The Qur'an: Word of God

From: http://www.islamia.com/the_last_book.htm

Contents
The Divine Word
Sacred Text, Sacred Language
Power
The Book
The Message
Divine Presence
Existence and Creation
Multiplicity and Unity
Signs and Realities
Levels of Meaning
Religion, Science and Symbols
Qur'anic Phrases
Summary

THE HOLY QUR'AN
The Divine Presence in the text provides food for the souls of men. The Qur'an is like existence itself, like the Universe and the beings who move through it. It contains all the elements of universal existence. It is in itself a universe in which a Muslim places his life from beginning to end.

The Divine Word
The covenant made between man and God by virtue of which man accepted the trust [amanah] of being an intelligent and free being with all the opportunities and dangers that such a responsibility implies, is symbolized physically by the stone by the stone of the Ka'ba. Spiritually the record of this covenant in contained in the Qur'an, that central theophany of Islam which is itself the eloquent expression of this eternal covenant between God and man.
The Qur'an contains the message with the aid of which this covenant can be kept and the entelechy of human existence fulfilled. It is thus the central reality in the life of Islam.
The Qur'an is the tissue out of which the life of a Muslim is woven; its sentences are like threads from which the substance of his soul is knit.
The Qur'an for the Muslim is the revelation of God and the book in which His message to man is contained. It is the Word of God revealed to the Prophet through the archangel Gabriel. The Prophet was therefore the instrument chosen by God for the revelation of His Word, of His Book of which both the spirit and the letter, the content and the form, are Divine. Not only the content and meaning comes from God but also the container and form which are thus an integral aspect of the revelation.
In other religions the 'descent of the Absolute' has taken other forms, but in Islam as in other Semitic religions but with more emphasis, revelation is connected with a 'book' and in fact Islam envisages the followers of all revealed religions as 'people of the Book' [ahl al-kitab].
A man who understands religion metaphysically and intellectually must either accept religion as such, that is, all orthodox tradition, or be in danger of either intellectual inconsistency or spiritual hypocrisy.
The unlettered nature of the Prophet demonstrates how the human recipient is completely passive before the Divine. Were this purity and virginity of the soul not to exist, the Divine Word would become in a sense tainted with purely human knowledge and not be presented to mankind in its pristine purity.

Sacred Text, Sacred Language
The form of the Qur'an is the Arabic language. Arabic is sacred in the sense that it is an integral part of the Qur'anic revelation whose very sounds and utterances play a role in the ritual acts of Islam.
The formulae of the Qur'an read in prayers and acts of worship must be in the sacred language of Arabic which alone enables one to penetrate into the content and be transformed by the Divine presence and grace [barakah] of the Divine Book. That is also why the Qur'an cannot be translated into any language for ritual purposes. The very sounds and words of such a sacred language are parts of the revelation.
Religion is not philosophy or theology meant only for the mental plane. It is a method of integrating our whole being including the psychical and corporeal. The sacred language serves precisely as a providential means whereby man can come not only to think about the truths of religion, which is only for people of a certain type of mentality, but to participate with his whole being in a Divine norm. This truth is universally applicable, and especially it is clearly demonstrated in the case of the Qur'an whose formulae and verses are guide posts for the life of the Muslim and whose continuous repetition provides a heavenly shelter for man in the turmoil of his earthly existence.
The text of the Qur'an reveals human language crushed by the power of the Divine Word.
The Qur'an, like every sacred text, should not be compared with any form of human writing because precisely it is a Divine message in human language.
It is not the sacred text that is incoherent. It is man himself who is incoherent and it takes much effort for him to integrate himself into his Centre so that the message of the Divine book will become clarified for him and reveal to him its inner meaning.
The whole difficulty in reading the Qur'an and trying to reach its meaning is the incommensurability between the Divine message and the human recipient, between what God speaks and what man can hear in a language which despite its being a sacred language is, nevertheless, a language of men. But it is a sacred language because God has chosen it as His insrurment of communication, and He always chooses to 'speak' in a language which is primordial and which expresses the profoundest truths in the most concrete terms.
The Qur'an is composed of a profusion and intertwining of plant life as seen in a forest often combined suddenly with the geometry, symmetry and clarity of the mineral kingdom, of a crystal held before light. The key to Islamic art is in fact this combination of plant and mineral forms as inspired by the form of expression of the Qur'an which displays this character clearly.
Power
The power of the Qur'an does not lie in that it expresses a historical fact or phenomenon. It lies in that it is a symbol whose meaning is valid always because it concerns not a particular fact in a particular time but truths which being in the very nature of things are perennial. Of course the Qur'an does mention certain facts such as the rebellion of a certain people against God and His punishment of those people as we see also in the Old Testament. But even those 'facts' retain their power because they concern us as symbols of a reality which is always present. The miracle of the Qur'an lies in its possessing a language which has the efficacy of moving the souls of men now, nearly fourteen hundred years since it was revealed, as much as it did at the beginning of its appearance on earth.

