Re: WC 150K Post Challenge - You Ready?!
Ideology and reality are often at odds with each other. That goes for both religion and politics.
I don't know enough to comment on Islam. From what little I know some of it seems like a copy over from the other two (Christian and Jewish) with some extra stuff thrown in. Since it's technically a Abrahamic Religion. The other bit I've heard (not sure if true) is that it was created to build unity and structure within the army at the time. (if you think about it, it makes sense) The Quran, like all religious books, should be seen as corrupted, as far as I'm concerned as it's been modified to suit whoever was in power.
From what I've heard from some scholars is that studying Islam objectively is difficult due to some of it's teachings and it's followers. I think some Muslims fear Islam becoming watered down like Christianity. Of course, like Christianity, there's many flavours of Islam... so it's already there in a way. You have many variations, from the extreme to the more relaxed.
Such is religion. I have hopes, though not in my life time, that one day these religions will fade and become the myths of tomorrow.
You weren't wrong in any of those except for the military part, never heard of that really. In the beginning there were very few followers, not to mention having a whole army.
Copy, well kind of. True. Islam recognizes other prophets as well, not just Muhammed. So as much is Quran our holy book, so is Bible, at least the parts of it, you know how it goes. Same goes Judaism. Islam takes many things from those two religions, but has so much of it's own stuff. Not to mention that the religion itself is a bit stricter.
About the corrupted book, it's much more complicated than you may think. At first only small parts were written, most of the book was carried by persons named Hazif. Basically, those are the people that know the whole Quran by mind, every single word. Now, as you may guess, some those folks forgot few words, few sentences, some of them remembered them differently and so on. So what they did was gathered those who they could trust the most (those who were highly unlikely to forget stuff, but still), and then they compiled the Quran as we know today. Other possible versions have been also gathered and burned. So if you count from then on, it's unchanged.
And yes, there's so much variations and crap (yes, literal crap) in there that it would take just too long to explain. Even I don't know much about it.