So tell the tale — perhaps they will reflect. [Koran 7:176]
The Koran and The Messenger
Introduction
The book, “The Vision of Islam” by American Professor couple Dr. Sachiko Murata and Dr. Professor William C. Chittick [Shamas-ud-din Chittick] covers the four dimensions of Islam as outlined in the Hadith of Gabriel, practice, faith, Ihsan/ spirituality, and the Islamic view of history. The excerpts from this popular and simple but interesting book are being presented here with his permission through a series of articles. The original language and words of the book have been kept as far as possible like the Koran for the Quran but supplications have been added with the name of the Prophet (Pbuh) as per Muslim tradition of respect. Drawing on the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet (Pbuh) and the great authorities of the tradition, the text introduces the essentials of each dimension and then shows how it has been embodied in Islamic institutions throughout history. Something is lost when Western thinkers approach Islam as they seem to see the religion in historical and cultural terms, obscuring Islam’s own internal logic and its true beauty and spirituality. This clearly written introduction to Islam changes that, vividly explaining the Islamic perspectives that have rung true for Muslims for nearly 1400 years.
Any explanation of the beliefs, practices, and institutions that make Islam a major religion can benefit from an example that makes sense in terms of modern scholarship and has a basis in traditional Islamic learning. The illustration and example apart from Quran is found as the famous and authentic hadith, known as Hadith Jabriel, that Muslim scholars and thinkers have often employed for similar purposes in primitive texts.[1] Typically anyone interested to know and understand Islam should memorize this hadith, in the fashion of traditional Islamic learning. Hadith of Jibriel contains everything basic to Islam in concise form and is harmony with Quran. Professor William C. Chittick and his wife Sachiko Murata has written a book “ The Vision of Islam[2]” which is based upon the Hadith of Jibriel or we can call it one of the best explanations of Hadith of Jibriel. This article is primarily based upon text from this book (other sources wherever required are mentioned). The contents reflect the views of authors, wherever required it is mentioned in notes.
This book is very popular and recommended equally for Muslims and Non Muslims who want to know about Islam. A Pakistani scholar Mr. Muhammad Suyhyl Umer[3] has translated this book in to Urdu, published[4] with the title: “Islam apni Nigah Main” (اسلام اپنی نگاہ میں), many editions have been sold out.
The Author Dr. Prof William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick was born in Milford, Connecticut in 1943. As an undergraduate student majoring in history at the College of Wooster (Ohio), Chittick spent the 1964–1965 academic year abroad, studying Islamic history at the American University of Beirut. Later Chittick began his graduate work in the foreign students program at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters in 1966. In 1974, he obtained a doctoral degree in Persian language and literature under Nasr’s supervision. Chittick then began teaching comparative religion at Aryamehr Technical University (now Sharif University of Technology) and, in 1978, joined the faculty of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (now the Iranian Institute of Philosophy). Shortly before the revolution in 1979, he returned to the United States with his wife, Sachiko Murata, who also graduated from the University of Tehran (PhD in Persian Literature) and is a professor of Islamic and East Asian Thought (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism…).
William Chittick (Shamsuddin) is currently Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. In the early 1980s, Chittick served as an associate editor for Encyclopedia Iranica. Chittick is author and translator of thirty books and more than one hundred seventy five articles on Islamic thought, Sufism, Shi’ism, and Persian literature. He is currently working on several research projects in Sufism and Islamic philosophy. Chittick regularly teaches courses on Islam, Islamic philosophy, Arabic classics on mysticism, Persian poetry and other courses in religious studies. On occasion he directs qualified students in the reading of primary Arabic or Persian texts in Sufism and Islamic Philosophy.[5]
Preface
This book grew out of an introductory course on Islam that one or the other of us has taught at least once a year since 1983 in the Program in Religious Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In teaching this course, we have dedicated our efforts to understanding the vision that animates the Islamic texts and to expressing it in the language of the classroom. From the beginning, we have been faced with the problem of presenting Islam to many kinds of students.
The diverse audience has accentuated the problem of how to present Islam without distorting it. How is it possible to explain Islam both to Muslims, who—as a general rule— know nothing about their own religion but are defensive, and to Westerners, who also know nothing but are instinctively hostile? One way, which we always employ is to have the students read various sympathetic accounts by contemporary scholars[6]; fortunately the number of these is increasing. Another way is to approach Islam is not as an alien, third-world, outdated enterprise, but as one of the several, currently living world views that give meaning to the lives of billions of people. From the beginning, the basic goal of our lectures has been to provide Islamic self understanding, and our lecture notes make up the substance of this book.
Many works on Islam acknowledge Islam’s living relevance in the contemporary world, but few take notice of what the universe looks like through Muslim eyes. Or, if Muslim views are cited, they usually belong to those who have taken a political stance with full awareness of the importance of the modern media. Such people have replaced serious and leisurely discussion of the nature of things—the traditional approach in centers of learning in the Islamic world— with dramatic declarations and camera-wise media events.
