The word martyr is first encountered in the 3rd surah, The Family of ‘Imran. Using only verses from this surah, I drafted a A Pitch for Martyrs (suicide bombers) that an Al-Qaeda or a Taliban cleric might make  to a receptive audience of young men. It is scary in its implications!

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Arabs used to add a thirteenth month, at pre-defined intervals, to resynchronize Allah’s Calendar with the passing of the seasons. Allah saw this as an attempt by the unbelievers to screw with his Sacred Months, and forbade it. They could have adopted the solar calendar but Allah said that the new moon was a better yardstick.

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The Battle of Badr, the most famous battle in the Koran, where men and angels fought side by side, may well become the most famous and consequential battle in all of human history.

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Beauty and the Bounties Surah 55, The All Compassionate, is often referred to as "The Beauty of the Qur'an". Is this beauty is in the eye of the believer?

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Cattle are mentioned more often in the Koran, usually in conjunction with something Allah has done for men, than any other animal, even the camel. It is obvious that Allah is extremely proud, if not mesmerized by this four-legged versatile creation of His.

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Alexander the Great built the gates that keep Gog and Magog contained. But only until Judgement Day.

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Would it interest you to know that there is a difference between Grave Sins and Evil Deeds; that you can do evil things and still be allowed into Paradise?

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In the Bible, the woman who tries to seduce Joseph, son of Jacob, is the wife of Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh and the captain of the guard; in the Koran she is the wife of the governor. In the Bible, it’s about cows and wheat; in the Koran, it’s about cows and corn. Throw in some Abbot and Costello "Whose on first?" type of confusion and you have Joseph, the Governor’s Wife and the Cupbearer

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The people wanted a Koran delivered in the same spectacular fashion that Moses delivered the Commandments before they believed. Allah had to reassure His Messenger that he was still the Greatest even if if He did not do for him what He did for Moses. Why in Moses vs. Muhammad.

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Karoon, of Moses vs. Karoon a.k.a. Korah, and his household were suffocated under tons of sand because he flaunted his wealth. Does having excessive wealth by Allah’s standards make you an immediate target of His Wrath and that of His followers? Was it justification for 9/11.

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The Samaritans emerged as “an ethnic and religious community distinct from other Levant peoples… after the Assyrian conquest of the Israelite Kingdom of Israel in approximately 721 BCE” (Wiki) at least two thousand years after Moses. The idea that a Samaritan, and a bad one at that, would be part of the Hebrew exodus out of Egypt is not realistic, to say the least. Moses vs. the Bad Samaritan

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Robert Redeker, a philosophy teacher writing in Le Figaro in 2006, described the Koran “as a book of incredible violence”. In Mughirah - Enemy of the Prophet, al-Mughirah’s reaction to hearing the Prophet recite revelations from the Koran is much more visceral.

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The Night Vigil  is mostly about a night with the Prophet waiting for, and receiving revelations, including a revelation that he may not have been alone waiting for Gabriel to appear with the latest batch of instructions from Heaven.

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Allah reduced the status of adopted sons so as to allow His Messenger to satisfy an irresistible urge to mate with the wife of his adopted son. This would lead to the creation of what was, until then, almost unknown in the Arab world: male Orphans.

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The Pillars of Faith are not to be confused with the Five Pillars of Islam which are rituals that one who has Faith must perform.

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The Pillars of Islam are not to be confused with the Six Pillars of Faith which are the core tenets of Islam.

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Polygamy! Is Allah for or against? It is not that cut and dried.

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There were at least two attempts on the Prophet’s life during his time in Mecca. One rather disgusting attempt occurred about three years after he received the first communication from the Angel Gabriel. It was only the swift intervention of his daughter Rukaya that prevented God's Messenger from suffocating to death inside the stomach of a dead camel.

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“Away with…” is how Allah ends many of His stories about the civilizations He destroys on the flimsiest of pretences. In Salih and The Destruction of Thamud, He kills all the inhabitants of the city (except for Salih of course, and maybe some believers) because of an alleged injury done to a camel.

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Sparrows at War is another example of how pre-Islamic folktales may have found their way into the Koran to become a revealed truth.

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Antagonizers were people who talked behind the Prophet's back, and which again compelled Allah to intervene; not to tell His Messenger about these private conversations, but to warn The Antagonizers to cease and desist or face His Wrath. Go figure!

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Of all the strange stories told by Allah about the meeting between Moses and Pharaoh none is stranger than the one about The Hidden Believer at Pharaoh’s Court. Allah will use this variation of the story to, in effect, invite civil disobedience should your leaders listen to their own council instead of that of His Messengers, and why this is better for you.

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One thing the massacre of the remaining Jews of Medina made perfectly clear is that you had to choose a side; you could not remain neutral in the war between the believers and unbelievers of which the Arab civil war was the opening gambit.

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Of all the inhabitants of the Koran, jinns (Allah refers to them collectively as The Jinn) are the most fascinating. They are Allah’s most versatile and mischievous creation. They even have a chapter of the Koran named after them, surah 72, The Jinn. The caricature of the genie is probably based on this imaginative creation of Allah

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Once upon a time, Muslims and Jews prayed together facing in the direction of Jerusalem. In the Qibla Verses Allah explains why He decreed an about-face for the progeny of Ishmael.

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The Treaty of Hudaibiyah will allow the Prophet to complete the encirclement of Mecca and provide him with an excuse to march on the city.

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The palm tree, the olive tree, the lotus tree, the acacia, a "gourd tree" and perhaps the banana tree, are the only variety of trees found on earth which Allah actually mentions by name in the Koran; with palm being the most often mentioned, by a wide margin. But it's not a palm tree, as you will discover when reading Trees of the Earth, Heaven and Hell, which marks the farthest boundary of the seventh level of Paradise.

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Where Babies Come From. If clot means zygote, then Allah knows more about the inner workings of his two-legged creation then He lets on.

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Witches and Warlocks In the Prophet’s time, witches were thought to blow into knots to cast spells; a ritual that is confirmed by the Koran.

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You Are What You Eat! Vegetarians are not believers. Why would a God go hungry?

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Young Abraham the Idol Breaker The aversion to idols of the patriarch of Arabs and Jews goes way back.

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The Indian rope trick said to have been performed in and around India during the 19th century and reportedly witnessed by thousands involved an Indian magician throwing a rope to the sky, but the rope does not fall back to the ground, instead it mysteriously rises until the top of it disappears into thin air. Revelation 22:15 reminded me of this illusion. It may or may not have anything to do with Zoroastrians and Sabians.