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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.
[Next: The centrality of the afterlife
]
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