Re: License Islamic Holy material

[Abdalla Alothman <abdalla at pheye dot net>]

Salam,

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 09:15 pm, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
>
> I see a number of issues both practical and philosophical (or principled
> at least) being noted.  A brief search on the 'net reveals that a number
> of people and organizations out there protect and license various
> "bibles" differently [...]

What you consider "philosophical" and practical are vague to me. :)

I would like to highlight that Jewish and Christian scriptures have a
different nature than that of the Quran. First, and foremost, they are
scriptures. The Quran is not a scripture. Secondly, and this might
sound a bit offensive to others, but what can we do -- it's the topic
of this thread: We say, the bible does not contain the word of the
Creator (tt). The Creator did not send down the word "Moses, God,
Jesus, Paul, etc." Those words have been translated. Thus, a
license for the bible is a license for some sort of translation. The
Quran is not a translation and doesn't exist as such. However, there
exists translations of the Quran and the general ruling is that the
translation of the Quran is not the Quran.Therefore, the actual words
of the Creator -- at least as we believe -- are what we are trying to
license. This sounds like a very bad idea to me, and it might attract
"control monsters..."

The problem is that the human being in the past was entrusted to protect
the words of the Creator and act upon them:

[k&h - 5:44]  [...] And the rabbis and the priests [too judged the Jews by the 
Taurât (Torah) after those Prophets] for to them was entrusted the protection 
of Allâh's Book, and they were witnesses thereto. [...]

Things have changed with the last revelation:

[k&h - 15:9] Verily We: It is We Who have sent down the Thikr (i.e. the
Qur'ân) and surely, We will guard it (from corruption).

> - I won't bore you with links (you can do that 
> for yourself) but I will offer one link just for grins [1].

I also wont bore you with the talk which might be unnecessary
for this mailing list. So let's try to see if checking the integrity
of the textual format of the Quran is what certain people want
to do.

Since this is a technical group, let's start with an idea and then
the code. We will use Perl because it's simple and many developers
already know it.

I will send some samples of the Quran and some code as an example
as soon as it's done.

Wishing you and your family peace and good health.

Salam,
Abdalla Alothman