CHAPTER VII.
THE RISE OF MOHAMMEDANISM
13. Selections from the Koran
The Koran comprises all of the recorded speeches and sayings of the prophet Mohammed and it has for nearly fifteen centuries been the absolute law and gospel of the Mohammedan religion. The teachings and revelations which are contained in it are believed by Mohammedans to have proceeded directly from God. They were delivered orally by Mohammed from time to time in the presence of his followers and until after the prophet's death in 632 no attempt was made to put them in organized written form. Many of the disciples, however, remembered the words their master had uttered, at least until they could inscribe them on palm leaves, bits of wood, bleached bones, or other such articles as happened to be at hand. In the reign of Abu-Bekr (632-634), Mohammed's successor, it became apparent that unless some measure was adopted to bring these scattered sayings together they were in a fair way to be lost for all time to come. Hence the caliph intrusted to a certain young man by the name of Zaid the task of collecting and putting in some sort of system all the teachings that had survived, whether in written form or merely in the minds of men. Zaid had served Mohammed in a capacity which we should designate perhaps as that of secretary, and so should have been well qualified for the work. In later years (about 660) the Koran, or "the reading," as the collection began to be called, was again thoroughly revised. Thereafter all older copies were destroyed and no farther changes in any respect were ever made.
The Koran is made up of one hundred and fourteen chapters, called surahs, arranged loosely in the order of their length, beginning with the longest. This arrangement does not correspond either to the dates at which the various passages were uttered by the prophet or to any sequence of thought and meaning, so that when one takes up the book to read it as it is ordinarily printed it seems about as confused as anything can well be. Scholars, however, have recently discovered the chronological order of the various parts and this knowledge has already come to be of no little assistance in the work of interpretation. Like all sacred books, the Koran abounds in repetitions; yet, taken all in all, it contains not more than two-thirds as many verses as the New Testament, and, as one writer has rather curiously observed, it is not more than one-third as lengthy as the ordinary Sunday edition of the New York Herald. The teachings which are most emphasized are (1) the unity and greatness of God, (2) the sin of worshipping idols, (3) the certainty of the resurrection of the body and the last judgment, (4) the necessity of a belief in the Scriptures as revelations from God communicated through angels to the line of prophets, (5) the luxuries of heaven and the torments of hell, (6) the doctrine of predestination, (7) the authoritativeness of Mohammed's teachings, and (8) the four cardinal obligations of worship (including purification and prayer), fasting, pilgrimages, and alms-giving. Intermingled with these are numerous popular legends and sayings of the Arabs before Mohammed's day, stories from the Old and New Testaments derived from Jewish and Christian settlers in Arabia, and certain definite and practical rules of everyday conduct. The book is not only thus haphazard in subject-matter but it is also very irregular in interest and elegance. Portions of it abound in splendid imagery and lofty conceptions, and represent the literary quality of the Arabian language at its best, though of course this quality is very largely lost in translation. The later surahs—those which appear first in the printed copy—are largely argumentative and legislative in character and naturally fall into a more prosaic and monotonous strain. From an almost inexhaustible maze of precepts, exhortations, and revelations, the following widely separated passages have been selected in the hope that they will serve to show something of the character of the Koran itself, as well as the nature of some of the more important Mohammedan beliefs and ideals. It will be found profitable to make a comparison of Christian beliefs on the same points as drawn from the New Testament.
Source—Text in Edward William Lane, Selections from the Kur-án, edited by Stanley Lane-Poole (London, 1879), passim.
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.
The opening
prayer[103]
Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds,
The Compassionate, the Merciful,
The King of the day of judgment.