An absolutely trash polemic by a new skit on the block, a Chinese Christian apologist by the name of Belle Liu. This childish individual is roaming the streets of her hometown like a ravenous wolf, repeating the same rhetoric that she believes constitutes an Islamic problem. What’s worse, she recently went to Speakers’ Corner in London and vomited up the same trash she had swallowed back home.
If anything, she is showing
that Asian Christians should not be taken seriously, making herself an
embarrassment to her own community, especially considering that Asians are
often recognised for their intelligence and technological achievements, and other
fields.
Christians wake up every
morning thinking of new arguments they can use against Islam to get paid. This
is nothing new, it’s as old as a magician pulling a rabbit out of a black hat
to amaze his audience, even though he knows he’s performed the same trick a
hundred times before.
Let us examine just how
ridiculous her argument against Islam is and whether she is intelligent enough
to realise that she is only humiliating herself and her fellow Christians.
Perhaps after this she should leave the field of apologetics and find a job
better suited to her childish mentality, rather than continuing to embarrass
herself in the public eye.
Belle Lui repeatedly
patronises Muslims by saying, “The Qur’an mentions nine plagues, whereas the
Bible mentions ten.” She then calls this an error from the Islamic perspective,
completely what the text reads.
What an absurd polemical
claim! What I want to know is this, exactly where does she get nine plagues
from the Qur’an? The verse she clutches at is Qur’an 17:101, where the Arabic
reads ءَايَـٰتٍ (āyātin), meaning “signs,” not “plagues.”
For the record, we are not
arguing that plagues cannot be a form of signs. Of course, plagues can serve as
signs. However, Belle’s original claim was that the Qur’an specifically
mentions nine plagues, which is simply not what the verse says. Before we run
to the 10 plagues of the bible, what are the nine signs mentioned in the
Qur’an?
Al-Hasan bin Yahya narrated:
Abdal-Razzaq narrated: Muammar narrated: Qatada narrated: Ibn Abbas narrated:
Concerning His statement, Nine clear signs, they are consecutive, And We seized
the people of Pharaoh with years of famine and a loss of fruits, he said: Years
were for the people of the desert, and a
loss of fruits for the people of the towns. So these are two signs, and the
flood, and the locusts, and the lice, and the frogs, and the blood, these are
five, and the hand of Moses when he brought it out white to the onlookers
without any disease: leprosy, and his staff when he threw it down, and behold,
it was a clear serpent. (Tafsir al—Tabari )
“The nine verses: the
staff, the hand, the tongue, the sea, the flood, the locusts, the lice, the
frogs, and the blood are detailed verses.” (Tafsir al-Qurtubi)
Ibn Abbas and Ad-Dahhak
said: It is the stick, the white hand, the knot that was on his tongue and he
untied it, the splitting of the sea, the flood, the locusts, the lice, the
frogs, and the blood (Tafsir al-Baghawi)
"On the authority of
Safwan, that a Jew asked the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace,
about them, and he said: That you do not associate anything with God, and do
not be extravagant, and do not commit adultery, and do not kill the soul that
God has forbidden except by right, and do not practice magic, and do not
consume usury, and do not walk with an innocent person to a person in authority
to kill him, and do not accuse a chaste woman, and do not flee from battle. (Tafsir
al-Baidawi)
The aforementioned hadith
relating to the verse, “And We gave
Moses nine clear signs”, is also cited in Tafsir Ibn Kathir,
Tafsir al-Qurtubi, and Tafsir al-Tabari.
The signs explained in
these classical tafasir, in this particular interpretation, are the laws and commandments given to Moses Pbuh,
rather than nine plagues, as mistakenly claimed by Belle Lui.
Now, coming to her second
contention regarding the reading “So
ask the Children of Israel,” Belle Lui claims that Muslims
should ask the Jews to verify whether these are the same plagues mentioned in
their scripture. Once again, we shall refer to the classical scholars and their
commentaries.