The few studies of Islam that attempt to reveal the depth of Islamic thinking demand too much knowledge of the religion for beginner students and are usually couched in language that is primarily a derivative of the Western tradition. Even, if an attempt is made to rely on Koranic terminology, typically little attention is paid to the richness and diversity of Islam’s own intellectual tradition. Our approach has always focused on bringing out what Islam has thought of itself. By “Islam,” we mean the great texts that have been universally acknowledged (until recent times) as the highpoints of the tradition. Like any great religion, Islam has its towering landmarks, and it is from these that we have sought to understand it. Such texts are rooted in the Koran. In a very deep sense, Islam is the Koran, and the Koran is Islam. The basic interpretation of the Koran is provided by Muhammad (Pbuh) himself.[7] Following in his wake, numerous great figures—sages, saints, philosophers, theologians, jurists—have elucidated and interpreted the nature of the original vision in keeping with the needs of their times.
In this book we try to pry open the door to the Islamic universe. We are not interested in evaluating Islam from within those dominant perspectives of modern scholarship that make various contemporary modes of self-understanding the basis for judging the subject. Instead, we want to portray Islam from the perspective of those great Muslims of the past who established the major modes of Koranic interpretation and Islamic understanding.
This is not to say that we will simply translate passages from the classical texts in the manner of an anthology. The classical texts ask too much from beginning readers. They were not written for people coming from another cultural milieu rather they were written for people who thought more or less the same way as the authors did and who shared the same worldview. Moreover, as a general rule they were written for those with advanced intellectual training, a type of training that is seldom offered in our graduate schools, much less on the undergraduate level. The classical texts did not play the same role as contemporary textbooks which attempt to explain everything in a relatively elementary format. On the contrary, they were usually written to present a position in a broad intellectual context.
Rather than present the texts themselves, we have tried to step backward from the texts and delve into the point of view that informs them. At the same time, we have attempted to avoid, as often as possible, the technical and abstract language that is typically used in many of the original texts and the erudite modern studies. We have also tried to keep in view the Koran’s own mode of exposition and explain it by making use of quotations rather than summaries.
We are perfectly aware that many contemporary Muslims are tired of what they consider outdated material; they would like to discard their intellectual heritage and replace it with truly “scientific” endeavors, such as sociology. By claiming that the Islamic intellectual heritage is superfluous and that the Koran is sufficient, such people have surrendered to the spirit of the times. Those who ignore the interpretations of the past are forced to interpret their text in light of the prevailing worldview of the present. This is a far different enterprise than that pursued by the great authorities, who interpreted their present in the light of a grand tradition and who never fell prey to the up-to-date—that most obsolescent of all abstractions.
Every introductory text on Islam that we have encountered devotes a relatively small proportion of space to the Muslim understanding of reality. The reader is always told that the Koran is of primary importance and that Muslims have certain beliefs about God and the afterlife, but seldom do the authors of these works make more than a cursory attempt to explain what this means in actuality. Usually the reader encounters a short history of Islamic thought that makes Muslim intellectuals appear a bit foolish for apparently spending a great amount of time discussing irrelevant issues. More sympathetic authors try to explain that these issues were important in their historical context. Rarely does anyone suggest that these issues are just as important for the contemporary world as they were for the past, and that they are constantly being discussed today in our own culture, though with different terminology.
We like to think that the Islamic tradition provides many examples of great answers to great questions. The questions are those that all human beings are forced to ask at one time or another, even if contemporary intellectual predispositions tend to dismiss them as irrelevant or immature or unanswerable or self-deconstructing. We have in mind the great why’s and what’s that five-year olds have the good sense to ask—though they soon learn to keep quiet in order to avoid the ridicule of their elders. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Where did we live before we were born? Where do we go after we die? Where did the world come from? Where does God come from? What are angels? Why is the world full of evil? What are devils? If God is good, why did he create Satan? Why does God allow good people to suffer? How can a merciful God predestine people to hell? Why do I have to go through all this?
Texts on Islam often tell the reader, in extremely cursory fashion, what Muslim thinkers have concluded about such issues; what they do not address is the universe of discourse that informs Islamic thinking and allows the conclusions to make sense. Studies usually highlight the differences of opinion; what they do not clarify is that the logic of either/or is not always at work. Perspectives differ in accordance with differing interpretations of the sources, and the perspectives do not necessarily exclude each other. We are told that people took sides, for example, on free will and predestination. But any careful reading of a variety of texts will show that the common intuition was that the true situation is neither/nor, or both/and. The extreme positions were often formulated as intellectual exercises to be struck down by the thinker himself, if not by his followers. In many ways this book responds to the texts that are normally employed to introduce Islam to Western readers. Most of what we say is designed to fill in the gaps in the works that are typically used on the introductory level. The result is one-sided, but the other side can be found by reading any of the readily available introductory textbooks, or by taking an historical approach to Islam. Readers need to be warned at the outset that this book is not designed to provide “historical facts.” In the last section of the book, we will say something about the Islamic view of history. That will help explain why the concerns of the modern critical study of history are not our concerns. To write history, after all, is to read meaning into the events of the past on the basis of contemporary views of reality. The events themselves cannot make sense until they are filtered through the human lens. If the Koran and the Islamic tradition are read in terms of contemporary scholarly opinions or ideologies, their significance for the Islamic tradition is necessarily lost to sight.
