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It
helps us find our way, but it does not do the travelling
for us. There were numerous revelations prior to the
Qur'an, and fragments of those scriptures are still
available today, like the Psalms of David (the Zabur of
Dawud), the Torah (Tawrah, the book given to Moses/Musa),
or the original gospel of Jesus (the Injil of Isa).
However, none of those were recorded in writing at the
time of their revelation, and in the process of oral
narration, codification and translation, they underwent
plenty of alterations and large parts were lost forever.
The Qur'an, on the other hand, was preserved in writing
each time as and when it was revealed.
The Qur'an is in Arabic, a Semitic language with
an immaculately preserved syntactical structure, which
has led many people to claim that it is not only the
language of the people. Muhammad (SAW) was sent to as a
messenger, but the original language of mankind. Because
the Qur'an, once revealed, codified the Arabic language,
it has remained virtually unchanged, and the classical
Arabic of the Qur'an is still easy to comprehend for a
speaker of modern Arabic. Furthermore, the Qur'an uses a
fairly simple language which permits readers of all
educational backgrounds to feel comfortable and take from
it. Nonetheless, a deeper study reveals several layers of
meaning in each Ayah (verse, literally: sign) of the
Qur'an, so that the same sentence, whilst fitting well
within its context, also imparts knowledge and
information about numerous other issues, personal,
social, metaphysic, and so on.
Because of this inimical style, which in
addition has undeniable poetic qualities, the Qur'an
contains the challenge that nobody, even with the most
advanced help systems available, can ever produce a
single Surah (chapter) like it. Those who have tried have
failed utterly for yet another reason: The Qur'an was not
written, edited, and eventually published as is the case
with other books. It was revealed portion for portion
over a period of 23 years. Each passage related to a
particular event at the time and made sense to the people
who heard it for the first time.
However, the verses were assigned a particular
order by Muhammad (SAW), following the instructions of
the angel of revelation, Gabriel (Jibril) and this order
is not chronological, yet anybody who reads the Qur'an
today, with its verses in a totally different order than
the one in which they were originally revealed, still
finds that the sequence makes perfect sense. So there is
the challenge: Write a book made up of contemporary
comments over a period of more than two decades,
rearrange them continuously all along until you end up
with a whole book which has a flowing narrative and is
well interconnected. It can't be done.
To complement the miracle, the Qur'an contains
knowledge of (he past and the future which was not
available at the time of its revelation. For example, it
mentions that the body of the Pharaoh of the Exodus would
be preserved as a sign for future generations, yet it was
mummified one and a half millennia before Muhammad (SAW)
on a different continent and not discovered until one and
a half millennia afterwards. The Qur'an also contains
most accurate scientific descriptions of the embryonic
stages of human development in the womb or of the orbital
movements of planets, all of which was undiscovered for
many more centuries to come. In fact, the scientific
encouragement of the Qur'an, which resulted in the
flourishing Muslim rule over Andalusia in Spain until
eradicated by the Inquisition, gave birth to the age of
enlightenment in Europe which eventually succeeded in
spite of the Roman Church' s opposition.
The social and political concepts of the Qur'an
were equally advanced: It liberated women from being in
the possession of men to being full members of society
with property rights and the right to choose their own
husbands, and Surah at-Tawbah (Repentance) contains the
first ever constitution of a state, in this case the city
state of Madinah, half a millennium before King John, for
example, granted limited rights to his subjects in Magna
Carta. The concepts contained in the Qur'an are so
revolutionary that it is not surprising that the Islamic
faith conquered the ancient world in the shortest
possible space of time, putting in the shade the great,
but corrupt Persian and East Roman Empires,
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