@ ALPHA, AND WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS?
During my investigative phase I found that a lot of people were involved in the compilation and the construction of the Qur’an. Unknown to the vast majority of Muslims, and buried deep inside the Qur’an, Ahadith and Sirah there are copious evidence to reject, out of hand, the contention that the Qur’an is the creation of Allah. Making Allah the author of the Quran, I think, is the prime lie perpetrated on mankind for more than a millennium. We can, with certainty, say that it was not even Muhammad alone who authored the Qur’an.In fact, the major part of the Qur’an was actually either composed by or inspired and written by a few other individuals. Most notable among them were:



Imrul Qays—an ancient poet of Arabia who died a few decades before Muhammad’s birth

Zayd b. Amr b. Naufal—an ‘apostate’ of his time who preached and propagated Hanifism

Labid—another poet

Hasan b. Thabit—the official poet of Muhammad

Salman, the Persian—Muhammad’s confidante’ and an advisor

Bahira—a Nestoraian Christian monk of the Syrian church

Jabr—a Christian neighbour of Muhammad

Ibn Qumta—a Christian slave

Khadijah—Muhammad’s first wife

Waraqa—Khadijah’s cousin brother

Ubay b. Ka’b—Muhammad’s secretary and a Qur’an scribe

Muhammad himself



There were other parties involved too. They were:



The Sabeans

Aisha—Muhammad’s child bride

Abdallah b. Salam b. al-Harith—a Jewish convert to Islam

Mukhyariq—a Rabbi and another Jewish convert to Islam



Of course, my list of the possible authors of the Qur’an is not exhaustive. There may be many other parties involved that I might not have even heard of. But for a concise discussion the above list should be ample enough, I guess. In this article I have simply enumerated the contribution of the above sources in the authorship of the Qur’an.



Now, to understand the Qur’an and its writer/s, we must, first of all, recognise the background of Muhammad, purportedly the ultimate and the best creation of Allah.

http://mukto-mona.net/Ar.../kasem/quran_origin.htm

RESEARCH....RESEARCH....RESEARCH.....

http://jacksonsnyder.com...ticles%202002/quran.htm

By Alexander Stille

The New York Times

Saturday, March 2, 2002

To Muslims, the Quran is the very word of God, who spoke through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad: "This book is not to be doubted," the Quran declares unequivocally at its beginning. Scholars and writers in Islamic countries who have ignored that warning have found themselves the target of death threats and violence. Yet a handful of experts have been quietly investigating the origins of the Quran, offering radically new theories about the text's meaning and the rise of Islam.

Christoph Luxenberg, a scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany, argues that the Quran has been misread for centuries. His work, based on the earliest copies of the Quran, maintains that parts of Islam's holy book are derived from pre-existing Christian Aramaic texts that were misinterpreted by later Islamic scholars who prepared the editions of the Quran read today. So, for example, the virgins who are supposedly awaiting Islamic martyrs in paradise are in reality "white raisins" of crystal clarity rather than fair maidens.

Christoph Luxenberg, however, is a pseudonym, and his scholarly tome "The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Quran" had trouble finding a publisher, although it is considered a major new work by several leading scholars in the field.

The caution isn't surprising. Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" prompted death threats because it appeared to mock Muhammad. Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed because one of his books was thought to be irreligious. And when the Palestinian scholar Suliman Bashear argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the prophet, he was thrown from a second-story window by his students at the University of Nablus.

While scriptural interpretation might seem like a remote and innocuous activity, close textual study of Jewish and Christian scripture played no small role in loosening the church's domination on the intellectual and cultural life of Europe.

"The Muslims have the benefit of hindsight of the European experience, and they know very well that once you start questioning the holy scriptures, you don't know where it will stop," said one scholar at an American university who asked not to be named.

The touchiness about questioning the Quran predates the latest rise of militancy. As late as 1977, John Wansbrough of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London wrote that subjecting the Quran to "analysis by the instruments and techniques of biblical criticism is virtually unknown."