Naturally, we as authors have our own lenses. In fact, some people may criticize us for trying to find Islam’s vision of itself within the Islamic intellectual tradition in general—an elitist enterprise, we will be told—and the Sufi tradition in particular. But it is precisely these perspectives within Islam that provide the most self-conscious reflections on the nature of the tradition. If we did not take seriously the Muslim intellectuals’ own understanding of their religion, we would have to replace it with the perspectives of modern Western intellectuals. Then we would be reading the tradition with the help of critical methodologies that have developed within the elitist circles of Western universities. But why should an elitist and alien perspective, one usually hostile to religion in general, be preferable to an indigenous perspective that is not nearly as elitist as some scholars suppose? It does not make sense to us to employ a methodology that happens to be in vogue at the moment and to ignore the resources of an intellectual tradition that is still alive after a thousand-year history.
The Vision of Islam Introduction
To talk about Islam we need to define some terms. Islam is an Arabic word that means “submission to God’s will.” More specifically, it designates the religion established by the Koran[8] and the Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh). A Muslim is one who has submitted to God’s will, or one who follows the religion of Islam. The Koran is a book that God revealed to Muhammad (Pbuh) by means of the angel Gabriel. This is the basic story in its most simplified outline. Now we need to fill in some details.
The Koran
Islam today is the religion of about one billion people. It is far from correct to think that all Muslims are familiar with the story of how their religion became established. History as such has never held much interest for most Muslims. What is important about historical events is simply that God works through them. The significant events of the past are those that have a direct impact on people’s present situation and their situation in the next world.
From this point of view, the one event of overwhelming significance in the Islamic view is God’s revelation of the Koran. The actual historical and social circumstances in which it was revealed is an extremely specialized field of learning that few scholars ever bothered with. The fact that Western historians have devoted a great deal of attention to the issue says something about modern perceptions of what is real and important, but it tells us nothing about Muslim perceptions of the Koran’s significance. Most of this book will be dedicated to bringing out some of the more obvious implications of the Koran’s teachings, including what the Koran has to say about itself. At this point, however, it may be useful to say something about the form of the Koran, since most of our readers have probably never seen the book itself, though some may have seen a translation.
Notice that we make a distinction between the Koran and a translation of the Koran. This is normal procedure in the Muslim view of things, in marked contrast with the Christian view, according to which the Bible is the Bible, no matter what language it may be written in. For Muslims, the divine Word assumed a specific, Arabic form, and that form is as essential as the meaning that the words convey. Hence only the Arabic Koran is the Koran, and translations are simply interpretations. Translations into the local languages of the Islamic world, particularly Persian, were made at a very early date. However, these were not independent books, but rather interlinear commentaries on the meaning of the text and aids to understanding. The Arabic form of the Koran is in many ways more important than the text’s meaning. After all, Muslims have disagreed over the exact interpretation of Koranic verses as much as followers of other religions have disagreed over their own scriptures. One of the sources of the richness of Islamic intellectual history is the variety of interpretations provided for the same verses[9]. Muslim thinkers often quote the Prophet (Pbuh) to the effect that every verse of the Koran has seven meanings, beginning with the literal sense, and as for the seventh and deepest meaning, God alone knows that. (The Prophet’s point is obvious to anyone who has studied the text carefully.) The language of the Koran is synthetic and imagistic—each word has a richness having to do with the special genius of the Arabic language. People naturally understand different meanings from the same verses.
The richness of Koranic language and its receptivity toward different interpretations help explain how this single book could have given shape to one of the world’s great civilizations. If everyone had understood exactly the same thing from the text, the religion would never have been spread as widely as it was. The Book had to address both the simple and the sophisticated, the shepherd and the philosopher, the scientist and the artist. The Koran says that God never sends a message except in the language of the people to whom it is addressed: Revelation conforms to the needs of its recipients. The Koran also tells us that Muhammad (Pbuh) was sent to all the world’s inhabitants. In order to present a message understandable to everyone in the world, the Koran had to speak a language that everyone could understand. And Islam did in fact spread very quickly to most of the civilizations of the world, from China and Southeast Asia to Africa and Europe. These people spoke a great diversity of languages—and we mean not only languages of the tongue, but also languages of the heart and mind. The Koran (Quran) has been able to speak to all of them because of the peculiarities of its own mode of discourse.
Far from being a hindrance to the spread of Islam, as some have imagined, the Arabic language has been an aid. Although the form of the text was fixed, the meaning was left with fluidity and adaptability. People who did not know Arabic were forced to learn the Arabic text and then understand it in terms of their own cultural and linguistic heritage. But no one’s interpretation could be final. The next generation could not depend exclusively upon the previous generation’s translation and commentary any more than it could ignore the understanding of the text established by the tradition. Each Muslim needs to establish his or her own connection with the scripture. All serious Muslims were forced to enter into this Arabic universe of — a universe, indeed, which they considered divine.
If, on the one hand, the Arabic Koran encourages diversity of understanding, on the other, it encourages unity of form. All Muslims recite the same scripture in the same language. They recite their daily required prayers more or less identically. Indeed, given the basic importance of God’s revealed Word, recitation is the major way of participating in the Word. Understanding is secondary, because no one can fathom the meaning of God’s Word completely. The most important task is to receive and preserve the divine Word. Its Arabic form is all important. What one does with the form that one receives follows after receiving it.
