The Quran and Muslims

By Dr Muzaffar Iqbal
10/19/2007

There are 6.6 billion human beings now living on planet earth; every fourth of them proclaims there is no one worthy of worshipping except Allah and Muhammad is Allah's Messenger. This testimony makes them Muslim — those who have consciously and willingly submitted to the Creator. Muslims derive their basic beliefs and learn about their practices from the Book of Allah and the practices of His Messenger, whose life and sayings, the Sunnah, form the second of the two primary sources of Islam; the first being the Qur'an. Both of these primary sources of Islam are in classical Arabic language now understood by only 20% Muslims.

This cleavage with their linguistic tradition is a recent phenomenon in Muslim history; until a generation ago, a large percentage of literate Muslims had at least a working knowledge of the language of their religion. This change has not occurred by itself; it has been brought about through a number of fundamental shifts in the make up of the contemporary Muslim world. These shifts have taken place over two of the last three centuries through replacement of their educational system with modern education imported from and often imposed by the European countries which occupied their lands for various lengths of time; through the disruption of economic lifelines which had supported institutions of learning for centuries, as well as through social engineering of an order never witnessed in human history.

These and other radical and disruptive changes have produced a several new political, economical, cultural and sociological phenomena. Among these is the basic fact that a very large number of Muslims have no access to the fundamental sources of their beliefs and practices. This religious illiteracy, in turn, has generated a storm-like situation in the Muslim world where internal wars are being fought over beliefs, rites, and practices which were authenticated or rejected by three successive generations of scholars within the first century after the demise of the Prophet of Islam. This wealth of scholarship is simply out of reach for most Muslims, not only because they do not have the linguistic abilities to access it, but also because those who can still read these texts have no training in reading them. Thus the so-called "hadith wars" in which isolated sayings of the Prophet are hurled at each other to prove or disprove a point and so many other manifestations of our time already foretold by the Prophet.

In spite of their lack of access to the Book that provides the foundations of their beliefs, all those who have proclaimed the two testimonies of faith with a sincere heart, hold the Qur'an in the highest esteem, whether or not they can read or understand it. This respect stems from their belief that it is a Book sent down by Allah Himself. They all believe that the Book was sent to Prophet Muhammad through the agency of Angel Jibril. Furthermore, they believe that the Prophet conveyed this to his Companions as he received it, without any distortion. That the Qur'an is preserved by God Himself and no distortion can ever occur in it. These are the fundamental beliefs held by all Muslims, whatever their madhhab sect? be. These beliefs are not new; all Muslims have believed in them since the time of the Prophet although there have been theological debates about the modalities of revelation and at one point in their history about whether the Qur'an was created or uncreated.

The Qur'an is fundamental to Muslims. Those who cannot read the original, try to read it in translation, even though they know that they are not reading the Word of God, but its meanings as expressed by a human being in a language other than the one chosen by Allah Himself. Outside the traditional lands of Islam, the language most often used for accessing the Qur'an is English or French, or one of the other Western languages. This is partly due to the fact that Qur'anic illiteracy is most prevalent among the educated Muslims who have received Western-style education and who have been thoroughly cut off from their linguistic and intellectual tradition. This situation is most apparent in the former British and French colonies. In another context, Qur'anic illiteracy in Turkey stems from the deliberate decision of certain military generals who cut off centuries of organically grown links with Arabic. In still another context, Muslims in Russian, China, and the former Soviet Republics — now slowly emerging out of their violent past, but still very much under the iron-fisted rule — rely on a Chinese or Russian translation for accessing the Book of Allah.

Until the advent of the twentieth century, translations of the Qur'an into Western languages were done by non-Muslims. This situation has drastically changed during the last half of the twentieth century and now many translations of the Qur'an by Muslims are available in almost every language of the world. Most Muslims who use these translations are, however, always aware of the shortcomings of these translations; at most they provide an approximation to the multi-layered linguistic richness of the original. But this is only the beginning of their predicament; what lies underneath this apparent inability to have access to the word of Allah is a far deeper problem stemming from the absence of adequate intellectual resources to read the Qur'an even in translation. This difficulty is largely the result of their intellectual make up, thought pattern, and habits of the mind shaped by their education and, in some cases, professional training. In this respect, their difficulty comes close to (but is not identical to) that of non-Muslims who approach the Qur'an sincerely in order to understand it, but find themselves totally at loss not because the text they read is incomprehensible linguistically — for no matter how inadequate a translation they might be reading, it is still comprehensible linguistically — but because of the very structure of the Qur'an.

(The International News)