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How do Muslims understand Revelation?
Most religions have a sacred text that they adhere to. In the case of Muslims the Qua’an is their most sacred text. To understand how much Muslims revere their sacred text will help in our understanding of how Muslims understand revelation. For reasons I shall explore in this essay, the relationship between revelation and the sacred text in Islam has tended to be closer and somewhat less ambiguous than in other faiths. This relationship is one of the central points of difference separating Islam from other world faiths. As Georges C. Anawati suggests: “In the beginning was the Koran” to some extent this paraphrase of the well-known verse from the Gospel of John will help us to underline the fundamental place held by the Arabian sacred book all through Muslim religious sciences and civilization. (Schact & Bosworth eds., 1974). although important differences in the interpretation of what “revelation” means do exist between sects and individuals within Islam, a shared reverence for The Qur’an as the locus of revelation exists. While we may not presume that there is a uniform attitude to revelation among Muslims, appropriate general remarks can be made. These include observations on the nature of revelation; its conduit(s) within Islam; the ways in which it might occur, and its status in relation to further Islamic thinking. These issues and their corollaries will be surveyed here.
“Revelation” in a religious context may be taken to mean the disclosure of information by a divine source to a human recipient. In the Judaic tradition divine revelation occurred through individuals called prophets, who proclaimed a message from their national God to their national peers. This message was preserved and written down, either by their pupils or by the prophets themselves. Muhammad, born c.570 C.E in Mecca (present day Makkah, Saudi Arabia) viewed himself as a reformer of this tradition and its final exponent. Around 610 C.E Muhammad, who had been employed as a merchant, began to tell relatives and acquaintances of certain experiences which had come to him. Initially these seem to have been in the form of visions, the first of which are described in Sura 53 of The Qur’an. As a result, Muhammad came to regard himself as “rasul Allah”, ortherwise known as “messenger of God”.
For Muslims, therefore, the primary conduit of revelation is unquestionably Muhammad. This does not rescind earlier instances of revelation from having happened: in fact, this is a required belief by those who view Muhammad as “the renewer of Abraham’s religion” in other words its transformation from distortion and decay” (Goldziher 1981). This view is predicated on God’s having first revealed himself to Abraham, and to pre-Abramic figures leading back to the first man Adam. The crucial difference is implied by Muhammad’s being described as “renewer”. Any written product of God’s revelation to figures pre-dating Muhammad could not be relied upon to provide a sound basis for religion. The renewed faith was to be free from the corruptions of the Judaism and Christianity proclaimed in Muhammad’s day. These religions had strayed from the ancient and pure monotheism of Abraham, of which this new and final prophet was to act as restorer. As a result, the only truly reliable revealed material was that which had been revealed to Muhammad himself, and compiled by scholars working under Caliph Uthman in the years 644-56 C.E. By the end of this period the collection had reached its definitive form, that of The Qur’an we know today. Thus although Muslim belief does not deny the possibility of authentic revelations having occurred prior to Muhammad, it does deny the suitability of texts outside The Qur’an as a basis for forming religious practice and beliefs about God. The contents of God’s revelation, the actual revealed material, is necessarily confined to this sense by Islamic faith.
The mechanisms by which revelation occurs are naturally more difficult to describe than the religious texts that spring from them. Initially Muhammad seems to have been aware of the presence of God Himself. later visions would be mediated by Jibril, an angel of God, who is equated with the angel Gabriel of Judaeo-Christian tradition. However difficult it may be to define the nature of a revelation, we can be sure that Muhammad did not believe his revelations to be the product of his conscious mind. W. Montgomery Watt, in The Cambridge History of Islam, states that “His sincerity in this belief must be accepted by the modern historian, for this alone makes credible the development of a great religion” (Holt, Lambton, Lewis eds., 1970) Watt notes the possibility that Muhammad actually heard words being spoken to him, for instance as part of a vision, but that he seems mainly to have “found them in his heart”. This does not impinge upon the Muslim belief that the verse form of the 114 Suras and their rhyming/assonant structure originates from God and not Muhammad. I. R. Netton describes them as “The uncreated word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad” (Netton 1992), and “uncreated” here refers to the passivity of Muhammad in the process.
