البيان في تفسير القرآن
The Prolegomena to the Qurʾān
Translated afresh from the Arabic original (Dār al-Zahrāʾ edition, 557 pp.), collated against the published English translation of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz A. Sachedina (Oxford University Press, 1998) as a control. Qurʾānic quotations follow the rendering of ʿAlī Qulī Qarāʾī. Transliteration of Arabic follows a simplified scheme.
The page numbers are those of the Arabic edition.
In the Name of God, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful.
Praise belongs to God, who has “sent down the Book to His servant and did not let any crookedness be in it, [a Book] upright, to warn of a severe punishment from Him, and to give good news to the faithful who do righteous deeds, that there shall be for them a good reward, to abide in it forever” (18:1–3)1; “[This is] a Book, whose signs have been made definitive and then elaborated, from One [who is] all-wise, all-aware” (11:1)2; “falsehood cannot approach it, from before it nor from behind it, a [gradually] sent down [revelation] from One all-wise, all-laudable” (41:42)3; “This is the Book, there is no doubt in it, a guidance to the Godwary” (2:2)4. “Say, the Holy Spirit has brought it down duly from your Lord to fortify those who have faith and as a guidance and good news for the muslims” (16:102)5. It is “a confirmation of what was [revealed] before it, and an elaboration of all things, and a guidance and mercy for a people who have faith” (12:111)6. “Indeed it is a reminder for you and for your people, and soon you will be questioned” (43:44)7.
And may God’s blessing and peace be upon the Prophet whom He sent — “It is He who has sent His Apostle with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may make it prevail over all religions, though the polytheists should be averse” (9:33)8 — the untutored Prophet, “whose mention they find written with them in the Torah and the Evangel, who bids them to do what is right and forbids them from what is wrong” (7:157)9;
and upon his House, the excellent and the chosen, “those who believe in him, honour him, and help him and follow the light that has been sent down with him” (7:157)10 — “it is they who are the truthful and the witnesses with their Lord; they shall have their reward and their light” (57:19)11 — with whom “Allah is pleased … and they are pleased with Him. They are Allah’s confederates. Look! The confederates of Allah are indeed felicitous!” (58:22)12.
And may God’s everlasting curse be upon their enemies, who “bought error for guidance, so their trade did not profit them, nor were they guided” (2:16)13 — on “the day when they emerge from the graves, hastening, as if racing toward a target, with a humbled look [in their eyes], overcast by abasement. That is the day they had been promised” (70:43–44)14; “the day when the excuses of the wrongdoers will not benefit them, and the curse will lie on them, and for them will be the ills of the [ultimate] abode” (40:52)15.
Since the days of my boyhood I have been enamoured of reciting the Most Great Book of God, of probing its obscurities and drawing out its meanings. It behoves the true Muslim — indeed, every thinking person — to bend his care upon understanding the Qurʾān, clarifying its secrets, and kindling his light from its fire; for it is the Book that guarantees the reform of mankind and takes upon itself their felicity and the securing of it. The Qurʾān is the reference of the lexicographer, the proof-text of the grammarian, the warrant of the jurist, the exemplar of the man of letters, the sought-after goal of the sage, the guide of the preacher, and the aim of the moralist. From it are drawn the sciences of society and of civil governance; upon it are founded the sciences of religion; and from its guidance are uncovered the secrets of the cosmos and the laws of creation. The Qurʾān is the abiding miracle of the everlasting religion, and the lofty constitution for the equally lofty and exalted Sacred Law (Sharīʿa).
From my boyhood I was devoted to its recitation, seeking to grasp its meaning plainly and to lay bare its purpose; and this love grew stronger in me whenever I was able to comprehend one of its manifold meanings and to fathom one of its countless mysteries — until this passion drove me to read the books of exegesis and to explore their depths. And it was there that I found what perplexed and bewildered me.
I found how slight is human reasoning and thought beside the greatness of God in His Qurʾān; I recognised the deficiency of the creature, in his finitude and dependence, before the perfection of the Creator, in the absoluteness of His being and His majesty. I saw the Qurʾān towering in glory while those other books shrank away in insignificance. I found, too, that a man exhausts himself to understand the Qurʾān, uncovers one facet of it or two, and then sets these down in a book which he calls an “exegesis,” implying that it clarifies the Qurʾān’s obscurities and unveils its mysteries. Yet how can anyone suppose that the imperfect could encompass the perfect?
Nonetheless, these scholars deserve praise and thanks for their labours; for the Book of God has surely cast upon their minds a ray of its light and clarity, from its guidance. It would indeed be unfair to require of anyone — however learned and thorough — an all-encompassing knowledge of the meanings of the exalted Book of God. Yet these exegetes may still be faulted for confining themselves to those facets of the Qurʾān that are readily grasped, while setting aside its loftier aspects. So one of them expounds the literary and grammatical side of the Qurʾān; another treats it from the philosophical standpoint; a third analyses it in the light of the modern sciences — and so on — as though the Qurʾān had been sent down to be understood only from the single vantage that this or that exegete has chosen.
Some of the commentators have composed works that contain very little exegesis at all. Others expound the Qurʾān either from their own opinion or according to the views of others, whom God did not appoint as His proof over His creatures.
It is incumbent upon the exegete to follow wherever the verse of the Qurʾān leads him, and to bring its meaning to light wherever it points. He should be a philosopher where a passage bears philosophy, an ethicist where it treats of morality, a jurist where it deals with law, a sociologist where it discusses society — and so on. Beyond this, the exegete must be able to expound the literary craft of the verse and the style of its wording and composition. In truth, to be an exegete one must produce a comprehensive work on the sciences of the Qurʾān; and the fact is that I have not found a single exegete who has succeeded in doing that.
In view of this, I resolved to compose this work of exegesis, hoping from the Real — exalted is He — that He grant me what I have hoped for and pardon me where I have fallen short. I have accordingly bound myself, in this book of mine, to gather what I can of the sciences of the Qurʾān that bear upon its meaning. As for the sciences of the Qurʾān’s literary art, I shall for the most part not take them up, since so many of the scholars of exegesis have written on them — such as al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī in al-Tibyān, al-Ṭabarsī in Majmaʿ al-Bayān, and al-Zamakhsharī in al-Kashshāf.16 Yet I may take up these matters when the inquiry obliges me to, or when I see an important aspect that the exegetes have neglected; and I may occasionally treat some important aspect even though the scholars have not neglected it.
The reader will find that in this exegesis of mine I do not swerve from the outward senses of the Book and its definitive verses (muḥkamāt), nor from what has been established by uninterrupted transmission (tawātur)17 or through sound channels among the reports handed down from the People of the House (the people of infallibility), the progeny of the Messenger (peace be upon them); nor from that which sound, innate reason independently affirms — that reason which God has made an inward proof, just as He has made His Prophet and the infallible members of his House an outward proof.18 The reader will find, too, that I frequently call upon one verse to help understand its sister, and seek guidance from the Qurʾān itself in grasping the Qurʾān’s meanings; and I then make the transmitted report a guide to this understanding.
What follows are a number of topics closely bound up with the purpose of this work, which shed light upon several of its aspects. I begin with them because they serve as an introduction to the exegesis of the Qurʾān. They comprise scholarly topics touching upon the greatness of the Qurʾān and the miraculous character of its inimitability; its immunity from alteration and its freedom from contradiction; the principle of abrogation in its legislation; and other such scholarly questions that must be clarified as an introduction to understanding the Qurʾān and to expounding it upon a sound rational foundation.
To God I turn in humble supplication, that He grant me success and regard my work with acceptance. Indeed, He is Praiseworthy, Glorious.
— Abū al-Qāsim al-Mūsawī al-Khūʾī
It is better for a person to hold back from entering upon this theme and to stand in the posture of helplessness before the greatness of the Qurʾān; for to confess one’s incapacity is better than to plunge into such a discourse. What can anyone say in describing the eminence of the Qurʾān and its majesty? What can he utter to set forth its excellence and its sublimity? How is a contingent being to grasp the greatness of the speech of the Absolute Being? What can a writer set down upon this subject, and what can a speaker say? Can the finite give any account of that which is without limit?
It is greatness enough for the Qurʾān — eminence and glory enough — that it is the speech of God Almighty and the miracle of His noble Prophet, and that its verses are the surety for the guidance of mankind in all their affairs and circumstances and in every age: their surety for attaining the ultimate goal and the supreme felicity, now and hereafter:
“Indeed this Qurʾān guides to what is most upright, and gives the good news to the faithful who do righteous deeds that there is a great reward for them.” (17:9)1 “[This is] a Book We have sent down to you that you may bring mankind out from darkness into light, by the command of their Lord, to the path of the All-mighty, the All-laudable.” (14:1)2 “This is an explanation for mankind, and a guidance and advice for the Godwary.” (3:138)3
It is related that the Prophet (peace be upon him and his House) said: “The superiority of the speech of God over all other speech is as the superiority of God over His creation.”4
Indeed, it is better that a person halt at this theme and commit the exposition of the Qurʾān’s excellence to those who are the peers of the Qurʾān; for they are the ones who know its rank best,
the ones most able to point to its lofty station, its equals in excellence and its companions in guidance. As for their noble grandfather, he it was who proclaimed the Qurʾān, guided [men] to its foundations, and made its teachings known; and concerning [the Book and them] he said: “I leave among you the two weighty things (al-thaqalān): the Book of God and my kindred, the people of my House (ahl al-bayt). The two shall never part until they return to me at the Pond [of Kawthar].”5
The “kindred” in this tradition are the guides to the Qurʾān and those who know its excellence. It is incumbent, then, that we confine ourselves to their sayings and take our light from their guidance. These reports have been gathered by al-ʿAllāma al-Majlisī in his Biḥār al-Anwār; here we shall content ourselves with a few of them.
Al-Ḥārith al-Hamdānī relates: I entered the mosque, and there were people fallen to disputing over ḥadīth. So I went in to ʿAlī [b. Abī Ṭālib] and said, “Do you not see that the people in the mosque are wrangling over ḥadīth?” He said, “Have they done so?” I said, “Yes.” He said: “I have heard the Messenger of God (peace be upon him and his House) say, ‘Sedition (fitna) is coming.’ I said, ‘And what is the way out of it, O Messenger of God?’ He said: ‘The Book of God. In it is the tiding of what was before you, the news of what comes after you, and the judgement of what is among you. It is the decisive word and no jest;6 whoever of the overbearing abandons it, God shatters him, and whoever seeks guidance in other than it, God leads him astray. It is the firm cord of God; it is the Wise Reminder;7 it is the straight path. By it desires do not swerve, nor do tongues fall into confusion; the learned are never sated with it; it does not grow stale through much repetition; and its wonders are never exhausted. It is that which, when the jinn heard it, they did not refrain from saying, “Indeed we heard a wonderful qurʾān.”8 Whoever speaks by it speaks truly; whoever judges by it is just; whoever acts by it is rewarded; and whoever calls to it is guided to a straight path. Take it up, O Aʿwar!’”9
In this tradition are several weighty points. The Prophet’s words, “In it is the tiding of what was before you and the news of what comes after you,” may be understood in more than one way. It may refer to the second creation — the world of the Barzakh, the reckoning, and the requital of deeds; and this is the likeliest sense, for it accords with a saying of ʿAlī in another oration: “In it is the tiding of what was before you, the judgement of what is among you, and the news of your return on the Day of Recompense (maʿād).” It may refer to the events of the unseen future of which the Qurʾān speaks. Or it may intimate that what befell the nations of old will befall this nation in like manner — the sense of God’s words, “you will surely fare from stage to stage,”10 and of the tradition, “You shall follow the ways (sunan) of those who were before you.”
