Reading the Qur'an - Surahs 1, 67-114

"Corán," by Juandc

As I mentioned in my last post, Trump is winning, Islamophobia is on the rise, and now is a great time for Americans to read the Qur'an and stand up for Muslims. All of these things remain true, so let's get started.

First, some basic facts:

• Muslims believe that the Qur'an was revealed gradually over the course of 23 years, 609-632 CE, to a man named Muhammad ibn ʿAbdullah, by the angel Gabriel. 
• The Qur'an is divided into 114 chapters, or surahs, which are further divided into verses, or ayahs. Each surah has a name by which it is known in Muslim tradition, though they can also be referred to by number.
• The surahs are arranged roughly from longest to shortest, after the first short surah, The Opening, which is a sort of introduction to the Qur'an that encapsulates its message. The order of the surahs is considered to be part of the revelation to Muhammad.
• While the Qur'an is emphatically not considered to be poetry, it is written with a keen ear, and is clearly intended to be recited aloud and listened to. It has many features that we associate with poetry, including rhyming and a general avoidance of narrative. 
• Muslims do not believe that the meaning of the Qur'an can be separated from the original Arabic language in which it was revealed; "translations" of the Qur'an are impossible, and any rendering of the Qur'an in another language is considered to be an "interpretation" of its meaning rather than a true translation.* 

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To start reading the Qur'an, I decided to read the shortest surahs, and only work my way back to the longer stuff later. I began with the first surah, The Opening, which sounds like this:

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds,
the Compassionate, the Merciful,
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Thee we worship and from Thee we seek help.
Guide us upon the straight path,
the path of those whom Thou hast blessed, not of those who incur wrath, nor of those who are astray.

It is, in essence, a prayer, and is frequently used as such by Muslims. Several of the shorter surahs double as prayers in the same way.

The Opening contains several of the names of God (the Compassionate, the Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment), which are prominent throughout the Qur'an; translators often capitalize them to make them stand out visually. Its focus on God as a source of both mercy and judgment is a very common theme throughout the book.

Indeed, as I skipped ahead to the shorter surahs, starting with surah 67, I found that there is frequently a strong focus on what will happen on the Day of Judgment, when the good will be separated by the wicked after their deeds are weighed on a scale. One of the key roles of Muhammad is as a warner, whose task is not primarily to save people but to warn them about the coming judgment:

And for those who disbelieve in their Lord is the punishment of Hell.What an evil journey’s end! When they are cast therein, they will hear it blaring as it boils over, 
Well-nigh bursting with rage. Whenever a group is cast therein, its keepers ask them, “Did not a warner come unto you?” 
They say, “Indeed, a warner came unto us, but we denied him and said, ‘God did not send anything down; you are in naught but great error. (67:6-9, "Sovereignty") 

This act of warning is the role not only of Muhammad, but also the many other prophets who appear throughout the Qur'an. Muhammad is cast as the last in a long line of prophets who have been sent to warn people about the coming Judgment, that they must submit to God and do good deeds. These include a number of figures who would have been familiar to 7th-century Arabs but obscure to modern people who are not Muslims, but also quite a number of figures who appear in the Christian Bible, including Jesus himself. Several of these have whole surahs named after them: Noah (71, "Nuh"), Joseph (12, "Yusuf"), Abraham (14, "Ibrahim"), Jonah (10, "Yunus).

"Abraham, Peace Be Upon Him," in Arabic, by Ibrahim ebi

Besides the Judgment Day/afterlife imagery, of which there is a fair amount, what struck me the most about the section that I read was how embedded it was in the context of Muhammad's own life: sayings prompted by recent conflicts, reactions to what was happening to the Prophet and his followers. While a lot of the Qur'an is dedicated to things that could easily be read clearly without the context of the Prophet's life and times, a healthy minority cannot. Take surah 111, "The Palm Fiber":

May the hands of Abu Lahab perish, and may he perish!
His wealth avails him not, nor what he has earned.
He shall enter a blazing Fire.
And his wife, carrier of firewood,
upon her neck is a rope of palm fiber.”

This guy, Abu Lahab, gets called out in the Qur'an. Apparently, he was Muhammad's uncle and a fierce opponent of the early Muslim community, so it's not surprising that he in particular would show up, but rather that someone specific from Muhammad's time would show up at all.

This is surprising because the Qur'an is supposed to have been pre-existent and only later revealed. Before being revealed piecemeal to Muhammad over the course of his adulthood, it was revealed in its entirety to Gabriel. In other words, while it may have appeared that the Qur'an was reacting to Muhammad's circumstances, the prophet himself and faithful Muslims ever since have affirmed that the Qur'an existed before the events and people that it describes. (Later, Islamic orthodoxy would affirm not only the pre-existence of the Qur'an, but also its un-createdness—like Jesus in Christianity, it has come to be seen as existing with God in the very beginning.)

Belief in the Qur'an thus appears to lead directly to belief in predestination. I found this somewhat shocking, but apparently there is a a doctrine of predestination in Islam; not only that, but believing in some version of predestination is apparently one of the six articles of Islamic faith. (What exactly is meant by predestination appears to vary between believing that people have no control over their actions and that everything is directly controlled by God, an extreme view, or the more moderate and common view that people can make choices but that God already knows everything that will happen. From what I can tell, the notion that people have complete control over their destinies and that not even God knows what will happen appears to be considered heretical in mainstream Islam.)

I have always held a very dim view of predestination in my own religion, and though I have come with time to accept that it is a reasonable interpretation, I still have very little patience for it. It may be childish, but I really have a hard time wrapping my head around the notion that life is worth living if it's all mapped out ahead of time. So it was unsettling to stumble across predestination in Islam.

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I realize that I'm making the Qur'an out to be a little scary and weird, but it's really mostly just interesting. It's genuinely unlike anything else I've ever read, though there are glimpses of both Old and New Testament influence in style and content. It's strikingly beautiful in places:

By the sun and its morning brightness;
By the moon when following it;
By the day when disclosing it;By the night when enshrouding it;
By the sky and the One Who established it;
By the earth and the One Who spread it;
By the soul and the One Who fashioned it
And inspired it as to what makes it iniquitous or reverent.
 Indeed, he prospers who purifies it. 
And indeed he fails who obscures it. (91:1-10, "The Sun")

Even listening to it as a non-Arabic speaker, you can get a sense of its majesty and aural power:

I look forward to diving into the longer surahs over the next month. I hope to start writing about the portrayal of Biblical figures in the Qur'an, though whether this happens in my next post will depend on how much of that material is present in my next set of reading.

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*In this it resembles the Book of Mormon, which, though recorded in a sort of archaicized 19th-century English, is not officially allowed to be rendered in modern English (although apparently there is a restricted modern English rendering used to translate the book into other languages). There are other interesting parallels between Mormonism and Islam: both have scriptures revealed to/by a single individual, who is considered to be a prophet whose message supersedes that of (traditional) Christianity.

Bibliography:

Esack, Farid. The Qur'an: A User's Guide. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005.

Gade, Anna M. The Qurʼān: An Introduction. Oxford: Oneworld, 2010.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E. B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015.

All quotes from the Qur'an are from The Study Qur'an's translation.