The Book
The Book is first of all al-Qur'an, namely a recitation from which its common name is derived. It is a recitation in the sense that it is a means of concentration upon the truth for 'recitation' is a concentration in which ideas and thoughts are directed towards the expression of a certain end. It is also al-Furqan, that is a discernment, a discrimination, in that it is the instrument by which man can come to discriminate between Truth and falsehood, to discern between the Real and the unreal, the Absolute and the relative, the good and the evil, the beautiful and the ugly. Finally it is Umm al-kitab, the mother of all books. As the 'Mother of books' the Qur'an is the prototype of all 'books', that is, of all knowledge. From the Islamic point of view all knowledge is contained in essence in the Qur'an, the knowledge of all orders of reality. But this knowledge lies within the Qur'an potentially, or as a seed and in principle, not actually.
The Qur'an is then the source of knowledge in Islam not only metaphysically and religiously but even in the domain of particular fields of knowledge.

The Message
The Qur'an contains essentially three types of message for man.
Firstly, it contains a doctrinal message, a set of doctrines which expound knowledge of the structure of reality and man's position in it. As such it contains a set of moral and juridical injunctions which is the basis of the Muslim Sacred Law or Shari'ah and which concerns the life of man in every detail. It also contains metaphysics about the nature of the Godhead, a cosmology concerning the structure of the Universe and the multiple states of being, and an eschatology about man's final end and the hereafter. It contains a doctrine about human life, about history, about existence as such and its meaning. It bears all the teachings necessary for man to know who he is, where he is and where he should be going. It is thus the foundation of both Divine Law and metaphysical knowledge.
Secondly, the Qur'an contains a message which on the surface at least is like that of a vast book of history. It recounts the story of peoples, tribes, kings, prophets and saints over the ages, of their trials and tribulations. This message is essentially one couched in historical terms but addressed to the human soul. It depicts in vivid terms the ups and downs, the trials and vicissitudes of the human soul in therms of accounts of bygone people which were not only true about such and such a people and time but concern the soul here and now.
Every event recounted about every being, every tribe, every race bears an essential meaning which concerns us. All the actors on the stage of sacred history as accounted in the Qur'an are also symbols of forces existing within the soul of man. the Qur'an is, therefore, a vast commentary on man's terrestrial existence. It is a book about whose reading reveals the significance of human life which begins with birth and ends with death, begins from God and returns to him.
Thirdly, the Qur'an contains a quality which is difficult to express in modern language. One might call it a divine magic, if one understands this phrase metaphysically and not literally. The formulae of the Qur'an, because they come from God, have a power which is not identical with what we learn from them rationally by simply reading and reciting them. They are rather like a talisman which protects and guides man. That is why even the physical presence of the Qur'an carries a great grace or barakah with it.