As for his words, “whoever of the overbearing abandons it, God shatters him,” they carry a promise that the Qurʾān is guarded against the tampering of tyrants: since it is divinely protected, the overbearing will leave off reciting it and acting by it and will withhold it from the people — as befell the earlier heavenly books — and so the phrase points to the Qurʾān’s immunity from alteration, a matter to be treated at length later. The same is implied by “by it desires do not swerve”: personal desire cannot bend it, for to deviate from the Qurʾān’s meaning would be to alter it. And the tradition alludes to this: were the community to bring its disputes and its perplexities of belief and of practice back to the Qurʾān, it would surely be shown the way and would find in it a just arbiter and the criterion by which truth is told from falsehood.
The Commander of the Faithful [ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib] describes the Qurʾān thus:
Then God sent down to him the Book — a light whose lamps are not put out, a lamp whose kindling does not die, a sea whose depth is not sounded, a way whose course does not mislead, a radiance whose light is not darkened, a criterion whose proof is not overthrown, an exposition whose pillars are not pulled down, a healing after which no sickness is feared, a might whose helpers are never routed, a truth whose supporters are never abandoned. It is the mine of faith and its heart, the wellsprings of knowledge and its seas, the meadows of justice and its pools, the foundation-stone of Islam and its firm base, the vales of truth and its plains, a sea that those who draw upon it cannot drain, springs that those who dip into them cannot empty, watering-places that those who come to them cannot exhaust, halting-stations whose road the travellers do not lose, waymarks seen by those who journey, hilltops that those who make for them cannot pass beyond. God has made it a quenching for the thirst of the learned, a springtime for the hearts of the jurists, a highroad for the ways of the righteous, a cure after which there is no ailment, a light unmixed with darkness, a cord whose handhold is firm, a fastness whose summit is impregnable. It is might to whoever takes it as ally, peace to whoever enters it, guidance to whoever follows it, a merit for whoever espouses it, a proof for whoever speaks by it, a witness for whoever contends by it, a triumph for whoever argues by it, a support for whoever upholds it, a mount for whoever acts by it, a token for whoever seeks a sign, a shield for whoever seeks shelter, a knowledge for whoever gives heed, a goodly narrative for whoever relates it, and a judgement for whoever adjudges.11
This luminous oration contains many points that call for reflection. In saying that the Qurʾān is “a lamp whose kindling does not die,” the Imam means — as he does in much of this oration — that the Qurʾān is a Book whose significations are never exhausted: it remains fresh and new until the Day of Resurrection. A verse may have come down concerning a particular occasion, or person, or people, yet its relevance is not confined to that occasion or person or people; rather its meaning and its application are general. Concerning the verse “there is a guide for every people,”12 al-ʿAyyāshī relates that Abū Jaʿfar [the Imam al-Bāqir] said: “ʿAlī is the guide, and the guide is ever one of us.” I said, “Then you — may I be your ransom — are the guide now.” He said: “You have spoken truly. The Qurʾān is living, it does not die; the verse is living, it does not die. Were a verse to die with the death of the people concerning whom it came down, the Qurʾān would have died; but rather it runs on among those who remain as it ran among those who have passed.”13
Another report has it that the Imam al-Ṣādiq said: “The Qurʾān is living; it has not died. It abides as the night and the day abide, and as the sun and the moon abide; and it will run for the last of us as it ran for the first of us.” Al-Kulaynī records in al-Kāfī that the Imam al-Ṣādiq was asked by ʿUmar b. Yazīd about the verse “those who join what Allah has commanded to be joined,”14 and said: “It came down concerning the kindred of Muḥammad (peace be upon him and his House), yet it may apply to your own kin as well. Be not of those who say that a verse concerns one thing only.” And in Tafsīr Furāt [al-Kūfī] it is related from the Imam al-Ṣādiq: “Were a verse to die with the death of the people concerning whom it came down, nothing would remain of the Qurʾān; but the beginning of the Qurʾān and its end run together and shall run so long as the heavens and the earth endure. For every people there is a verse which they recite, and its good and its ill are theirs.”15
The Qurʾān is the divine law (al-nāmūs al-ilāhī) that undertakes, on behalf of mankind, the reform of their religion and their world, and stands surety for their felicity in this life and the next. Each of its verses is an overflowing spring of guidance and a mine of instruction and mercy. Whoever desires everlasting bliss and success in the ways of religion and of the world should attend to the Book of God by night and by day, commit its verses to memory, and mingle them with his thoughts; thereby he will tread, in the light of the Wise Reminder,1 toward a success that has no end and “a commerce that will never go bankrupt.”2
Numerous traditions have come down from the Imams of guidance and from their noble grandfather (peace be upon him and his House) concerning the merits of reciting the Qurʾān. Among them:
The Imam al-Bāqir said that the Messenger of God (peace be upon him and his House) said: “Whoever recites ten verses in a night is not written down among the heedless; whoever recites fifty is written among those who remember [God]; whoever recites a hundred is written among the devout; whoever recites two hundred is written among the humble; whoever recites three hundred is written among the triumphant; whoever recites five hundred is written among the assiduous; and whoever recites a thousand, there is recorded for him a qinṭār of gold.”3
The Imam al-Ṣādiq said: “The Qurʾān is God’s covenant with His creation; it behoves every Muslim to look upon his covenant and to read fifty of its verses each day.” He also said: “What hinders any one of you, when he returns home after being busy in the market, from not sleeping until he has recited a sūra of the Qurʾān? For every verse he recites, ten good deeds are recorded for him and ten evil deeds effaced.” And he said: “Keep to the recitation of the Qurʾān, for the degrees of Paradise are to the number of the verses of the Qurʾān; and on the Day of Resurrection it will be said to the reciter, ‘Recite and ascend,’ and for every verse he recites he is raised a degree.”
The compendia of the Shīʿa hold many traditions of this kind — in particular the Qurʾān-volume of al-Majlisī’s Biḥār al-Anwār. All of them concern the excellence of reciting from the written text (al-muṣḥaf) rather than from memory. Among them is the report of Isḥāq b. ʿAmmār from the Imam al-Ṣādiq: I said, “May I be your ransom — I have gathered the Qurʾān in my breast; is it more excellent that I recite from memory, or that I look into the muṣḥaf?” He said: “Rather recite it looking into the muṣḥaf, for that is more excellent. Do you not know that looking into the muṣḥaf is an act of worship?” And he said: “Whoever recites the Qurʾān from the muṣḥaf is granted the enjoyment of his eyesight, and the burden is lightened for his parents, though they be unbelievers.”4
This urging to recite by sight carries a weighty purpose worth pondering: to guard the Qurʾān against loss by ensuring that its copies multiply. For had recitation from memory been given precedence, the demand for written copies would have slackened, so that they would have grown few and might in time have vanished altogether. Beyond this, the many wholesome effects the traditions ascribe to recitation are attained only through recitation by sight — among them the Imam’s words that the reader “is granted the enjoyment of his eyesight.” This is a comprehensive expression: it may mean that reciting from the text preserves the eyes from blindness and inflammation, or that it grants the reader the enjoyment of the Qurʾān’s meanings and its subtleties. For when a man gazes upon a thing he loves he finds joy in it, and both eye and understanding are quickened; so it is with the reciter of the Qurʾān when he lets his eye range over its words and gives his mind free rein to dwell upon its meanings and ponder its stores of knowledge.
The noble traditions also draw our attention to the merit of reciting the Qurʾān in the home. The reason is the spread of Islam and of the Qurʾān’s recitation: if the head of the house recites it, so will the woman and the child, and the summons is thus carried abroad — whereas were recitation confined to appointed places, the opportunity would be open neither to all nor at all times. Among the traditions on the effects of reciting the Qurʾān at home:
“Truly, a house in which the Qurʾān is recited and God the Exalted is remembered — its blessings grow many, the angels attend it, the devils depart from it, and it shines for the dwellers of heaven as a bright star shines for the people of earth. And a house in which the Qurʾān is not recited nor God remembered — its blessings grow few, the angels forsake it, and the devils attend it.”
Astonishing indeed to the mind is what the traditions relate of the excellence of the Qurʾān and the reward God has laid up for its reciters. The Prophet (peace be upon him and his House) said: “Whoever recites a letter of the Book of God, a good deed is recorded for him, and each good deed is tenfold. I do not say that alif-lām-mīm is a [single] letter; rather alif is a letter, lām is a letter, and mīm is a letter.”5
This tradition has been related by Sunnī traditionists as well: al-Qurṭubī reports it from al-Tirmidhī, from Ibn Masʿūd, and al-Kulaynī reports its like from the Imam al-Ṣādiq. Whoever examines the books and compendia of ḥadīth will find abundant traditions on the merits of the Qurʾān and its recitation, and on the special virtues of each sūra and verse.
Yet there is an ill-famed band of lying transmitters who fancied that what had been handed down on these matters did not suffice, and so forged reports on the merits of the Qurʾān and its sūras for which there is neither revelation nor prophetic warrant — among them Abū ʿIṣma Faraj b. Abī Maryam al-Marwazī, Muḥammad b. ʿUkāsha al-Kirmānī, and Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ghuwaybārī. Abū ʿIṣma al-Marwazī indeed confessed to the forgery: asked, “Whence did you get these traditions from ʿIkrima, from Ibn ʿAbbās, on the several merits of the sūras of the Qurʾān, sūra by sūra?” he answered, “I saw the people turning away from the Qurʾān to the jurisprudence of Abū Ḥanīfa and the campaigns of Muḥammad b. Isḥāq, so I forged these traditions seeking reward.” And Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān b. al-Ṣāliḥ said, of the tradition related from Ubayy b. Kaʿb from the Prophet on the merits of the several sūras: “A scholar pursued the source of this tradition until he came upon a man who confessed that he and a company of transmitters had fabricated it; and al-Wāḥidī and others among the exegetes who have set it down in their commentaries have erred.”6
Consider these brazen men, how they fasten a lie upon the Messenger of God — and, not content with that, claim that these falsehoods were framed to please God! “To the profligate is thus presented as decorous what they have been doing.”7
The Qurʾān and the authentic Sunna urge us with the strongest urging to reflect upon the meanings of the Qurʾān and to ponder its purposes and ends. God the Exalted says: “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān, or are there locks on the hearts?”8 — a severe rebuke to those who neglect reflection upon it. And it is related from Ibn ʿAbbās that he heard the Prophet say: “Seek to understand the Qurʾān, and search out its marvels.”
In another tradition, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī says: “Those of the Prophet’s Companions who used to teach us the Qurʾān told us that they would take from the Prophet (peace be upon him and his House) ten verses [at a time], and would not go on to the next ten until they had learned the knowledge and the practice these contained.” The like is related on the authority of ʿUthmān [b. ʿAffān] and Ibn Masʿūd: the Prophet would recite to them ten verses and would not pass on to the next ten until they had mastered all that was in them — teaching them the Qurʾān and its practice together.9
It is related that the Imam ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib mentioned Ghābir b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī and described him as learned. A man said to him, “May I be your ransom! You ascribe learning to Ghābir, and you are what you are?” He said: “He knew the interpretation of God’s saying, ‘Indeed He who has revealed to you the Qurʾān will surely restore you to the place of return.’”10
The traditions on the merit of reflecting upon the Qurʾān are many, and a great number are gathered in the Qurʾān-volume of al-Majlisī’s Biḥār al-Anwār. Yet the merit of reflection stands in no need of proof from the traditions: for the Qurʾān is the Book that God sent down as a law by which men are to order their worldly life, and a lamp by which to light their way to the Hereafter — and these ends are not attained save by reflecting upon it and pondering its meanings. Reason itself decrees this; and what the transmitted texts contain regarding it does no more than point the way.
