Islam
The Qur'an (also Quran and
Koran,
Arabic ﻥﺍﺮﻗ) is the
Islamic holy book of
Allah (God).
Practioners of Islam, called
Muslims, believe that the Quran is the eternal, literal word of
God, revealed to the
Prophet Muhammad over a period of 22 years. The Qur'an consists
of 114
suras[?] (chapters) and 6,228
ayats (verses).
Much of the content in the Qur'an makes reference back to parts
of the
Jewish and
Christian
Bibles. Well-known Biblical characters such as
Adam,
Moses,
Abraham,
Noah,
Jesus,
Mary, and
John the Baptist are mentioned. Non-Muslims hold that Muhammad
was merely taking older religious documents and stories and
embellishing them.
Muslims believe that the wording of Qur'anic text that we have
today is identical to that spoken by Muhammad himself. Muhammad only
delivered the Qur'an in spoken form during his lifetime; the word
"Qur'an", in fact, means "the recitation". To ensure they remembered
the text thoroughly, the faithful were required to (and many still
do) memorize passages perfectly, down to the last syllable, and
recite them frequently. Shortly after his death in
632 CE, Muhammad's disciples began recording all the Suras in
written form. Thus, two different mechanisms were in place -- oral
and written -- to help ensure that no corruption of the text took
place over time. There is almost no dispute among Islamic clerics
that the text today is as it was when it was first written down.
However, translations of the Qur'an from
Arabic to other languages are not considered by Muslims to be
actual copies of the Qu'ran, but rather are considered to be
interpretive translations of the Qu'ran.
Muslims believe that only their scripture is the true word of
God. In recent years, a new development of Muslim theology has been
to latch onto the findings of modern biblical scholarship. Such
scholarship has shown that the extant version of the
five books of Moses was not written solely by Moses, as
traditional Jews and Christians had believed, but instead was edited
together from a number of previous sources; this is known as the
Documentary hypothesis. Similar work has been carried out on the
New Testament. According to religious Muslims, this is "proof"
that Jews and Christians deliberately faked and distorted their own
scripture, making it unreliable; in this view one is thus forced to
adopt the religion of Islam, as (according to its adherents) its
scripture (i.e. the Qur'an) is the only scripture that is the pure
and unaltered word of God. (But, see below for the discussion of the
origin of the Quran.) This ideology also holds that the Qur'an has
no errors nor inconsistencies.
An analogue to Christian Creation Science has recently developed
within Islam, in which
fundamentalist Muslims attempt to prove that the Qur'an predicts
all the accomplishments of modern-day science, including Quantum
Physics. Other Muslims reject this position.
Just as higher biblical criticism revolutionzed Judaism and
Christianity by calling into question long held assumptions about
the origins of the Bible, similar studies have done the same for the
Qur'an. Parts of the Qur'an are based on stories of the
Tanakh [Hebrew Bible], the
New Testament of the
Christian Bible and other non-canonical Christian works.
Differences of the biblical to the quranic versions indicate that
these stories were not taken directly from written texts but seem
rather to have been part of the oral traditions of the Arab
peninsula at Mohammed's time.
Islamic history records that
Uthman collected all variants of the Qur'an and destroyed those
that he did not approve of. Beside the known earlier versions from
Abdallah Ibn Masud and Ubay Ibn Ka'b, there exist also some dubious
reports about a shiite version which was allegedly compiled by Ali,
Mohammed's son in law which he gave up in favor of Uthman's
collection. Modern researchers assume that the differences between
the versions consisted mostly of orthographical and lexicalic
variants and differing count of verses.
Since Uthman's version contained no diacritical marks and could
be read in various ways, around the year 700 started the development
of a vocalized version. Today the Qur'an is published in fully
vocalized versions.
The
Hadith repesents the authoritative Muslim understanding of the
Qur'an and Islamic law. (It is roughly equivalent to Judaism's oral
law in the Mishna and Talmuds.) In detail it gives information about
which suras are to be regarded as abrogated by later ones, an
important question for the Islamic law. It explicitly refers to
chapters
suras[?] in the Qur'an that are no longer extant. Moreover the
Hadith often give an account about the situation when specific sura
were revealed, which was also an important aspect for
interpretation.
The interpretation of the Qur'an soon developed into its own
science, the ilm at-tafsir. Famous commentators were at-Tabari,
az-Zamahshari, at-Tirmidhi. While these commentaries mention all
common and accepted interpretations, modern fundamentalist
commentaries like the one of
Sayyed Qutb show tendencies to stick to only on possible
interpretation.
Today seven canonical readings of the Qur'an and several
uncanonical exist. This sevener-system was laid down by Ibn Mugahid
who tried to find the special characteristics of each reading and
thus derived common rules by analogical reasoning (qiyas).
Robert of Ketton was the first to translate it into Latin in
1143.
The proper rules (laws?) governing the translation and
publication of the Qur'an state that when the book is published, it
must never simply be entitled "The Qur'an." The title must always
include a defining adjective, which is why all available editions of
the Qur'an are titled The Glorious Qur'an, The Noble Qur'an,
and other similar titles..
- engl. translation by A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted,
London 1961
- Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari, Jami al-bayan an ta'wil ay
al-Qur'an, Cairo 1955-69, engl. translation ed. J. Cooper,
Commentaries on the Qur'an, Oxford 1987
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