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In the year 610 of the Christian Era, a merchant of the prominent Quraysh tribe sat
meditating in a cave on Mt. Hira near Mecca. He heard a voice saying,
Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created.
created man of a blood clot.
Recite: And thy Lord is the Most Generous,
who taught by the Pen,
taught Man that he knew not. [96.1-5]
Thus began the youngest of the major world religions and one of the most successful
lives in world history. As a religious, political, and military leader, Muhammad
(570-632) is without equal. Only Moses comes close, but Moses was not allowed to
enter the Promised Land, while Muhammad returned to Mecca as a victorious conqueror.
We are. moreover, fortunate to have better documentation for his life than for that of
Moses, Jesus, or the Buddha. On any reckoning, Muhammad’s biography is one well
worth studying. If you read the Qur'an, you may want to read along with it the most
important early biography, the Life of Muḥammad by Ibn Isḥāq.
Today, however, our primary goal is to become acquainted with the Qur’an. While
some light may be shed on this great book by a fuller knowledge of its historical context,
nothing replaces study of the text itself. Thus, most of my talk will focus on the primary
text, though I will first discuss some of the major events and issues that form the
background of the Qur’an.
Muhammad was an orphan. His father died before he was born and his mother when
he was six years old. His grandfather took care of him for two more years before he died
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�as well. Thereafter his uncle Abu Talib, head of the Banu Hashim clan, assumed
guardianship of the boy. Thus Muhammad grew up as something of an outsider within
Meccan society. Although he did belong to its most prominent tribe, the Quraysh, he was
a weak and vulnerable member of it. He rose to prominence, however, due to his skills as
a caravan trader, as well as for his reputation of honesty. When he was 25, the wealthy
widow Khadija, rather impressed, asked for his hand in marriage, was accepted, and
became his first wife.
Mecca was a major hub of the Arabian caravan trade routes that connected the
Byzantine Empire in the north with the spice-exporting Yemen in the south. The Quraysh
not only dominated Meccan trade but also were custodians of the Kaaba, the central
shrine for the still largely pagan Arab tribes. The word Kaaba, related to our word
"cube", refers to the cubical structure enclosing the Black Stone, a sacred object
traditionally venerated by the pagan Arabs and possibly of meteoric origin. Mecca and
the Kaaba were already sites of pilgrimage before Muhammad's time, the time that
Muslims refer to as Jahiliyya, or the time of ignorance.
During their sojourn there, the Arabs would hold fairs, including competitions in
poetry, still a largely oral art. Several of these pre-Islamic poems survive. Some of them
are known as the "Hanging" or "Suspended" Odes and were supposedly hung up in the
Kaaba as a token of honor.
Although Arab polytheism still flourished at its major center of Mecca, monotheistic
religions were common not only in the surrounding areas but even with Arabia itself.
Orthodox Christianity was the official religion of the Byzantine Empire, while the
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�Sassanid Persian Empire supported Zoroastrianism, arguably a monotheistic faith,
although a highly dualistic one. Many Christians, of various sects, were spread througout
Arabia, and there was a sizeable Jewish community in the city of Yathrib.
Thus when Muhammad brought forward his monotheistic message, he had many
enemies. Although he had hoped to find a receptive audience among the “People of the
Book”, i.e, Jews and Christians, in this hope he was largely disappointed. The fiercer and
earlier struggle, however, was against the leaders of his own city and tribe, the polytheist
Quraysh, for Muslims, like Jews and Christians before them, not only believed in the
existence of one God, but held that God to be a jealous god, a god who would “have no
other gods before him.” Polytheism was not simply mistaken, but even a direct affront to
God and could not be tolerated.