Al-Kulaynī relates in al-Kāfī, on the authority of al-Zuhrī, that he heard the Imam ʿAlī [Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn] b. al-Ḥusayn (peace be upon them both) say: “The verses of the Qurʾān are treasuries; so whenever a treasury is opened to you, it behoves you to look upon what is within it.”11
In its linguistic usage the word iʿjāz and its derivatives carry several senses: to be unable to do a thing, to find another unable to do it, or to render another unable to do it. In its technical usage, iʿjāz means that one who lays claim to a divine appointment proves the truth of his claim by performing what lies beyond the laws of nature and what others are unable to match.
A miracle, however, is evidence of the claimant’s truthfulness only where it is possible for him to be truthful in that claim. If the claim is refutable — whether by the intellect or by reliable transmission from a prophet or an inerrant Imam — then the wondrous act is no evidence of his veracity, nor is it a “miracle” in the conventional sense, even were others incapable of the like. An instance of refutation by the intellect is the claim to be a deity, which sound proofs show impossible. An instance of refutation by transmission is the claim to prophethood after the Prophet of Islam, which is false by the definitively established report that his is the seal of prophethood; and God is under no obligation to expose a claim that reason or transmission has already falsified.
It may even be that a claimant performs a deed beyond human power which itself proves him false. Such was Musaylima, who is said to have spat into a failing well to increase its water — whereupon its water dried up — and to have passed his hand over the heads and palates of the children of Banū Ḥanīfa, so that baldness struck those whose heads he touched and a lisp those whose palates he stroked.1 When a pretender furnishes such “evidence,” God need not expose him, for the evidence itself gives him the lie; nor is such a thing a miracle in the conventional sense.
Likewise, miracles do not, by convention, include the feats of magicians, tricksters, or masters of the exact theoretical sciences, even where these accomplish what others cannot; for these rest upon laws well known to their specialists, which yield their results whenever correctly applied. Thus the wonders of medicine lie outside the class of miracles, being conditioned by the constitution of substances, though the layman — and perhaps the physician himself — be ignorant of them. It is not unfitting that God single out one of His creatures for knowledge of some such matter; but it would be unfitting that He mislead the ignorant through their ignorance by letting a true miracle appear at the hands of an impostor.
It is incumbent upon God, the Exalted, to lay moral-religious obligation (taklīf) upon mankind. This is a rational conclusion: human beings need such obligation to reach their perfection and felicity, and were God not to provide it, this would be from ignorance of their need — and He is far above ignorance — or from an unwillingness to let them reach their perfection — and such niggardliness is inadmissible of the Absolutely Generous — or from inability to provide it — and such incapacity is inadmissible of the Absolutely Powerful. It is therefore imperative that He lay obligation upon them, which in turn requires a human herald to make its terms known, “so that he who perishes might perish by a manifest proof, and he who lives may live on by a manifest proof.”2
Since this office attracts many pretenders and is coveted by the ambitious — so that the truthful risks being confused with the false — the true claimant must furnish unmistakable evidence of his veracity. Such evidence cannot be an ordinary act others can perform; it can only be something exceeding the laws of nature. A miracle answers to this, for it lies beyond nature and so cannot occur without divine empowerment; and were the claimant false, that empowerment would be a support of falsehood — impossible on the part of the Wise God. A miracle wrought at a claimant’s hands is therefore a sign of his truthfulness and of God’s acceptance of his prophethood.
This is a settled rule accepted by all rational persons. If a man claims to be a king’s envoy and his hearers doubt him, he must produce unequivocal evidence; and if he says, “The proof of my truthfulness is that tomorrow the king will greet me in the manner reserved for his envoys,” and the king, knowing what has passed, then greets him so, no rational person could doubt the mission — for a capable king who guards his subjects’ interests would not confirm a false claimant bent on corrupting them. What is unfitting for a rational person is impossible for the Absolutely Wise. God has pointed to this in His Book: “Had he faked any sayings in Our name, We would have surely seized him by the right hand and then cut off his aorta.”3 That is: Our forbearance confirms what he conveys and forbids the intrusion of falsehood into the sacred law, whose protection is incumbent upon Us both in its establishment and in its continuance.
A miracle’s force as evidence, however, rests upon the intellect’s power to distinguish good from evil (ḥusn and qubḥ). The Ashʿarites, who deny this power, have thereby — against their will — closed the door upon establishing prophethood: for miracles prove veracity only if reason deems it improper that a miracle be wrought by a liar; and if reason cannot judge so, none can tell the true prophet from the false. Al-Faḍl b. Rūzbihān answered that, though God could do evil, His custom is to grant miracles only to true prophets, so that the Ashʿarite doctrine does not after all close that door. The weakness of this reply is plain. First, such a “custom” is not perceived by sense; only the intellect could establish it — yet the Ashʿarites deny the intellect this competence. Second, knowledge of the custom presupposes faith in earlier miracle-working prophets; those who deny or doubt them have no way to it. Third, if reason cannot judge good and evil, nothing prevents God from altering His custom, for He is not questioned as to what He does — and might, then, manifest a miracle at a liar’s hands. Fourth, a custom is formed only after repetition over time; so what established the truthfulness of the first prophet before any such custom existed? (The Ashʿarite doctrine will be treated more fully in its place.)
A miracle can be recognized as such most readily by the specialists in the art it resembles, for they best know that art’s limits and can tell what human power can and cannot reach; the layman, ignorant of those limits, is slower to concede, suspecting that the pretender may have drawn on techniques known only to specialists. Divine wisdom therefore appointed for each prophet the kind of miracle that most resembled the prevailing art of his age, so that its specialists — of whom there were many — might quickly attest it.
Thus it was wise that Moses be given the staff and the white hand, for magic was widespread in his day; and it was the magicians who, seeing the staff become a serpent “swallowing what they had faked,”4 knew it lay beyond their art and believed, heedless of Pharaoh’s wrath. Greek medicine flourished in the time of Jesus, in Syria and Palestine; so his proof was made to resemble medicine — the raising of the dead and the healing of the blind and the leprous — which the people knew to be beyond human power. As for the Arabs, they were masters of eloquence, who held assemblies to vie in poetry and oration, rating a man by the excellence of his speech; so great was their love of poetry that they wrote the choicest odes in gold and hung them upon the Kaʿba — whence a man’s finest poem was called “his gilded ode” — and al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī sat as judge at the fair of ʿUkāẓ beneath a red hide dome, to whom the poets brought their compositions.5 It was therefore wise that the Prophet of Islam be given the miracle of the Qurʾān’s clarity and eloquence, so that the Arabs recognized it as the speech of God, beyond human power — as every Arab who was not obstinate acknowledged.
To this points the report of Ibn al-Sukayt, who asked the Imam Abū al-Ḥasan al-Riḍā why God sent Moses with the staff and the white hand, Jesus with healing, and Muḥammad with speech and oration. The Imam replied that God sent each prophet to confound the art that prevailed in his age: Moses among a people given to magic, with what rendered their magic vain; Jesus, when chronic sicknesses had appeared and men needed medicine, with what raised the dead and healed the blind and leprous by God’s leave; and Muḥammad, when eloquence and poetry prevailed, with exhortations and wisdom that reduced their speech to nothing — and by each He established His proof.6
The Prophet worked other miracles besides the Qurʾān — the splitting of the moon, the serpent that spoke, the pebbles that glorified God — yet the Qurʾān is the greatest of them and the strongest in proof. For the Arabs, ignorant of the natural sciences, might have doubted those other wonders and ascribed them to causes they did not understand — magic being the nearest to their minds — whereas they could not doubt the Qurʾān’s eloquence, whose art they grasped; and those other miracles were transitory, soon becoming mere reports handed down and open to doubt, while the Qurʾān abides, its inimitability continuous across the generations. (The Prophet’s non-Qurʾānic miracles will be treated separately, with attention to those who deny them.)
Every intelligent person whom the call of Islam has reached knows that Muḥammad summoned all mankind to Islam, established his proof by the Qurʾān, and challenged them, by its inimitability, to produce its like — even helping one another; then he lowered the challenge to ten sūras like it; and finally to a single sūra.7 Had this been possible, it would have behoved the Arabs — above all their masters of eloquence — to take up the challenge and undo his proof by matching a single sūra, and so win a manifest victory and lasting renown, sparing themselves wars, ruinous expense, exile from their homes, and every hardship. But they weighed the Qurʾān’s eloquence and conceded its inimitability, knowing they would be worsted in the attempt. So some believed and entered Islam, while others, choosing obstinacy, took to the sword rather than the word and preferred a contest of lances to a contest of eloquence — and this incapacity and recourse to war were themselves the fullest proof that the Qurʾān is a revelation beyond human power.
Some ignorant opponents have claimed that the Arabs did match the Qurʾān, and that the record of it has perished with time. But had any such encounter occurred, the Arabs would have proclaimed it in their assemblies and published it at their fairs; the enemies of Islam would have taken it up as a refrain, repeating it on every occasion and guarding it as a litigant guards his proof, more zealously than they preserved their ancestral history. Yet, though pre-Islamic poetry fills the books of history and the anthologies of letters, we find no trace of any such matching, nor hear any mention of it — and this though the challenge is addressed to all, jinn and men together: “Say, ‘Should all humans and jinn rally to bring the like of this Qurʾān, they will not bring the like of it, even if they assisted one another.’”8
Moreover, the enemies of Islam spend vast sums, year upon year, to diminish this religion and to disparage its Prophet and its Book; yet had they been able to counter the Qurʾān, even by matching one sūra, that would have served their aim better than all their expense: “They desire to put out the light of Allah with their mouths, but Allah shall perfect His light though the faithless should be averse.”9
Again, one who dwells long upon an eloquent text may in time come to approach its style; yet, despite unceasing study of the Qurʾān, none has approached its manner in the least — proof that its style lies beyond teaching and learning. And had the Qurʾān been the Prophet’s own composition, his orations and sayings — preserved in writing — would resemble it and equal it in eloquence; but they are of another style altogether, and any resemblance, had it existed, would have been trumpeted by his enemies. Finally, customary eloquence has bounds it rarely oversteps, and its masters specialize — one excelling in heroic verse, say, but not in love poetry — whereas the Qurʾān ranges over countless subjects and every mode of expression, surpassing all others in each: a versatility impossible for a human being.
Belief in a prophet comes only through the miracle he works as proof of his claim. The prophethoods of former prophets were bounded by their own times, so divine wisdom allowed their miracles to be brief: their contemporaries witnessed them directly, and later folk learned of them by unbroken transmission (tawātur), so that in either case the miracle served as evidence. But the everlasting Sharīʿa of Islam requires a timeless miracle; for a short-lived one, were its transmission ever broken, could not reach the distant in time or place, and God would then be imposing upon them belief in what they cannot verify — an impossible obligation, inadmissible of Him. Hence the final and abiding prophethood necessarily requires an abiding miracle: God sent down the Qurʾān as such, a proof to later generations as to the first.
From this two things follow. First, the Qurʾān surpasses every other miracle — those of the former prophets and those of our own Prophet besides the Qurʾān — since it is lasting and its inimitability continuous, to be heard by every generation and to stand as proof across the ages. Second, the former sacred laws were temporary; the sign that their term has ended is that the proofs which served them ended with the passing of the miracles that confirmed them.
