I've heard this over a lot of forums and even from some non Muslim friends: why don't you remove some texts from Quran because they seem outdated, obsolete, and I even heard "bloody" as a comment? My reaction would be the same every time I heard or read something like that: FLABBERGASTED! I don't get how any human being can think about replacing divine words by ones written by mortals? How could they even think of omitting something that is divine in the first place? It's like "let's see how the world is like without the sun or the moon or PHYSICS!"
Now, I am perfectly aware of the fact that non Muslims believe that Quran is not divine text, so I've been thinking of ways to get them to understand how their "requests" are not possible. First, when it comes to one of the most controversial verses, the one that allows the beating of wives, the Sunna, which, if we consider the Quran to be the textbook of Islam, is the workbook or the manual on how to "act" according to Islam, has demonstrated that it is like a tap on the hand using something resembling a pencil, nothing major, no brutality involved, and by all means no disrespect or belittling of the woman. Since pain has always been known as a behavioral stimulus to the extent that there is a well known exercise to snap a rubber band on one’s wrist as stimulus for the brain to stop doing or thinking about something negative. Since excessive pain has been known to have negative side effects, wouldn't God know THAT?! On the other hand, if we disregard the Sunna for a second, and look at Quran only, how many other texts opposed to that one that actually promote mercy and compassion? So if we assume the man that beats his wife is using Quran as his only reference, then he is not doing by it because he's using it selectively by disregarding the mercy texts which outweigh that one single verse. What he is doing seems very similar to those promoting the removal of some verses because they are using something that is divine selectively, how wrong is that?!
I will not go into each "controversial" verse and explain it, I don't need to. I'm sure if someone wants to research the verse instead of lashing out, they'd find very sound explanations by people who are far more qualified than I am to respond to them. I want to tackle however the concept of time in a divine sense. People say Quran is obsolete and outdated, that it was meant for a certain period of time which was the time of the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him. As a side note, I don’t understand why this is not being said about the Torah, but this not the issue. Throughout time, there have been prophets and messengers of God sent to people. Those prophets were human, their time on earth was limited, whether it was 900 years like Noah for example, or 30 like Jesus, they were sent for a limited time on earth. Even Muhammad, being a human, lived for 63 years only, 23 of which were the actual time he spent spreading the word of God through Islam. God sent Islam through Muhammad. Quran is a series of verses, words, a book. The words did not die with Muhammad, Islam did not die with Muhammad, they kept on living. And wouldn't God, the creator of time as we know it, KNOW that? So would the "Entity" that created time, create a book that would survive through 1500 years (up till now) and not know that it would become obsolete? Now that sounds like a bad developer creating a software that works for a specific version of an operating system and forgetting how the word moves on ?(apologizing for the software analogy already). That mentality would make sense if we were talking about a human, a mortal, not a god, and definitely not THE GOD who created the world in 6 days. So God must have known that times would change and that the book would live on. God, being the creator of everything and who knows all, who, since He has created time, probably understands how it works better than we mere mortals do, would probably know beyond doubt how time would progress, and how technology would be so and so. If you were someone who created something such as time, wouldn't you, as a human with a limited brain such as ours, consider building a time machine at least? Or maybe something to view how time progresses? Or maybe even have it all planned out on the outside and have humans see only one dimension of it (like the tail of an elephant which seems like a rope) without being able to view the entire thing and how it functions? Those are just some thoughts coming from a limited mortal mind of someone who is neither philosopher nor quantum scientist.
I mean, how many years of experience do we actually have in quantum science in the first place to go into a debate about time in the divine sense?! From an engineering point of view, you can't use a few lines of code and ask them to work alone without the rest of the code to have it actually work, this goes for machines, chemical formulae, and cooking recipes, so why are we asking to apply that on Islam as well?
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