Polytheism is more tolerant than monotheism. The chief god of the Arabic pagan
pantheon was Allah, or "the God." "Allah" simply comes from a common Semitic root
for "god" and is cognate with Hebrew Elohim and Ugaritic El. The pagan Arabs had
traditionally associated other gods with Allah and worshipped these other divinities, in
particular Allah’s daughters (al-Lat, Manat, and al-Uzza). The polytheists could well
accept that Allah was the one supreme god; they could not, however, accept that he was
the only god or the only god to be worshipped. Particularly offensive to this traditional
tribal society, however, must have been the claim that their ancestors, by worshipping
associates alongside of Allah, were now burning in hell. Moreover, Muhammad’s attack
upon polytheism was a direct threat to their domination of the Meccan trade and shrine.
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�The polytheists challenged Muhammad to prove his apostleship by performing a
miracle. He replied that it was not in his power to perform miracles, but only in God’s
power to do so, and that the Qur’an itself was the miracle. A noble, elevated discourse
spoken through an illiterate merchant, the Qur’an impressed both believers and nonbelievers alike. Muhammad challenged his opponents to sit down and produce
something like it. If they could not do so, the argument goes, then the Qur’an must be a
work of greater than human creation.
Besides the Qur’an itself, there is one other miracle involving Muhammad that
cannot be passed over in silence, since it is the basis of the Muslim claim on Jerusalem as
a holy city. It is reported that one night as he was sleeping in Mecca, Muhammad was
transported by the fabulous winged beast Buraq to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem,
whence he was allowed to ascend the seven heavens and discourse with Abraham, Moses,
and Jesus. Thence he was brought back to Mecca the same night. More than half a
century after the Muslims conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantine Christians, the
Umayyad Caliph Abd-al-Malik, had the Dome of the Rock constructed on the Temple
Mount, known to Muslims as Haram es-Sharif.
The hostility of the Quraysh leadership could well have led to the murder of
Muhammad, if it had not been for the protection of his still pagan uncle Abu Talib. The
killing of somebody under tribal protection would have led to a blood feud. So instead of
attacking Muhammad directly, the polytheists persecuted his followers. Despite
persecution, Islam grew, attracting in particular many of the alienated members of
Meccan society, such as freedmen and slaves. When Abu Talib died, however, (619) and
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�the new leader of the Banu Hashim, Abu Lahab (another uncle of the prophet) withdrew
protection from him, Muhammad looked for another home for the Muslim community.
When an opportunity for refuge and alliance presented itself in nearby Yathrib, he and his
Muslim followers migrated there. This migration, or hijra, is the beginning of the
Muslim epoch.
Up to this point, Muhammad had been a religious leader. Now he became a political
leader by founding the nascent Islamic state in Yathrib, now known as Madinat an-Nabiy,
that is, the City of the Prophet, or Medina. The revelations of the Medina period show a
much greater concern for political matters and laws relevant to the foundation of a state.
The hostility between the Muslims and the polytheists of Mecca did not end then,
however. Muhammad insisted that the Muslims be allowed to worship at the Kaaba,
which he claimed had been originally a monotheist shrine founded by Abraham and his
son Ishmael. The Meccans had also confiscated Muslim properties in Mecca and the
immigrants to Medina turned to the Arab tradition of caravan raiding to make a living.
This hostility broke out into open war when Muhammad led the Muslims in a raid on a
Meccan caravan at Badr (624). Engaging with reinforcements from Mecca and
outnumbered by more than three to one, the Muslims won a decisive victory. After
further battles with mixed results, Muhammad entered Mecca as a conqueror in 630,
pardoned nearly the whole population, and purified the Kaaba of its idols.
Muhammad only lived for two more years. In that time he completed the conquest
and conversion of Arabia and unified the Arab tribes for the first time in history, a
unification made possible perhaps by religion alone. He thus provided the basis for the
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�astonishing Arab military expansion that was to explode onto the world scene shorty after
his death. He had no surviving sons, however, and his only significant failure as a leader
was that he did not appoint a clear successor or establish a clear policy of succession.
