Yesu, you make a fair point.
While Qur'anists continue to identify as Muslim, other Muslims consider them heretics and they are heavily persecuted in Muslim countries (a Quranist blogger got imprisoned in Cairo not so long ago).
I guess I see the Qur'anist vs. Orthodox debate as similar to the Catholic vs. Protestant debate. When Luther challanged the traditions of the Catholic Church I am sure many no longer considered him Christian and if his revolt had failed there would be no such thing as a Christianity divorced from Catholicism. But Luther succeeded. Thousands of common people listened to him and intellectuals like John Calvin used their learning to build upon his dissent. Now we have millions of people who utterly reject the Pope and many of the traditions of the Catholic church; and yet these people consider themselves to be Christians. Is the pope going to tell them they're not?
If Qur'anism is able to take the Muslim world by storm the way Protestantism took the Christian world, I think we could have hundreds of thousands of Qur'anists who yet consider themselves Muslim and are recognized as such by the non-muslims as well. Whether or not this ever happens is an open question, but if liberal Muslims want to justify their unwillingness to live under sharia law, this is the only option I see for them.
Diogenesister13 hours ago
Rainbow _Troll Can you tell us anymore about these " satanic verses"? About these daughters of Allah please?
Records of pre-Islamic religion are sketchy at best and some Muslims will even deny the Satanic verses incident ever happened; but here is what I know:
Allah, the Muslim God is actually a contraction of Al-Ilah or "the god". Al-Ilah was the creator deity of the pre-Islamic polytheists of Mecca and he had daughter goddesses who were also worshiped there. Most Muslims will vehemently deny what I have just said, for obvious reasons, but so what? Anyways, in comes Muhammad with his gospel of one God. "Al-Ilah", he says, "is the only true God and I am his prophet!". The priests and merchants of Mecca are indignant and for good reason: Mecca was a popular holy site and they made a lot of money from the chumps who would make pilgrimage there to worship the gods of the Kabba. Threats are made on Muhammad's life (though they can't be carried out due to tribal politics). He and his followers are persecuted without mercy. The stress gets to the prophet so he tries to compromise with his opponents. All this time he had been uttering revelations which would eventually become the Qur'an and now he utters a new revelation that you won't find in any version of the Qur'an extent. He says:
"Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzzá and Manāt, the third, the other? These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for."
Muhammad's enemies are appeased by this rather equivocal sentence but Muhammad is racked with guilt. He's no charlatan. He really believes that he is receiving revelations from Allah and this wasn't one of them. He soon retracts his new 'revelation' and the persecution of Muslims resumes. End of story.