In the Koran, Words for Living a Righteous Life

The Koran is the ultimate authority in Islam. For centuries, the holy book has guided Muslims on weighty issues like faith and ethics and such practical matters as marriage and inheritance. Like the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, the Koran is considered a revelation from the same God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Many of the prophets revered by Christians and Jews are also honored in the Koran. And first-time readers of the Koran may be surprised to find Noah and his ark, Joseph's brothers, and Mary's Immaculate Conception.

And yet, despite the similarities, the Koran is not the Muslim Bible. And it is the differences in the ways that the Koran and Jewish and Christian Scriptures developed that illuminate the most critical distinctions in Islam.

Unlike the Bible, the Koran was not written by men; it was revealed by God through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad over little more than two decades. The Bible, for its part, was written by many men, in multiple languages, and compiled over several centuries. Says Jane Dam-men McAuliffe, dean of the College of Georgetown University and general editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an: "There's a whole process of collection and redaction."

According to Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad received divine revelations, starting around the year 610, and recited them in the public square. But since he was illiterate, he wrote nothing down. (Koran itself means "recitation.") At the time of Muhammad's death in 632, therefore, the Koran existed not as a written book but only as a memorized document, alive in the hearts of those who had heard the Prophet speak and as random notes they had jotted on bones or parchment. Compiling the text became the job of Muhammad's secretary, Zaid ibn Thabit, who completed the task between 644 and 656. The reigning caliph at the time, Uthman, declared Zaid's work the official version of the Koran and ordered all other copies destroyed. Since then, Zaid's text has been off limits to additions or subtractions of any kind. "There could be no Koranic equivalent of the elevation to scriptural status of the letters of St. Paul," writes Thomas Lippman in his book Understanding Islam.

The timing of the revelations is also crucial to understanding the Koran. Muslims believe that Muhammad is the "seal of the prophets," the last prophet God has sent to humankind. The Koran, consequently, serves to complete—or, in some views, to correct—the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Islamic tradition, which derives from both the Koran and the Sunna, the narratives of Muhammad's life, holds that in their original form, God's revelations to Moses and to Jesus were completely compatible with the Koran but that they were later corrupted—either inadvertently or deliberately.

"Historically, the idea is that at some undefined time, Jews and Christians collaborated to delete references to the coming of Muhammad," says David Cook, assistant professor of religious studies at Rice University. "The idea came from the fact that certain verses and ideas in the Koran are incompatible with those in the Bible, which is chronologically earlier, and therefore the answer to this incompatibility must be a malevolent process of deletion or suppression." Omid Safi, an associate professor of religion at Colgate University, sees it differently. "My reading of early Islamic history is that Jews were criticized for coming up with a legal tradition that was more strict than that which God had required of them originally, whereas Christians are criticized for the doctrine of the Trinity."

While there is overlap with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, the Koran often differs significantly. Islamic tradition holds that Jesus was neither God nor the Son of God but "no more than God's apostle...God is but one God. God forbid that he should have a son!" the Koran reads. Muhammad is on an equal footing with Jesus—and indeed Muslims are instructed to respect all of God's prophets equally. Christians "expect some Christ figure to stand at the center of the [Koranic] text," Safi says, but for Muslims, "there is no God incarnate, no salvific figure, nor a need for one."

Rather than being a chronology, the Koran's 114 suras, or chapters, are generally laid out according to length, from longest (286 verses) to shortest (three verses). Believed by Muslims to have been arranged by Muhammad according to divine instruction, the Koran opens with a brief invocation that is traditionally followed by a sura known as "The Cow"—which delivers a miscellany of unrelated information including the saga of Adam and Eve, God's warnings to the children of Israel, fasting during Ramadan, and the rules governing divorce.

The order can be a challenge to non-Muslims. "People who start out from the Bible expect that every Scripture should begin with Genesis and should end with a book of Revelation," says Safi. "They expect Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Koran to state, 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.' "

Compounding the difficulty for beginners, the Koran assumes that readers are already familiar with the stories of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, at least in the broad sense. "What in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is often prolonged narrative is, in the Koran, short, alluding to [well-known] stories," McAuliffe says.

The language of the Islamic holy book is also of terrific importance: All of God's revela-tions were delivered to Muhammad in Arabic, and the Koran is the first book in the Arabic tongue. Whereas missionaries have translated the New Testament into hundreds of languages to extend its reach while never questioning its authenticity, traditional Muslims treat all translations of the Koran as merely interpretations. What is lost in translation, they believe, is not only the original meaning but also the literal and lyrical power of the language of God. "We can read the Bible in English and feel that we are reading the Bible," McAuliffe says, "but Muslims cannot pick up an Indonesian version and think that they're reading the Koran."

Indeed, for Muslims, Arabic is the sole language of ritual prayer. Going back to the tradition of recitation begun by Muhammad, the Koran is primarily an aural experience—"something you hear rather than something you read," McAuliffe notes—and something that even the youngest children are taught to memorize. "Their experience is of beautiful sounds in Arabic recited by people who are very accomplished. An analogy would be if our experience of the Bible were through Gregorian chants."

Recitation is not only an art form but also a lucrative career for the most accomplished reciters, who speak in public and on television and audiotape.

But while the words of the Koran never vary, their meanings are open to interpretation, in part because Arabic originally contained no vowels. In this sense, the Koran is similar to other scriptures, which have also generated controversies about interpretation. Over the centuries, the Koran has spawned countless commentaries, including the first guidance from Muhammad, to help explain the text.

Furthermore, "the Koran speaks with a number of different voices," Cook says. For instance, the Koran's degree of tolerance for Christians and Jews seems to change from one verse to another. The portrayal of God is another example of the Koran's variations. He is all transcendent in some verses and intimate—closer than the "jugular vein"—in others.

Some scholars attribute the changes in message to differences in the times at which Muhammad's recitations were revealed. During the first, or Meccan, period of Muhammad's life, the language was one of peace, stressing monotheism. After Muhammad left for Medina, under attack from polytheistic Mecca, the recitations became increasingly political; the Muslim community was looking to God's guidance through the Koran to help orient it. That's why "it's fruitless to engage in debates about is Islam inherently x or y," says Roxanne Euben, an associate professor of political science at Wellesley College. "The Koran is indeterminate of what it means to be a good Muslim."

The arguments among Muslims today are not over whether the Koran represents divine guidance, says Safi, but rather how the Koran is to be interpreted—whether some verses are to be highlighted over others—and the processes of interpretation that are brought to the text. People turn to different verses of the Koran to justify their own agendas, says McAuliffe. One such debate turns on whether men and women are created with equal rights and dignity or whether men are inherently superior to women. Another is whether warfare is a natural state or something people resort to when attacked. Nonetheless, Safi concludes, it is in this text—"magical and mystical, historical and divine"—that Muslims continue to confront reality and existence, seeking to conform to God's will.