This failure resulted in a series of civil wars after his death and in the schism of the
Islamic community into Sunni and Shi’ite sects that has remained of fateful importance
even to the present day. The majority sect, the Sunnis, accepted Abu Bakr as the caliph
or successor to Muhammad, whereas the Shi'ites believed that Muhammad's nephew and
son-in-law 'Ali should have been recognized as the first caliph.
Even if Muhammad had only united the Arab tribes, he would be remembered as an
eminent political and military leader. But his importance as not merely an Arab leader,
but also as a world leader rests on his prophetic mission. For although the Qur’an is in
Arabic and addresses Arabs most directly, its message is of universal import. From the
beginning, Islam, like Christianity, has seen itself as having a universal mission. So
without further ado, let us turn to the Qur’an.
When we first encounter with the Qur’an as Westerners, we are likely to be puzzled.
This is not a book like the books we are familiar with. It does not tell a story like the
Iliad or War and Peace. Although it has many themes in common with the Bible, it lacks
the narrative frame that organizes many, if not all, of the books of the Bible. Although it
has chapters, or suras, there is little or no apparent connection between a given chapter
and the one that comes before or after it. Even within a given sura, one can encounter a
bewildering mixture of prophetic warnings, stories, and legal stipulations. So our first
question is, “What kind of book is the Qur’an?”.
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�Just as the Bible is not one book, but a collection of many books, so too the Qur’an is
not a single revelation but a collection of several revelations. If one were to sit down and
read the entire Bible, one would be rightly puzzled if one were to find the book of Joshua
next to the Gospel of Matthew, the Song of Songs next to Paul’s Letter to the Romans. It
is not surprising to find diversity within the Bible, a collection of texts spanning some
thousand years, written by different authors, addressing different audiences in widely
divergent circumstances. Since the Qur’an, however, was all revealed within a span of
some 23 years, and to one man, Muhammad, we might have expected a high degree of
uniformity, and while there is more uniformity in the Qur’an than in the Bible, there is
still a surpising amount of diversity, as we shall see.
When I say that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, I do not wish to take a
stance on the question of divine authorship, but I do want to emphasize that Muhammad
did not compose or write this book. According to all accounts, both those supportive of
and hostile to him, Muhammad spoke forth individual suras while in a kind of trance or
ecstatic state. Some believed that he was receiving communication from the angel
Gabriel, others that he was possessed by a genie or demon. The former, of course, took
him to be the latest prophet and became his first followers; while the latter accused him
of being a “poet possessed,” alluding to the traditional Arabic view of poets as being
possessed by some divine or demonic spirit. The Arabic word for "crazy," majnun
derives from the same root as jinn or genie.
While some thought that he spun old wives’ tales, there is no contemporary
accusation that he was simply “faking” an ecstatic state for some ulterior motive, e.g., a
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�political one. This, I have no doubt, is how Machiavelli sees Muhammad, thus joining
him with Numa and Moses as political leaders who feigned divine communication in
order to bolster a political order. But telling against this view is the fact that when the
Quraysh offerred Muhammad political leadership in exchange for ceasing to preach
monotheism, he refused.
Muhammad spoke forth individual revelations or suras when he fell into an ecstatic
trance. He and many of his followers were illiterate, so although some may have been
written down by his literate followers, by and large the revelations were passed on by
word of mouth, until they were all written down and collected by the third caliph
‘Uthman (c.656). Although traditions had passed down some information about when the
various suras were revealed, in particular whether during the Meccan or the Medinan
period, ‘Uthman did not attempt to arrange the suras chronologically. Instead, by and
large, and with the exception of the first sura, the suras are arranged from longest to
shortest.
It turns out that the Meccan suras tend to be shorter than the Medinan suras, so the
Qur’an roughly moves in a backwards chronological order. Thus the traditional Muslim
way of learning the Qur’an in Arabic—beginning with the end of the book—also makes
chronological sense. A concern with chronology, however, is a largely Western concern,
for Muslims would deny that there is any change or development in the message revealed
in their holy book, whereas Westerners are always looking for development, even where
there is none to be found. Although I would argue that there are interesting differences
between the Meccan and Medinan suras, it is still debatable how significant those
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�differences are. The Meccan suras tend not only to be shorter, but also often use beautiful
natural imagery to discuss the coming Day of Judgment. The Medinan suras, by contrast,
are not only longer, but often deal with many of the social and legal issues that needed to
be addressed by the nascent Islamic state in Medina.
