Summer 1991
THE UNKNOWN BESTSELLER - THE KORAN
Among the books that decisively changed the river-bed and flow of human history in the last 1,300 years the Koran, source of Islam, is one of the least read in the Christian world in general, in the West (Europe and America) in particular. One would have expected a much livelier interest in a book held sacred by about thousand million Moslems in Asia, Africa, Southeast Europe and beyond. (This figure is an informed estimate. No exact statistics are available, but it is known to be rising still in Third World countries). Most of the Islamic countries also register the fastest population growths on the globe. But they are not the
best market for the book trade, because their literacy rates and living standards are, on the whole, lower than those of the West. Islam which has the second largest following among the religions, passes on knowledge of the Koran (the word means “recital”) from one generation to the next by word of mouth.
The first news and rough knowledge of the Koran and its impact on the peoples of Asia and around the Mediterranean which converted to Islam reached Europe almost together with
the conquering Muslim Arabians themselves, sweeping from their peninsula in all directions, westward to the Middle and Near East, through North Africa and into Southern Europe, eastward as far as India - all this within the short span of 150 years. Detailed news on Islam and this time more accurate knowledge reached the West through the Crusaders. But even that was still hearsay and fragmentary reporting. The full text of the Koran was not yet at the disposal of the West hundreds of years after Muhammad's death. The finalized authoritative text that has come down was not written by Muhammad himself. He never tired declaring that the Koran was the Word of Allah in Arabic revealed to him for the purpose of teaching his own people, the tribes of Arabia, and he was his messenger. Towards the end of his life, in the light of the phenomenal success of his mission, he thought of Allah's words as a universal message addressed to him for all nations.
The Koran was written down by Muhammad's early followers and codified after his death (in 632 A.D., aged 62). It was translated for the first time in 1143, over 500 years later, and then only into Latin. That restricted access to it in hand-written manuscripts to only a few scholars. Even after the invention of the printing press by the German Johannes Gutenberg (in 1449) the Latin translation was not printed for another hundred years. During the Middle Ages university teachers in Europe complained that aspiring young students were keen on learning
enough Arabic to write prose and even poetry in that language rather than in Latin, the lingua franca of the learned until then, to gain access in Spain to foreign literature, ancient and modern, and to the outstanding Muslim schools there famed for their intellectual freedom and absence of clerical censorship. At that time the main and obligatory course of studies at European universities was still Christian theology.
The first translation of the Koran into English (and that from an earlier French translation) was published in 1649. It took another 85 years for the first translation from the original Arabic to be published in Britain (in 1734) by the Oriental scholar George Sale. It is of some interest to note that the second edition of the book was published thirty years later, the third only 91 years after the first! It reflects the scant scholarly, not to mention public, interest in the West in one of the most influential books in history.
One of the reasons for this indifference is inherent in the Koran itself. Reading it is as strange and unappealing an experience to Western tastes as Oriental music is to Western ears. One of the first Europeans to reflect and comment on this aspect of the book was the German poet and thinker Goethe. He summed up his impressions of the subject of Islam and its impact on Islamic Arabian poetry in an essay on Muhammad. "The entire content of the Koran, to say much in a few words, is found at the beginning of the second sura (chapter). It reads as follows: "There is no doubt in this book; it is a direction to the pious, who believe in the mysteries of faith, who observe the appointed times of prayer, and distribute alms out of what we have bestowed on them; and who believe in that revelation, which hath been sent down unto thee, and that which hath been sent down unto the prophets before thee, and have assurance in the life to come: these are directed by their Lord, and they shall prosper. As for the unbelievers, it will be equal to them whether thou admonish them, or do not admonish them; they will not believe. God hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing; a dimness covereth their sight, and they shall suffer a grievous punishment."
In this paragraph Goethe saw a summary of Muhammad’s message and went on: "And thus the Koran keeps repeating itself sura after sura. Belief and unbelief divide between them things above and below; heaven and hell are assigned to the believers and unbelievers. Closer fixation of what is enjoined and what is forbidden, fabled stories of the Jewish and Christian religions, amplifications of all kinds, unending tautologies and repetitions make up the body
of this holy book which keeps repelling us as often as we approach it, but then attracts us, astonishes us and in the end compels our reverence."
What all serious scholars of the past two hundred years have noted and is that Muhammad stresses time and again that he is only the messenger of Allah, the author of the Koran in the original Arabic, the transmitter of the divine message. Whatever we know of Muhammad comes from the personal recollections of his contemporaries. Soon after his death already Moslem scholars and theologians had difficulty in distinguishing between fact and fiction in the accounts of Muhammad's life. Nor is there agreement on the order in which the 114 suras of the Koran were revealed to and by Muhammad. After his death they were all (except the first) arranged by their respective length, beginning with the second and longest.