Divine Presence
The Qur'an possesses precisely a barakah for believers which is impossible to explain or analyze logically. But because of this Divine presence and barakah it endures from generation to generation. The Divine presence in the text provides food for the souls of men. It is in fact a sacred act to recite the Qur'an. Its reading is a ritual act which God wishes man to perform over and over again throughout his earthly journey.

Existence and Creation
Taken as a whole, the Qur'an is like existence itself, like the Universe and the beings who move through it. It contains all the elements of universal existence and for this reason is in itself a univerese in which a Muslim places his life from beginning to end.
In a metaphysical sense, the Qur'an contains the prototype of all creation. Metaphysically, the Qur'an has an aspect of knowledge connected with its text as a book and an aspect of being connected with its inner nature as the archtypical blueprint of the universe.

Multiplicity and Unity
The Qur'an corresponds to the world we live in from day to day. Man lives in a world of multiplicity and before he becomes spiritually transformed, he is profoundly attached to this multiplicity. The roots of his soul are deeply sunk into the soil of this world. That is why he loves this world and finds it so difficult to detach himself from it and attach himself to God.
The Qur'an, being like the world, is also a multiplicity in its chapters and verses, words and letters. The soul in first encoutering it discovers the same differentiation and multiplicity to which it is accustomed through its experience with the world. But within the Qur'an is contained a peace, harmony and unity which is the very opposite of the effect of the world as such on the souls of men. The external multiplicity of the world is such that in it man runs from one thing to another without ever finding peace and contentment. His soul runs from one object of desire to another thinking that it will find contentment just around the corner. Yet, it is a corner which he somehow never reaches.
The Qur'an begins by also presenting to the soul the possibility of running from one 'thing' to another, of running around corners, of living in multiplicity, but within lies a peace and contentment which leaves the very opposite effect on the soul.
The Qur'an does present itself as the world but a world in which there is not differentiation and dissipation but essentially integration and unification.

Signs and Realities
The Qur'an is the cosmos, the vast world of creation in which man lives and breathes. God displays his 'signs' the vestigia Dei, on the horizons, that is, the cosmos and more specifically the world of nature and within the souls of man until man comes to realize that it is the Truth.
The Qur'an corresponds in a sense to nature, to God's creation. That is why when a Muslim looks at a natural phenomenon he should be reminded of God and His Power and Wisdom. Man should be reminded of the 'wonders of creation' and constantly see the 'signs' of God upon the horizons. This attitude which is one of the essential traits of Islam is enextricably tied to the correspondence between the Qur'an and the Universe.
Human experience is based on a world and a subject that lives in this world and travels through it. Man's existence can be analyzed in terms of two realities, a world, a background, an environment, and a being, a traveller, who journeys through this background and lives in this environment.
The Qur'an again reflects this reality. The chapters of the Book are like worlds and we who read them like the traveller journeying through them. Or from another point of view the chapters are like the worlds, or realms, and the verses like the subject passing through them. In this aspect as in so many other essential ones the Qur'an corresponds to the very structure of reality; it corresponds in its external and inward aspects to all degrees of reality and knowledge, of being and intellection, whether it be practical or theoretical, concerned with social and active life or with metaphysical knowledge and the contemplative life.
Besides containing the basis of the Divine Law, the Qur'an expounds also a metapysics, a cosmology and an eschatology whose expression and formulation is what it should be.