A translation of the Koran is not the Koran, but an interpretation of its meaning. The Koran has been translated dozens of times into English. Each translation represents one person’s understanding of the text, each is significantly different from the others, and none is the Koran itself. There is but one Word, but there are as many interpretations of that Word as there are readers. This is not to say that Islam is a cacophony of divergent interpretations—far from it. By and large there is much less diversity of opinion on the fundamentals of faith and practice than, for example, in Christianity. Those who try their hand at interpretation have to undergo a great deal of training to enter into the Koran’s world of discourse. Moreover, this training is accompanied by the embodiment of the Koran through recitation and ritual. The Koran possesses an obvious power to transform those who try to approach it on its own terms. This is precisely what Islam is all about—submission to the will of God as revealed in the Koran—but this is not simply a voluntary submission. The Koran establishes an existential submission in people so that they come to express its fundamental message through their mode of being, no matter how “original” their interpretations may be.
Of course, we are speaking of Koranic interpretation in the context of Islamic faith and practice. There are many Westerners, some of whom have been intensely hostile toward Islam, who have offered their interpretations of the Koranic text. There is no reason to suppose that such interpretations will help non-Muslims understand the text that reveals itself to Muslims. The Arabic book that goes by the name of the Koran is about as long as the New Testament. In most editions it is between 200 and 400 pages in length. In contrast to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Koran issued from the mouth of a single person, who recited what he heard from the angel Gabriel. Both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures are collections of many books that were written down by a large number of human beings, and opinions differ as to their status as revelation. Even if we say that the books of the Bible were all revealed, they were revealed to different people who did not live at the same time or in the same place.
The Koran is divided into chapters of unequal length, each of which is called a sura, a word that means literally “a fence, enclosure, or any part of a structure.” The shortest of the suras has ten words, and the longest sura, which is placed second in the text, has 6,100 words. The first sura, the Fatihah (“the opening”), is relatively short (twenty-five words). From the second sura onward, the suras gradually decrease in length, although this is not a hard and fast rule. The last sixty suras take up about as much space as the second.
The suras are divided into short passages, each of which is called an aya. Some of the longer ayas are much longer than the shortest suras. The word aya is often translated as “verse,” but literally it means “sign.” This is an extremely significant word, and we will discuss it in some detail.
The content of the Koran is reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The Koran tells stories about many of the same persons and draws conclusions for its listeners’ edification. The Koran calls the great human exemplars of the past prophets and mentions as the most important of these Adam, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus (peace be upon them). Moses is mentioned by name more than any other person, followed by Pharaoh, his great enemy, who is the Koranic archetype of human evil.
The Koran elaborates upon the ways in which the followers of the prophets, specifically the Jews and the Christians, have or have not lived up to the prophetic messages. It issues instructions on how to live a life pleasing to God. It tells people that they should pray, fast, and take care of the needy. It goes into great detail concerning human interrelationships—such as laws of inheritance and marriage—in a manner reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible but foreign to the New Testament. It tells people that they should observe God’s instructions purely for God’s sake, not for any worldly aims. It warns those who deny God’s messages that they will be thrown into the fire of hell, and it promises those who accept the messages that they will be given the bliss of paradise. Much more than the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran talks specifically about God. No matter what the topic may be, it finds occasion to refer the discussion back to God, if only by the device of attaching clauses mentioning God by one or more of his names, such as “And God is the Mighty, the Knowing.” For Westerners, the Koran is an extremely difficult text to appreciate, especially in translation. Even for those who have spent enough years studying the Arabic language to read the original, the Koran may appear as disorderly, inaccurate, and illogical. However, there is enough evidence provided by Islamic civilization itself, and by the great philosophers, theologians, and poets who have commented on the text, to be sure that the problem lies on the side of the reader, not the book. The text is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary ever put down on paper. Precisely because it is extraordinary, it does not follow people’s expectations as to what a book should be.[10]
At the height of the imperialist era, when social Darwinism had convinced a large number of Westerners that they were situated at the peak of human perfection, many scholars looked upon Muslims with disdain for thinking that the Koran was worthy of respect. From that high point of human progress, the Koran appeared as a badly written mishmash of old sayings and superstitions. Most Western scholarship of a more recent vintage has dropped the assumption of cultural superiority and looked at the Koran as a book that has its own unique genius. Positive evaluations are much easier to find than they were fifty years ago. Nevertheless, major barriers remain that prevent an appreciation of the Koran by non-Muslims or by those who do not have a thorough training in the Arabic language and the Islamic sciences. Even such training does not guarantee access to the book.
Many Muslims, especially those who are native Arabic speakers, feel a proprietary relationship to the Koran. However, it is not uncommon to meet people who know a great deal of the text by heart but have not the slightest understanding of the world view that permeates it. This does not necessarily hinder them from absorbing the Koran’s transforming influence. But it does mean that they are unable to express the Koran’s meaning in a way that harmonizes with their own tradition.
The nature of the Koranic worldview presents a fundamental barrier to understanding the book. It is true that the Koran’s view of things has a deep kinship with both the Jewish and the Christian worldviews, but most people in the modern world have little understanding of those worldviews either. Simply attending synagogue or going to church does not mean that one sees things any differently from contemporary atheists. Our culture’s dominant ways of thinking are taught to us not in our places of worship, but in our media and educational institutions. We may like to think that our education is scientific and unbiased, but this is a highly biased judgment, as many contemporary thinkers and social critics have told us.[11]
As a rule, it seems, when people with no grounding in the Islamic worldview pick up a translation of the Koran, they have their prejudices confirmed, whatever these may be. No real entrance into the Koranic view of things is possible without some idea of the type of thinking that infuses the text. And that thinking is foreign to the way that we are taught to think in our own culture and in modern education in general.
