Tfw when you read an exceptional piece of writing in your native tongue and get sad that you can never translate it...

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name one arabic text worth reading that isn't One Thousand and One Nights. (which is good enough in Burton's translation)
name one piece of arabic literature that is half as important as the Mahabharata.
name one piece of arabic literature that is greater than The Lusiads

>inb4 muh philosophy
anything relevant in arab philosophy was brought over to the west in the middle ages, get over it.

>another dumb westerner don't know shit about east

The good news is that learning any single language opens up a lifetime's worth of reading for you. So if you can learn a handle of languages, then you have a handful of lifetimes of reading there for you, especially if you learn a big language like French, Italian, German, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit etc.

What piece of literature and in which language.

Arabic literature isn't that great. The Koran itself is a mess. It's worth learning for specialists and people who would like to travel the Middle East or North Africa, but its value as a literary language doesn't compare to any of the big Indo-European languages like Sanskrit, Farsi, or the European tongues like English, French, German, Italian, etc.

>not knowing at least three languages already
user, I...

stop projecting

Anything related to Hinduism or India is irrelevant.
And I'm not even going to bring up the Quran but Arabic has a rich literature ,Arabic poetry is probably the most developped complex poetry of any language

>Arabic poetry is probably the most developped complex poetry of any language
yikes

I understand the allure of the Quran , the book has never been change it's the same book since the time Muhammed.
All Indian's epics are just some no name street shitter's interpretation of his fellow steet shitters folklore centuries, a whole millennia after said folklore had been concieved

understand the allure of the Quran , the book has never been changed it's the same book since the time of Muhammed.
All Indian's epics are is just some no-name-street-shitter's interpretation of his fellow steet shitters retarded folklore, some whole millennias after said folklore had been concieved

>understand the allure of the Quran , the book has never been changed it's the same book since the time of Muhammed.
That's not true at all. It's documented that there was a war where many Muslim soldiers fell and a lot of verses were lost because the people who had them memorised died. It is also a consensus among textual critics and historians that the Qu'ran had many different versions before Caliph Uthman ibn Affan ordered a standardised version based on Abu Bakr's recitation and had all of the varying versions suppressed. Further than that, there's a story in the hadiths that says the Qu'ran ordered women to let men suck on their breasts if they had to be in the same room with them as a way of easing the sexual tension; this excerpt was apparently lost when a sheep ate it.

Anyway, I'm not saying this as a slight to the Qu'ran. It's not unusual for ancient works to have textual variants (though the standardisation process is unique to the Qu'ran). Why do you think this is something to be impressed about anyway?

> It's documented that there was a war where many Muslim soldiers ....
I know all of that but Uthman chose to take the Quran from the people that were very close to Muhammed and were known to memorise the Quran by heart , there were many of them and they all agreed with each other wich leaves very little room for doubt
>the Qu'ran ordered women to let men suck on their breasts if they had to be in the same room
Source ?
> Why do you think this is something to be impressed about anyway?
How is a book being passe on word for word for 1400 years not impressive ?

>How is a book being passe on word for word for 1400 years not impressive ?
not at all. that's what writing is for, and the process of compiling the Quran was a fucking mess

> not at all. that's what writing is for, and the process of compiling the Quran was a fucking mess
What other books written at the same time or close to the quran and as vastly distributed and discussed have remained unchanged ?

But the Quran has been changed. The caliph just suppressed all of the versions which didn't fit with Abu Bakr's. The most reliable book from antiquity is the New Testament because of how many manuscripts we have.

Assuming the Quran was changed (it wasn't).
The oldest manuscript we have of the bible was written 400 years after the death of Jesus.
The oldest written copy we have of the Quran was put together only 20 years after Muhammad's death. Quran wins

>The oldest manuscript we have of the bible was written 400 years after the death of Jesus.
that's blatantly false

Resalat Al-Ghufran

Are you a self hating Brit or one of the shitholes we dragged into civilisation? Either way be grateful for our beautiful language.

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That's not true at all lmao. We have plenty of manuscripts from the 2nd century.

>The oldest manuscript we have of the bible was written 400 years after the death of Jesus.
Not a Christian but even I know this is retarded. The earliest manuscript from the NT is dated from the late 1st century to early 2nd century and us from john: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rylands_Library_Papyrus_P52

Yeah I’m American and agree with this

I’ve never found a book written in English that wasn’t shit

The war was probably led by those who knew the Qur'an but that doesn't mean that everyone who memorized the whole Qur'an went to war. Also, the quran was recited orally and to a mass of people to memorise so they could at least piece it together. The different versions you speak of weren't variants but rather different dialects. Uthman just wanted to make a standard version that was based off of the dialect that was originally revealed to Muhammad which was the quresh dialect, probs spelt that wrong and too lazy to look it up. And that story about the Qur'an verse that was eaten by a goat or whatever. I doubt it's authenticity. Like I said when Muhammad was given a revelation he would say it out loud for a group of people to hear. Not just him. And the Qur'an even says that god brings a better verse and causes the last one to be forgotten so it could be gods way of abrogation.

Not a Muslim, just don't like bad arguments.

I really didn't want to have to go looking things up to refresh my memory of this subject, but here you go I guess.

I am not making it up when I say that some parts of the Qu'ran may have been lost in the battle of Yamama. We find trepidation among the early Muslims themselves because of this. Here I quote Abu Bakr.
>"Umar has come to me and said: "Casualties were heavy among the Qurra' of the! Qur'an (i.e. those who knew the Quran by heart) on the day of the Battle of Yalmama, and I am afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the Qurra' on other battlefields, whereby a large part of the Qur'an may be lost. Therefore I suggest, you (Abu Bakr) order that the Qur'an be collected."

Now Zaid bin Thabit,
>So I started looking for the Qur'an and collecting it from (what was written on) palmed stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart, till I found the last Verse of Surat At-Tauba (Repentance) with Abi Khuzaima Al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him.
Here we see that substantial variances existed in the early Qu'ranic tradition. This verse that he speaks of was only found with ONE man.

Another quote
>Umar was once looking for the text of a specific verse of the Qur’an he vaguely remembered. To his deep sorrow, he discovered that the only person who had any record of that verse had been killed in the battle of Yamama and that the verse was consequently lost.

Ubayy ibn Ka'b
>"Ubayy ibn Ka'b said to me, 'What is the extent of Suratul-Ahzab?' I said, 'Seventy, or seventy-three verses'. He said, 'Yet it used to be equal to Suratul-Baqarah and in it we recited the verse of stoning'. I said, 'And what is the verse of stoning'? He replied, 'The fornicators among the married men (ash-shaikh) and married women (ash-shaikhah), stone them as an exemplary punishment from Allah, and Allah is Mighty and Wise."
Suratul-Baqarah is the longest chapter of the Qu'ran. 286 verses. Yet Ubayy ibn Ka'b believes that Suratul-Ahzab was equal in length to it.

Again, I'm not using any of this to degrade the Qu'ran or anything of the sort. It's only natural for a text that was transmitted orally to have these kinds of problems, which is why the written word will always be a better way of preserving a text. I do not doubt that the Qu'ran we have today is more or less the same as what Muhhamad revealed, and I recognise the majority of the suppressed versions of the Qu'ran only differed in dialect, but to claim that this was a miraculous process is insane.