Satyarth Prakash

17. " And when we made a covenant with you that ye should not you’re your own blood, nor expel one another from your abodes, then ye ratified it and yourselves were witnesses. Then were ye the very persons who slew one another; and ye drove out a part of your own people form their abodes." )2: 78, 79.)

C. ~ Is the making of covenants the work of man, possessed of finite powers, or of God? God being Omniscient cannot behave like an ordinary man. Now what kind of virtue is this to consider it wrong to shed the blood of one's brethren or to dispossess them of their houses, but to regard it commendable to shed the blood of others and dispossess them of their houses? It is merely the result of folly and prejudice to believe in such things. Did not God know it before hand that men would act against their covenant? It appears from this that the Mohammedan God has many attributes in common with the God of the Christians and that the Qoran is not an independent book in itself, and with a few exceptions it is a mere echo of the Bible.

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The Response

There is nothing objectionable in making a covenant.  Allah, through his Prophet, is taking a covenant that they would keep His commandments and not shed each others blood.  So, what is objectionable in this?  How does this undermine the omniscience of Allah? Swamiji always forgets his own Vedic concepts while pointing a finger at the Quran.

Yajurveda 1:5 says,

"I will observe the vow, Lord of Vows, Agni! May I have strength therefore. Success attend me. Now into truth from untruth do I enter."

Agni has been called Vrtapati (व्रतपति) or Lord of vows/covenants at so many places. Even at the time of marriage, the couple go around the fire, making it a witness.

Of course, God knew that men would act against the covenant but the people who would break the covenant did not know.  It is as simple as that.  How can a criminal be punished before he committed the crime and without him knowing what the crime was?  For a certain time the Israelites did keep this covenant but later people violated it. If Aryans one day leave the Vedas, should we understand that the revelation of the Vedas was useless or Ishwar does not have knowledge of the unseen?

Nowhere in the Quran is the shedding of the blood of others considered commendable. The Quran clearly prohibits one from killing innocent people. The permission of fighting is only given to those who have been attacked first. The Vedas, however, call for the indiscriminate killing of all non believers of the Vedas. Please refer to my article Vedas and World Peace for details.

The Quran is not an echo of the Bible, but is a guardian over the Bible.  It confirms the truth of the Bible, by also corrects the inaccuracies which had crept into the Bible.  However, if you want to see what an echo or a copy is just take a look at the Samaved, which is nothing but a copy of 1800 mantras of the Rigveda.  Similarly, two thirds of the Yajurveda is a copy of the Rigveda and more than half of Atharvaveda is a copy of the Rigveda.