Book of signs

For more than 1,000 years it has been the compass of moral guidance for millions around the world. Bruce Lawrence on the origins and influence of the Qur'an

The earliest copies of the Qur'an were written in a script called Kufic Arabic, which had no vowel signs. It was not until the rule of the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik (685-705) that the first written version of the Qur'an with diacritics was produced. Seven different ways of reciting the Qur'an were also fixed, but that occurred still later, ca 934 CE. The same seven forms of Qur'an recitation have remained a canonical standard ever since.

Revelations are sorted out into chapters and verses, and the causes of each revelation provide context for its content. The number of revelations exceeds 200. They came to the Prophet Muhammad via a divine mediary (the Archangel Gabriel) between 610 and 632 CE. They are now arranged in 114 chapters. All but one begin by invoking God's Name, then qualify the Name as at once Compassion and Compassionate: "In the Name of God, Full of Compassion, Ever Compassionate". Different people close to the Prophet Muhammad heard these revelations as he uttered them. They remembered the words and repeated them orally. A few wrote them down. In all they total at least 6,219 verses. The contents of the surahs (chapters) and ayat (verses) are informed by the causes of revelation - that is, by events and circumstances that marked the Prophet's life and the early Muslim community.

Through a complex process, the recitations that had been revealed in verses and chapters became, over time, a book. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, 'Ali, his close relative and supporter, worked with others to compile them into a written text. Then 20 years later, during the rule of 'Uthman, the third Caliph or Successor to Muhammad (after Abu Bakr and 'Umar but before 'Ali), all extant versions were arranged into one "standard" version. This version persists substantially unchanged to the present day.

The Qur'an is a book unlike any other: it is an oral book that sounds better spoken than read silently, but it is an oral book that is also a scripture. More evocative in recitation than in writing, the Qur'an is only fully the Qur'an when it is recited. To hear the Qur'an recited is for Muslims unlike anything else. It is to experience the power of divine revelation as a shattering voice from the Unseen. It moves, it glides, it soars, it sings. It is in this world, yet not of it.

The Qur'an was first enunciated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad in early seventh-century Arabia. What Muhammad heard then must be heard again and again, from now until the end of time. Hearing the Qur'an recited is the compass of spiritual insight and moral guidance for Muslims. It is the message in its pure form, a form at once starkly pure and vivid.

The Qur'an is a multilayered Arabic text. Even those who hear it understand it in numerous, sometimes divergent ways, and those who cannot hear it in Arabic grasp no more than a fraction of its intended message.

The limits of human experience affect the way we approach the text. The Qur'an as written in Arabic is less than the revelation given to Muhammad; it is a second-order revelation. The Qur'an written, then translated from Arabic to English, becomes a third-order revelation. Distance from the source handicaps us, yet we can still learn about Islam by engaging with the Qur'an, even as a written text, translated from Arabic to English.

The Qur'an rendered into English projects an echo, at times a loud echo, of the vibrant spiritual core of Islam. Whether one hears or reads it, in Arabic or some other language, it is A Book of Signs because each of its many verses, like delicate filigree, is more than words: the Arabic word for the smallest unit of Qur'anic text means "verse", but "verse" also means "sign" or "miracle". As tangible signs, Qur'anic verses are expressive of an inexhaustible truth. They signify meaning layered within meaning, light upon light, miracle after miracle.

In 610 a Meccan merchant, while meditating in a mountain-top cave, heard a voice summoning him from beyond to be a messenger. He was given messages, which were disclosures, or revelations, from on high. What became the Qur'an transformed the way Muhammad thought about himself, his society and the world. These revelations prompted him to challenge kin and clans, to motivate others to follow him, to form a new community and to make that community the centre of a new movement. There followed skirmishes and warfare, alliances and treachery which changed his life but did not alter his purpose. He was confirmed as the Prophet, the final Prophet, of God. His name was Muhammad ibn Abdallah, the religion revealed to him was Islam, the centre of Islam was Mecca (and then, after the hijrah or flight, Medina as well as Mecca).

During Muhammad's lifetime, but even more after his death in 632, Muslim armies fanned out in all directions from Mecca. They confronted long-established empires adjacent to Arabia. To the east they attacked Hindu coastal cities in Gujarat and Sind. To the north they swept through the Persian Sassanian empire. They swiftly toppled it, claiming Iraq and Iran as part of a new Islamic polity by the mid-650s. To the west, Muslim armies quickly conquered Egypt but then moved less rapidly across North Africa, fighting both Berbers and Byzantines until they reached the Atlantic Ocean in the 680s. It was a military conquest that occurred faster, and with more consequence, than the spread of the Roman empire 700 years earlier. It made Arab armies and navies the major controlling forces of both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It also expanded the audience for the Qur'an beyond what could have been imagined in the lifetime of the Prophet.

The Prophet's young wife 'A'ishah became a major figure in its transmission, as did a descendant of 'Ali, the Shia Imam Ja'far as-Sadiq. Monuments as well as persons transmitted the text and projected the authority of the Qur'an, none more so than the Dome of the Rock. Built in Jerusalem within a century of the Prophet's death and on the Temple Mount, hallowed for both Jews and Christians, the Dome of the Rock memorialised the Night Journey of Muhammad, the journey that took him from Mecca to Jerusalem to Heaven to Jerusalem then back to Mecca. The Dome of the Rock etched the Night Journey with words of the Qur'an. They are words that have preserved until today the earliest written verses of the Qur'an.

