Introduction to the Koran

WHAT IS THE KORAN?

4:163 - We gave to David Psalms.

5:46 - And We sent, following in their footsteps, Jesus son of Mary, confirming the Torah before him; and We gave to him the Gospel, wherein is guidance and light, and confirming the Torah before it, as a guidance and an admonition unto the godfearing.

87:18 - Surely this is in the ancient scrolls,

87:19 - The scrolls of Abraham and Moses.

2:75 - Are you then so eager that they should believe you, seeing there is a party of them that heard God’s word, and then tampered with it, and that after they had comprehended it, wittingly?....

2:79 - So woe to those who write the Book with their hands, then say, “This is from God,” that they may sell it for a little price; so woe to them for what their hands have written, and woe to them for their earnings.

10:37 - This Koran could not have been forged apart from God; but it is a confirmation of what is before it, and a distinguishing of the Book, wherein is no doubt, from the Lord of all Being.

5:15 - People of the Book, now there has come to you Our Messenger, making clear to you many things you have been concealing of the Book, and effacing many things. There has come to you from God a light, and a Book Manifest whereby God guides whosoever follows His good pleasure in the ways of peace, and brings them forth from the shadows into a light by His leave; and He guides them to a straight path.

Those five verses say it all. God revealed a scripture to the blessed Abraham, the Pentateuch to the blessed Moses, the Psalms to the blessed David, and the Gospel to the blessed Jesus. Note that: the real Gospel was one Jesus (peace be on him) himself wrote, not one of the third person accounts you have in the Bible. But these scriptures, as well as the whole Bible, became corrupted by copyists and editors who added things in and took things out. And “the Book” in question is definitely the Bible, although the Koran sometime uses that phrase to refer to itself too. You can tell that from this verse:

2:113 - The Jews say, “The Christians stand not on anything”; the Christians say, “The Jews stand not on anything”; yet they recite the [same] Book.

What book do the Christians and Jews share? The Bible. The Bible has been corrupted, as has God’s revelations outside it, as the above verses say. But God put a perfected distillation of all those scriptures he revealed in one place: the Koran. The Koran is a complete guide to life sent from God to you which tells you all about how to live your life. It gives you a perfect moral code, gives you all the wisdom you need, tells you how to do your finances, tells you the rules of marriage and divorce, how to build a society, tells you everything. And it does so much more.

What’s the thing that people always say they’re going to do when they meet God? Ask Him questions. Usually one of the “big questions.” Well, one of the things you should expect of a scripture inspired by an all-knowing God is that it would anticipate the “big questions” and answer them, and answer them perfectly—and this is just what the Koran does. It answers all of life’s big questions, perfectly.

Question: Why are we here?

Answer: I have not created jinn and mankind except to serve me. (Surah 51, Verse 56)

An answer so obvious it’s self-explanatory—when you make something, it’s to serve you in some way, you must have a reason for making it or else you wouldn’t have made it—and yet it has eluded the greatest minds for thousands of years. To me that makes it all the likelier that the Koran was inspired by that very Creator.

Question: What are we? What is the soul?

Answer: The Spirit is of the bidding of my Lord. You have been given knowledge nothing except a little. (Surah 17, Verse 85)

The way I see it, that the soul is of God’s bidding means that it emanates from God, but not in the way of being in His image (Allah forbid!), but more like the way that sickly black haze called smoke emanates from a bright, powerful, glorious fire. But the exact nature of this emanation, the text continues, is mostly unknown to us. We do not know exactly what our selves are, of course, or else we wouldn’t ask the question. It cannot be understood by our brains how the verb “to bid” can accurately describe, in human language, the appearance of a soul from God, but we are told this much.

Question: Is there an afterlife? What reason have we to hope for one?

Answer: God is He that looses the winds, that stir up cloud, then We drive it to a dead land and therewith revive the earth, after it is dead. Even so is the uprising. (Surah 35, Verse 9)

In all of our experience, nothing is ever really destroyed, at least not without some element of it being changed into something else. God kills the earth every year and resurrects it every year—the death of one thing changes into the more beautiful and lively reconstruction of another that was taken from the original, dead thing. Death and rebirth, destruction and resurrection is, in fact, the way of things throughout the universe. From this, the winter and spring cycle being the best analogy, we can derive hope that some part of our selves will remain after death—and God will resurrect it in newer, better versions of our old bodies.

Question: Are we alone in the universe?

Answer: It is God who has created seven heavens, and of the earth their like, between them the Command descending, that you may know that God is powerful over everything and that God encompasses everything in knowledge. (Surah 65, Verse 12)

Regardless of what the seven heavens are, it is crystal clear that “seven earths” means that there are seven planets like our own, regardless of what the verse as a whole means. The second verse of the Koran describes Allah, in most translations, as the “Lord of the worlds”. Surahs 55 and 72 speak of djinni (semi-physical beings like gremlins or demons) trying to plumb the depths of outer space. So the answer is: no, we are not alone in the universe.

Question: Are people basically good or basically bad or neither?

Answer: So set thy face to the religion, a man of pure faith—God’s original upon which He originated mankind. (Surah 30, Verse 30)

This is a basic belief of Islam, that all people are born in a state of submission to God, and we become morally imperfect later on because of the corruption of other humans (Surah 16, Verse 25) and the “whispers” of evil djinni into our minds (Surah 114, Verses 4-6). Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, teaches, from both the Old and New Testaments, that people are depraved from birth—and yet still somehow responsible for being depraved (??).

Question: Why do people suffer?

Answer: We have sent no Prophet to any city but that We seized its people with misery and hardship, that haply they might be humble. (Surah 7, Verse 94)

Remember also Our servant Job: when he called to his Lord, “Behold, Satan has visisted me with weariness and chastisement.”....We gave to him his family, and the like of them with them, as a mercy from us, and a reminder unto men possessed of minds. (Surah 38, Verses 41-43)

The first verse is important because God sent prophets to every part of the world (Surah 16, Verse 36). So the answer to the question is: to make us humble before God and call to Him, as only suffering makes us do.

Question: Does the universe end somewhere?

Answer: O tribe of jinn and of men, if you are able to pass through the confines of heaven and earth, pass through them! You shall not pass trhough except with an authority. (Surah 55, Verse 33)

So the answer is “yes”.

Question: Why are there so many religions? How can any religion be the right one with so many out there?

Answer: Indeed, We sent forth among every nation a Messenger, saying, “Serve you God, and eschew idols.” (Surah 16, Verse 36)

Muhammad is not the father of any one of your men, but the Messenger of God, and the Seal of the Prophets. (Surah 33, Verse 40)

So God sent a prophet to every part of the world (as I mentioned before), and the blessed Muhammad is the prophet who gathered and consummated all previous true revealed religion.

That, in short, is the Koran. Read it, I beg you: it is God’s handbook for us.