The Essence of Qur’an

From: http://www.whyislambay.org/brochures/essentialkoran.html

By Thomas Cleary

The Qur’an is universally known as the sacred book of Islam, the religion of submission to the will of God. The Qur’an is undeniably a book of great importance even to the non-Muslim, perhaps more today than ever, if that is possible. One aspect of Islam that is unexpected and yet appealing to the post-Christian secular mind is the harmonious interplay of faith and reason. Islam does not demand unreasoned belief. Rather, it invites intelligent faith, growing from observation, reflection, and contemplation, beginning with nature and what is all around us. Accordingly, antagonism between religion and science such as that familiar to Westerners is foreign to Islam.
This connection between faith and reason enabled Islamic civilization to absorb and vivify useful knowledge, including that of ancient peoples, whereby it eventually nursed Europe out of the Dark Ages, laying the foundation for the Renaissance. When Europe got on its cultural feet and expelled Islam, however, the European mind was torn by the inability of the Christian church to tolerate the indivisibility of the sacred and the secular that characterized Islam and had enabled Islamic civilization to develop natural science and abstract art as well as philosophy and social science. The result was a painful, ill-fated divorce between science and religion in Europe, one whose consequences have adversely affected the entire world.
In the post-Christian West, where thinking people, including scientists themselves once more, are seeking solutions to the difficulties created by the Christian divorce between religion and science, the Qur’an offers a way to explore an attitude that fully embraces the quest for knowledge and understanding that is the essence of science, while at the same time, and indeed for the same reasons, fully embraces the awe, humility, reverence, and conscience without which “humankind does indeed go too far in considering itself to be self-sufficient” (Qur’an 96:6-7).
Even for the secular Westerner, apart from any question of religious belief or faith, there are immediate benefits to be found in reading the Qur’an. First, in view of the sacredness and vital importance of the Qur’an to approximately one-fifth of all humanity, a thinking citizen of the world can hardly develop a rational and mature social consciousness without considering the message of the Qur’an and its meaning for the Muslim community.
With the fall of communism, it has become particularly clear that global peace, order and self-determination of peoples cannot be achieved without intelligent respect for Islam and the inalienable right of Muslims to live their religion. The second immediate benefit in reading the Qur’an, therefore, is that it is a necessary step toward the understanding and tolerance without which world peace is in fact inconceivable.
For non-Muslims, one special advantage in reading the Qur’an is that it provides an authentic point of reference from which to examine the biased stereotypes of Islam to which Westerners are habitually exposed. Primary information is essential to distinguish between opinion and fact in a reasonable manner. This exercise may also enable the thinking individual to understand the inherently defective nature of prejudice itself, and thus be the more generally receptive to all information and knowledge of possible use to humankind.
The Qur’anThe name Qur’an means the Recital or the Reading. According to its own word, the Qur’an is a revealed Book in the spiritual tradition of the Torah and Gospel transmitted by Moses and Jesus. Connecting itself and these distinguished predecessors to even earlier dispensations of original religion, the Qur’an represents its teaching as confirming and clarifying the truth of what was in those messages.
The Qur’an is undeniably unique in its tradition, and indeed unique in the entire context of classical sacred tradition throughout the world, in having been revealed in the full light of history, through the offices of a Prophet who was well known.
As the last link in a chain of revelation going back to time immemorial, even to the very origin of humankind, the Qur’an has the special function of recollecting the essential message of all revealed Books and distinguishing this from the opinions and reactions later interpolated into ancient texts whose original dispensation had taken place in remote and even unknown times.
Therefore the Qur’an is not only called the Reading or the Recital but also the Criterion: it is called a Reminder and also a Clarification. A modern descendant of Prophet Muhammad wrote of this comprehensive scope and function of the Book in these terms:
The Qur’an is nothing but the old books refined of human alloy, and contains transcendent truths embodied in all sacred scriptures with complete additions, necessary for the development of all human faculties. It repeats truths given in the Holy Vedas, in the Bible, in the words of the Gita, in the sayings of Buddha and all other prophets, and adds what was not in them, and gives new laws to meet the contingencies of the present time when the different members of God’s family who lived apart from each other in the days of old revelations had come close one to the other.1
Because the Qur’an synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations, its function as a Criterion to distinguish between truth and falsehood is not carried out in the form of dogmatic assertion or condemnation of one religion or another, but in the form of distinction between human artifice and the essential meaning of religion, between hypocrisy and true faith. Thus the same writer explains, “The Qur’an calls itself Hakam—‘judge,” to decide between Christian and Christian, between Hindu and Hindu, between Buddhist and Buddhist, and so it did.”2 The observation that the Qur’an distinguishes the differences within the adherents of each religious dispensation, rather than among the dispensations themselves per se seems to be a key to approaching the Qur’an without religious bias.
The Qur’an could not function in this manner in the context of world religions if it were no more than a collection of dogma or the handbook of a particular new sect or cult. The Qur’an speaks to humanity as a whole, to nations, communities, families, and individuals; complete with both an outer teaching and an inner teaching, it speaks both to persons and to souls, individually and collectively.
Hence, the very least advantage we can derive from reading the Qur’an is the opportunity to examine our own subjectively in understanding a text of this nature. This can have important educational consequences, both immediate and long-term, that can hardly be derived simply by imbibing received opinions and attitudes without individual thought and reflection.