We do not mean to suggest that people with a modern mindset—which includes practically all English-speaking or modern educated Muslims—will not be able to understand anything of the Koran, or that they should not bother reading the available translations[12]. First of all, the very fact that the Koran has been translated means that the translator has accomplished the task of bringing it into the range of modern ways of thinking—and, of course, by that very fact may have severely distorted the meaning. In any case, everyone curious about Islam who cannot read Arabic should certainly read the book in translation. As a rule, it is much more useful to open it at random and read a few pages than to try to go through it systematically. The Koranic worldview is closely tied to the Arabic language, which, like Hebrew and Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus), belongs to the Semitic family. The internal logic of Semitic languages is very different from that of Indo-European languages such as English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian. To begin with, each word derives from a root that is typically made up of three letters. From the three letter root, many hundreds of derived forms can be constructed, though usually only a few score of these are actually used. We will often discuss Arabic words in explaining the meaning of concepts. Without such discussion it would be impossible to suggest the richness of the associated meanings, the difficulty of translating words into English, and the interrelationships among Arabic words that are obvious in the original.
The Messenger of God
The story of Muhammad’s (Pbuh) life has often been told.[13] Few Muslims know all the details available to Western readers. For people who come from a Christian background, where the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus play a major role in faith, it is well to keep in mind that Muhammad (Pbuh) plays second fiddle to the Koran. He is enormously important for Islamic religiosity, but his importance stems from his relationship to the Koran. As F. E. Peters reminds us, repeating a point that has been made by many observers:
The Christian cannot but study the “Good News of Jesus Christ,” since the sacred work of Jesus is revealed therein; the Muslim reads the “Life of the Prophet of God” simply as an act of piety: revelation lies elsewhere.[14]
Muhammad (Pbuh) was born in about 570 C.E. into a respected family in the city of Mecca in Arabia. The Meccans were connected to various Arab tribes, some of whose members still lived as nomads. The city had a certain importance as a trading center. More significantly, it marked the location of the Kaaba, an ancient temple that, tradition said, had been built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham. In Muhammad’s (Pbuh) time, the Kaaba was home for a large number of idols representing the gods of the Arab tribes. Four months of the year were designated as sacred months, when tribes were forbidden to war among themselves.
Ancient Arab warfare had no resemblance to modern warfare, although on occasion people were killed. Mainly, it was the means whereby the culture stayed virile and periodically redistributed wealth. It also encouraged attention to each tribe’s distinctive characteristics and heritage. The real heroes of battles were sometimes poets rather than swordsmen. Tales exist of tribal warriors drawn up for battle who turned away in despair after a great poet put them to shame.
Muhammad’s (Pbuh) father died before Muhammad (Pbuh) was born, and his mother died when he was six years old. He was raised by relatives. Like many of the city people, he was placed for a time with a nomadic tribe so that he could learn pure language and unspoiled habits. He grew into a respected member of the community. He was known for his honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness. He engaged in trading, and occasionally accompanied caravans to Syria. When he was about twenty-five years of age, his relatively wealthy employer, a widow of about forty years old by the name of Khadijah, proposed marriage. He accepted and lived happily with her until her death twenty-five years later.
Muhammad (Pbuh) was not content with the rituals of the local tribes and preferred a monotheistic current of ancient Arabian religion, whose scattered followers were known as hanifs. He used to go to a cave in the mountains to be alone and meditate, and it was in this cave that an event occurred that was to have enormous repercussions for world history. He is said to have been forty years old, the age at which, in the words of the Koran, “a man reaches full maturity” (46:15).[15] While he was meditating, an angel appeared to him, told him that God had chosen him as his messenger, and revealed to him the first few words of the Koran.
Muhammad (Pbuh) underwent a period of self-doubt after this, especially when the angel did not return. Khadijah, however, supported him, being convinced that her husband was too stable to have lost his mental balance. Some accounts report that in the absence of the angel, Muhammad (Pbuh) reached the point of considering suicide. Finally, the angel returned and confirmed that he was God’s messenger, and thereafter came regularly. Reluctant at first, Muhammad (Pbuh) submitted to God’s will and began to proclaim his mission.
Little by little, people began to acknowledge the truth of Muhammad’s (Pbuh) message. What he told them was simple: God had chosen him to warn the people of the last judgment; people must accept God’s sovereignty over them and mend their ways. This meant that they had to give God the worship that was his due and to adhere to certain moral instructions in both their individual and social lives.
Nowadays, many people find it difficult to imagine why such a message would be taken seriously. But Muhammad (Pbuh) presented a supporting argument that many of his contemporaries found overwhelming: the language of the divine message; that is, the Koran itself, whose verses kept on arriving piecemeal until shortly before Muhammad’s (Pbuh) death.
In a society where poetry could be more powerful than swords, the awesome language of the Koran could be very convincing indeed. Not that the Koran was considered poetry, though many of its passages are highly poetical. But practically everyone who heard it had to acknowledge that its language was extraordinarily powerful. This was especially true of the verses that were revealed during the earlier period of the Prophet’s career. The Koran was Muhammad’s (Pbuh) grand argument because it was, in effect, a living miracle.