So the Qur’an is not a composition, if by “composition” we mean an arrangement
ordered according to a certain principle, so that it would be impossible to move pieces
around and still have the same thing. Exodus cannot come before Genesis, the death of
Patroclus cannot come before the anger of Achilles, Proposition I.47 of Euclid cannot
come before proposition I.1. Nothing is lost, I would argue, by reading the Qur’an
backwards. This is another way of saying that the Qur’an is a collection rather than a
composition.
But perhaps a more important point to emphasize is that each sura is meant to stand
on its own. The longer suras, one might argue, are even meant to present the whole truth.
Thus to go from one sura to another in sequence is not like adding pieces together to form
a whole picture but is like revisiting the same truth again and again, sometimes from a
slightly different angle. Thus a key feature of the form of the Qur’an is repetition. While
this may be tedious for a Western reader who is used always to encountering something
new in the next chapter, this formal feature also reinforces one of the central points of the
content of the Qur’an: human beings’ central failing is that they are forgetful. Prophets
come to remind us of the truth that we have forgotten or that we would like to forget.
And as anybody knows who has tried to learn a foreign language, repetition is the key to
remembering.
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�To fend off the accusation that Muhammad was just another “posessed poet,” the
Qur’an itself is claimed not to be poetry, altough it does make use of many poetic
techniques. The suras are composed of verses and make extensive use of end rhyme. I
will now play for you a recitation of the first sura, “Al-Fatihah”, or “The Opening.”
Notice the end rhyme on “-im, -in.”
I hope this excerpt, even through the medium of a foreign language, gives you a sense
of the beauty, power, and appeal of the original. These features of language, in particular
of poetic language, suffer the most in the process of translation. Nor are they thought to
be extrinsic to the essence of the Qur’an. For the Qur’an tells us more than once that it
is written in clear, noble Arabic. The incomparable beauty of the language is the main
argument for the Qur’an being a divine revelation. The verses are called ‘ayāt,’ which
literally means “signs.” Just like the beautiful and powerful cosmic signs such as the sun,
the moon, and the stars, the verses of the Qur’an are taken to be signs that point to the
power, goodness, and wisdom of the Creator who made them.
Having touched briefly on the form of the Qur’an, I will now turn to its content. The
first and most essential part of this content is the theology. A concise statement of its
theology is provided by sura 112:
Say: ‘He is God, One
God, the Everlasting Refuge,
who has not begotten, and has not been begotten,
and equal to him is not any one.’
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�Thus God is one and without associates. That he neither begets nor is begotten not
only rules out the Arab polytheist beliefs that he has daughters but also the Christian
trinitarian doctrine. He is eternal and absolute. Elsewhere we are told that he is allknowing and all-powerful. He created everything, not only inanimate things like the sun
and moon, stars and earth, but also the different orders of living things—the angels, the
jinn, and human beings and plants and animals. God is not only just but also
"compassionate and merciful." He commands human beings to do good and resist evil,
but is compassionate towards those who turn to him and ask for forgiveness. On the Day
of Judgment, human beings will be resurrected and summoned before God. Their good
and evil deeds will be recorded and weighed in a balance. Those whose good deeds
prevail will be rewarded will eternal life in Paradise. Others will be cast into the pit of
Hell to suffer eternal torment.