The Qurʾān has, moreover, a further merit over all other miracles: it is charged with the guidance of mankind to its ultimate perfection. It was the Qurʾān that took the rude and oppressive Arabs — sunk in idol-worship, tribal warfare, and the vainglory of the age of ignorance (jāhiliyya) — and made of them, in a very short time, a community eminent in learning and noble in conduct. Whoever studies the lives of the Companions who won martyrdom in the Prophet’s presence perceives the greatness of the Qurʾān’s guidance and the reach of its influence: it drew them up from the abyss of ignorance to the heights of knowledge and gave them such devotion to the sacred law that they grudged neither wealth nor children nor homeland.
The words of al-Miqdād at Badr bear this out. When the Prophet consulted the believers about setting forth, al-Miqdād said that they would not say to him what the Children of Israel said to Moses — “Go ahead, you and your Lord, and fight! We will be sitting right here”10 — but rather: “Go, you and your Lord, and fight; we are with you as fighters. By Him who sent you with the truth, were you to march us to Birk al-Ghimād” — meaning the farthest reaches beyond the sea — “we would press on with you until you reached it.” And the Prophet spoke kindly to him and prayed for him.11 Many Muslims shared this sincerity; the Qurʾān made them firm against unbelief and tender toward one another, each holding his companion’s life dearer than his own, so that by Islam they conquered in eighty years more than others conquered in eight hundred — whereas the followers of earlier prophets abandoned and betrayed them in adversity, and those prophets could only hide from their oppressors in caves and ravines. This is the second merit of the Qurʾān over every other miracle. Having established that the Qurʾān is a divine miracle of eloquence, we add that its inimitability is not confined to that: it is a Lordly miracle and a manifold proof of the prophethood of the one to whom it came down — some of whose aspects we now set out, in brief.
In many of its verses the Qurʾān affirms that Muḥammad was unlettered (ummī); the Prophet himself said as much openly among his own people and clan, in whose midst he had been raised, and none of them denied it — wherein lies a decisive proof. Unlettered though he was, he brought in his Book such learning as overwhelms the minds of philosophers and baffles the thinkers of East and West, from the dawn of Islam to this day, and will perplex them until the Day of Judgment — one of the greatest aspects of its inimitability.
Let us grant the opponents their claim and suppose that he was not unlettered, but tutored, and that he acquired his knowledge of science and history by learning. Then he must have taken it from the learned of his time, among whom he grew up: but these were, for the most part, idolaters given to superstition, or People of the Book who drew their knowledge, history, and law from the two Testaments. Were that so, his teaching would bear the traces of those sources. Yet we find the Qurʾān differing from the two Testaments in every respect, and purifying them of the delusions and myths that fill them.
Thus the Qurʾān, in many verses, ascribes to God the attributes of perfection befitting His majesty and exalts Him above every deficiency:
“And they say, ‘Allah has taken a son.’ Immaculate is He! Rather to Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth. All are obedient to Him, the Originator of the heavens and the earth; and when He decides on a matter, He just says to it, ‘Be!’ and it is.” (2:116–117) “Your god is the One God, there is no god except Him, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful.” (2:163) “Allah — there is no god except Him — is the Living One, the All-sustainer. Neither drowsiness befalls Him nor sleep. To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth …” (2:255) “Nothing is indeed hidden from Allah in the earth or in the sky. It is He who forms you in the wombs however He wishes. There is no god except Him, the All-mighty, the All-wise.” (3:5–6) “That is Allah, your Lord, there is no god except Him, the creator of all things; so worship Him. He watches over all things. The sights do not apprehend Him, yet He apprehends the sights, and He is the All-attentive, the All-aware.” (6:102–103) “Say, ‘Allah originates the creation, then He will bring it back.’ Then where do you stray?” (10:34) “It is Allah who raised the heavens without any pillars that you see, and then presided over the Throne …” (13:2) “He is Allah, there is no god except Him. All praise belongs to Him in this world and the Hereafter …” (28:70) “He is Allah — there is no god except Him — Knower of the sensible and the Unseen … the Sovereign, the All-holy, the All-benign, the Securer, the All-conserver, the All-mighty, the All-compeller, the All-magnanimous … He is Allah, the Creator, the Maker, the Former. To Him belong the Best Names …” (59:22–24)12
Could an unlettered man reared in an ignorant milieu bring forth such lofty knowledge of God, guided by clear proof and accordant with sound reason? The Qurʾān, further, names the prophets and ascribes to them the noblest traits and deeds befitting the sanctity of prophethood:
“… those who follow the Apostle, the uninstructed prophet, whose mention they find written with them in the Torah and the Evangel …” (7:157) “It is He who sent to the unlettered [people] an apostle from among themselves, to recite to them His signs, to purify them, and to teach them the Book and wisdom …” (62:2) “… and yours indeed will be an everlasting reward, and indeed you possess a great character.” (68:3–4) “Indeed Allah chose Adam and Noah, and the progeny of Abraham and the progeny of Imran above all the nations.” (3:33) “When Abraham said to his father and his people, ‘I repudiate what you worship, excepting Him who originated me; indeed He will guide me.’” (43:26–27) “… he saw a star and said, ‘This is my Lord!’ But when it set, he said, ‘I do not like those who set.’” (6:76) “And We gave him Isaac and Jacob and guided each of them … David and Solomon, Job, Joseph, Moses and Aaron … and Zechariah, John, Jesus and Ilyās … and Ishmael, Elisha, Jonah and Lot — each We graced over all the nations.” (6:84–88) “Certainly We gave David and Solomon knowledge, and they said, ‘All praise belongs to Allah …’” (27:15) “And remember Ishmael, Elisha and Dhu’l-Kifl — each [of whom was] among the elect.” (38:48) “They are the ones whom Allah has blessed from among the prophets … When the signs of the All-beneficent were recited to them, they would fall down weeping in prostration.” (19:58)
Such are a few of the verses by which the Qurʾān clears the prophets of every blemish and shows them in their true sanctity. The two Testaments, by contrast, also describe the prophets — but to how base a level they reduce these emissaries of God. Al-Khūʾī adduces, as the extant Testaments relate them, the following:
These, al-Khūʾī concludes, are but a few of the incongruities and errors of the two Testaments in their current form — neither congruent with reason nor compatible with sound logic. He sets them before the reader to weigh with his own conscience: Can it be supposed that Muḥammad drew the content of his Noble Qurʾān, that repository of lofty knowledge and firm teaching, from such sources? And can books that so defame the prophets be held to be a heavenly revelation?
Every rational person acquainted with the course of affairs knows that whoever founds his laws and reports upon falsehood is bound to fall into self-contradiction and inconsistency — the more so if he ventures upon the many weighty matters of legislation, of society and doctrine, and of ethical systems resting on intricate principles, and the more so still as time passes while he is at his work. Deficient human nature, bereft of guidance, cannot but slip into contradiction, whether by design or not; hence the proverb, “A liar has no memory.”
The Qurʾān, by contrast, treats a great range of matters — theology and prophethood, jurisprudence and the social and political order, ethics, astronomy, history, the rules of war and peace, the description of the heavens and the earth and their creatures, parables, and the terrors of the Day of Resurrection — and in all this there is no contradiction, not the least inconsistency, nor any departure from what reason accepts. It relates one and the same episode more than once — the story of Moses, for instance, recurs several times, each with its own distinctive touch, yet without discord in its essential meaning. And when one considers that its verses came down piecemeal, on scattered occasions, one sees the wonder the more, for disconnected composition of its nature breeds unevenness when the parts are joined; yet the Qurʾān is a miracle in both states — miraculous as it came down in fragments, and miraculous again when gathered. To this God points: “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would have surely found much discrepancy in it.”1 The Qurʾān often refers people thus to the judgement of their own innate sense — the most effective of all guidance — and the Arabs, keen judges of language, perceived this rectitude in it. The words of al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra make it plain: pressed by Abū Ghahl to pronounce on the Qurʾān, he said that by God he knew no man more versed than himself in poetry and its meters, yet what he had heard resembled none of it — “it is the most refined speech; … it surely surpasses and cannot be surpassed; this is not the word of a human being.” Only when Abū Ghahl warned that his people would not rest until he disparaged it did al-Walīd, after deliberation, call it “magic handed down from another.”2
Whoever would appreciate this should study the other scriptures ascribed to revelation, and will find them incongruent in sense and disordered in style. Al-Khūʾī cites, as examples of inconsistency in the Gospels: that in one place Christ says “He who is not with me is against me” (Matthew 12; Luke 11), and in another “he that is not against you is for you” (Mark 9; Luke 9); that he answers “Why do you call me good? None is good but God alone” (Mark 10; Luke 18), yet elsewhere calls himself “the good shepherd” (John 10); that Matthew 27 has both crucified robbers revile him, while Luke 23 has one rebuke the other; and that he says “If I bear witness to myself, my testimony is not true” (John 5), yet also “Even if I bear witness to myself, my testimony is true” (John 8).
Whoever studies history knows the depth of ignorance in which people lay before Islam, and how low their knowledge and morals had sunk. Barbarism prevailed; raiding and aggression were ceaseless; myth and lawlessness abounded; no religion united the Arabs and no order bound them. Most were idolaters, each clan with its own gods taken as intercessors; they swore by the sacred stones (anṣāb) and the divining arrows (azlām), gamed for gain and boasted of it, married widows to their foster-sons, and — most abominable of all — buried their infant daughters alive (al-waʾd). When the light of Muḥammad broke and the sun of Islam rose over Mecca, they took their enlightenment from the Qurʾān’s truths and exchanged idolatry for the affirmation of God’s oneness, ignorance for knowledge, and discord for brotherhood, until they became a community whose might spread over the world and who raised the standards of civilization when Europe lay in the darkness of the Middle Ages.3
All this issued from the teachings of the Book of God, whose legislative order accords with plain truth and sound reason and holds to the path of justice, shunning both excess and neglect. Thus in the Opening (al-Fātiḥa) the Qurʾān has mankind pray, in their own words, “Guide us on the straight path” (1:6) — a phrase brief in wording yet vast in meaning, to be treated in its place. It enjoins justice and the middle way throughout:
“Indeed Allah commands you to deliver the trusts to their [rightful] owners, and, when you judge between people, to judge with fairness.” (4:58) “Be fair; that is nearer to Godwariness.” (5:8) “And when you speak, be fair, even if it were a relative.” (6:152) “Indeed Allah enjoins justice and kindness and generosity towards relatives, and He forbids indecency, wrong, and aggression.” (16:90)
It warns against avarice and its evil end — “They will be collared with what they grudge on the Day of Resurrection” (3:180) — and equally against extravagance: “do not be wasteful; indeed He does not like the wasteful” (6:141); “Do not keep your hand chained to your neck, nor open it altogether, or you will sit blameworthy, regretful.” (17:29) It enjoins patience under adversity and promises its reward — “Indeed the patient will be paid in full their reward without any reckoning” (39:10); “and Allah loves the steadfast” (3:146) — yet does not leave the wronged defenceless, permitting retaliation in equal measure to end corruption and uphold justice: “Should anyone aggress against you, assail him in the manner he assailed you” (2:194); “whoever is killed wrongfully, We have certainly given his heir an authority. But let him not commit any excess in killing.” (17:33)
By this moderation the Qurʾān joins the good of this world to that of the next — unlike, al-Khūʾī observes, the Torah in its present form, which for all its bulk says nothing of the Day of Resurrection or the requital to come, and unlike the Gospel, which neglects the ordering of worldly affairs. The Qurʾān’s law provides for both:
“Whoever obeys Allah and His Apostle, He shall admit him to gardens with streams running in them … And whoever disobeys Allah and His Apostle, and transgresses the bounds set by Allah, He shall make him enter a Fire.” (4:13–14) “So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.” (99:7–8) “By the means of what Allah has given you, seek the abode of the Hereafter, while not forgetting your share of this world.” (28:77)
It permits the good things of life and the ordinary dealings that bind people together — “Who has forbidden the adornment of Allah which He has brought forth for His servants, and the good things of [His] provision?” (7:32); “Allah has allowed trade and forbidden usury” (2:275); “Keep your agreements” (5:1) — and commands marriage, by which alone the species endures: “Marry off those who are single among you” (24:32); “marry [other] women that you like, two, three, or four; but if you fear that you may not treat them fairly, then [marry only] one.” (4:3) It commands kindness to wives, parents, kin, and all people:
“Consort with them in an honourable manner.” (4:19) “The wives have rights similar to the obligations upon them, in accordance with honourable norms.” (2:228) “… be good to parents, the relatives, the orphans, the needy, the near neighbour and the distant neighbour, the companion at your side, the traveller, and your slaves.” (4:36) “Indeed Allah’s mercy is close to the virtuous.” (7:56) “… and be virtuous. Indeed Allah loves the virtuous.” (2:195)
These teachings it lays as a duty upon every member of the community, binding each to enjoin right and forbid wrong, restricted to no class or office. So the Qurʾān makes of every household and every neighbour a guide and a guardian for the rest — indeed every Muslim a watchman over every other, to lead him to the straight path and hold him back from injustice. What army of any ruler could keep such watch, in every place and at all times? Chief among the teachings that welded the Muslims into one is the doctrine of brotherhood across all ranks, and the rejection of every distinction save knowledge and Godwariness (taqwā): “Indeed the noblest of you in the sight of Allah is the most Godwary among you” (49:13); “Are those who know equal to those who do not know?” (39:9)
The Prophet declared that God had, through Islam, stripped away the arrogance of the Age of Ignorance and its boasting of lineage: all people, white or black, Qurayshite, Arab or non-Arab, are children of Adam, and Adam was of clay; the dearest to God are the most godly.4 And he said that the merit of the learned over other people is as his own merit over the lowliest of them. So Islam raised Salmān the Persian, by the purity of his faith, until he was counted of the Prophet’s household (ahl al-bayt), while it abased Abū Lahab, the Prophet’s own uncle, for his unbelief. The Prophet took no pride in clan or noble descent, but called men to God and the Last Day and to the oneness of God and of the people — and so gained mastery over a community that had gloried in lineage, until a man of wealth and high birth would give his daughter in marriage to a poor Muslim of humble descent. Can a rational person doubt the prophethood of one who brought so great a law, reared though he was among a people ignorant of all such teaching?