Muhammad (Pbuh), after all, was a man whom everyone knew. He was recognized as a good man, but there was nothing very special about him. He was, if anything, rather ordinary, even if his honesty and reliability had earned him the title al-Amin, “the trustworthy.” Like many of his fellow townspeople, he spoke the pure language of the tribes. But suddenly, this ordinary man began reciting a text of extraordinary power and beauty. Not only did the language surpass anything the Arabs knew—and remember, this is a society where language and power are intimately intertwined—but it confirmed something that they had heard before.
The Arab tribes considered themselves descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham. They counted Abraham as a prophet of old (though few people had clear ideas of what he had said). Moreover, there were Christians and Jews in the local environment. What Muhammad (Pbuh) was saying was not unfamiliar to any of these three groups. The Koran often refers to the objections of the locals to the new message—they called it “fairy tales of the ancients,” or “myths of those who came first.” In other words, they reacted by saying that they had heard all this before, and it was nonsense:
The unbelievers say, “This is nothing but the fairy tales of the ancients.” (6:25)[16]
“We have been promised this, and our fathers before. This is nothing but the fairy tales of the ancients.” (27:68)[17]
What was convincing to the earliest Muslims was a combination of things: The sudden transformation of Muhammad (Pbuh), the incredible eloquence of his language, and the recognition that this was something they had always known but somehow had stopped taking seriously. Or perhaps all of these remarks represent unwarranted psychologizing on the part of us moderns who have no way to appreciate what really happened in the minds of people living fourteen hundred years ago. After all, we hardly know what our next-door neighbors think. It may be that the best way to understand what was happening is to cite, in good Muslim fashion, God’s guidance and the resultant human faith. “Faith,” as Muslim scholars have often said, “is a light that God casts into the heart of whomsoever He will.” It is fundamentally inexplicable.
At first, the powers that be in Mecca simply thought that Muhammad (Pbuh) had gone mad. But gradually, as their own friends and relatives started joining his small group, they took notice, and before too long they felt threatened. They did what they could to make life difficult for the converts, and Muhammad (Pbuh) and his followers went through persecutions and trials.
The turning point came in the year 622 C.E. A delegation had come to Muhammad (Pbuh) from the town of Yathrib, some two hundred miles to the north of Mecca. They were looking for a peacemaker to stop their internal quarrels, and they had heard good things about Muhammad’s (Pbuh) wisdom. They were willing to accept him as a prophet if he would come and rule their town. In the meantime, the Meccan oligarchy had decided that Muhammad (Pbuh) had to be killed, because his teachings were becoming more and more of a threat to the status quo. A few hours before they put their plot into effect, Muhammad (Pbuh) slipped out of the city with Abu Bakr, a close companion who was destined to take over Muhammad’s (Pbuh) political role after his death. After about ten days of following a circuitous route to avoid pursuers, the two of them reached Yathrib. Before long, it was called Madinat al-Nabi, “the city of the Prophet,” or simply al-Madina (Medina), “the city.”
The Prophet’s (Pbuh) move to Medina, called al-hijra (the emigration), was the grand turning point of his career. From then on, with some minor setbacks, the religion flourished. Islam was now established; a new civilization had been born. Hence the hijra is taken as the first year of the Islamic calendar. We will indicate dates both according to the hijra year (A.H., anno hegirae) and the Common Era (C.E.). Thus Muhammad (Pbuh) died in the year 10/632, Constantinople (soon to be called Istanbul) fell to the Turks in 857/1453, and Napoleon invaded Egypt, marking the beginning of the colonial era in northern Africa, in 1213/1798.
The ten years in which the Prophet (Pbuh) lived in Medina was a period of consolidation. By the time of his death, Mecca had surrendered to the Muslims without bloodshed—”poetry” had won another battle—and all of Arabia had embraced the new religion.[18]
The consolidation of Islam that took place during the Medinan period meant that the focus of the Koranic verses that were being revealed shifted from threats of doom and promises of salvation to concrete instructions on how life should be lived in keeping with God’s wisdom. Muhammad (Pbuh) acted as prophet, king, judge, and spiritual counselor to the whole community. Hence he was the recipient of the divine message, he issued commands concerning political and social goals, he decided disputes and handed out punishment or pardon for transgressions of God’s law, and he advised people in their personal attempts to gain nearness to God[19].
In short, the Muslims of Medina lived their lives in keeping with God’s instructions as detailed by Muhammad (Pbuh). In later times, this period was looked back upon as Islam’s golden age. God’s messenger was present, and hence the truth was near at hand. There could be no differences of opinion, because Muhammad (Pbuh) himself explained the Koran’s meaning.
Just as people memorized and wrote down the text of the Koran, so did they memorize and record what Muhammad (Pbuh) said and did. The records of his words and the reports about his activities (and the activities that he sanctioned) came to be called hadiths. We will refer to the whole body of this literature as the Hadith, and to each individual saying or report as a hadith.[20] Both the sayings of Muhammad (Pbuh) recorded in the Hadith and the verses of the Koran are words that issued originally from Muhammad’s (Pbuh) mouth. However, Muhammad (Pbuh) himself always distinguished carefully between his words and God’s words, and all Muslims have preserved this distinction, whose importance can hardly be overemphasized.
