Doctrine
Khalifa said that he was a messenger (rasool) of God and that the Archangel Gabriel 'most assertively' told him that chapter 36, verse 3, of the Quran, 'specifically' referred to him. His followers refer to him as God's Messenger of the Covenant. He promoted a strict monotheism and was a prominent Quranist, rejecting the hadith and sunnah as fabrications attributed to prophet Muhammad by later scholars.
He is most notable for his statement that the Quran contains a mathematical structure based on the number 19 and making the highly controversial claim that the last two the verses of chapter nine in the Quran were not canonical, telling his followers to reject them. Starting in 1968, Khalifa used computers to analyze the frequency of letters and words in the Quran. In 1974, he claimed that he had discovered a mathematical code in the text of the Qur'an involving the number 19. The details of this analysis are available in his book, Quran, the Final Testament.
Khalifa's research did not receive much attention in the West. In 1980, Martin Gardner mentioned it in Scientific American. Gardner later wrote a more extensive and critical review of Khalifa and his work.
Khalifa's first publicized report in the Arab world appeared in the Egyptian magazine Akher Sa'a, in January, 1973. Updates of his research were subsequently published by the same magazine later that year and again in 1975.
Read more about this topic: Rashad Khalifa
Famous quotes containing the word doctrine:
“But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that every man ought to stand in primary relations to the work of the world, ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties.”
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“The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)