Levels of Meaning
The Qur'an is meant for both the simple peasant and the metaphysician and seer and of necessity contains levels of meaning for all types of believers.
Many people in fact who read the Sacred Book receive no more from it than the literal message. This is because no sacred text opens itself to human scrutiny and reveals its secret so easily. The Qur'an is like the Universe wtih many planes of existence and levels of meaning. One has to be prepared to be able to penetrate its meaning. It is, moreover, particularly in the inspired commentaries, that man comes to understand explicitly and in more extended form what is contained often implicitly and in a contracted form in the Qur'an.
The inner meaning of the Qur'an can be understood, but for certain exceptional cases, only through the inspired commentaries each of which seeks to elucidate and elaborate certain aspects of the Book.
This type of commentary which is a penetration into the inner meaning of a sacred text is written by a traditional authority who has himself penetrated into the inner dimensions of his own being.
Man sees in the sacred scriptures what he is himself, and the type of knowledge he can derive fromt he texts depends precisely on 'who' he is.
It is essential to realize that we cannot reach the inner meaning of the Qur'an until we ourselves have penetrated into the deeper dimensions of our own being and also by the grace of heaven. If we approach the Qur'an superficially and are ourselves superficial beings floating on the surface of our existence and unaware of our profound roots, then the Qur'an appears to us also as having only a surface meaning. It hides its mysteries from us and we are not able to penetrate it. It is by spiritual travail that man is able to penetrate into the inner meaning of the sacred text by that process which is called ta'wil or symbolic and hermeneutic interpretation, just as tafsir is the explanation of the external aspect of the Book.
The Arabic term ta'wil contains etymologically the meaning of the process involved. It means literally to take something back to its beginning or origin. To penetrate into the inner mysteries of the Qur'an is precisely to reach back to its Origin because the Origin is the most inward, and the revelation or manifestation of the sacred text is at once a descent and an exteriorization of it. Everything actually comes from within to the outside, from the interior to the exterior and we who live 'in the exterior' must return to the interior if we are to reach the Origin.
When intellectual intuition is present and under the guidance of revelation one can penetrate the appearance to that reality of which the appearance is an appearance, one can journey from the exterior to the interior by this process of ta'wil, which in the case of the Qur'an means coming to understand its inner message.
The idea of penetrating into the inner meaning of things is to be seen everywhere in Islam, in religion, philosophy, science and art.
There is an inner meaning to the Qur'an not meant for anyone except those who are qualified to hear and understand it.
The Qur'an possesses an inner dimension which no amount of literal and philological analysis can reveal. And it is precisely this aspect of the Qur'an that is least known to the outside world.

Religion, Science and Symbols
Qur'anic commentary was the meeting ground for the knowledge derived from science and from the tenets of revelation.
The whole process of penetrating the inner meaning of the Qur'an, of discovering that wisdom which alone is the common ground between religion and science, is based on this process of ta'wil, which does not mean seeking after a metaphorical meaning or reading into the text. Ta'wil in the sense used by Sufis and Shi'ite sages is the pentration into the symbolic -- and not allegorical -- meaning of the text which is not a human interpretation but reaching a divinely pre-disposed sense placed within the Sacred Text trhough which man himself becomes transformed. The symbol has an ontological reality that lies above any mental constructions. Man does not make symbols. He is transformed by them. And it is as such that the Qur'an with the worlds of meaning that lie hidden in its every phrase transforms and remakes the soul of man.

Qur'anic Phrases
First Shahadah
Basmallah
Second Shahadah
Alhamd
Allahu Akbar
Insha' Allah and Masha' Allah
First Shahadah
The most fundamental formula of the Qur'an is the first Shahadah, that is, witness or testimony, La ilaha ill' Allah, which is the fountainhead of all Islamic doctrine, the alpha and omega of the Islamic message. In it is contained all of metaphysics. He who knows it knows everything in principle. It is both the doctrine and the method, the doctrine because it negates all relativity and multiplicity from the Absolute and returns all positive qualities back to God, the method because it is the means whereby the soul can combat against the enemies within. The very la at the beginning is a sword -- and in Arabic calligraphy the lam in fact resembles a sword -- by which the soul is able to kill al the evil tendencies within itself which prevent it from becoming unified and which endanger it towards polytheism, or shirk, by making it see the relative as Absolute. A Muslim repeats the Shahadah, not only because it reaffirms over and over again Divine Unity but also because, through its repetition, this Unity comes to leave its permanent imprint upon the human soul and integrates it into its Centre. It is a sword with which the 'deities' that keep springing up in the soul are destroyed and all multiplicity and otherness is negated.