God’s words are eternal and uncreated, while the words of his messenger are inspired by God, no doubt, but they must not be confused with God’s own words. The Koran always takes pride of place. Muslims say and write, “God says,” when referring to the Koran, but “the Prophet said,” when referring to the Hadith. There is also a special category of Hadith in which Muhammad (Pbuh) quotes the words of God. Then the formula reads, “Muhammad (Pbuh) said that God says.” These are often called hadith Qudsi (holy sayings). They are totally distinct from the Koran, since they are Muhammad’s (Pbuh) sayings as contrasted with God’s eternal Word. Often, however, they are given special respect—as indicated by the term “holy sayings”—because Muhammad (Pbuh) possessed inspired knowledge about God’s words.[21]
Medinan Islam was a way of life that did not exclude any human affair from God’s domain. It may be that some affairs were considered indifferent, but this needed to be established by God and his prophet. Its indifference was itself a divine ruling. In later periods, the sense that everything had to be brought within the guidelines of the religion never left the Muslim consciousness. During most periods, governments pursued their own business with the usual worldly goals in view. Muslims accepted this as a fact of life, but they did not approve of it. In modern times, many political movements in Islamic countries have appealed to this time honored sense that the government should be run with God’s guidance. Whether or not those in charge of the modern Islamic governments have really wanted to establish Islamic norms, and whether or not they have succeeded in doing so, are different issues altogether.
After the death of the Prophet (Pbuh), Islam underwent many growing pains and internal conflicts. The most significant of these was probably the split between the majority of Muslims and a minority over the issue of the Prophet’s (Pbuh) successor. The two groups came to be called the Sunnis and the Shi’ites. When Muhammad (Pbuh) died, a small group that centered around Ali and his wife, the Prophet’s (Pbuh) daughter Fatima, held that the Prophet had chosen Ali to lead the community after his death. But the majority took no notice, and the elders of the community met together and chose Abu Bakr as the Prophet’s (Pbuh) successor. His duty would be to rule over the community and act as its judge on the basis of God’s law. The small circle around Ali at first refused to accept Abu Bakr as legitimate, but eventually Ali himself swore allegiance to him, and his partisans (shi`a, the source of the term Shi’ite) followed suit. Nevertheless, Ali did not give up his claim. In the Shi’ite view, the right order was only restored when the community selected Ali as the fourth successor of the Prophet (Pbuh) in the year 35/656. But in 40/661 he was murdered by political opponents, and this marked the beginning of the period of the great hereditary caliphates, first the Umayyads and then the Abbasids.
Ali is recognized by Shi’ites as the first legitimate Imam (leader) of the community, while the Sunnis consider him the fourth of the four “rightly guided” caliphs (Khalifa, “successor”). After him, political considerations took the dominant role in the dynasties that ruled the Islamic world. Islamic teachings had a say in determining a ruler’s legitimacy, but government policy had no necessary connection with Islamic ideals.
Within one hundred years of the Prophet’s (Pbuh) death, Muslims had become a ruling elite throughout a good portion of the civilized world, from southern Spain to India. Political rule did not mean that all the subject peoples accepted Islam; far from it. The Koranic principle, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256)[22], meant that no pressure was brought on local people to convert to the new religion. Outside the Arabian peninsula, most people were Christians, Jews, or Zoroastrians.
Hence they were recognized as recipients of revealed books with the right to their own religious institutions. Moreover, the Muslim ruling elite did not encourage the subject peoples to convert, since it diluted their own privileges as Muslims.
Within three or four hundred years, Islam had become not only the dominant political power, but also the dominant popular religion in a region extending from Spain and North Africa into the Indian subcontinent. This, in any case, is another story, which should be sought in any of the many books that have been devoted to the history of Islam.
Book Reference:
https://SalaamOne.com/vision
[1] See for example Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 769/1368), The Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, translated by N. H. H. Keller (Dubai: Modern Printing House, 1991), pp. 807-15. For an interesting example of a twentieth-century African Muslim who used this model to teach the basics of Islam to illiterate tribes people, see L. Brenner, West African Sufi: The Religious Heritage and Spiritual Search of Cerno Bokar Saalif Taal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 187-92.
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Vision-Visions-Reality-Sachiko-Murata/dp/1557785163
[3] http://www.allamaiqbal.com/team/suheyl.htm
[4] ادارہ تحقیقات اسلامی ، شاہ فیصل مسجد کمپلیس اسلام آباد ، اقبال اکیڈمی، ایوان اقبال چھٹی منزل لاہور – ( ISBN 978-969-416-420-5)
[5] https://www.williamcchittick.com/#about
[6] 1 Among the books that we recommend to our students are the following: Victor Danner, The Islamic Tradition: An Introduction (Warwick, N.Y.: Amity House, 1988); F. M. Denny, An Introduction to Islam (New York: Macmillan, 1985); G. Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1985); J. Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path (New York: Oxford, 1988); H. A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism (London: Oxford, 1949); S. H. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966); J. Renard, In the Footsteps of Muhammad (New York: Paulist, 1992); Annemarie Schimmel, Islam: An Introduction (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992).