The Qurʾān treats an immense range of subjects — from the knowledge of God to the branches of learning; from the first creation to the return for judgement; from the spirit, the angels, Iblīs, and the jinn, to astronomy, the earth, history, and the lives of the earlier prophets; and from proverbs, proofs, and ethics to the rights of the family, politics and public order, the laws of war, decree and destiny, worship and transactions, marriage and divorce, penalties and retribution. In all of them it brought lasting truths that never lose their fitness nor lie open to just criticism — “falsehood cannot approach it, from before it nor from behind it” (41:42) — things ordinarily beyond human reach, above all for one reared among an unlettered people. For whoever writes on a theoretical subject soon finds much of it overtaken: the longer such matters are studied the clearer the facts become, so that later generations correct their predecessors, and what the ancients took for certainty is exposed by later scrutiny as fancy. The books of the old philosophers and of those who came after fell thus under the criticism of their successors. Yet the Qurʾān, for all its manifold aims and lofty meanings and for all the passage of time, has been found wanting in nothing — save in the fancies of a few presumptuous critics, whose objections will be answered in their place.
In several places the Qurʾān gives news of weighty matters yet to come, and all it foretold came to pass exactly — knowledge of the hidden that can come only by revelation. Thus of Badr: “When Allah promised you [victory over] one of the two companies … you were eager that it should be the one that was unarmed. But Allah desires to confirm the truth with His words, and to root out the faithless.” (8:7) The believers were few and ill-equipped — their only horseman, it is said, al-Miqdād, or perhaps al-Zubayr b. al-ʿAwwām — against a numerous, well-armed foe; yet God fulfilled His promise and gave them the victory. And in Mecca, in the earliest days, when none could imagine that Quraysh would fall or the Prophet prevail: “So proclaim what you have been commanded, and turn away from the polytheists. Indeed We will suffice you against the deriders.” (15:94–96) — revealed, as Anas b. Mālik reports, when the Prophet passed men of Mecca who jeered that here was the one who claimed prophethood and Gabriel’s support.5 So too: “It is He who has sent His Apostle with the guidance and the religion of truth that He may make it prevail over all religions.” (61:9) And of the Byzantines: “Byzantium has been vanquished in a nearby territory, but following their defeat they will be victors” (30:2–3) — which came to pass within some ten years, when the Byzantine emperor overcame the Persians. And of the rout of the unbelievers: “Do they say, ‘We are a confederate league’? The league will be routed and turn its back [to flee].” (54:44–45) — fulfilled at Badr, where three hundred and odd men, all but unarmed, scattered a great host; had Abū Ghahl not been destroyed there with his troops, how could so few have overcome so many, but for God’s command and the truth of the prophecy? And of Abū Lahab: “Perish the hands of Abū Lahab, and perish he! … Soon he will enter the blazing fire, and his wife [too], the firewood carrier.” (111:1–5) — foretelling that he and his wife would die in unbelief, as indeed they did.
The Qurʾān speaks, in more than one verse, of the order of the universe, the laws of nature, and the heavenly bodies — matters that could not have been understood at the dawn of Islam save by revelation, and some of which became known only after the sciences had advanced. It disclosed such things where disclosure was fitting and alluded to them where allusion was the wiser course, since some were too hard for the minds of that age and were best hinted at for the people of later times.
Thus of the earth and its growth: “And We spread out the earth, and cast in it firm mountains, and We grew in it every kind of balanced thing.”1 — an allusion, later scholars observed, to the fact that each species of plant is composed of parts of exact and measured proportion. And of the winds: “And We send the fertilizing winds.”2 Though the early exegetes took “fertilizing” (lawāqiḥ) to mean the bearing of clouds, the winds do not bear the clouds but drive them; the verse rather points to the pollination of plants by the wind — a mystery the ancients could not fathom. That the law of pairing is not confined to animals but runs through the plants too is shown by “and of every fruit He has made in it two kinds”3 and “Immaculate is He who has created all the kinds of what the earth grows, and of themselves, and of what they do not know.” (36:36)
Of the earth’s motion: “He who made the earth for you a cradle.”4 The likening of the earth to a cradle — which rocks the infant for its rest and growth — subtly intimates the earth’s daily and yearly motions, ordained for the nurture of mankind; and the verse alludes to this rather than stating it plainly, since the age held the earth’s stillness to be beyond doubt.5 Of another continent: “Lord of the two easts, and Lord of the two wests!”6 — which, al-Khūʾī argues, points to a landmass on the far side of the earth, where sunrise answers to our sunset; supported by “Would that there were between me and you the distance of the two easts”7 (the two easts being the greatest perceptible distance). The singular “east” and “west” denote direction — “To Allah belong the east and the west: so whichever way you turn, there is the face of Allah” (2:115) — the dual denotes the far continent, and the plural, the many easts and wests of the globe.
Of the earth’s roundness: “the east and west of the land” (7:137); “the Lord of the easts” (37:5); “So I swear by the Lord of the easts and the wests that We are able.” (70:40) The many rising- and setting-places imply that the sun rises over one part of the globe as it sets over another — so the earth is round; the plurality of easts and wests is thus no mere figure. Traditions of the Imams point the same way. The Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq confirmed a companion who reasoned from the sun’s differing risings and settings to the earth’s sphericity, while reminding him of his own duty of prayer;8 and in the supplications of the Imam Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn, the words that God “has caused each of them [night and day] to pass into its companion, and has caused its companion to pass into it” intimate that the passing of night into day for us entails the passing of day into night for others — a pointer to the round earth, the second clause being no mere repetition of the first.9
These few aspects suffice as proof that the Qurʾān is a divine revelation beyond human power. A further proof is that the Qurʾān was the sole schooling of the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, whose eloquence in the orations of Nahj al-Balāgha is such that it has been said to stand “below the speech of the Creator and above the speech of created beings.” His testimony to the Qurʾān’s inimitability — from a master of eloquence and of the hidden sciences, an ascetic who spurned the world and refused rule on unjust terms — could spring neither from ignorance nor from worldly motive, and is itself a proof of the Qurʾān’s divine origin.
The Qurʾān has challenged all mankind to bring a sūra like its own, and none has met the challenge. Its stubborn enemies, unable to bear its victory, sought to lower its standing by raising doubts that their fancies contrived; it is fitting to set these out and show how far their knowledge reached and how their whims cast them into error.
First: that the Qurʾān contains matter at variance with eloquence because it does not comply with the rules of Arabic grammar, and such a book cannot be a miracle.
This is false on two counts. Had the Qurʾān broken the rules of Arabic, the masters of the language — challenged to counter it, and reminded that they could not “even if they assisted one another” (17:88) — would have seized upon those breaches instead of resorting to swords and lances, and history would have preserved the tale; yet nothing of the kind is recorded. And the rules of grammar were themselves derived, only afterward, from the usage of the eloquent; the Qurʾān is itself among the highest sources of that usage, so that if later grammatical doctrine were to conflict with it, this would condemn the doctrine, not the Qurʾān. Besides, the objection would hold only if the various readings were uniformly transmitted from the Prophet; but the prevalent readings rest, as will be shown, on the readers’ own reasoning — so an objection to a reading impugns that reading alone, not the greatness of the Qurʾān.
Second: that eloquent speech cannot be a miracle, since eloquence is appreciated by some and not by others, whereas a miracle must be recognized by all, every person being bound to believe the prophet who works it.
This doubt is as weak as the first. It is not required that a miracle be recognized directly by all — were that required, no miracle would remain — for a miracle is recognized by the specialists and reaches the rest by uninterrupted transmission (tawātur). The Qurʾān is distinguished among miracles in that it abides so long as the Arabic tongue and those who know its ways abide, be they Arabs or not.
Third: that whoever fully commands Arabic can bring forth a word like the Qurʾān’s, and therefore the like of the Qurʾān.
This deserves no mention: the power to produce a part is not the power to produce the whole — a man who can shape a single brick cannot therefore raise a palace, nor can every Arab who knows the words compose orations and odes. It was this error, likely, that led al-Naẓẓām and his followers to the doctrine of “diversion” (al-ṣarfa) — that the Qurʾān’s inimitability lies in men’s being turned away from matching it.10 This cannot stand. If it means that God is able to empower a man to produce its like but has withheld that power, this is true of every miracle, not of the Qurʾān alone; and if it means that men possess the power but God restrains them, it is false, for many have tried and failed and confessed their failure. Moreover, had the inimitability been mere “diversion,” the like of the Qurʾān would have existed before the challenge and would have been transmitted; since none was, the Qurʾān is by itself a divine miracle.
Fourth: that even granting the Qurʾān’s inimitability, this does not establish the prophethood of the one who brought it, since its narratives contradict those of the two Testaments, whose divine origin is fixed by uninterrupted transmission.
The answer is that by contradicting the mythical tales of the two Testaments the Qurʾān has itself put every doubt to rest: it holds no myth, no absurdity, nothing that reason refuses to ascribe to God and His prophets — so that its very contradiction of the Testaments is a proof of its divine origin. This was shown earlier, together with a number of the fallacies of the two Testaments.
