The Faith of Islam | Page 5

eloquence, for the skill
with which they arranged their material and gave expression to their
thoughts. It is in this very particular that superior excellence is claimed
for the Qurán.[6] It is to the Muhammadan mind a sure evidence of its
miraculous origin that it should excel in this respect. Muslims say that
miracles have followed the revelations given to other prophets in order
to confirm the divine message. In this case the Qurán is both a
revelation and a miracle. {6} Muhammad himself said:--"Each prophet
has received manifest signs which carried conviction to men: but that
which I have received is the revelation. So I hope to have a larger
following on the day of resurrection than any other prophet has." Ibn
Khaldoun says that "by this the Prophet means that such a wonderful
miracle as the Qurán, which is also a revelation, should carry
conviction to a very large number."[7] To a Muslim the fact is quite
clear, and so to him the Qurán is far superior to all the preceding books.
Muhammad is said to have convinced a rival, Lebid, a poet-laureate, of
the truth of his mission by reciting to him a portion of the now second
Súra. "Unquestionably it is one of the very grandest specimens of
Koranic or Arabic diction.... But even descriptions of this kind, grand
as they be, are not sufficient to kindle and preserve the enthusiasm and
the faith and the hope of a nation like the Arabs.... The poets before
him had sung of valour and generosity, of love and strife and revenge ...
of early graves, upon which weeps the morning cloud, and of the
fleeting nature of life which comes and goes as the waves of the desert
sands, as the tents of a caravan, as a flower that shoots up and dies
away. Or they shoot their bitter arrows of satire right into the enemy's
own soul. Muhammad sang of none of these. No love-minstrelsy his,
not the joys of the world, nor sword, nor camel, nor jealousy, nor
human vengeance, not the glories of tribe or ancestor. He preached

Islám." The very fierceness with which this is done, the swearing such
as Arab orator, proficient though he may have been in the art, had never
made, the dogmatic certainty with which the Prophet proclaimed his
message have tended, equally with the passionate grandeur of his
utterances, to hold the Muslim world spell-bound to the letter and
imbued with all the narrowness of the book.
So sacred is the text supposed to be that only the {7} Companions[8] of
the Prophet are deemed worthy of being commentators on it. The work
of learned divines since then has been to learn the Qurán by heart and
to master the traditions, with the writings of the earliest commentators
thereon. The revelation itself is never made a subject of investigation or
tried by the ordinary rules of criticism. If only the Isnád, or chain of
authorities for any interpretation, is good, that interpretation is
unhesitatingly accepted as the correct one. It is a fundamental article of
belief that no other book in the world can possibly approach near to it
in thought or expression. It deals with positive precepts rather than with
principles. Its decrees are held to be binding not in the spirit merely but
in the very letter on all men, at all times and under every circumstance
of life. This follows as a natural consequence from the belief in its
eternal nature.
The various portions recited by the Prophet during the twenty-three
years of his prophetical career were committed to writing by some of
his followers, or treasured up in their memories. As the recital of the
Qurán formed a part of every act of public worship, and as such recital
was an act of great religious merit, every Muslim tried to remember as
much as he could. He who could do so best was entitled to the highest
honour, and was often the recipient of a substantial reward.[9] The
Arab love for poetry facilitated the exercise of this faculty. When the
Prophet died the revelation ceased. There was no distinct copy of the
whole, nothing to show what was of transitory importance, what of
permanent value. There is nothing which proves that the Prophet took
any special care of any portions. There seems to have been no definite
order in which, when the book was {8} compiled, the various Súras
were arranged, for the Qurán, as it now exists, is utterly devoid of all
historical or logical sequence. For a year after the Prophet's death

nothing seems to have been done; but then the battle of Yemana took
place in which a very large number of the best Qurán reciters were slain.
Omar took fright at this, and