When God created Adam he commanded the angels to bow down before him. All did
so except for Iblis (Satan), who thereby became man’s bitter enemy. Adam and Eve were
cast from the Garden for eating of the fruit of the tree of life, contrary to divine
prohibition. There is no Islamic doctrine of original sin, however. We are not being
punished now for the sin that Adam and Eve committed. We have, however, inherited
their forgetfulness. In particular, human beings get caught up in pursuing their individual
self-interest, such as accumulating wealth, and forget divine warnings. We will all die
and cannot take our wealth with us. We will all be judged and our wealth will not help
us. We are commanded to provide for the more vulnerable members of society—the
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�widow, the orphan, the poor. We are commanded to do so by paying the alms tax, the
zakat. Failure to do so will result in grievous punishment in the hereafter.
Prophets have been sent to all peoples and have by and large been ignored. Even
after punishment came upon certain cities that ignored a prophet’s warnings, others did
not heed those examples. God has even sent down two books, the Torah and the Gospel,
to be constant reminders. The people who preserve those books, the “People of the
Book” (i.e., Jews and Christians), continue to bear witness to the one true God, although
even they have altered the true message by corrupting the divine text with human
interpolations. During to these corruptions, Islam, unlike Christianity, does not regard
earlier biblical texts as part of its canon. All the truths of the Torah and Gospel are also to
be found in the Qur'an itself. Muhammad has now been sent as the final prophet, as the
“seal of the prophets,” so this is humanity’s last opportunity to finally get the message.
The message has been essentially the same ever since Abraham, the first monotheist,
brought it to human beings. By submitting his willing to Allah, the one God, Abraham
became the first Muslim, (“one who submits”). The word muslim comes from the same
root as the greeting salām, and is cognate with the Hebrew shalom. According to Islam,
Islam did not begin with Muhammad but rather with Abraham. Muhammad’s importance
lies not in founding Islam, but in restoring it and in being the final prophet. Together
with his son Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, Abraham built and consecrated the
central shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca.
To receive the message brought first by Abraham, restated by Moses and Jesus, and
finally restored by Muhammad, is to be a believer. To ignore or reject the message is to
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�be a non-believer, or infidel. Since the essence of the message is monotheism, infidels
and polytheists are seen as one and the same. Because prophets have been sent to all
peoples, there are no “innocent” polytheists: every people has had an opportunity to
accept the monotheist message. Since there are clear signs everywhere pointing to the
existence of one God, rejecting the oneness of God is taken to indicate not mere
ignorance, but willful ignorance. Polytheists reject God because they want to, not
because they are clueless. Some passages suggest a doctrine of predestination: "God
guides whom he wills and leads astray whom he wills."
The “People of the Book” are not infidels, nor are they believers in the proper sense.
While they have accepted the core of the message—i.e., that God is one—they have
become confused as to other aspects of it. Christians, for example, have mistakenly taken
their prophet Jesus to be not a mere messenger of God, but to be God. Jews have
wrongly rejected Muhammad’s prophetic mission.
Islam asserts a strong dualism of good versus evil and sees them as in constant
struggle with one another. Struggle, or jihād, is a central concept of Islam, although it is
not quite one of the pillars of the faith, at least for Sunnis. Just as in the universe, so too
amongst human beings and in the human soul there is a constant battle between good and
evil, a battle that will last until the Day of Judgment, when all will be resolved by God.
Since God is good, and believers are the ones who have taken God’s side, believers are
inherently on the side of good. This does not mean that believers cannot fall into evil or
err, but it does at least mean that they are on the right side of the cosmic struggle.
Contrariwise, to disbelieve is to go against God, to side with evil against good. Thus
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�whatever meritorious action, such as feeding a beggar, disbelievers may do, that action
cannot override the fact that disbelievers have taken the wrong side in the battle of good
versus evil. While they continue in their disbelief, they cannot be saved. Believers, on
the other hand, are not guaranteed salvation, but they will at least receive God’s open ear
and mercy when they ask for forgiveness for their sins.
The struggle against disbelief and evil in oneself and in the world has important
implications for how the Islamic community defines itself in relation to others. During
the Meccan period, when Muslims were a perscuted minority in a largely pagan city, the
message preached sounds something like a message of toleration, as we can see from sura
109:
Say: ‘O unbelievers,
I serve not what you serve
and you are not serving what I serve,
nor am I serving what you have served,
neither are you serving what I serve.’