[7] Note by Abdallah: The Master Key to Quran (3:7): “It is He Who has sent down on you this (glorious) Book, wherein are verses absolutely explicit and firm: they are the core of the Book, others being allegorical. Those in whose hearts is swerving pursue what is allegorical in it, seeking (to cause) dissension, and seeking to make it open to arbitrary interpretation, although none knows its interpretation save God. And those firmly rooted in knowledge say: “We believe in it (in the entirety of its verses, both explicit and allegorical); all is from our Lord”; yet none derives admonition except the people of discernment.” (Quran:3:7), https://quran.wwpa.com/page/verse-3-7/شاه کلید قرآن https://bit.ly/Key2Quran-Eng
[8] Note by Abdallah: Islamic and Arabic scholars say the spelling Qur’an is preferred, but in much of the non-Arabic, Western world, the name of the scripture is more commonly spelled Koran.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2005-06-12-0506110147-story.html
[9] Note by Abdallah: The Master Key to Quran: “It is He Who has sent down on you this (glorious) Book, wherein are verses absolutely explicit and firm: they are the core of the Book, others being allegorical. Those in whose hearts is swerving pursue what is allegorical in it, seeking (to cause) dissension, and seeking to make it open to arbitrary interpretation, although none knows its interpretation save God. And those firmly rooted in knowledge say: “We believe in it (in the entirety of its verses, both explicit and allegorical); all is from our Lord”; yet none derives admonition except the people of discernment.” (Quran:3:7), https://quran.wwpa.com/page/verse-3-7/شاه کلید قرآن https://bit.ly/Key2Quran-Eng https://bit.ly/IslamicRevival-net, https://bit.ly/Tejdeed-Eng
[10] Note by Abdallah: Quran was revealed over a period of 23 years on different occasions, hence it is not like a book, or thesis of Phd. It takes years of study to comprehend the book fully, however the simple messages of guidance can be understood by anyone familiar with the language.
[11] Those interested in learning more about some of the criticisms we have in mind might begin by looking at the books cited by Lawrence E. Sullivan in his masterly study, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 884-85. What he says in the passage leading up to the suggested reading applies also to Western perceptions of Islam: “One of the great disservices to our understanding of South American religions [read: Islam] has been the perception of tribal peoples [read: Muslims] as slavishly dedicated to an unchanging order revealed in the images of myth and handed down unquestioned and unmodified from one generation to the next. This attitude accompanies the evaluation of ‘myth’ as a banal and inane narrative. Tribal peoples (representing ‘archaic’ modes of thought) childishly cling to their myths, infantile fantasies, whereas mature contemporaries jettison myths with the passage of ‘historical time’ and the ‘entrance’ into ‘modernity.’ It would be fascinating to study these and other justifications proffered for avoiding a serious encounter with the reality of myth [read: Islamic thought] and symbolic acts . . . . This is not the place to carry out a history of the ‘modern’ ideas of myth and religion. It is enough to suggest that the Western cultural imagination turned away when it encountered the stunning variety of cultural worlds that appeared for the first time in the Age of Discovery. Doubtless this inward turn sparked the appearance of all sorts of imaginary realities. The Enlightenment, the withdrawal of Western thinkers from the whirling world of cultural values into an utterly imaginary world of ‘objective’ forms of knowledge, and its intellectual follow-up coined new symbolic currency. These terms brought new meanings and new self-definition to Western culture: ‘consciousness/ unconsciousness,’ ‘primitive/civilized,’ ‘ethics/mores,’ ‘law/custom,’ ‘critical or reflective thought/action.’ “
[12] Note by Abdallah: Molana Modudi in ‘Understanding Quran’ has given the methodology for study of Quran: https://wp.me/pbruvK-2o, https://bit.ly/IslamicRevival-net, https://bit.ly/Tejdeed-Eng
[13] For the English retelling that is closest to the story as told by the classical texts, see Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983).
[14] Peters, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 5.
[15] In citing from the Koran, we usually follow the translation of A.J. Arberry (The Koran Interpreted, London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), which is the most careful, accurate, and eloquent translation available. On occasion, however, we modify Arberry’s translation in order to maintain consistent usage for important terms. In addition, the chapter and verse that we cite follow the standard Egyptian order, used in most translations, but not in Arberry’s. Hence there are sometimes small discrepancies between our numbering of verses and that of Arberry’s translation. https://tanzil.net/#trans/en.arberry/46:15
[16] https://tanzil.net/#trans/en.arberry/6:25
[17] https://tanzil.net/#trans/en.arberry/27:68
[18] Note by Abdallah: The impact of language of the Quran was immense, however extensive preaching through logical, convincing arguments embedded in the verses of Quran multiplied the impact. “Surely the worst of beasts in God’s sight are those that are deaf and dumb and do not understand”. (8:22)/ https://tanzil.net/#trans/en.arberry/8:22
[19] Note: He neither preached nor practiced asceticism. The Quran does not prescribe it: “– And monasticism they (Christians)invented — We did not prescribe it for them — only seeking the good pleasure of God; but they observed it not as it should be observed. So We gave those of them who believed their wage; and many of them are ungodly. (57:27), https://tanzil.net/#trans/en.arberry/57:27
[20] Note: There is controversy on writing of Hadiths books, it was prohibited by the Prophet (Pbuh) and Four Rightly Guided Caliphs to avoid undermining Quran, the book of Allah, as done by Jews by writing Talmud (38 volumes) and Christians writing 23 books in New Testament with Gospels, abandoned the Gospels and went astray. See details: https://bit.ly/IslamicRevival-net, https://wp.me/scyQCZ-index, https://wp.me/pcyQCZ-34
[21] On the significance of this genre of Hadith, see W. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam (The Hague: Mouton, 1977).
