love]

Hi Ibrahim

Thanks for the prompt reply.

I am comfortable enough in arabic to read and comprehend, but I am desperately hopeless at composition (to join the arabic discussion) let alone the more difficult task of translation, so there's no way I can faithfully translate the arabic discussion into this thread and be of help to you.

The Joker's thread of argument seems to be as follows.

1. god has 99 names in islam
2. they may sound like attributes but they're not attributes (he gives an example, a man called Karim need not necessarily be a generous (karim) person)
3. therefore, these are not attributes of a god, but 99 gods (this is a rather interesting point to which I will come to later)
4. finally, the evidence that the joker produces that this is indeed how practicing muslims think of their god, is that they name people in this way (abdallah, abdelfattah,abdelkarim etc...)

On the first point, islam's god indeed has the much celebrated 99 names, but it's not at all clear from this fact alone that there are 99 islamic gods, this requires some more evidence, and as I mentioned earlier, the judaeo-christian god has a lot of attributes and names as well, but this does not by itself imply pantheism.

On the second point, the islamic names for god may or may not accurately depict the truth (he may be called karim, but is not actually a 'karim' individual) is purely a matter of faith, not logic.

On the third point, which is that the 99 names are not merely names of god but an aggregation of all the pre-islamic arab conceptions of god, the point is largely valid historically.

At a certain point in history arabs were feeling left out, sensing that god had spoken to the christians and the jews and gave them divine revelations, but left the arabs out. In response, it was decided that muhammad was going to have some revelations of his own, and that any arab who could not identify culturally with christians or jews could at last have their very own words and prophecies from god.

This fatuous and self centred argument is written in history, from the way that the koran was haphazardly plagiarised from snippets of many different religions, to the way that the early muslims took it upon themselves to spread the faith by the sword, to the way that they insist until this day that no true koran can be written in any other language but arabic.

On the fourth point, which is that muslims 'prove' that there are 99 gods by naming their children after the 99 names I have to protest this in two ways.

First, it is again illogical to jump from 99 attributes of god, to 99 gods.

Second, it is unfair and it is not something that you would like to have done to you as a copt. There are plenty of copts with names such as abdelmalek, abdelnour, abdelmassih, abdel.etcetera

To make the leap between multiple names of god and multiple gods in islam, but to completely ignore this in coptic tradition is, just on the face of it, stupid.