The Quran claims to be “Clear” but it is anything but clear.

The Quran doesn't just claim to be a good book. It claims to be clear. The word "mubeen" (plain, clear, manifest) is used to describe it over and over. Allah apparently took time out of running the universe to make sure their final message was impossible to misunderstand.

So hows that going?

The Quran contradicts itself so much that Islamic scholars invented a whole system to deal with it: naskh, or abrogation. Later verses cancel earlier ones. Except scholars have argued for 1,400 years about which verses abrogate which. If the book were actually clear, you wouldn't need a system just to figure out which parts of it still count.

The Quran itself admits in 3:7 that some of its verses are "clear" (muhkamat) and some are "ambiguous" (mutashabihat), and that only Allah knows the full meaning of the ambiguous ones. So the clear book... contains parts that are unclear by design. God hid the meaning on purpose. In their clear book….Right….

Mohammed reportedly said Islam would split into 73 sects, 72 of which go to hell. Every single one of those sects is reading the same clear book and reaching different conclusions about theology, law, and practice. Sunni vs Shia vs Ibadi vs Ahmadi vs Mutazilite and on and on. If a set of instructions produces this many different outputs, the instructions are not clear. That's not a debate, that's just basic logic.

Most people don't know there are different official recitations of the Quran with different words in different places. Hafs (used in most of the world) and Warsh (used in North Africa) are the two biggest. They differ in ways that affect meaning, not just pronunciation. The "perfectly preserved" clear book has variant editions that Islamic biased institutions quietly don't talk about.

Classical Quran Arabic is not readable by the average Arabic speaker today without serious study. Millions of Muslims recite it in prayer without understanding a word of it. A book that requires years of specialist training to read in its original language, and loses significant nuance in translation, is not a clear book. It's an obscure book with biased people pushing it hard.

Example verses hotly debated by Muslims themselves:

4:34 - The wife beating verse.

The verse tells husbands to deal with disobedient wives in stages, ending with "wadribuhunna." That word comes from "daraba," which has over 20 meanings in Arabic including: to beat, to strike, to set forth, to travel, to ignore, and to have sex with.

Scholars say it means a light, symbolic strike. Some modern scholars say it means to leave or separate. Others say it means to strike but not on the face. A minority say it has been mistranslated entirely and means to have consensual relations.

This is the verse governing domestic authority in Muslim marriages. And nobody agrees what the key word means. In the clear book.

A clear message from an all knowing God should not require 1,400 years of scholars in disagreement, a cancellation system for its own contradictions, builtin mystery passages, variant editions, and a dead language to navigate.

If God wrote this, they are either not as clear as they think they are, or they wanted the confusion. Neither is a great look.