The Quran calls its adherents

It is a matter of grave concern and reflection that among the revealed or unrevealed books, the Quran is becoming rapidly the book that is read without ever trying to understand it. Not even its literal meaning is ever bothered to understand, let alone reading between its lines, and that too by its adherents for whom it has been sent for guidance by the Divine, and it is the book whereby they boast of being the best of peoples on this earth since the advent of Islam.

We love to read the best seller books by the best seller authors. Has any one of us ever read a book in a language that we don’t understand? For it, we either learn the language or read the book’s translation in the language we are well conversant with. Mostly we opt for the latter. But why don’t we follow the same route for the best of the best books, written by the Creator of the universe?

Some might put a lame excuse of shortage of time but they easily spare time for watching sports matches or movies without having a pricking of conscience for not reading and understanding the Quran. We don’t mean to sound evangelical, the aim is to explode some intellectual fallacies of our excessive puritanism and liberalism.

The puritanical scholars are also equally responsible as they have made the reading of the Quran surreal and hence difficult. They recommend special etiquette for its reading. Rather, the Quran should be read just like any other book. We can underline or highlight its text to suit our convenience and purpose. But we have made it too sacrosanct by wrapping it in thick cloth covers and placing it on high shelves as a souvenir of the past. By confining its reading to strict time and space, we have distanced our youth from it. However, internet and android phone have made it easier to read or listen to its translation defying all the limitations of time, space and its etiquette. One can also gain contextual understanding of its text vicariously from video lectures of scholars like Javed Ahmed Ghamdi and Professor Ahmed Rafique Akhtar.

Isn’t it embryology and genetics when the Quran says in its unit Alaq: “We have created man from a clot of congealed blood.” In Al-Mu’minun (23: 12_14) it describes all the stages of human growth from germ cells to foetus? The world famous embryologist Prof Keith Moore acknowledges: “It is clear to me that these scientific references (about embryonic growth) must have come to Muhammad from God, because almost all of this knowledge was not discovered until many centuries later.”

The Quran describes women rights comprehensively in its unit Al-Nisa. It discusses movement of the astrological bodies in the unit Yasin, and anthropology and history in Al-Baqra. In Al-Anbya (21:30), it says: “We have made every living thing from water.” It mentions the Big-Bang in the same unit: “...that the heavens and the earth were a joined entity, and We separated them.” In the unit Adh-Dhariyat (51:47), it says: “And the heaven (cosmos) We constructed with strength, and indeed We are its expander.” In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking writes: “The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20^th century.”

The critics of the Quran allege that whenever a finding or discovery of science is reported, the Muslims downplay the episteme of science, saying that it has already been mentioned in the Quran centuries before. To some extent their objection seems right as we don’t study the Quran on scientific basis and for research purpose. To contextualise scientific findings to the Quranic revelations is to motivate the youth to study the Quran to infer scientific theories alluded in the Quranic text.

Some religious zealots ascribe a healing effect to the Quranic text when it is recited in rhythm. The rhythmic frequency of the Quranic text lends it spirituality but the serendipitous semantics of the text are equally metanoic and transcendental.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 14^th, 2023.

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