Gabriel Said Reynolds

We ask such questions as, does God speak Arabic? How can God, a timeless being, express himself in a human language created within time by mortal finite beings such as ourselves? Or does God's speech transcend language and Any attempt to put it into a human language, whether Arabic or Estonian or Basque, is inevitably some sort of transmutation or translation.

This interview in some ways is a companion interview to an earlier interview on our channel, which you've probably seen with Gabriel Said Reynolds.

That was on the authorship of the Quran.

This is a more searching, theologically-minded exploration of the origins of the Qur'an and some of the questions this throws up.

Compared to that Gabriel Said Reynolds interview, which comes from, one could say, the skeptical or the non-Muslim perspective in which it is assumed that the Qur'an has an author who is not God, as a human author ramon is a believer and we come from perhaps not a traditionalist islamic perspective but an islamic perspective nonetheless so we take the quran as our basis as the word of god what does that mean within the paradigm that jack has already mentioned that of a sort of divine language or divine essence into human language but also into more practical, specific questions, not only why Arabic, but what kind of Arabic.

In the Quran, there is famously a challenge to produce a surah like it.

What exactly does that challenge mean? Does it mean to write something of a Quranic poetry that could be mistaken for a real surah? Or is there a more meaningful, deeper rationale to that challenge that has not been met?

What about guardian angels? What about guardian angels? Man, I wish I would have had time to go over that and pick Dr.

Gabriel Said Reynolds' mind on that, to pick his brilliant brain.

Unfortunately, time ran out for him and he had to go, but we'll be definitely bringing him on again in the future.

For people that are wondering...

That ain't new at all.

That is likely, um, either 1800s or early 1900s in terms of the scholarship that I've looked into.

Uh, I've picked even Dr. Gabriel Said Reynolds mind on this.

That is not new.

People from my time in college who have been very influential, Gary Anderson, who has done a lot on the Adam books.

Gabriel Reynolds, who kind of sparked interest in Quranic studies.

Philip Alexander at Manchester, who also knows a lot about Pirke De-Rabbe Eli'ezer, was a big supporter.

Had a lot of fruitful exchanges with him and his student, Katharina Keim, who published the major monograph about Pirke De-Rabbe Eli'ezer before mine.

The part of the Masjid al-Haram immediately surrounding the Kaaba is called the Mataf, literally the Place of Tawaf.

Tawaf is a key part of the Hajj pilgrimage, ritually walking around the Kaaba counterclockwise seven times, though religious studies scholars like to use the fancy term circumambulation, which just means walking around.

Pilgrims must perform tawaf when they first enter the Masjid al-Haram to signal their intention to begin the Hajj.

They then perform it at least twice more during their pilgrimage, once before traveling to the area of Mina for the stoning of the devil, when pilgrims throw stones against a wall, and once as a farewell to end their Hajj.

One of the key features of the Kaaba is the black stone, embedded in a silver case attached directly to the eastern corner of the Kaaba.

Some scholars suspect that this black stone is a meteorite and trace it to a series of pre-Islamic Arabian shrines.

Muslim tradition, however, connects it to Adam and Eve.

In these accounts, the stone fell from heaven to help them find one another as they were separated while being cast out of the Garden of Eden.

Nikolai Sinai says, The view that the Arabic names Israel and Ishmael reflect some version of the Christian Aramaic, such as Syriac, as do other biblical proper names in the Quran, such as Fir'an, Pharaoh.

Gabriel Reynolds says the term Pharaoh is a name, not title, of the Egyptian ruler in the time of Moses, who considers himself a god, but meets his demise.

Joseph Horowitz says, In the same surah, verse 17 introduces us for the first time to a figure from biblical history, Pharaon, by his actual name.

In an AMA on Reddit, the scholar Sean Anthony agreed Pharaoh seems to be a personal name.