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The Koran and Islamic Life
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18961 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
4,071 Words |
| Author
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Mustansir Mir
Mustansir Mir is assistant professor of Islamic studies in the
Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. His most recent book is Verbal Idioms
of the Koran (Ann Arbor: Center for Near Eastern and North
African Studies, 1989). |
A small town of three thousand in the province of the Punjab in Pakistan has a tradition that is strictly maintained: every member of the population, male and female, young and old, must be a hafiz, that is, one who has committed the entire Koran to memory. It might seem remarkable that a child of ten, or even younger, should be able to reproduce a book the size of the New Testament from memory, but this is not at all unusual in the Muslim world. Huffaz (pl. of hafiz) are found in every Muslim country, in some countries thousands of them. In many cases they are non-Arab, and so do not know the language of the Koran, although they have learned to read the Koranic script. Together, these huffaz form a human chain that serves, among other things, to preserve and transmit the sacred scriptures of Islam from one generation to another.
The Koran is made up of the revelations received by the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad. Born in Arabia in 570 C.E., Muhammad had his first revelatory experience at the age of forty (610). Thereafter the revelations came in small and large portions until his death (632), and were given the arrangement in which we possess them, according to some authorities by Muhammad himself, according to others by Muhammad's Companions not too long after his death. The Koran has 114 chapters of varying length: the longest chapter has 286 verses, while the shortest chapters have only 3. The chapters are arranged roughly according to the principle of diminishing length.
Content, Structure, and Language
The Koranic material deals with doctrine, law, ethics, and history. The essentials of the doctrine are: an uncompromising belief in the oneness of God (even the Christian trinitarian interpretation of deity is rejected); belief in prophets who receive, through the agency of angels, revelation (which sometimes takes the form of a scripture) from God and convey it to mankind; and belief in the Day of Judgment. Concise statements of the doctrine are to be found in the four-verse long 112 chapter, and in 2:255, 1:285; 4:136; 31:34; and 59:23.
The law covers both worship and conduct. On the one hand the Koran enjoins the believers to offer ritual prayer regularly, give to the poor, fast the month of Ramadan (ninth in the lunar calendar), and, means permitting, perform a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. On the other hand, it gives them instructions, sometimes brief but sometimes detailed, in several fields of law: social (marriage and divorce), civil (inheritance, bequest, usury), criminal (theft, homicide,
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