Koran

"Koran" (Quran) means something recited or read; applied to Mohammed's revelations, it may indicate that they are to be used for recitation in worship.

The name may, however, also refer to the mode and nature of the revelations. Muslims consider the Koran to be the very words of God Himself. The messages given to Mohammed by the angel were taken from a Heavenly Book, uncreated and eternally coexistent with God, that is called the Mother of the Book or the Well-Preserved Tablet. This eternal book represents the eternal Speech of God, the expression of His truth and His will for the universe.

Books of previous prophets, such as the Gospel of Jesus or the Torah of Moses, were also taken from this source. The Koran is but another, yet the highest and final instance, of God's offerin g guidance to straying men through Scriptures brought by His chosen messengers. Followers of previous prophets, like the Christians and Jews, had corrupted their messages, thereby necessitating the sending down of the Koran to res tore the purity of divine guidance.

As the very words of God, the Koran is the foremost authority for Muslims in all matters of faith and practice. They pay it enormous reverence and have been at pains to preserve its contents exactly as they were received from the Prophet.

Safeguarding the Koranic text was the chief spur to perfecting the previously imprecise system of writing Arabic, just as the need to understand its meaning was the stimulus to the first systematic studies of Arabic grammar and lexicography.

There is probably no other book in history, including the Bible, that has been so much studied or commented upon. Studies that deal with its various aspects fill entire libraries and have been composed in all the important languages of the Islamic world. A commentary on the Koran is known as a tafsir, or explanation. The best-known and most used tafsir is that of al-Tabari (died 923), which fills 30 volumes with a phrase-by-phrase consideration of the Koran.

Reverence for the Koran is everywhere evident among Muslims. The book is never laid on the ground or permitted to come into contact with any filthy substance. The most superstitious sometimes use a fragment from its pages as an amulet or spell to ward off evil, to effect cures from sickness, and so on.

Religious ceremonies of any kind, as well as daily prayers, normally include recitation from it. All over the Islamic world there exist Koran schools where children are taught to memorize the text and recite it according to a set of customary modes. To have mastered the book perfectly makes one a hafiz (memorizer) and is reckoned a sign of great spiritual excellence. Even in countries where Arabic is not understood thousands of persons labor to commit the divine words to memory. Verses from the Koran in an elegant calligraphy decorate the facades and walls of mosques, religious schools, tombs, and other buildings.

The book itself has been magnificently embellished in thousands of hand-painted, illuminated copies. Evidence of the sacred character of the Koran is also seen in the refusal of most Muslim thinkers to sanction its translation from Arabic to any other language.

When it is rendered into another tongue, however skillfully, the words are no longer those spoken by God and, therefore, no longer the Koran.

In its present form the Koran does not show a literary unity, and the reader unaccustomed to it may find its contents somewhat fragmented. The explanation lies in the nature of its material and the manner of its collection into the book we know. It should be remembered that it contains a collection of prophetic utterances delivered over a period of more than 20 years. All of these utterances were relatively short, some of them only a line or two in the written text. Each was made in a different context and was related to the changing circumstances of Mohammed's life and the various audiences whom he addressed.

It should be remembered also that the revelations came to Mohammed in an ecstatic state.

Under the inspiration of prophecy he spoke from a kind of a trance, and the revelations were expressed in a powerful, pithy, rhymed, and rhythmic language quite unlike his ordinary speech.

The Koran was not composed as a continuous book in the modern sense but grew, bit by bit, out of the religious experiences of the Prophet. The fragmentation of the text is complicated also by the fact that those who collected Mohammed's revelations after his death had no concern to preserve their chronological order. A close reading of the Koran shows, and Muslim historians agree, that parts of the same revelation are sometimes widely separated in the pages of the book.

The Koran is approximately the size of the New Testament. It is divided into 114 chapters, each called a sura. Each sura bears a name taken from something mentioned in it. The second sura, for example, is called "The Cow" because of a story about a slaughtered cow. In every case but one, the suras are introduced by the formula "Bismillah," "In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful"; and 29 of them also have some mysterious and unexplained letters of the alphabet that have been the object of much commentary among Muslim writers. The names of some of the suras go back to Mohammed himself.

The suras were further divided into verses, or ayat (the plural form) , in later Islamic times.

The word ayat is interesting for what it tells of the Muslim understanding of the Koran; it means "signs," that is, the evidences of God's existence and sovereignty that include not only the Koranic revelations but natural phenomena, the miracle of life, and so forth.

The Koran took its present form after Mohammed's death in 632. As long as the Prophet was alive, he continued to receive revelations and to rearrange those that had already come to him. From the records it is clear that a certain amount of the Koran was written down under his supervision and that the basic structure of the suras was already established. There is unanimous agreement, however, that gathering the various piecemeal revelations into a standard text was undertaken by his successors, the pious caliphs. Tradition gives the chief role to Zayd Ibn Thabit, one of Mohammed's secretaries.

And most authorities agree that the collection was made in the time of Uthman, the third caliph (reigned 644- 656), whose version is still accepted throughout the Muslim world today.

Uthman's version, however, was not the only version available to the early Muslims and was not immediately acknowledged as the sole legitimate one. Several others were known, along with numerous variant readings of the text in minor points. The early Muslims felt great freedom in resorting to different readings of the Koran and, in fact, were proud of the richness exhibited in these variants. The learned men of the community continue to recognize variant readings, accepting the doctrine that the Koran has come down in seven versions.

With the exception of a short one at the beginning, called "The Opening," the suras of the Koran are arranged roughly in the order of length, with the longest coming first. This order has nothing to do with the chronological sequence of the revelations; in fact, the shorter suras at the end are generally agreed to date from the earliest period of Mohammed's prophethood. Since it would be of great help to historians to have the Koranic materials in historical order, several modern scholars, working from internal evidence of style and subject matter, have attempted chronological reconstructions.

For Muslims the questions of Koranic style, chronology, history of the text, and the degree of influence of previous writings upon its contents are secondary and unimportant. Islamic faith views the Koran as more than a sacred book; it is the very words of God Himself, a faithful copy of His eternal truth recorded in the heavenly Mother of Scriptures. The Koran thus occupies a fundamental place in the Islamic religious outlook.