Page 68 - World Religions I - Islam

and 15 times taller than the average man - as tall as a ten-story building! What was he
supposed to do up there? Foraging for food or building a shelter would have been practically
impossible. There is no archeological evidence (bones, tools, weapons, artwork, remains of
buildings) to support such a statement. Furthermore, according to biologists such a size would
be a physical impossibility. Adam would have weighed an astonishing 270 tons (246,375 kg)!
Neither his skeletal nor circulatory system would be able to handle the load.
 Adam is mentioned in the Qur'an by name 25 times.
o Noah (Nuh)
 Noah is counted amongst the earliest prophets sent by God to mankind.
 Noah's mission was to preach the message of God to his people, both verbally and by example,
warning them of the punishment they would face if they did not mend their ignorant ways.29
o The people continually rejected Noah's message, even to the point where Noah admits that his
preaching only made his people disbelieve further.30
o God eventually revealed that no one would believe the message aside from those who had
already submitted to God.31
 Because of the people's unbelief, God promises to send a destructive flood and commands Noah to
build an ark which would save him and the believers from death.32
 When the flood arrived, Noah and most his family, along with the believers and two of each kind of
animal, boarded the ark.33 Exegesis states that the believers in the Ark numbered 80: 40 men and
40 women. The bones of Adam were placed in the middle of the Ark to separate the men from the
women. The Qur'an uses this example to emphasize that everyone is accountable for themselves on
the Day of Judgement, and that relations will not be of aid when judgement takes place.
o One of Noah's sons remained with the unbelievers and perished in the flood.34
o Noah's wife is recorded in Qur'an as being an evil woman who eventually ended up in hell, but she
was saved from the flood along with the believers for Noah's sake.35
o The ark came to rest on Mount Judi. 36
 Noah is mentioned in the Qur'an by name 43 times, and an entire Surah of the Qur'an is named after
him.
o Abraham (Ibrahim)
 Abraham is recognized as a prophet and apostle of God and patriarch of many peoples.
 Abraham was appointed by God to eliminate idolatry and to convey the message of Islam to the
people of his day.
o Abraham tried to convince his father (known as Azar in the Qur'an) to follow the ways of Islam,
but his father became hostile towards him.
o Abraham prayed for his father to be forgiven, but later dissociated himself from his father
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after it became clear that he would remain an enemy of God.38
o At one point after destroying most of the idols of the people around him, they in their
indignation attempted to burn Abraham alive. But God cause the fire to be cool and safe and he
survived unscathed.39 This account is a plagiarized fable that arose in the Talmud around the
1st century AD as a result of a mistranslation of Genesis 15 by the Jewish rabbi Jonathan Ben
Uziel. As he was translating the passage into Aramaic, Uziel, who was not familiar with "Ur" of
the Chaldeans being a specific city, mistranslated the word using Hebrew ("fire") instead of
Babylonian. This story was quite popular in Arabia during the time of Muhammad among the
Jews living there. So did Muhammad get his information from God, or from the people around
him? Later commentaries attempt to re-interpret the verse by claiming that the fire referred to
the "fire of persecution" from which Abraham was saved as he left the Chaldeans.
 Muslims scholars believe that Abraham had many children, but that Ishmael and Isaac were the
only two who became prophets.

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