Of the Qran and its stylistic resources: deconstructing the persuasiveness Draft

I am sorry. I seem not to have a clear idea of what I am looking for, precisely. Let me see... When you hear a political speech, it is usually easy to deconstruct all the resources used? The buzzwords. The appeals to emotion, tradition, ridicule. The syntactical construction, alliteration, anaphores. Rythm, pauses. Specific ways the phrases are constructed to transmit a precise feeling. Applause Lights. All those tools... Now, the Qran was written fourteen centuries ago. Surely its rethorical structure can be broken piecemeal and reduced to its elementary components. We live in a reductionist universe, don't we?

The problem is, I am not familiar with a specific, systematic method of doing this properly and rigoursly, without letting my emotions get in the way. It's not been much time since I relinquished my old beliefs, and I get really emotional and bothered and confused when reading this stuff again. I don't like feeling that way. I want to tidy my mind till I feel I have understood the Islam phenomenon utterly and completely. I want to Dissolve The Question.

When I am confronted with a religious apologist I don't want to only be able to say: "You are wrong".

I want to be able to say "You have tried to manipulate me into believing your stuff this way and that way. Your own beliefs stem from this and that emotion, common human mistake, bias, fallacy, mechanism, and those beliefs influence your actions this and that way."

I know most people here are more familiar with Bible and Torah analysis, but I thought perhaps some of you could direct me to something that may help me understand what powers my own religion's texts, how they work on people's minds, which would help me in Raising The Sanity Waterline if it comes to that.

^ I'm sorry, I have only just finished reading the How To Actually Change your mind sequence, and I am still currently unable to understand this post. Could you please say it a bit less technically for my convenience?.

It's Muhammad, not Mahmoud :(. Even if I'm now an atheist, I still think he was a pretty cool guy, eh brought peace and social justice and considerable progress in gender equality for the time (women were upgraded from "cattle"/"comodity" to "eternal minors under tutelage", which from their perspective must have been pretty awesome) and doesn't afraid of nothing.

And yes, as for your question, Richard is right on the money, save for one detail.

I think the standard answer to this is that the text has been transmitted exactly, down to the last jot and tittle. In fact, the vowel marks of written Arabic were developed in order to make this possible. (The same is true of Hebrew and the Torah.) One can then ask whether the interpretation of this exact text has changed, to which the standard answer is no, for the last thousand years no new interpretation has been allowed (the so-called "closing of the gate of ijtihad"). In modern times, some Muslims are questioning this, but I don't think they're making much progress.

Think of Frank Miller (who once knew how to write awesomely), only with even more repetition and much less whores. Which isn't much like Frank Miller now that I think of it.

That's a very impressive Dissimile. ;)

No, but now that you mention it, this is hilarious. I shall bring it up next time I meet some compatriots. However, in Morocco (and perhaps other Arab countries' defence), I will say that our society has been heavily molded by the imperialism-serving police states that appointed themselves our rulers. In Morocco everyone spies on everybody, and people are such gossips they might give you intel about their neighbours for free, just because. Everyone is corrupt, everyone is compromised, because otherwise there is no way to get anything done: if you want to live without ever bribing anyone you might as well go live in a cave, because even in a monastery you will need to bribe someone for some reason. Society and status revolve around money and crass materialism and small-minded hedonism AND bigotry AND religious puritanism. Hypocrisy and doublethink run rampant, and family men who pray regularly and berate you for smoking will go once a month to the red district to completely whore themselves up. The families I know that are genuinely, observantly, rigorously Muslim can be counted on the phalanges of one finger, and they tend to be gentle, compromising people who do not overlap at all with The Fundamentalist.

In the grim darkness of present Morocco, there is no justice, there is no freedom, there is only social warfare, and the laughter of thirsting pimps.

Now to lighten the mood, read the entire post in your hammiest voice. Don't worry, it's not nearly as GRIMDARK as it would seem. Humans... can get used to anything. But I am sure we could use some applied rationalism in sorting this mental mess out :)

BTW, a cookie to whoever acknowledges the GRIMDARK reference.

LW isn't really the place to discuss the relative merits of different religions, so I don't want to prolong this.

I wasn't aware that that was the way you saw this discussion. Why compare things that are equally false? But I understand that, from your perspective, the text is boringly monotonous. I had similar problems when reading the Bible. All those names one after the other, with no introduction, no context, no Character Establishing Moments, nothing... Well, at least you have just demonstrated that there is something strongly subjective about the appeal and power of the Qran. Then again, to return to the Obama example, his speeches will probably appeal and move much more the choir he is preaching to rather than his detractors, no matter how well done they are.

When you read Allah Knows All and variations, you do not feel the scrutiny of the LORD looking upon your shoulders, policing all your thoughts, knowing your decisions before yourself. It's like Big Brother Is Watching, except on a Cosmic Horror scale. And Big Brother loves you and is just and fair and merciful. My God a pattern for a Qran/1984/TheMatrix/CtuthluMythos crossover parody is forming in my mind. Now that would be an attack against Islam (and theism in general). AND it could be hilarious.

By the way

They consider it a favor to you that they have accepted Islam. Say, "Do not consider your Islam a favor to me. Rather, Allah has conferred favor upon you that He has guided you to the faith, if you should be truthful."

I think I have heard something similar over here

Do not consider you are giving others a favour by accepting their arguments. The favour is to yourself. (paraphrased)

wonder if there are statistics on the number of people, worldwide, voluntarily converting to or from the various faiths (plus atheism)?

That would mean officially classifying citizens according to religion, which can lead to discrimination. No secular state would ever dream of doing such a thing.