Bad Poets Society

sura 26, verse 224: As for the poets, only those who go astray follow them.

Y'know what I think? I think the koran is just a lot of sour grapes. Y'know why?
1. By all accounts, poetry was a big deal in Arabia. They say people used to write poems and stick them up on the Kaaba for everybody to read, kind of an early day open mike. Early on, Mo hung out with poets like Zayd ibn Amr, but people weren't sure whether he was a poet or not. They even had a meeting to decide if he was a sorcerer or a poet or just a loony.

2. The koran is not really prose, it's written in kinda sorta poetic form that its admirers say is a unique form of literature unmatched anywhere else. We see a lot of that in English Composition—we call it BAD POETRY.

3. Mo was was a vengeful prick, and later on he had a lot of poets murdered, and he had god reveal lines like 26:224. They ran his ass out of Mecca, so he came back and nuked the place; the Jews didn't help him at the Ditch, so he massacred them; people made fun of his poetry, so he wrote the koran so he could say “It's not bad, it's inspired by god, you're just too dumb to understand it.”

And they're still at it. When they talk about these Meccan 'revelations' they always stress how Mo was oh so persecuted. Sure, the polytheists let him hang around their holy city dissing their gods for 13 years and trying to overthrow their religion (while the Christians everywhere else were torturing heretics like him to death) but hey, they called him names. They laughed at him. In his mind this so-called persecution was unbearable, and justified all his later pillaging and murder, and his followers today are still singing that same song. When they say Islam teaches to fight only those who attack them, by 'attack' they mean 'say mean things'. Like criticize Mo's crappy poems.