Fifth: that the Qurʾān contradicts itself — for the sign given to Zechariah is once “that you will not speak to people for three days” (3:41) and once “for three complete nights.” (19:10)
But “day” (yawm) may mean the daylight alone — “seven grueling nights and eight days” (69:7) — or a day together with its night — “Enjoy yourselves in your homes for three days” (11:65); and “night” (layl) may mean the dark hours alone — “By the night when it envelops” (92:1) — or a night together with its day — “We made an appointment with Moses for forty nights.” (2:51) In the two verses on Zechariah both words carry the fuller sense of a whole day-and-night span; there is no contradiction. The objector, who overlooks this plain sense to belittle the Qurʾān, is blind to the real contradiction of the Gospels: Matthew has Christ foretell three days and three nights in the tomb, yet all four Gospels agree that he lay there only from before sunset on Friday to before dawn on Sunday — how, then, do three days and three nights add up?
The second charge of inconsistency is that the Qurʾān once attributes the deed to the creature’s own choice — “let anyone who wishes believe it, and let anyone who wishes disbelieve it” (18:29) — and once to God’s will — “But you do not wish unless it is wished by Allah” (76:30) — the one implying free choice, the other compulsion.
The answer prepares the true doctrine. By his innate sense a man knows he is capable of acts he may do or leave — hence all rational people praise the good-doer and blame the evildoer, and a man knows his walking is not like his falling from a height. Yet the rudiments of any act — his very existence, his perceiving the act, his desiring it, his capacity and power for it — are not of his own making but are set in him by his Creator; and the Creator does not withdraw from His creation once made, for created things need their Sustainer at every instant. His relation to them is not that of a mason to a wall, which stands after he dies, nor of an author to a book, which needs him only in the writing; it is rather as the relation of the electric current to the light, which shines only while joined to its source and is extinguished the moment the wire is cut. So all things draw their being, at every moment, from their First Creator, ever in need of His support, whose “mercy embraces all things.” (7:156)
Human action, then, falls between free will and compulsion: the power and every element of the act are conferred by God, so that in one respect the act is the creature’s and in another it is God’s, and the creature’s freedom does not annul the effect of God’s power. Imagine a man whose hand is paralyzed and cannot move of itself, but which a physician can move by supplying it, at will, with an electric current, so that the man moves his hand only while the current is joined to it. When the man then acts with that hand, the motion cannot be ascribed to him alone, since he depends on the supplied power, nor to the physician alone, since it proceeds from the man’s own will. Such is every freely chosen act: the doer is not compelled, for he wills it; nor is the matter wholly delegated to him, for its means come from another. This invalidates alike the compulsion (al-jabr) held by the many and the unbridled free will (al-tafwīḍ) held by the few. It is the doctrine of the People of the House: asked whether God had compelled His servants to disobedience, or delegated the matter to them, the Imam al-Ṣādiq answered, “No” to both, and said, “The benevolence of your Lord is between these two”; and again, “There is neither compulsion nor delegation, but a matter between the two.”11
Sixth: that if an inimitable book were a miracle, then Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest would be miracles — which is absurd, so the premise is absurd.
But those two books are not inimitable at all: later scholars have easily surpassed them and added what the ancients never broached. And they lack the marks of a miracle set out earlier — being put forward as a challenge to prove a claim to prophethood, and lying beyond the laws of nature — both of which are absent here.
Seventh: that the Arabs left the Qurʾān uncountered not because it was beyond them but for other reasons — fear of Muslim power at first, and later, under the Umayyads, the Qurʾān’s having grown familiar and beloved.
Yet the challenge was issued at Mecca, before Islam held any power, and still none could meet it. Fear did not keep the People of the Book, living secure and equal among the Muslims — above all under the just rule of ʿAlī — from professing their rejection of Islam; had they been able to match the Qurʾān they would surely have produced it in argument. Fear could at most have prevented an open attempt, not a private one, which they would have preserved against the day the fear passed, as they preserved the myths of their Testaments. And whereas ordinary fine speech palls with repetition — a much-heard ode grows wearisome — the Qurʾān only gains in beauty and power the more it is recited, the very opposite of customary literature, which itself confirms its inimitability. Even were we to grant that familiarity stayed the Muslims’ hand, what stayed the skilled non-Muslim Arabs, who had every motive to succeed?
Eighth: that history tells how Abū Bakr, resolving to collect the Qurʾān, set ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb and Zayd b. Thābit at the door of the mosque to write down only what two witnesses attested — which shows the Qurʾān does not exceed nature, for else it would need no witness but would testify to itself.
The answer: the Qurʾān is a miracle in the eloquence of its whole, not in each isolated word, so that a word might conceivably be slipped or dropped or added by a reciter; the witnesses, if truthful, serve only to guard against such error — and a man’s inability to bring a whole sūra does not deny his power to frame a single verse-like phrase, which the Qurʾān never claimed impossible. Further, the reports of a collection under Abū Bakr on the testimony of two witnesses are of a single chain (āḥād) and prove nothing in such a matter; and they are contradicted by many reports that the Qurʾān was gathered in the Prophet’s own lifetime, when a great number of his Companions had it by heart. Could the Muslims — who recited it day and night, prized its memorizing, and were urged to it by the Prophet — have doubted it enough to require double attestation of its text? (This will be established at length later.)
Ninth: that the Qurʾān’s style, unlike that of the masters of Arabic, mingles subjects — passing from history to promise and threat, to maxims, and on to other things — and that it would be more useful were it ordered by topic.
But the Qurʾān was sent for guidance, not as a manual of history or law that must give each subject its own section. Its manner is the best suited to its end: from a few sūras the reader gathers, in the least time, the knowledge of creation and the return, the lessons of vanished nations, the excellences and branches of learning, and the rules of worship and dealings — all with the order of the discourse preserved and the demands of each occasion met; whereas a book ordered by topic would yield its aims only to one who read it entire, and, if hindered, would profit him by no more than a section or two. Its shifting from theme to theme keeps a perfect cohesion, as if each sentence were a pearl in a matched necklace; and its retelling of a story in varied wording suits the varied occasions — a benefit that gathering the versions in one place would destroy. Only hatred of Islam could make a critic see the Qurʾān’s beauty as ugliness and its virtue as a vice.
The author of a pamphlet, Ḥusn al-Iʿjāz, claimed to counter the Qurʾān by taking some of its sentences and altering their words.12 In doing so he betrayed only the narrowness of his knowledge and his want of skill in eloquence. To “counter” a speech is to produce an independent match rivalling it in aim and art — not to swap a word here for a word there; else any speech at all could be “countered,” and the Prophet’s contemporaries, masters of the tongue, would have found the task easy rather than confessing, as they did, their inability.
For al-Fātiḥa he offered: “Praise be to the Merciful, Lord of existences (akwān), the Judging King; for You alone is worship, and from You alone is help; show us the path of the faith.” Yet “al-Raḥmān (the Merciful)” cannot stand for “Allah,” which is the proper name of the Sacred Being embracing every perfection, of which mercy is but one; “Lord of the existences” misses “Lord of the Worlds, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful,” which affirms the many worlds and God’s unbroken mercy over them; “the Judging King” misses “Master of the Day of Judgement,” with its world to come and God’s sole sovereignty on that Day; “for You alone is worship and help” misses the verse’s instruction that the servant profess God’s oneness and his own need of Him; and “show us the path of the faith” misses “the straight path” — comprehensive, and secure from going astray — and the verse that follows, of those God has favoured against those who earn His wrath or go astray. Small wonder such a one said of the Qurʾān only, “This is nothing but magic of old.” (74:24)
For al-Kawthar — “Indeed We have given you abundance; so pray to your Lord, and sacrifice; indeed it is your enemy who is without posterity” (108:1–3) — he produced: “Indeed We have given you jewels; so pray to your Lord and proclaim; and rely not on the words of a magician” — a line plagiarized from Musaylima the Liar’s parody of the same sūra.13 But a gift of jewels is no ground for prayer, whereas God’s gifts of life, intellect, and faith are; his “the jewels,” with the definite article, is ambiguous; and his clause about “a magician” is idle and irrelevant. The true sūra was revealed of one who taunted the Prophet as “cut off,” without issue — as in “Or do they say, ‘[He is] a poet, for whom we await the calamity of fate’?” (52:30) — and God answered that it is the insulter who is “cut off”: al-Kawthar is abundant good in every respect — prophethood, the guidance of mankind, the pool (al-Ḥawḍ) of the Hereafter, and offspring through his truthful daughter Fāṭima, by whom his name endures as long as the world — while of the insulters no good name remained. Between the lofty meaning and perfect eloquence of this sūra and the borrowed, botched lines of that writer there is no comparison at all. And with this, the discussion of the Qurʾān’s inimitability is complete.
No one versed in the matter doubts that the Qurʾān is the greatest miracle the Prophet of Islam brought — and therefore the greatest miracle wrought by any prophet or messenger. Yet it does not follow that it was his only miracle. Rather, he equalled the other prophets in the working of miracles and surpassed them in this, the Book Sublime; and two things establish that his miracles were not confined to the Qurʾān.
The first is the great body of reports, handed down among Muslims by uninterrupted transmission (tawātur), that the Prophet worked other signs; the books of every school are full of them. These reports are stronger than those the People of the Book preserve of their own prophets in two respects: they stand nearer to the events they record — and the nearer a report to its event, the readier it is to be believed — and they come through a far greater number of transmitters, for the Companions who beheld the Prophet’s miracles were beyond counting, whereas the followers of Jesus in his lifetime could be numbered on the fingers. Hence, if the miracles of Moses and Jesus have any claim to be received by uninterrupted transmission, those of the Prophet of Islam have a stronger claim still.
The second is that the Prophet confirmed the miracles of the prophets before him, declared himself superior to them all, and sealed their line with himself — and a claim to superiority requires that his own signs be more wonderful than theirs, since no reasonable man claims pre-eminence while confessing himself outstripped. It is for this reason that most false prophets denied that miracles occur at all and laboured to explain away the verses that mention them, lest the people demand the like and their own incapacity be laid bare.
Some who mislead the simple have written that the Qurʾān itself denies the Prophet any miracle but the Qurʾān. Chief among the verses they cite is: “Nothing keeps Us from sending signs except that the former peoples denied them. We gave Thamūd the she-camel as an eye-opener, but they wronged her. We do not send the signs except as warning.”1 From this they infer that the Prophet brought no divine sign but the Qurʾān, the sending of other signs being barred because the earlier communities had denied them.
But the signs the verse withholds are only the signs a people demanded of its prophet, not signs as such; the verse says merely that the Prophet did not comply with the unbelievers in the particular signs they called for. Three considerations show this. First, were “the signs” meant in their widest sense, the verse would deny that any confirming sign was ever sent — which would make the sending of a prophet vain, and would burden men with a duty they had no means to discharge; and it cannot mean “all the signs together,” since a single sign suffices to confirm a prophet, and no one demanded them all. What remains is that the barred signs are certain known, demanded ones. Second, if the denial of past peoples were reason to withhold a sign, it would equally have barred the sending of the Qurʾān — yet the Qurʾān was sent, the abiding challenge to every age; so the bar touches only signs of a particular kind. Third, to explain the absence of a thing by an obstacle presumes some cause requiring that thing to be present; here the only cause requiring these signs was the people’s own demand — and a demand pressed after the proof is already complete is mere obstinacy, so that granting it and then meeting fresh denial would call down the ruin that fell on Thamūd. From that ruin the Prophet’s community was reprieved as an honour to him: “But Allah will not punish them while you are in their midst, nor will Allah punish them while they plead for forgiveness.”2 This is why the verse ends by calling such signs a “warning.”
