The Essence of Qur’an

From: http://www.whyislambay.org/

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’an
The 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’an
It 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

Readings from the Qur’an
For the reasons summarized above, the Qur’an is extremely dense and extraordinary intense. The translations of the Qur’an are simply designed to help non-Muslim Westerners approach this sacred book and savor something of its literary amazing power and grace, and grasp some of the central ideas and essential beauties of the Book.

Such is the nature of the Qur’an that many of the variations in literal translations that are as linguistically accurate as can be under the circumstances are present in subtleties, particularly nuances of particles and modal relations. For this reason, most renditions of the Qur’an look much alike to non-Muslim Westerners at first glance. These subtle nuances, however, can be combined in many ways to develop into considerable differences. These differences are intensified, furthermore, in proportion to the measure and degree of concentration and contemplation brought to bear by the individual reader.

Certain characteristics of English also come into play when translating a sacred text into this language. Most significantly, there is the fact that thee is no such thing as a sacred English. There is, furthermore, no such thing as a Standard English. There is not even a classical English, in the same sense that there is a classical Arabic or a classical Sanskrit. Finally, for the very reason that there is no sacred, standard, or classical English, there is also no universal or even common literary aesthetic in English.

One particular problem in rendering the Qur’an into English is presented by the numerous intensive forms used to refer to attributes of God. There are different forms of intensification in Arabic, with different ways of interpreting or describing even one form. In English versions, general, encompassing terms of intensity are used, with the provision that these expressions are intended to function as points from which the consciousness of the reader is to launch upwards toward contemplation of supernal ideals. The purpose, in other words, is not to represent God in human terms but to use human language as a means of directing the eye of contemplation toward the inexpressible infinity of the spiritual and metaphysical realities symbolized by language.

Another special problem in translating from the Qur’an into modern English is in the treatment of pronominal reference to God. In contemporary English, there is no third person pronoun perfectly well suited to making reference to the transcendent God beyond human conceptions. The ultimate shortcoming of human language is natural, of course, and not peculiar to English; but there are particular reasons for attending to the problem of the third person pronoun. Many people of Jewish and Christian background feel alienated from their native faiths by what they call the Angry Old Man image of God, with which they have been taught to associate religion. Furthermore, what has been perceived as the masculine bias of this image is particularly well known to have alienated many Western women from monotheism. This would seem to be an unnecessary waste.

To avoid short-circuiting the attention of significant segments of the modern audience at such a rudimentary stage, it may be preferred to translate the third person Arabic pronoun huwa/hu as referring to God as God, or God as Truth, rather than as referring to the English pronouns “He” or “Him.” In technical terms, this means that since the fundamental linguistic resource is the power of reference, one technique for handling difficulties in translation begins with considering language from this point of view.

Inasmuch as languages do differ, it is axiomatic that manners of reference can never be completely or perfectly aligned from language to language; and therefore the attempt to do so does not in itself reproduce equivalent powers of reference. Thus the first priority of translation, in terms of meaning, is to seek to engage the power of reference as efficiently as possible, in whatever manner the target language may afford. In this case, the principle means that a pronoun in one language is not taken to refer to a pronoun in another language, but to the original nominal referent for which the pronoun stands, and by which name/noun it can thus be meaningfully translated. In this case, following the injunction of the Qur’an to call God by “the most beautiful names,” the translations generally render pronominal reference to the divine by “God,” a name that is in this context uniquely unambiguous.

It should be observed, furthermore, that reference to God in the Qur’an is commonly made in the first person plural, occasionally singular: God often speaks as “We/Us/Our,” sometimes as “I/Me/My.” God is also addressed as “You,” and reference to God may shift through first, second, and third person within a short span of discourse. Humanity also may be addressed as “you” at one moment and then referred to as “they” the next. To distinguish them, pronominal references to God are often capitalized, to make them completely unambiguous. Once it becomes familiar, this shifting of perspective is one of the most interesting aspects of the consciousness engendered by Qur’an reading.

According to the eminent theologian Al-Ghazali, there are six aims of the Qur’an.5 The first aim is knowledge of God, including the essence, attributes, and works of God. The second aim is definition of the Path to God, by which the “rust” is removed from the “mirror” of the soul, so that the light of God may be reflected clearly in the purified soul.

The verses of the Qur’an dealing with the first aim, knowledge of God, are called by Al-Ghazali the jewels of the Qur’an. The verses dealing with the second aim, defining the Path to God, are called the pearls of the Qur’an. In giving these epithets to designated verses, Al-Ghazali emphasizes that these two aims, knowledge of God and the way to God, are most important.

The luster of the jewels and pearls is further highlighted and reflected by the verses representing the other four aims of the Qur’an as defined by Al- Ghazali. The third aim is definition of human conditions at the time of attaining to God. The condition of spiritual fulfillment, of which the epitome is one’s intimacy with God, is actualized by the Garden. The condition of spiritual bankruptcy, of which the epitome is alienation from God, is actualized by Hell, or the Fire.

The fourth aim is definition of the conditions of people who traveled the path to God, such as the prophets of the past, and the conditions of those who deviated from the path to God, such as the tyrants and oppressors of the past. These verses describe the attitudes and behaviors that have, do, and will lead people to felicity and misery.

The fifth aim is definition of the arguments of those who reject truth, proofs against these arguments, and exposure of the inherent falsehood and selfdeceit underlying these arguments. The special beauty of these verses is in their demonstration of the self-veiling operation of hypocrisy and specious logic based on unproven assumptions.

The sixth aim is definition of the fulfillment of what is required at each stage of the Path to God, including the manner of preparation of the journey. These verses demonstrate the connection between life in human society and the life of the spirit, how the self and world may be made into vehicles for the journey to enlightenment and completion.

In this connection, it is essential to observe that the English versions should be read aloud, for absorption and reflection, because this is characteristic of the Qur’an itself, from the very beginning of its revelation. Reading or recitation of the Qur’an is not supposed to be fast and glib, but measured and attentive, being in and of itself a spiritual exercise. The readings in Arabic follow the unique diction of the original Arabic Qur’an (which, it will be remembered, is unique and inimitable even in Arabic itself) for the effect this has on pace, attention, and psychological impact on the intelligent reader.

This article is an excerpt from the Introduction to the book “The Essential Koran” by Thomas Cleary, Castle Books, 1993. ISBN 0-7858-0902-3.
1.
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, Islamic Sufism (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1971), p.41. Go back...
2.
Ibid., p. 43. Go back...
3.
Ibid., p. 441. Go back...
4.
Seyyid Hussien Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), pp. 47-48. Go back...
5.
Muhammad Abul Quasem, The Jewels of the Qur’an: Al-Ghazali’s Theory (London: Kegan Paul International, 1984), p. 23 et passim. Go back...
Reviews for this book (“The Essential Koran” by Thomas Cleary):
“For the reader of English, Cleary unlocks the Koran and opens up its power and grace.” – Alan Godlas, Professor of Islamic Studies, Department of Religion, University of Georgia.
“Thomas Cleary has crafted a stunning evocation of the ‘untranslatable’ verses of the holiest of the holy books in Arabic, the Noble Qur’an. His is a poet’s touch, a seer’s vision, a traveler’s love for the journey to Truth. The Essential Koran will be essential reading for all who seek the core of Islamic spirituality.” – Bruce B. Lawrence, Professor of History of Religion, Duke University, and author of Defenders of God.