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Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the
book of divine guidance and direction for mankind and consider the text in its
original
Arabic to be the literal word of
God, revealed to
Muhammad through the
angel Gabriel over a period of twenty-three
years and view the Qur’an as God's final revelation to humanity.
The Christian concept of revelation
which means God incarnating and unveiling himself and become visible and audible
for mankind is foreign to Islam.
Wahy in Islamic and Quranic concept means the act of God addressing
an individual, conveying a message for a greater number of recipients. The
process by which the divine message comes to the heart of a messenger of God is
tanzil (to send down) or nuzul (to come down).
As the Qur'an says, "With the truth we (God) have sent it down and with the
truth it has come down." It designates positive religion, the letter of the
revelation dictated by the angel to the prophet. It means to cause this
revelation to descend from the higher world. According to hadith, the verses
were sent down in special circumstances known as
asbab al-nuzul. However, in this view God
himself is never the subject of coming down.
The Qur'an frequently asserts in its
text that it is divinely ordained, an assertion that Muslims believe. The Qur'an
— often referring to its own textual nature and reflecting constantly on its
divine origin — is the most meta-textual, self-referential religious text
amongst all religious texts. The Qur'an refers to a written pre-text which
records God's speech even before it was sent down.
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And if ye are in doubt as to
what We have revealed from time to time to Our servant, then produce a
Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers (If there are
any) besides God, if your (doubts) are true. But if ye cannot — and of a
surety ye cannot — then fear the Fire whose fuel is men and stones,
which is prepared for those who reject Faith. |
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The issue of whether the Qur'an is
eternal or created was one of the crucial controversies among early Muslim
theologians.
Mutazilis believe it is created while the most
widespread varieties of
Muslim theologians consider the Qur'an to be
eternal and uncreated. Sufi philosophers view
the question as artificial or wrongly framed.
Muslims maintain the present wording of
the Qur'anic text corresponds exactly to that revealed to
Muhammad himself: as the words of God, said to
be delivered to Muhammad through the angel
Gabriel. Muslims consider the Qur'an to be a
guide, a sign of the prophethood of Muhammad and the truth of the religion. They
argue it is not possible for a human to produce a book like the Qur'an, as the
Qur'an itself maintains.
Therefore an
Islamic philosopher introduces a
prophetology to explain how the divine word
passes into human expression. This leads to a kind of
esoteric hermeneutics which seeks to comprehend
the position of the
prophet by mediating on the modality of his
relationship not with his own time, but with the eternal source from which his
message emanates. This view contrasts with historical critique of western
scholars who attempt to understand the prophet through his circumstances,
education and type of genius.
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