The context confirms it. The verse before speaks of communities marked for destruction — “There is not a town but We will destroy it before the Day of Resurrection, or punish it with a severe punishment”3 — and the verse itself couples the withheld sign with Thamūd, whom a demanded sign destroyed. Throughout the Qurʾān the unbelievers of Mecca are heard demanding that very doom, whether openly — “O Allah, if this be the truth from You, rain down upon us stones from the sky”4 — or in the challenge, “We will not believe until we are given the like of what was given to Allah’s apostles,”5 which the Qurʾān answers by recalling how “those who were before them” were overtaken by ruin “whence they were not aware.”6
The exegetes of both schools read the verse as we have. It is related from the Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir that when some demanded a sign, Gabriel came down and said: God declares that nothing hinders the sending of signs but that the ancients denied them; were a sign sent to Quraysh and they to deny it, they would be destroyed as the others were — and so it has been deferred.7 And it is related from Ibn ʿAbbās that when the people of Mecca asked the Prophet to turn Ṣafā to gold and clear the hills that they might till the land, he was given the choice between granting it — with destruction to follow if they then disbelieved — and granting them a respite; and he said, “Rather, give them time.”8
A second verse they cite: “They say, ‘We will not believe you until you make a spring gush forth for us from the ground, or until you have a garden of date palms and vines … or until you cause the sky to fall in fragments upon us … or until you bring Allah and the angels right in front of us, or until you have a house of gold, or you ascend into the sky … until you bring down for us a book that we may read.’ Say, ‘Immaculate is my Lord! Am I anything but a human apostle?!’”9
From the Prophet’s reply the deniers infer a confession of incapacity. But two things show these to be demanded signs pressed in obstinacy: the unbelievers hung their belief upon these particular wonders — had they sought only proof, any sign would have served — and they capped the list by asking, after an ascent to heaven, for a written scroll to be brought down, as though the ascent itself were no proof; a plainer mark of contumacy could not be.
Moreover, of the six things demanded, three were impossible and three, though possible, bore no relation to prophethood. The three impossible ones: that the sky fall on them in fragments — which is the undoing of the earth and its people, appointed only for the end of time, as in “When the sky is split open”10 and “When the sky is rent apart,”11 a thing the All-Wise will not bring on before its hour;12 that God be brought before their eyes — impossible, for God is not seen by the eye, which would make Him bounded and bodily; and that a letter penned by God’s own hand come down — impossible, for it would ascribe to Him a body and limbs, and had they meant a letter sent by any means, there was no sense in requiring it from heaven, an earthly one serving as well. The three possible but irrelevant ones — a gushing spring, a garden of palms and vines, a house of gold — have no bearing on prophethood, for many possess them who are no prophets, indeed no believers. Nor does it help to say these would be signs if wrought by extraordinary means; for the unbelievers wanted them by ordinary means, thinking a messenger could not be poor — “Why was not this Qurʾān sent down to some great man from the two cities?”13 — and they stipulated that the garden and the house be the Prophet’s own, which a true miracle would not require, a single grape or a little gold sufficing. And when the Prophet said, “Immaculate is my Lord!”, he confessed no incapacity; he declared that God is above all incapacity and able to do whatever is possible, above being seen or brought forth or commanded at a creature’s whim, and that he himself was but a man under God’s command.
Other verses they press are of the same cast: “Why has not some sign been sent down to him from his Lord?” — met with, “The knowledge of the Unseen belongs only to Allah; so wait”14; and “You are only a warner, and there is a guide for every people”15; and “Allah is indeed able to send down a sign, but most of them do not know.”16 Here too the unbelievers asked not for a sign that would prove his truth but for signs of their own choosing — witness their demanding an angel be sent with him, or a treasure, or a garden.17 Had they wished any proof, he would have pointed them to the Qurʾān, by which he challenged them again and again. Two things stand plain from all these verses: that the Prophet’s abiding challenge to mankind was made with the Qurʾān and no other sign, for an everlasting prophethood requires an everlasting miracle, which none of his passing signs could be; and that the working of a sign was never the Prophet’s to choose, but lay in God’s leave — “an apostle may not bring a sign except by Allah’s leave; there is a written ordinance for every term.”18
Beyond this, the Qurʾān contains verses that affirm miracles did issue from the Prophet — above all: “The Hour has drawn near and the moon is split; and if they see a sign, they turn away, and say, ‘An incessant magic!’”19 That the sign here is a wrought miracle and not a recited verse appears from three things: the verse speaks of seeing it, where a verse of the Book would be heard; it joins the seeing to the splitting of the moon; and it says the sign “comes” to them, not that it “descends.” Their very words, “an incessant magic,” bear witness to signs worked again and again. The sum of the matter is this: no verse of the Qurʾān denies that other miracles occurred, and several affirm them; the working of a sign was God’s to grant, not the Prophet’s to choose; when prophethood is claimed, only the sign that proves it is owed, and any beyond that God need not grant nor the Prophet supply on demand; a sign entailing a community’s ruin is forbidden to that community; and the Prophet’s one lasting miracle, his challenge to every age until the Resurrection, is the Book of God — his other miracles, however many, being not lasting, and in this like the miracles of the prophets before him.
The Qurʾān declares in several places that Moses and Jesus foretold the coming of Muḥammad, and that this good tiding stood written in the Torah and the Gospel. Of the first: those who follow “the untaught prophet, whose mention they find written with them in the Torah and the Evangel, who bids them to do what is right and forbids them from what is wrong.”20 And of the second, the word of Jesus: “O Children of Israel! Indeed I am the apostle of Allah to you … and to give the good news of an apostle who will come after me, whose name is Aḥmad.”21
Now many Jews and Christians believed in the Prophet, both in his lifetime and after it — and this is itself the decisive proof that the annunciation still stood in the two scriptures when he was sent. Had it not, they would have held in their own books a ready weapon to refute his claim and would have flung it in his face; that so many instead embraced Islam shows the tiding was yet preserved. For such as these, faith in Moses and Jesus itself entailed faith in Muḥammad, and no further sign was needed to establish his truth; while for the communities that did not believe in Moses and Jesus, the abiding proof remained the Noble Qurʾān — with which stand, besides, his many other miracles, borne to us by uninterrupted transmission, and worthier of belief than the miracles of any prophet before him.
Opinions differ concerning the seven famous readings most current among the people. A number of Sunnī scholars have held that all of them were handed down from the Prophet by mass transmission (tawātur), and this is sometimes reckoned the commonest view among them; on the authority of al-Subkī it is even said that the readings transmitted by mass transmission are ten.1 Some went so far as to charge with unbelief whoever holds that the seven readings need not be mass-transmitted — a extreme opinion ascribed to the muftī of Andalusia, Abū Saʿīd Faraj b. Lubb.2 Among the Shīʿa it is well known that these readings were not mass-transmitted; rather, some rest upon the reader’s own reasoning (ijtihād) and others upon a single report (khabar al-wāḥid). This view is shared by a body of Sunnī scholars and is likely the prevailing one among them; and it is the correct view. To establish it, two points must be set down.
First: Muslims of every school agree that the fixity of the Qurʾān rests on mass transmission alone. Being the foundation of the faith and the standing miracle of the Prophet’s mission, the Qurʾān has every motive to be transmitted by an unbroken multitude — and whatever has such motives to be so transmitted must in fact be so; hence whatever reaches us by a single report is certainly no part of the Qurʾān. (Al-Suyūṭī reports that al-Qāḍī Abū Bakr, in al-Intiṣār, allowed that small portions transmitted singly might lawfully be counted Qurʾān, though not with certainty; but the people of the truth rejected this.3) The point is plain by analogy: were one or two persons to report that a great king had entered a city — an event impossible to hide — and none else confirmed it, we should know the report false; so too a portion of the Qurʾān borne by a lone report is thereby shown to be no divine speech. The upshot is that there is no bond between the mass transmission of the Qurʾān and the mass transmission of the readings: the proof that the Qurʾān is mass-transmitted does not establish that its readings are, nor does the failure of the readings to be mass-transmitted touch the Qurʾān itself.
Second: the surest way to show that the readings were not mass-transmitted is to examine the lives of the readers — seven in number — and of those who transmitted from them. To the seven we add three, making ten; and we set out their circumstances one by one.
The transmission of each reader passed chiefly through two named transmitters (rāwiyān), themselves learning it, more often than not, through intermediaries rather than from the reader directly — the first sign that these chains are single, not mass, transmission. And a great many of the readers and their transmitters, for all their standing in recitation, were faulted by the critics of ḥadīth — further proof that their readings rest on individual judgement and report.
Abū ʿImrān al-Yaḥṣubī, chief reciter of the mosque of Damascus under al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik and later its chief judge; the Syrians took him as their authority in reading. He studied with al-Mughīra b. Abī Shihāb, though some reports have him confessing that he did not know from whom he took the recitation.4 Born 8 A.H., died 118. His two transmitters were Hishām b. ʿAmmār and Ibn Dhakwān, both by way of Ayyūb b. Tamīm. Of Hishām it was said that he was truthful, yet Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal thought him confused and would have the prayer repeated behind him, and it was reported that he carried four hundred traditions on baseless chains and would not relate a ḥadīth without payment; of Ibn Dhakwān’s own transmitters, none is known.
ʿAbd Allāh b. Kathīr, of Persian stock, reciter of Mecca; he presented his reading to ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Sāʾib and to Mujāhid b. Ghabr. Born at Mecca 45 A.H., died 120. Some, as Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Hamadhānī, faulted him — “he is not known among us” — though Ibn Saʿd and others held him reliable. His transmitters were al-Bazzī and Qunbul, by intermediaries. Al-Bazzī, of Hamadhān, a precise teacher of the reading, was nonetheless declared weak in ḥadīth (“his transmission is rejected,” said Abū Ḥātim); Qunbul led the reciters of the Ḥijāz and served as chief of police at Mecca, but in old age his mind failed and he ceased teaching seven years before his death.
Ibn Abī al-Najūd, Abū Bakr al-Asadī; he took the reading from Zirr b. Ḥubaysh, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī, and Abū ʿAmr al-Shaybānī, tracing one line through al-Sulamī to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and another through Zirr to Ibn Masʿūd.5 A leading reciter, reckoned reliable, though the critics noted that his ḥadīth was mixed and his memory failed at the last. Died 127 or 128 A.H. His transmitters were Ḥafṣ and Abū Bakr Shuʿba. Ḥafṣ b. Sulaymān, reared by ʿĀṣim, was consistent and accurate in the reading — he said he departed from ʿĀṣim’s reading in but a single word, in Sūrat al-Rūm (30:54), reading ḍuʿf where ʿĀṣim read ḍaʿf — yet in ḥadīth he was roundly rejected, some going so far as to brand him a fabricator. Abū Bakr Shuʿba b. ʿAyyāsh, who presented his reading to ʿĀṣim thrice and claimed to have completed the Qurʾān eighteen thousand times, was a great authority, but his ḥadīth too was called confused and error-ridden.
Zabbān b. al-ʿAlāʾ al-Māzinī, said to be from Fārs; no one among the seven had more teachers, for he studied at Mecca, Medina, Kūfa, and Baṣra. His reading came to prevail in Syria, displacing Ibn ʿĀmir’s. Born 68 A.H., died 154. He was held trustworthy, save that he did not commit the traditions to memory. His reading passed through Yaḥyā b. al-Mubārak al-Yazīdī — grammarian and reciter, reckoned the most exact of Abū ʿAmr’s circle — and thence to two transmitters, al-Dūrī and al-Sūsī. Al-Dūrī (Ḥafṣ b. ʿUmar al-Baghdādī), the first to compile the variant readings, was called reliable by some and weak by al-Dāraquṭnī; al-Sūsī (Ṣāliḥ b. Ziyād) was reckoned honest and reliable, though Muslim b. Qāsim thought him weak and undocumented.