Basmallah
After the Shahadah the most cardinal and often used formula is Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim, which is usually translated as 'in the Name of God, the Most Merciful and Compassionate'. Al-rahman is the transcendent aspect of Divine Mercy. Al-rahim is the immanent mercy of God. It is like a ray of light which shines in our heart and touches individual lives and particular events. The two qualities combined express the totality of Divine Mercy which envelopes us from without and shines forth from within our being.
The basmallah opens every chapter of the Qur'an except one which is really the continuation of the previous chapter. It also opens the Surat al-fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur'an, which is recited over and over again in the daily canonical prayers, and which contains the essence of the Qur'anic message. 'Ali, the representative par excellance of esotericism in Islam, said that 'all the Qur'an is contained in the Surat al-fatihah, all this Surat is contained in the basmallah, all of the basmallah in the letter ba' with which it begins, all of the letter ba' in the diacritical point under it and I am that diacritical point.'
Like the point which generates all geometric space, this point is the symbol of the Origin of all creation, as the basmallah itself marks the beginning of things. Its recitation at the begining of an act relates that act to God and sanctifies it. Even if every Muslim is not aware of all the metaphysical implications of the formula, yet its sanctifying power is known and felt by all and for that reason every act which is necessary and legitimate in life should begin with the basmallah, such as eating a meal or beginning a journey. In fact that act is illicit at whose commencement a devout Muslim cannot pronounce the formula. Otherwise all that is acceptable before the eyes of God can be sanctified by it. Through the basmallah the Divine joy and bliss enters into human life to bless and sanctify it.

Second Shahadah
Closely connected with the basmallah in meaning is the second Shahadah, Muhammadun rasul Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of God, which again expresses the Divine mercy for the world, for the Prophet is mercy for this world and the next [rahmat Allah li'l-alamin]. He is the mercy of God for all worlds and through his aid man is able to lead a life of happiness here below and felicity in the world to come. The second Shahadah is the complement of the first. The first negates all otherness from God, the second asserts that all that is positive in creation, of which Muhammad -- Upon him be peace -- is the symbol, comes from God.

Alhamd
The Alhamduli'-llah, Praise be to God, is the complement of the basmallah. It ends an act as the basmallah begins it. The Alhamd integrates the positive content of every act into its Divine Origin and makes man conscious of the fact that whatever he has done that is good comes from God and returns to Him. This formula again cannot be iterated except after an act that is pleasing to God and that leaves a positive imprint upon the soul and again it is the criterion of the spiritual value of an act.

Allahu Akbar
The formula, Allahu Akbar means fundamentally that whatever one says of God He transcends it and is greater than it. It is thus a way of asserting the Infinite nature of God that transcends all limited descriptions and formulations of Him.

Insha' Allah and Masha' Allah
Finally, among the most common formulae used are the two insha' Allah and masha' Allah, 'if God wills' and 'what God has willed', which are heard so often in daily speech.
The first refers to the future and expresses man's confidence in God's Will and the realization that nothing can be achieved without His Will. No matter how much we plan we do not know whether tomorrow we shall be here or elsewhere, or whether we shall be in the same state as now, and so we plan and act but fully conscious of the dependence of this action on the Divine Will, that Will which infinitely transcends ours.
As for the masha' Allah it comes at the end of an act and again reminds us that, ultimately, whatever occurs comes from God, and that whatever is realized is not by human effort alone but through His Will.
Through these Qur'anic phrases the life of man, which is scattered in multiplicity, becomes integrated by a thread of 'remembrance' which runs through it.

Summary
The Qur'an is both a source of law to guide the practical life of man and of knowledge which inspires his intellectual endeavors. It is a universe into whose contours both the natural and social environment of man are cast, a universe which determines the life of the soul of man, its becoming, fruition, death and final destiny beyond this world. As such it is the central theophany of Islam, but one which would never have come to men and never been understood save for him who was chosen as its messenger and commentator to men.
And it is in studying the life, teachings and significance of the Prophet that the full meaning of the message of Islam as contained in the Qur'an can be understood.