To you your religion, and to me my religion!’
Now this sura can be taken in more than one way. The weakest reading is that it is a mere
observation that Muslims and polytheists have different religions. But since this is said
directly to polytheists, it is at the very least an act of defiance, for polytheism seeks to
incorporate new gods and cults within itself. It may even, as we can see from Herodotus,
deny the existence of different religions. This sura may be a way of saying, “You may
say that both you and we worship Allah, but in fact we don’t worship the same thing, for
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�we worship Allah alone, while you worship him alongside of his supposed daughters and
other false gods.” The last line is thus an assertion of an impassable barrier between
Islam and polytheism.
Another intriguing possibility lies in an ambiguous word in the last line. The
word translated as “religion,” din, can also mean “judgment,” as in the expression,
yawmu d-din, the “Day of Judgment.” Thus we could translate instead, “To you your
judgment, and to me my judgment.” This could be a way of saying, “We fundamentally
disagree, and God will decide between us on Judgment Day.”
Whichever of these possible readings we adopt, something like tolerance is still
being proposed, for in this sura the believer is told to speak the truth to the non-believer,
rather than to attack, oppress, or kill the unbeliever. It does not, however, go against the
idea of a fundamental struggle between good and evil, or between believers and nonbelievers. The Muslim community in Mecca was not in a position to take the offensive
against the Meccan polytheists, so the most that can be expected of them is to maintain
the integrity of their belief by bearing witness to it, i.e., being martyrs for it, in the face of
persecution and oppression.
Once the Muslims migrated to Medina, however, and became powerful enough to
assert themselves against the Meccans, they did so. And the suras from that period reveal
a more aggressive and militant policy against polytheism. Muslims are commanded to
fight the polytheists of Mecca until they cease oppressing Muslims and allow them to
worship in the sacred mosque of Mecca: “Fight them, till there is no persecution and the
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�religion is God’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for
evildoers.” (2.193).
Thus Islam is not a religion that says “Turn the other cheek.” On the other hand,
Muslims are explicity warned not to be the aggressors, “And fight in the way of God with
those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors.” (2.190) Thus
only defensive warfare is justified, and it is not only justified but even commanded.
Moreover, while Muslims are commanded to spread the word, forced conversion is
explicitly forbidden, “No compulsion is there in religion.” (2.256).
The People of the Book have a special status within Islam. While conflict
between Muslims and polytheists is seen as nearly unavoidable, the People of the Book
should be granted tolerance as fellow, although erring, monotheists. Tolerance in this
context means that Jews and Christians living in a Muslim society are allowed to practice
their own religion under their own laws so long as they recognize Muslim superiority and
pay a tax in exchange for Muslim military protection. While this policy is not explicitly
stated in the Qur’an itself, it did become enshrined in the shari’a or Muslim law. The
Qur’an itself is equivocal on the relations between Muslims and Jews or Christians. To
cite a favorable passage:
Dispute not with the People of the Book
save in the fairer manner, except for
those of them that do wrong; and say,
‘We believe in what has been sent down
to us, and what has been sent down to you;
our God and your God is One, and to Him
we have surrendered.’ (29.46)
#16
�We also read:
Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry
and the Christians, and those Sabaeans,
whoso believes in God and the Last Day, and works
righteousness—their wage awaits them with their Lord,
and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow. (2.62).
