so it does not come as too great a surprise to see religious books OTHER THAN QURAN on the list ( is what i inteded to say )

i have not read all thru the replies yet , so please excuse me if i am repeating a previous comment...

the problem is , with religious works, the Quran is the ONLY unaltered book.... so it does not come as too great a surprise to see religious books on the list ..

salaam and eid mubarak to u all, may u all be blessed with a wonderful new year :)

I believe that the evidence used for this restriction is based on the following:

The Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ?Two religions cannot coexist in the Arabian Peninsula.? Abu Dawood narrated with his isnaad from ?Umar that he heard the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) say: ?I will certainly expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula,, and I will not leave anyone there but Muslims.? Al-Tirmidhi said: this is a saheeh hasan hadeeth.

It was reported that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) became angry when he saw that ?Umar had a page with something from the Tawraat written on it, and he (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: ?Are you in doubt, O son of al-Khattaab? Have I not brought you something shining and pure? If my brother Moosa were alive, he would have no choice but to follow me.? (Narrated by Ahmad and al-Daarimi, and others).

Salam Sym_metry,

There are a lot of practises in Saudi Arabia that are extreme so if I were you I wouldn't measure Islam according to any country's practise or even to any person's practice of it. Having said that, I would like to point the fact that the Qur'an talks about Torah, Zaboor, Injeel in reference to older revelations. However and unfortunately, those books are not what we have today in the bible or at least they're not there in their original pure form.

What is called the Torah today in the Bible refers to the first 5 books of the old testaments, supposedly revealed to Prophet Moses. However today it is conventionally believed that Moses wrote those 5 books however there is no proof for it, and this is coming from Bible scholars and not Muslim scholars. They simply don't know who wrote those books as there is no clear cut evidence that it's Moses (and as a matter of fact the 5th book talks about how/when/where Moses died and was burried in the 3rd person as if it's someone else writing). And such is the case with many books in the bible's old and new testaments, we simply have no clue who wrote them. If one reads the bible, one would find some passages that "could" be attributed to God based on the nature of their messages.. However some other texts in that same bible can also be attributed to prophets, others to historians, and others aren't even worth of being in that book.. and you will run into such passages as you study the bible like you said.

Finally, the "bible" as we know it today has many versions, some of them omitting entire books, some omitting whole verses, and others having additions or variations of verses or books. And the bible as we know it today was simply assembled by people in the first few centuries after Christ, based on older books that were inherited through the Jewish tradition.. so basically humans selected what books to include and what to exclude and elected to throw them between two covers called "Bible".. there is more to it but I'll just stop here.

Back to the Qur'an, it talks about the Torah which is the book that was revealed to Prophet Moses, and about the Zaboor which is the book revealed to prophet Jacob, and the Injeel which is the message that was revealed to prophet Jesus/Issa peace be upon them all. The Qur'an asks Muslims to believe in those 3 and in all other revelations and prophets that Allah Almighty sent to human kind, that is a belief and acknowledgment of their existence (regardless if they still exist today in any form), however Muslims are not asked to believe in those books in the sense that we should follow them. The only book Muslims follow is the Qur'an because it updated previous books, and corrected whatever beliefs/information from older books that had been corrupted through time.. so you can say we have the final version of what Allah wants human kind to follow in the Qur'an and thus we should not really follow what is "left" of older/previous books, partly because we simply have no clue where they came from (neither do Bible scholars).

I hope this helps.

edgard

I was aware of this. Saudi Arabia does not allow other religions to be practiced openly. I do feel it's very contradictory to the Quran because there is no compulsion in religion. I feel this act of not allowing other religions to be practiced/religious texts to be in the country is not halal. Then again, many Saudi laws are not Islamic.