It's like all those fundamentalists that think Jeezus is returning next Tuesday.
It is hard to determine what is or what is not in agreement with the Koran, because the Koran is a horrible, disorganized mishmash.
It is organized like this: it is written in poetic stanzas, beginning with the shortest and ending with the longest. There is no coherence between this verse and the next or the preceding verses.
Take any novel, put it in verse,and then arrange it with the shortest chapters first and the longest ones last.
Then try to make sense of it. That is rather what reading the Koran is like, except at the beginning of each verse there is this: In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
It was proclaimed a holy book when 98% of Muslims were totally illiterate, so basically, it was sort of like magic to them. Oooooh! Aaaaaah! Hocus Pocus and abracadabra. It is ever so helpful to get children toemorize the Koran in a language they do not and will not ever actually speak. O whaa Ta Nass Siam! Pas de la Rhone que nous! In the name of the most holy of Gringo saints, San Avabeechi!
Yearning a Perfect World by reading about how it is coming has been, the last three thousand years or so, the chief obstacle to perfecting the world we have. Religion has more often been the main obstacle to progress. Good decisions come from experience -- and experience comes from decisions we make that turned out to be bad ones. The key to progress is pragmatism.
Essentially, Islam promotes an unchanging, static society. Mohammad cannot be drawn or sculpted lest someone worship him, but the only fit rulers of the world are those descended from Mohammad's house, the Quireshis. Therefore, elections are bogus, any sort of true meritocracy is bogus, and the whole mess is kept in line by requiring the faithful to pray five times a day. Which is essentially a form of brainwashing oneself. Once my college hired a short, chubby Pakistani accounting teacher, whose name was Mohammad Queraysh. We were talking about names at lunch one day he pointed out that his name meant that he was a descendent of Mohammad. He seems surprised when no one said, WOW! Like all accounting teachers, the administration drafted him to help them with their bookkeeping, and like all those that had come before and after him, he figured out that he was hugely overpaid when he was hired compared with the rest of the faculty, and that he would never see a raise. So he left.
Christianity does something similar. I have heard people say with a perfectly straight face, that all of the problems of the world can be solved by reading the Bible. To which I say, does the Bible tell me not to grab the white wire, the black wire of the green wire? Which of these here mushrooms are safe to eat?
The most fervent believers of absolute faith in both the Bible and the Koran are those who have only read tiny parts of it, or most likely, have had tiny passages read to them. That is why they call it "The Great Story Ever Told": anyone who read the whole thing can easily see that it is not a story, it is a collection of stories, many lacking in greatness, some just mishmashes and rantings of old farts warning of impending disasters for walking on their lawns.
