Islam: A Brief Guide


An introduction on Islam’s straight forward philosophy and outlook on life

 

The Qur’an – a living miracle

The Qur’an is no ordinary book of fact or fiction. It is a living communication to humankind by our Creator, intended as a guidance for life, akin to an instruction manual or a travel guide. It helps us find our way, but it does not do the travelling for us. There were numerous revelations prior to the Qur’an, and fragments of those scriptures are still available today, like the Psalms of David (the Zabur of Daud), the Torah (Taurat, the book given to Moses/Musa), or the original gospel of Jesus (the Injil of Isa). However, none of those were recorded in writing at the time of their revelation, and in the process of oral narration, codification and translation, they underwent plenty of alterations and large parts were lost forever. The Qur’an, on the other hand, was preserved in writing each time as and when it was revealed.

The Qur’an is in Arabic, a Semitic language with an immaculately preserved syntactical structure, which has led many people to claim that it is not only the language of the people Muhammad – peace be with him – was sent to as a messenger, but the original language of mankind. Because the Qur’an, once revealed, codified the Arabic language, it has remained virtually unchanged, and the classical Arabic of the Qur’an is still easy to comprehend for a speaker of modern Arabic. Furthermore, the Qur’an uses a fairly simple language which permits readers of all educational backgrounds to feel comfortable and take from it. Nonetheless, a deeper study reveals several layers of meaning in each Ayah (verse, literally: sign) of the Qur’an, so that the same sentence, whilst fitting well within its context, also imparts knowledge and information about numerous other issues, personal, social, metaphysic, and so on. Because of this inimical style, which in addition has undeniable poetic qualities, the Qur’an contains the challenge that nobody, even with the most advanced help systems available, can ever produce a single Surah (chapter) like it. Those who have tried have failed utterly for yet another reason: The Qur’an was not written, edited, and eventually published as is the case with other books. It was revealed portion for portion over a period of 23 years. Each sentence or passage related to a particular event at the time and made sense to the people who heard it for the first time. However, the verses were assigned a particular order by Muhammad, following the instructions of the angel of revelation, Gabriel (Jibril), and this order is not chronological, yet anybody who reads the Qur’an today, with its verses in a totally different order than the one in which they were originally revealed, still finds that the sequence makes perfect sense. So there is the challenge: Write a book made up of contemporary comments over a period of more than two decades, re-arrange them continuously all along until you end up with a whole book which has a flowing narrative and is well interconnected. It can’t be done.

To complement the miracle, the Qur’an contains knowledge of the past and the future which was not available at the time of its revelation. For example, it mentions that the body of the pharaoh of the Exodus would be preserved as a sign for future generations, yet it was mummified one and a half millennia before Muhammad on a different continent and not discovered until one and a half millennia afterwards. The Qur’an also contains most accurate scientific descriptions of the embryonic stages of human development in the womb or of the orbital movements of planets, all of which was undiscovered for many more centuries to come. In fact, the scientific encouragement of the Qur’an, which resulted in the flourishing Muslim rule over Andalusia in Spain until eradicated by the Inquisition, gave birth to the age of enlightenment in Europe which eventually succeeded in spite of the Roman Church’s opposition. The social and political concepts of the Qur’an were equally advanced: It liberated women from being in the possession of men to being full members of society with property rights and the right to choose their own husbands, and Surah at-Taubah (Repentance) contains the first ever constitution of a state, in this case the city state of Madinah, half a millennium before King John, for example, granted limited rights to his subjects in Magna Carta. The concepts contained in the Qur’an are so revolutionary that it is not surprising that the Islamic faith conquered the ancient world in the shortest possible space of time, putting in the shade the great, but corrupt Persian and East Roman Empires, and once again, as these Qur’anic truths are being re-discovered, these ideals provide a balanced and increasingly attractive alternative to the failed ideologies of communism and capitalism.

For people brought up in a Christian or secular tradition, the concept of verbal revelation, that God speaks to man through an angel, is a difficult one. Christianity only concedes that there may be divine inspiration, which makes revelation not much different from intuition. However, the concept of verbal revelation was generally accepted prior to the establishment of the Christian Church. God spoke to Moses and dictated the Ten Commandments. He also told him that there would be raised amongst his brethren (that is the Ishmaelites or Arabs who are the brothers of the Israelites or Hebrews) a prophet like him (that is one who will receive such revelation and be a law-giver). This prophet must undoubtedly be Muhammad, for Jesus only came to confirm the law, not to change it.

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