Wansbrough insisted that the text of the Quran appeared to be a composite of different voices or texts compiled over dozens if not hundreds of years. After all, scholars agree that there is no evidence of the Quran until 691 -- 59 years after Muhammad's death -- when the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem was built, carrying several Quranic inscriptions. These inscriptions differ to some degree from the version of the Quran that has been handed down, suggesting, scholars say, that the Quran might have still been evolving in the last decade of the seventh century. Moreover, much of what we know as Islam -- the lives and sayings of the Prophet -- is based on texts from between 130 and 300 years after Muhammad's death. Scholars such as Luxenberg have returned to the earliest known copies of the Quran to grasp what they suggest about the document's origins and composition.

For example, the famous passage about the virgins is based on the word "hur," an adjective in the feminine plural meaning simply "white." Islamic tradition insists the term hur stands for "houri," which means virgin, but Luxenberg says this is a forced misreading of the text.

In both ancient Aramaic and in at least one respected dictionary of early Arabic, hur means "white raisin," a prized delicacy in the ancient Near East.

Several new volumes of revisionist scholarship, "The Origins of the Quran" and "The Quest for the Historical Muhammad," have been edited by a former Muslim who writes under the pen name Ibn Warraq. Warraq, who leads a group called the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, makes no bones about having a political agenda. "Biblical scholarship has made people less dogmatic, more open," he said, "and I hope that happens to Muslim society as well."

But many Muslims, including broad-minded liberal scholars of Islam, find the tone and claims of revisionism offensive.

"I think the broader implications of some of the revisionist scholarship is to say that the Quran is not an authentic book, that it was fabricated 150 years later," says Ebrahim Moosa, a Duke University religious studies professor and a Muslim cleric.

This article delves into the very authorship of the Holy Qur’an—a new way of looking at the Holy Qur’an. An enquiry is made using logical reasoning and historical references on the authorship of the Qur’an. Thus this methodology is totally opposed to the blind believers who accept the authenticity of the Qur’an unquestionably. By analysing, dissecting and carefully interpreting the contents of the Qur’an, the Ahadith, Sirah (Muhammad’s biography) the author has identified several parties who had undoubtedly contributed to the composition of the Qur’anic verses. It was not Allah who wrote the Qur’an; it was not even Muhammad alone who did this either. The Qur’an is not the creation of a single entity or a single person. There were several parties involved in the composition, scribing, amending, inserting and deleting the Qur’anic verses. The most important personalities involved in the creation of the Qur’an were: Imrul Qays, Zayd b. Amr, Hasan b. Thabit, Salman, Bahira, ibn Qumta, Waraqa and Ubayy b. Ka’b. Muhammad himself was involved in the make-up of a limited number of verses, but the most influential person who motivated Muhammad in the invention of Islam and the opus of the Qur’an was, perhaps, Zayd b. Amr, who preached ‘Hanifism’. Muhammad later metamorphosed Zayd’s ‘Hanifism’ into Islam. Therefore, the assertion that Islam is not a new religion stands to be true. However, the important finding is that the Qur’an is definitely not the words of Allah—it is a human-made scripture which Muhammad simply passed up as Allah’s final words to mankind. Another important aspect of this essay is that among the ancient religions that the writers of the Qur’an incorporated in it, perhaps the practices of the Sabeans is crucial. In fact, the rituals of 5 prayers and the 30 days fasting were actually adapted from the Sabeans. Qur’an, thus, is a compilation of various religious books that existed during Muhammad’s time. Muhammad, not Allah, simply adopted, picked and chose from various sources and created the Qur’an. While many parties contributed to the Qur’an, Muhammad became its chief editor—to say it plainly.

I doubt mohammeds parents were pagans from the little knowledge i have.

The arabs are descedants of the hunter, Ishmael who was brother to Jacob and their father Isaac.

I bet they knew of God most probably, until 622 AD or somewhere thereafter when Islam was born and Jihad started with mohammed as the commander and the prophet...Am i right????

thanks for the correction but Ishmael is the important object here...