Why Ahmad Deedat is an Idiot

Ahmad Deedat is a South African who is well known for his "debates" with Christians. He is no longer with us and passed away just a couple of years ago, but Saudis and others in the Muslim world remember him well, think well of him, and often hand his materials to us English teachers and refer to him in our classes.

Well, the guy is an idiot. Sorry to put it so bluntly and crudely. But he is not a creator of dialog by any means. He comes at Muslim-Christian discussion in a very disrespectful way, in something of the way that Christian creationists "debate" evolutionary biologists. I just watched some of a six-part DVD series of his talks and I found him saying one stupid thing after another but things the Muslims in the audiences were all agreeing with.

This kind of guy is also dangerous. Here is only some of why. He starts off the DVD series with a tall called "The Qur'an: Miracle of Miracles. It is basically a slam against the Christian and Jewish "corrupted" and "multi-authored" texts as opposed to the singly authored Qur'an. The problem is that Deedat is unfortunately not willing to admit, as do the majority of Muslims, that the text of the Qur'an has a history and that the so-called miracle of an illiterate trader reciting a book in the most refined Arabic of the day and showing the most sophisticated theology of the day is, while perhaps not a total fiction, not as pure and straightforward as Muslims hold. There were other texts of the early Qur'an. And Mohammad was surrounded by people steeped in sophisticated versions of Jewish and Christian theology and who aided the redaction of the text. The text also has a political and economic context that shaped the text that is rendered out of the picture by Muslims as well. As Gerd-R. Puin puts it
"My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad...Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants."

Patricia Crone adds: "The Koran is a scripture with a history like any other—except that we don't know this history and tend to provoke howls of protest when we study it. Nobody would mind the howls if they came from Westerners, but Westerners feel deferential when the howls come from other people: who are you to tamper with their legacy? But we Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone's faith." (see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199901/koran)

But I want to keep the focus on Deedat here, however fascinating the subject of Qur'anic origins is. One huge thing Deedat totally misses is that most people in the western world are not walking around thinking: "hmmmm, which religion should I go with, Islam or Christianity?" Instead, many of them are thinking that both Islam and Christianity are religions of violence and that modern people cannot honestly follow either of them and still be intellectually and ethically honest with themselves. Deedat made many attacks on the secular and scientific understanding of the world, and attacked Christians for having what he says is an inadequate set of expressions for God by using familial, biological and bodily images (God the father, son etc) to express this. But instead of finding common ground with Christians and looking into what they actually think and finding common ground with those more comfortable with thinking of the numinous in the idiom of science (which is often a kind of religion too), he does nothing but pander to the goons in his audiences and the tit-for-tat mentality that way too is the only way these discussions take place. Notice how said takes place in this youtuber. Not sure why this video comes in threes and not the one video I scooped it from (XYZ?) .