However, not all Christians or Jews accepted the Qur'an as true or Muhammad as God's Prophet. Among the doubters was Robert of Ketton, a Christian monk, who first translated the Qur'an into Latin. His role as a hostile but engaged student of A Book of Signs deserves mention along with the parallel role of major Muslim interpreters who elaborated Qur'anic themes in new and imaginative directions. Two of them were Persian: the ninth-century scholar at-Tabari and the 13th-century poet Jalal ad-din Rumi. Another was an Andalusian Arab, the 12th-century mystic, Muhyi addin Ibn 'Arabi.

The commentary of at-Tabari, together with the interpretive approaches of Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, had an impact on the large and varied Muslim community of India. From the seventh century India had been linked to the global Muslim community. Known as Hindustan, the Asian subcontinent or South Asia today encompasses the current nation state of India as well as India's biggest neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Hindustan has been a major platform for the growth of Muslim communities, and remains today a vast arena for the expression of Islamic loyalty.

South Asian Muslims approach the Qur'an from a cultural domain shaped by language and outlook that are Islamic but not Arab. Open to outside influences, they filter what they receive through their own distinctive aesthetic imagination. Consider the story of a royal woman who was memorialised in her burial space: the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal is a 17th-century tomb that is at once simple and complex. Its marble surfaces project a unity that forever changes, from morning to evening light. It is fronted by a water pavilion, surrounded by mosques and geometrical gardens, and banked against the Jumna River. The Qur'anic inscriptions on the marble surfaces of the Taj Mahal tell the story of its intent. The Taj Mahal proclaims a view of the next world etched by the Qur'an and echoing Ibn 'Arabi in its visionary breadth.

India has also produced several notable male interpreters of the Qur'an. One was the 19th-century rationalist Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Sir Sayyid welcomed the pragmatic values of the British, especially in governance and education. To the extent that modern science embodied the metaphysical values of modern Europe, however, he challenged its superiority and countered with an alternative modernity based on the rigorous retrieval of Qur'anic values. In this sense, he was the precursor to Muhammad Iqbal, the most famous Indian, then Pakistani, interpreter of Islam in the 20th century. A poet-philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal was not a Qur'an interpreter, either by intention or by reputation. He engaged European philosophy and modern science as twins, each reinforcing the authority of the other, yet he saw both as inseparable from the larger message of Islam over time that was presented in the Qur'an. Iqbal was a citizen of the modern world, intent on reconciling reason with revelation. Resolutely Muslim, he projected in verse a perception of Qur'anic truth that was pervasive and superior to all other truths, including modern philosophy.

While the Qur'an itself is a unitary, coherent source of knowledge, there is not a single Qur'anic message. The Qur'an - like all sacred literature - requires study. The act of studying its form, content and transmission over time is called interpretation. For the Qur'an, as for the Torah or the Bible, interpretation requires a form of human labour inseparable from the conscious or unconscious decisions of the labourer. Each interpreter must choose. Each must follow a principle of interpretation. No matter who the interpreter, no matter the time or place from which she or he looks at the Qur'an, certain themes, issues and accents will be selected and emphasised over others. The major difference is between narrow and broad selection of Qur'anic texts - or, more precisely, between taking certain verses and passages out of context rather than viewing them in their full context when making claims about a normative Islamic world-view.

But selection is not the same as invocation. Nearly all Muslims invoke the Qur'an - as ritual authority, as everyday guide, as artistic motif, or even as "magic". Some memorise the Noble Book from youth, honouring the tradition that prizes its orality or spoken quality as the bedrock of truth. Even for those who do not memorise all of its 6,000-plus verses, its words acquire an everyday rhythm. They can be put around the neck in an amulet; they can sit on taxi drivers' dashboards, in rear windows or on bumper stickers; they can be carved into stone or scratched into metal or used to grace a letterhead. Written on an alphabet or prayer board, they can also be washed off and drunk for curative purposes. Even a Muslim who doesn't know Arabic or has never learned the Arabic of the Qur'an, respects the book, can recognise when others use it, and may draw on its syllables and sounds in everyday life.

Contexts are crucial. Although the Qur'an as a whole is authoritative, its content must be applied to particular contexts. Which aspect of the Qur'an applies and where? When does it apply and for whom? These are questions that probe coherence and selectivity at two levels. First, why are some but not all passages of the Qur'an of special value at different times and places? And second, how do changes in context impart special value to particular verses or chapters?

The crucial criterion for interpreting the Qur'an is history. In a historical context the Qur'an becomes A Book of Signs, multilayered in its meanings, continuously reinterpreted by successive generations and diverse audiences. Detached from history the Qur'an becomes the Book of Signs, singular in its meaning, applicable across time and place, unchanging, univocal.

· This is an edited extract from The Qur'an: A Biography, part of the series Books That Shook the World published by Atlantic Books