The text shows that Muhammad had detailed knowledge of the Old and New Testaments, however incomplete and imprecise, acquired during travels in the Middle East with trading caravans in his youth in the service of a wealthy widow whom he married later on. The stories of Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) and Moses (Mousa) and the "Blessed Land" are
mentioned many times (though never Jerusalem). The Koran castigates the children of Israel and the Christians for their sins and holds up the punitive misfortunes Allah inflicted on them as a warning to his own people. The book orders the true believers to observe the strictest monotheism by professing that "there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." The essential and plain duties of a of a Muslim are five daily prayers; prostrations in the direction of Mecca; alms giving; daytime fasts during a whole month; and whoever can afford it a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his life.
Like the faithful of other religions Muslims are enjoined to apply the doctrines and commands of Islam to their daily life. It complicates this duty by the element of predestination as a central dogma: Allah's immutable will seals the fate of his believers and every other creature from the moment of their entry into this life and the life beyond. This dogma had a powerful and electrifying effect on Muhammad's own generation of fellow Arabians, until then split into a multiplicity of tribes living on crafts, trading, pillaging caravans and possessions of one another, and on a little agriculture. The idea of a foreordained fate so fired the combative tribes that they took up with enthusiasm Muhammad's call for spreading the true faith beyond their own peninsular territory. With the battle-cry of 'Allah akbar' (Allah is great) and inspired by the assurance that they were doing Allah’s will they fell on the neighbouring nations, certain that no harm could come to them on the battlefield unless it was so decreed from the beginning of time. And if that happened in the waging of what they felt was a holy war, they would be rewarded for their service to Allah, as his Prophet Muhammad had revealed, by instant admission to Paradise.
Within hundred years this overwhelming conviction carried the fierce Arabian warriers on their swift horses and camels from their own desert land across the Middle East and North
Africa to Spain and eastward deep into Asia, and from obscurity and poverty to power over highly civilized nations and fabulous riches. In the wake of their conquests most of the Middle
East and North African Christians converted to Islam and together with them the original Muslims built an empire larger than that of the Romans. With changing ethnic leadership and borders it lasted until the beginning of our century. Within some four hundred years the original Arabian Muslims and later their convert descendants mellowed and weakened in the new conditions of power, luxury and ease until they lost their supremacy to the Turks, a gifted, warlike mountain people from Central Asia who themselves had only recently adopted Islam. They took over from the Arabs the khalifate - the succession to the leadership of Muhammad - which meant both the supreme spiritual and temporal authority of the empire.
The once mainly Christian peoples of the Middle East adopted together with Islam also the Arabic language and culture. Aramaeic, the most widely used language in the Middle East since the time of Christ, was all but forgotten. The Turkish rulers adopted Arabic script for their own language and kept it for about thousand years. (It was replaced by Latin script in the twenties by order of the political and anti-religious reformer Kemal Ata Turk).
The original Arabians and the Arabs assimilated under Islam, never regained the pre-eminent military and political power they lost to the Turks. The compound of belief in predestination, their sudden rise to power and undreamt of wealth after Muhammad’s death gradually made them passive and fatalistic. Today all Muslim countries without exception belong to the “Third World” group. The Arabs of today with their strong sense of decline of their once splendid and imperial role in political and cultural history are strongly vexed by this state
of affairs and blame it on the allegedly anti-Muslim West though evidence for the charge of humiliation by others is scant. The Islamic dogma of predestination, reward or guilt, as taught by the Koran itself would rather suggest that the Arabs could find in their own record how, when, where they defied Allah’s will and how by their own conduct brought the great empire of their forefathers to its present impotence.
We quote the views of three Western scholars who commented on this development some fifty and hundred years ago. One of the founding fathers of modern Oriental Sciences late last century, Prof. Ignaz Goldziher of the University of Budapest, wrote on the rise and fall from the summit and glory of Arab power and culture that "he who has not read the Koran cannot understand the Arabs; and he who reads only the Koran cannot understand them either." In our century (1957) Prof. Wilfred Cantwell Smith of McGill University, Canada, in his “Islam in Modern History” wrote: “The Arab increasingly lives in a world that he feels is not his own; that he can only partially understand, and certainly cannot control.
(Actually, the whole of humanity lives in this kind of world in the twentieth century; all
of us are faced with a modernity that undermines our past and challenges our survival.
But few Arabs realize this; most see the novelty as alien, a disruption from outside, and
see other human beings – particularly the West – not as sharing their distress, but as
inflicting it). the great empire which their forefathers had created.
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