As for his saying, So ask the
Children of Israel when Moses came to them, most of the reciters of Islam read
it as a command, meaning: So ask, O Muhammad, the Children of Israel when Moses
came to them. It was narrated on the authority of Al-Hasan Al-Basri in his
interpretation of it: Al-Harith told me: Al-Qasim told us: Hajjaj told us, on
the authority of Harun, on the authority of Ismail, on the authority of
Al-Hasan: So ask the Children of Israel. He said: Your question to them: your
consideration of the Qur’an. It was narrated on the authority of Ibn Abbas that
he used to read it as ask meaning: Moses asked the Pharaoh of the Children of
Israel to send them with him as a statement. Who said that? Ahmad bin Yusuf
told us, he said: Al-Qasim told us, he said: Hajjaj told us, on the authority
of Harun, on the authority of Hanzala Al-Sadusi, on the authority of Shahr bin Hawshab,
on the authority of Ibn Abbas, that he recited: He asked the Children of Israel
when he came to them, meaning that Moses asked Pharaoh of the Children of
Israel to send them with him (Tafsir al—Tabari)
So ask the Children of
Israel. Ibn Abbas and Ibn Nahik read So ask as a statement: that is, Moses
asked Pharaoh to release the Children of Israel and set them free and with him.
The others read So ask as a command: that is, ask them, O Muhammad, when Moses came
to them. The question is a question of testimony for greater reassurance and certainty,
because when the evidence comes together, it is stronger, and those asked are
the believers among the Children of Israel, such as Abdullah bin Salam and his
companions. So Pharaoh said to him, ‘Indeed, I think, O Moses, that you are bewitched.’
The letter fa is the eloquent letter: that is, Moses showed Pharaoh the clear
signs that We had given him and conveyed to him what he had been sent with, so Pharaoh
said to him. The bewitched is the one who has been bewitched and whose mind has been confused. Abu Ubaidah
and al-Farra’ said: It means the magician, so the object was placed in place of
the subject. (Tafsir Fath al-Qadir)
Had Belle read the
classical commentaries, she would not have embarrassed herself by advancing
such an argument. The more she speaks, the worse matters become for her. The reading “So ask the Children of Israel” does not
mean that Muslims are being instructed to ask them, and this is according to
the reading of Ibn Abbas and Ibn Nahik.
Let us now turn to the Old
Testament and examine these alleged ten plagues. Wait! For the record, there is no verse anywhere in the entire Tanakh that
explicitly uses the exact phrase “ten plagues.” So, we
are already off to a bad start.
Isn’t that something? The
Qur’an explicitly mentions “nine
signs,” whereas Belle’s entire argument revolves around “ten plagues,” a phrase that is not
even explicitly mentioned in the Bible. How embarrassing is that. Never the
less, let us start with the Belle’s ten plagues.
- Water
turned to blood
- Frogs
- Lice
or Gnats
- Flies
or Wild Animals
- Livestock
pestilence
- Boils
- Hail
- Locusts
- Darkness
- Death
of the firstborn
Belle’s list of ten
plagues certainly raises an eyebrow. Since when were “water turned to blood”
and “hail” considered plagues in their own right? Even if we grant that the
other eight on her list to qualify as plagues, these two remain questionable. So,
we are now left with eight plagues rather than ten, which raises the question
of whether Belle is even aware of the actual number of plagues mentioned in her
own scripture.
Notice those biblical
plagues don’t mention, “the stick, the white hand, the knot that was on his
tongue and he untied it, the splitting of the sea, the flood” as mentioned in
the Islamic narratives?
The question is: did she
genuinely think that making such a comparison would cause Muslims to doubt
their faith, or was she under the impression that it would make her look
intelligent in front of her Christian followers?
Belle’s entire argument collapsed like a house of cards. She brought nothing to the table that could be considered a serious academic argument. Her approach comes across as cunning and deceptive. This only goes to show how far some apologists are willing to go in pursuit of attention, even at the expense of their own credibility.