If we turn to the structure of the Islamic society, we find it bound together by religious
and social duties. Although the Qur’an itself does not assign a particular number to these
duties or refer to them as “pillars,” different Islamic sects have enumerated different
“pillars of the faith.” The majority sect, the Sunnis, enumerate five such pillars. Besides
payment of the alms tax, or zakat, that we have already mentioned, we also find the
prescription of five daily prayers, or salat, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or the hajj, as well as
the fast of Ramadan. The remaining duty, the shahada, or testimony of faith, is not
explicitly prescribed as a duty in the Qur’an but may be seen as a precondition for
accepting the Qur’an as a revealed word at all. It goes, “I testify that there is no god but
God, and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
What kind of society do these duties promote? First of all, it is one that struggles
against the selfishness of individualism. There is nothing wrong with becoming wealthy
in itself, but there is if one does so at the expense of others, or if one refuses to contribute
to the welfare of those less fortunate. The Qur’an does not seek to abolish or level
existing social hierarchies, whether of rich vs. poor, free vs. slave, or man vs. woman, but
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�it does accept the spiritual equality of all before God and insists that all have a duty to
attend not only to the spiritual, but also to the physical, welfare of all others in the
community.
The opposition between the spiritual and the physical, between the spirit and the
“flesh,” so marked in Christianity, is not so strong in Islam. Islamic paradise includes
flowing water, flourishing plants, abundant honey, and beautiful virgins and youths.
Christians have long been scandalised, but that only shows that Muslims do not war
against the flesh as Christians have for so long. Given that God has made both our bodies
and our souls, our flesh and our spirit, to reject the physical is to reject part of God’s
creation. While Islam does believe in a strong opposition between good and evil and
does contrast this current inferior world with the superior world to come, it does not show
a marked contrast between flesh and spirit, nor does it brand the “desires of the flesh” as
inherently evil. There is nothing wrong with desiring and enjoying beautiful things. This
world is inferior to the world to come not because this world is physical and the next
world is spiritual. Even Christians, after all, insist on the resurrection of the body, and
what would a body be good for in a purely spiritual realm? This world is inferior to the
next rather because it is fleeting and filled with injustice and selfishness.
To take one particular example. Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol not
because it excessively titillates our appetite for gustatory relish, but rather because it
inhibits our ability to act as responsible members of society. Likewise, its sexual
regulations, against adultery and fornication for example, are justified in terms of
mainting a well-regulated society. There is nothing wrong with sexual pleasure per se,
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�much less with sexual desire. Modesty in dress is prescribed for both men and women,
although it is more strictly expected of the latter.
Let us take another example. Islam, along with Judaism and Christianity,
prohibits usury on loans to one’s fellow citizens. While economists will rightly point out
that prohibiting usury is both ineffective and inefficient, that criticism misses the point,
for the economists are presupposing a core human selfishness that Islam is striving to
overcome. It is possible to feed the poor to bolster one’s sense of grandeur, or one’s
ranking on some list; it may even work well when all in society simply pursue their
enlightened self-interest. But to do the right thing for the wrong reason is still not to act
morally: one should support charity just because it is the right thing to do.
This is much more that one could say about the Qur’an. I hope the little that I
have said gives you some sense of the context in which it was revealed, of its form and
content, and also of how it conceives of the nature of Islamic society and the relation of
Islam to other religions.
#19
�
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St. John's College Meem Library
Coverage
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Santa Fe, NM
Description
An account of the resource
Items in this collection are part of a series of lectures given every year at St. John's College at the Santa Fe, NM campus.
Text
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Original Format
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pdf
Page numeration
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19 pages
Dublin Core
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Title
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The Qur'an : an introduction for Johnnies
Description
An account of the resource
Transcript of a lecture given on June 16, 2021 by Ken Wolfe as part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series. Mr. Wolfe provided this description of the event: "In this introduction to the Qur'an, I will explore the context of its composition within the life of Muhammad and 6th century Arabia, its form and content, its relation to other texts and traditions (the Bible, Judaism, Christianity), and its influence upon certain aspects of the Islamic tradition."
Creator
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Wolfe, Kenneth
Publisher
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St. John's College
Coverage
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Santa Fe, NM
Date
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2021-06-16
Rights
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Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Subject
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Qur'an
Islam
Language
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English
Identifier
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SF_WolfeK_The_Qur'an--An_Introduction_for_Johnnies_2021-06-16
Graduate Institute
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