The Advent of the Qur’anAs is well known, the Qur’an was revealed through the Prophet Muhammad, who was born around the year 570 C.E. Muhammad was of the noble Quraish clan, the custodians of the sacred shrine of Mecca, believed to have been built by Abraham in the remote past.
Orphaned at an early stage, Muhammad developed into a sober and responsible young man, known for his trustworthiness. When he was twenty-five years old, he married his employer, a successful businesswoman most impressed by Muhammad’s goodness.
The first revelation came when Muhammad was forty years old, a mature man of impeccable character. It took place during one of his periodic meditation retreats in a mountain cave outside Mecca. Far from inflated by the experience, Muhammad was fearful and demurred; he rushed home to his wife and anxiously revealed what had happened to him. Reminding him of his well-known virtues, she assured him that he was not mad. Then she took him to a cousin, a Christian, who listened to the beginnings of the Recital and declared it to of the same Truth as that brought by Moses and Jesus.
The first Muslims were members of Muhammad’s house. Beside his wife Khadija, there were the freed slave Zaid and Muhammad’s young cousin and future son-in-law Ali. Shortly thereafter Abu Bakr, a longtime friend of Muhammad, also joined the fledgling community of Islam.
After a brief pause, revelations continued, and word of the new Muslim movement soon began to get around. This annoyed the leaders of the Quraish because they felt Islam undermined their authority. Teaching that there can by nature only be one real God, Islam undermined the religious authority of the Quraish as leaders of the old tribal polytheism. Attracting many converts from among slaves and other disenfranchised people, Islam was also seen to undermine the political authority of the dominant clan fathers. Preaching a level of humaneness and social responsibility well above that realized by existing practices, Islam was also seen to diminish the moral stature of the tribal patriarchs.
For ten years Muhammad and the Muslims of Mecca were subjected to abuse and torture. A group of Muslims emigrated to Abyssinia, assured by Prophet that the king of that land was Christian and would protect them. Eventually the leaders of the Quraish tried to assassinate Muhammad, and so that Prophet was finally forced to flee from Mecca in 622 C.E. This became known as the Year of the Emigration, the year from which all dates in Islamic history are counted.
The persecuted Muslims migrated en masse to Yathrib, later known as Medina Al-Nabiy, “The city of the Prophet,” or simply Al-Medina, “The City.” Hostilities and intrigues against them expanded, however, as the evident moral force of the movement aroused the hopes and fears of increasing numbers of individuals and groups. As a result, during nearly a decade of residence in Medina, Muhammad was repeatedly obliged to lead the Muslims in war. In one battle the Prophet was severely wounded in the head and face, and presumed dead.
At length Muhammad and the Muslims emerged triumphant, not by virtue of a crushing military victory but by constant devotion to Islam and indefatigable resistance to oppression. Poorly armed Muslims would face, and sometimes even defeat, battalions of trained warriors outnumbering them ten to one. And the movement continued to grow, in spite of opposition and hardships.
In the seventh year of the Emigration, Muhammad made the pilgrimage to Mecca with a large party of Muslims, unopposed. He cleared the sacred shrine of idols and established worship of the one real God, including the practices of prayer, charity, and fasting. Through the promulgation of the Qur’an and his own example as an inspired Prophet, Muhammad also reformed many aspects of family, social, and economic life.
The Language of the Qur’anIt is generally accepted that the Qur’an cannot be translated in a complete and literal manner because of the intimate relationship between its linguistic form and its semantic content, and because of the incommensurability of Arabic and non-Arabic languages. A modern descendant of the Prophet explains the nature of the sacred language of the Qur’an in these terms:
Classical Arabic is the version of Arabic that was used by the Koreshite tribe, hereditary guardians of the Temple of Mecca, and to which Muhammad belonged. Long before Arabic became considered a holy tongue because of the sacerdotal class of Mecca, a sanctuary whose religious history legend starts with Adam and Eve. Arabic, most precise and primitive of the Semitic languages, shows signs of being originally a constructed language. It is built up upon mathematical principles—a phenomenon not paralleled by any other language. Sufic analysis of its basic concept groupings shows that especially initiatory or religious, as well as psychological, ideas are collectively associated around a stem in seemingly logical and deliberate fashion which could hardly be fortuitous.3
Because this type of concentration, made possible by the nature of the classical Arabic language, cannot be reproduced in English, translators attempt to compensate somewhat by the addition of linguistic notes simplifying the meanings of certain words by reference to their roots and related derivatives. These notes should therefore be viewed as an intrinsic part of the translation itself. The pregnancy of Arabic also makes it possible, and even useful, to render the same word in different ways when translating from Arabic into another language. According to the eminent theologian Al- Ghazali, there is no repetition in the Qur’an, because “repetition” means that no further benefit is conferred; this aspect of language and meaning in the Qur’an also dovetails with the intensive concentration of Arabic that enables a single word to yield a whole group of concepts.
Another distinguished contemporary Muslim scholar and thinker descended from the Prophet describes the language of the Qur’an in terms that seem most directly expressive and experientially oriented, yet also enhance the new reader’s sense and appreciation of the unique and inimitable literary qualities of the Qur’an:
The text of the Qur’an reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word. It is as if human language were scattered into a thousand fragments like a wave scattered into drops against the rocks at sea. One feels through the shattering effect left upon the language of the Qur’an, the power of the Divine whence it originated. The Qur’an displays human language with all the weakness inherent in it becoming suddenly the recipient of the Divine Word and displaying its frailty before a power that is infinitely greater than man can imagine.4