Charles Le Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man (1985, pp. 73-74)

Muslims consider the Qur'an (a.k.a. Koran) to be a Divine revelation. The assumption that God has spoken often to humans is a central tenet of the Islamic faith. Accordingly, Muslims accept Abraham, Moses and Jesus (among others) as Divinely inspired Prophets. At the same time, however, they assert that the books into which earlier revelations were collected are hopelessly corrupted by human tampering. Heeding the Qur'an's warning on textual authenticity, the early Muslims took great pains to keep separate from the Qur'an another rich source of Islamic guidance, the sunnah and hadith (praxis and maxims of the Prophet Muhammad). The non-Qur'anic texts were written and codified over a century after his death and are judged by an elaborate science of transmission chains. Most scholars (Muslim and Western) agree that the Arabic Qur'an we have today is identical to the first written collection made by Muhammad's companions after his death in the 7th century CE. However, to see the Qur'an as a book in the conventional sense is misleading.

The Qur'an is first and foremost a recitation. The Prophet did not receive a book or set of tablets, he received the Word of God as sounds. (Early biographical literature suggest that he first heard a bell-like tone which gradually formed into words.) One useful way to emphasize the oral/aural nature of the Qur'an is to play audio and video recordings of Muslims (men, women and children) reciting the Qur'an in its original language, Arabic. Inviting guests into class who can recite well is also quite effective. (This is highly feasible since every Muslim has to learn to recite at least a few chapters in Arabic, whatever their native tongue.) Every year during the Holy month of Ramadan, Muslims gather from Kuala Lumpur to Timbuktu to recite the Qur'an in its entirety, as the Prophet did each year of his life. In fact, despite the millions of printed copies of the Qur'an in dozens of languages available today, Muslims still learn it the way the first community learned from the Prophet--by listening to and reproducing its sounds in the Arabic language. The distinctive sound of Qur'anic recitation, with its emphasis on segmentation and elongation, has an influence upon other "sound arts" in the Muslim world.

In order to understand the impact that these sounds had on 7th century Arabia, we need a lecture that will at least briefly consider the cultural milieu into which the Qur'an was revealed. The most excellent art form of the Arabs was poetry, with a high degree of prestige accorded to poets who could dazzle audiences with clever turns of words and who could reproduce vast amounts of poetic material from memory. The revelations of the Qur'an engaged the superiority of poetry in Arab culture, challenging listeners to bring forth verses matching its poetic and rhetorical impact: "And if you are in doubt as to that which We have revealed to Our servant, then produce a chapter like it and call on your witnesses besides God if you are truthful" (Qur'an 2:23). Muslims describe the Arab's inability to "produce a like chapter" as "the miracle of Islam."

The Qur'an was revealed over a period of 23 years, beginning with general admonitions about God-consciousness, the wonder of creation, and the inevitability of life after death. Only after a decade did the revelations begin to include more detailed guidance for worship and social relations. Since portions of the Qur'an were often revealed in direct response to specific situations, it can be useful to contextualize various revelations with a study of early Near Eastern social history, though unlike the way Jews and Christians see the Bible most Muslims shy away from seeing the Qur'an as a book of history.

Our course could benefit from comparative discussion of language in culture, especially as it pertains to religion, since several of our classic texts are also religious texts. Arabic in Islam, like Hebrew in Judaism and Sanskrit in Hinduism, is what scholars of comparative religion call a "sacred language." This means that language is the central way for humans to connect with the Divine. Other religions, while using language, have centralized other ways to connect with the Divine. For example, the Body of Christ transcends language, as does the image of the Buddha. You can be a perfectly good Christian or Buddhist in any language. In the Muslim view, once the heart opens to God, believers intone the sacred sounds in the original language in order to develop their God-consciousness.

Though the Qur'an does not explicitly prohibit figurative art, Muslims inherited a Semitic distrust of graven images. They channeled their sense of visual aesthetics into calligraphy and abstract decorative arts. As other-than-Arabic speaking peoples entered Islam, a distinctly visual style of inscription developed that was not meant only to be recited but also to stand on its own as visual art. There are several distinct styles of inscribing and illuminating the Qur'an, which can be amply illustrated through slide presentations and linked to the use of "arabesque" designs in architecture and the plastic arts. This illustrates how a classic text can be intertwined with the visual arts.

Muslims continue to derive direct guidance from the Qur'an. A unit of our course can focus on how they have interpreted its words through the ages. The first level of interpretation is by using the Qur'an itself: when a word or phrase is unclear in one verse, Muslims seek its meaning in other contexts. The Prophet's companions often asked him to expound on particular verses, and his responses are recorded in the hadith collections. One hadith even says that the Prophet was "a walking Qur'an," and Muslims study his mannerisms and aphorisms as indirect interpretations of the Qur'an. After the Prophet's death, his immediate companions and family members were sought as the most authoritative interpreters of the Qur'an. Eventually, schools of interpretation developed around various scholars in the main metropoles of early Islam. The shari'ah, or Islamic law, was codified during this period. Some schools of thought continued to encourage independent reasoning on the basis of the Qur'an and hadith. In short, our look at interpreting the Qur'an would lead us into a fruitful discussion of Islamic philosophy, dialectical theology, law, and Sufism. It is also useful to consider here a thematic approach to the Qur'an, choosing themes and topics--such as travel, nature, the afterlife--and carrying them through all their different Qur'anic permutations.

To alleviate the confusion that Le Gai Eaton blames on the "occidental's sense of order," it might be useful to talk about the structure of the Qur'an as compared to other classic texts. While the Bible, for example, begins with Creation, proceeds chronologically through the lives of the Prophets, and ends with Armageddon, the Qur'an weaves its message in a cyclical fashion. The Western reader encounters familiar persons like Moses and Solomon, but their stories recur in various places throughout the text. Since Muslims consider the order of verses and chapters to be Divinely inspired, we can contemplate what it means to have a classic text that is not teleological and ordered in the Western sense, and explore the impact this may have had on the Islamic worldview.

To fully appreciate the Qur'an as a classic text, our course can make use of a holistic, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach that integrates history, philosophy, anthropology, ethnomusicology, theology, and communications. This approach is, I believe, particularly well-suited to a Core Curriculum Humanities sequence of courses. It affords students an opportunity to benefit from several different academic disciplines and to discover how classic texts are interconnected with the lives of people who read them.