A corroborative belief is that an attempt to translate The Qur’an affects, to a debatable extent, its status as revealed scripture. The Arabic words themselves, and not merely their abstracted meaning, were revealed by God, whereas a translation filters the material through the mind of a human agent, robbing it of its divine provenance. Any translation of The Qur’an is therefore inevitably an “interpretation” and not simply a conveyance of the sense in another language.
Muslim thinkers have almost always considered revelation as prior to Philosophy and reflective Theology. The latter are open to expansion and revision, but this is not true of The Qur’an. Its authority and validity may not be questioned. At most, one might suggest an allegorical interpretation. Because the content of The Qur’an originates in a God subject to reason, it should be compatible with scientific enquiry, and this is often explicitly stated. The Muslim philosopher Avicenna (Arabic: Abd Allah ibn Sinah; p 1037) lists four sciences: Logic; Physics; Mathematics, and Metaphysics. All the revealed data contained in The Qur’an are included as part of Metaphysics, and as such are subject to regular scientific enquiry. Averroes (Arabic: Ibn-Rushd; p 1198) states that the revealed nature of the Qur’an actually makes it a superior basis for reasoning. He observes that the Mutakallimun, or theologians, have “a tendency towards dialectic reasonings which prove nothing” (Schact & Bosworth eds., 1974). By contrast, a method of reasoning that has its basis in God’s self-revelation is apodictic: it is grounded in certain truths and therefore yields more reliable results. This tradition of arguing naturalistically with the revealed text as a basis is not as consistently represented among adherents of other faiths as it has been among Muslims. In Christian scholastic Theology, for example, the tendency is to separate revealed and natural Theology: natural Theology argues truths about God by observing the world, and revealed Theology analyses God’s self-revelation. Although these two may be complimentary, they are not thought to be part of the same process. In Islamic thought this has often been the case, as is possible due to the rooting of natural Theology in revealed scripture. This is further illustrated, as Anawati (ibid. 1974) argues, by the content of important Islamic creeds. If we examine the Fiqh Akbar, the Wassiya of Abu Hanifa (p 797), the second Fiqh Akbar and the creed of Al-Ash‘ari (p 935), in not one of them do we find the distinction between revelation and what is accessible to reason.
Before closing this survey of revelation as understood by Muslims, it may be helpful to introduce an explanatory model which sheds light on the issue as a whole. The phrase “how do Muslims understand revelation” might imply a further question which merits attention here: how does the content of revelation come to be understoodby the Muslim individual? Averroes (ibid. 1974) believed that there are three categories of mind amongst human beings. The demonstrative mind works at the level of rigorous rational argument; the logical mind is persuaded by reason rather than passion, and the exhorted mind is most easily swayed by oratorical skill. The Qur’an, Averroes states is able to fulfill its revelatory purpose because it functions on all three of these levels, and each mind is therefore able to discern the truth in it according to its capacity. The ability of The Qur’an to speak to people at all levels may, for the Muslim, add substance to the claim that true revelation is located within it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- “The Cambridge History of Islam”, P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, Bernard Lewis eds., Cambridge University Press, 1970
- “Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism”, Georges C. Anawati, in ‘The Legacy of Islam’, J. Schacht and C Bosworth eds., Oxford University Press, 1974
- “Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law”, Ignaz Goldziher, Princeton, 1981
- “The Oxford History of Islam”, John L. Esposito ed., Oxford University Press, 1999
- “A Popular Dictionary of Islam”, I. R. Netton, Curzon Press London, 1992
- “The Qur’an”, M.A.Abdel Haleem ed., Oxford University Press, 2005
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