Ḥamza b. Ḥabīb al-Tamīmī, Abū ʿImāra al-Zayyāt; he presented his reading to Sulaymān al-Aʿmash and Ḥumrān b. Aʿyan, and it is related that he took it from Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq (peace be upon him). After ʿĀṣim and al-Aʿmash the leadership in reading passed to him; Abū Ḥanīfa and Sufyān al-Thawrī owned his mastery of the Qurʾān. Born 80 A.H., died 156. Yet his reading was sharply criticized: Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal disliked praying behind those who followed it, one authority wished it flogged out of Kūfa, and Abū Bakr b. ʿAyyāsh called it “a sinful innovation.”6 His transmitters were Khalaf b. Hishām and Khallād b. Khālid, both through Sulaym; Khalaf differed from Ḥamza in some 120 letters.
Nāfiʿ b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abī Nuʿaym, of Isfahani origin, a leading reciter of Medina who took the reading from a group of the Successors there. Mālik b. Anas held the reading of the people of Medina to accord with the Prophet’s way, meaning Nāfiʿ’s, and Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal preferred it above all. Died 169 A.H. His ḥadīth, however, some judged objectionable. His two transmitters were Qālūn and Warsh. Qālūn — ʿĪsā b. Mīnā, reared by Nāfiʿ, who nicknamed him “Qālūn” (Greek for “good”) — was reliable in reading but slight in ḥadīth, and, being deaf, would catch his students’ errors by reading their lips. Warsh — ʿUthmān b. Saʿīd — succeeded to the leadership of the reciters of Egypt and chose a reading at points at variance with Nāfiʿ’s.
ʿAlī b. Ḥamza al-Asadī, of Persian descent, to whom the leadership of the reciters of Kūfa passed after Ḥamza; he presented his reading to Ḥamza four times and relied upon him, and also studied with Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (peace be upon him) and others, and tutored Hārūn al-Rashīd and al-Amīn. Died 189 A.H. He was an exact reciter and master of the Arabic tongue, though the biographers relate against him grave moral censure.7 His two transmitters were al-Layth b. Khālid and Ḥafṣ b. ʿUmar al-Dūrī (whose notice was given under Abū ʿAmr).
These are the seven whose lives, and their transmitters’, we have set out; al-Qāsim b. Fīrruh worked their names and their transmitters’ into his famous ode, the Shāṭibiyya. There remain the three who complete the ten: Khalaf, Yaʿqūb, and Yazīd b. al-Qaʿqāʿ.
His notice was given under Ḥamza, whose reading he transmitted through Sulaym; he was trustworthy, ascetic, and learned, having memorized the Qurʾān at ten. His own reading was transmitted by Isḥāq (Ibn Ibrāhīm, of Marw, settled at Baghdad, his copyist, reckoned reliable; died 286 A.H.) and Idrīs (Ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Ḥaddād al-Baghdādī, an exact and reliable recorder; died 292).
Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥaḍramī of Baṣra, one of the ten; his line ran through Salām and Shihāb back through Maslama and Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalī to the Imam ʿAlī (peace be upon him). Died Dhū al-Ḥijja 205 A.H., aged eighty-eight. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal and Abū Ḥātim held him honest, though Ibn Saʿd did not reckon him decisively trustworthy. His transmitters were Ruways (Muḥammad b. al-Mutawakkil al-Baṣrī; died 238 A.H.) and Rawḥ (Ibn ʿAbd al-Muʾmin al-Hudhalī, grammarian of Baṣra; died 234 or 235).
Abū Jaʿfar al-Makhzūmī al-Madanī, a Successor and leading reciter of Medina — for which he was styled “al-Qāriʾ” — who presented his reading to ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAyyāsh, Ibn ʿAbbās, and Abū Hurayra; reliable, but of few traditions. Died at Medina 130 A.H. His transmitters were ʿĪsā b. Wardān al-Madanī (a leading reciter, later a link in Nāfiʿ’s chain; died c. 160 A.H.) and Ibn Ghammāz (Sulaymān b. Muslim al-Zuhrī of Medina, who likewise presented his reading to Yazīd and Shayba and then to Nāfiʿ; died after 170).
These are the transmitters of the ten readers known to the biographers; readings carried by other chains are not soundly recorded, and where the biographers name further transmitters they are in disagreement, so we have passed them by.
At the opening of the foregoing chapter it was shown that those who have looked closely into the matter deny that the readings were handed down by mass transmission (tawātur), whereas the Muslims are agreed upon the mass transmission of the Qurʾān itself. Here the grounds for the view we hold — that the readings were not transmitted by an unbroken multitude in every generation of their chains — are set out.
First: a careful look at the transmitters shows for certain that the readings reached us by single reports (āḥād), whose transmitters fall far short of the number needed for mass transmission, as the biographies made plain; and some of those transmitters were never even acknowledged reliable. Second: the manner in which the readers received their readings likewise shows them to have come by single report. Third: the chains stop at the readers themselves, not at the Prophet — each was plainly transmitting his own reading — so continuity to the source is broken even where no generation is suspected of collusion. Fourth: that each reader, and his followers, argued to prove his own reading sound and rejected the readings of others is decisive proof that the readings rested on the reader’s judgement; had they come unbroken from the Prophet, no such arguing would have been needed. Fifth: that eminent scholars rejected a number of readings is itself proof of the break in transmission — for otherwise the rejection would be impermissible. Ibn Gharīr al-Ṭabarī rejects the reading of Ibn ʿĀmir and contests several others of the seven; others faulted Ḥamza, Abū ʿAmr, and Ibn Kathīr.1 Al-Zarkashī, holding that the readings are not open to choice, faulted Ḥamza for reading wa-l-arḥāmi (4:1) in the genitive, and reports that Abū Zayd, al-Aṣmaʿī, and Yaʿqūb al-Ḥaḍramī faulted his musrikhiyyī (14:22), and that Abū ʿAmr was censured for assimilating the r into the l in yaghfir lakum — of which al-Zajjāj said, “an atrocious error.”2
To set the matter beyond doubt, it is worth citing what the authorities in this field have said in denial of the readings’ mass transmission. Ibn al-Jazarī lays down that any reading that accords with the Arabic tongue in one of its accepted degrees, agrees with one of the ʿUthmānic codices — even by supposition — and rests on a sound chain, is a sound reading that may not be rejected, whether it come from one of the seven readers, or the ten, or another; and any reading failing one of these three tests is weak or aberrant, whoever its reader.3 He reports that this was the view of Abū ʿAmr al-Dānī, of Makkī b. Abī Ṭālib, and of al-Mahdawī, and that Abū Shāma held it to be the view of all the early scholars, none known to dissent. Abū Shāma warns in al-Murshid al-Wajīz that one must not be deceived by every reading ascribed to a leading reader into holding it revelation, unless it meet those tests: the worth of a reading turns on the tests, not on the name attached to it.4
Ibn al-Jazarī adds that a contemporary had demanded unbroken transmission from the Prophet, unsatisfied with a merely sound chain, arguing that the Qurʾān is fixed only by mass transmission — but this, Ibn al-Jazarī answers, is plainly weak, for were mass transmission required, the two other tests would be needless, and most of the readings preserved from the seven and others would fall; he confesses he had once inclined to it, then saw its weakness.5 Abū Shāma, again, in Kitāb al-Basmala: “We are not of those who insist upon mass transmission for the disputed words; rather the readings rest upon both unbroken and single transmission.”6 Others note that no master of legal theory ever declared the readings mass-transmitted; that where some claim mass transmission from the seven, it is doubtful whether it reaches the Prophet, the chains in the books of readings being single ones reporting one from another; and that “the people who best know a craft are those who practise it.”7 Al-Suyūṭī pronounces Ibn al-Jazarī the best authority on the question; Makkī observes that some defer to what ʿĀṣim and Nāfiʿ agreed upon, their readings having the soundest chains and the most eloquent Arabic; and al-ʿIryān grants outright that “none of the readings is free of incongruity — even the seven famous ones have much of it.”8
After the witness of all these scholars, what worth is left in the claim of mass transmission for the readings? And can it be established by mere deference (taqlīd) to an authority who has himself only conceded another’s claim without proof? Most astonishing of all is the ruling of the muftī of Andalusia, Abū Saʿīd Faraj b. Lubb, that whoever denies their mass transmission is an unbeliever — a charge that is, in truth, but insolence against God, a transgression of His bounds, and a sowing of division among the people of His religion.
Those who uphold the readings’ mass transmission rest on four grounds. First, a claimed consensus of scholars — but a view held by one school and rejected by others is no consensus, and the falseness of the claim has already appeared. Second, that the Companions’ and Followers’ care for the Qurʾān must have carried its reading by mass transmission too. This, however, establishes the mass transmission of the Qurʾān, not of the manner of its reading, since some readings rest on a reader’s judgement or on hearing from a single source; else all readings, not merely the seven or ten, would be mass-transmitted — and the confinement to seven, as will be shown, arose only in the third century and had no earlier existence. Third, that if the seven readings are not mass-transmitted, neither is the Qurʾān — since the Qurʾān reached us through the memorizers and the famous readers alike. The answer: difference over the shape of a word does not undo agreement upon its substance — as differences among the transmitters of al-Mutanabbī’s verse, or in the particulars of the Prophet’s highra, leave the poem and the highra themselves mass-transmitted; the Qurʾān was borne by the whole community, in memory and in writing, and would stand mass-transmitted had the seven or ten readers never existed, for its greatness is too exalted to hang upon that handful. Fourth, Ibn al-Ḥājib’s argument that, were the readings not mass-transmitted, to prefer malik over mālik (1:4) would be mere arbitrariness. The answer: this would equally require holding all readings mass-transmitted, and confining that to the seven would itself be the arbitrariness — for some non-seven readers were reckoned above the seven; where two forms differ, one is certainly the Qurʾān though we know not which, and this touches the wording, not the mass-transmitted substance. Al-Zurqānī himself conceded that the Qurʾān’s mass transmission does not entail the readings’.9
It is imagined that the seven ḥarfs in which the Qurʾān was sent down are the seven readings, and thence that the seven readings are Qurʾān. The inference is false, and has occurred to none of the investigating scholars. (The traditions of the “seven ḥarfs” are here granted without dispute; their authenticity is examined later.10) The seven readings held no special rank until Ibn Mujāhid, about the year 300, gathered them at Baghdad — choosing Nāfiʿ, Ibn Kathīr, Abū ʿAmr, Ibn ʿĀmir, ʿĀṣim, Ḥamza, and al-Kisāʾī; and scholars have faulted him for fixing the number at seven, since it misled the unlearned into supposing these the seven ḥarfs of the tradition — had he but made them fewer or more, al-Mahdawī says, the confusion would have been spared.11 Makkī notes that more than seventy readers stood above those seven, and that al-Kisāʾī was added only lately, under al-Maʾmūn, in place of Yaʿqūb al-Ḥaḍramī. Al-Qurṭubī reports from al-Dāwūdī, Ibn Abī Sufra, and others that these seven readings are not the seven ḥarfs at all, but all go back to the single ḥarf upon which ʿUthmān united the codices. Ibn al-Jazarī sets out the history — the famous readings today are but a drop beside those current in the early period; the first to gather readings in a book was Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Sallām (with some twenty-five readers besides the seven), then Ibn Ghubayr, then al-Qāḍī Ismāʿīl al-Mālikī (twenty readers), then al-Ṭabarī in his al-Jāmiʿ (more than twenty), then al-Dājūnī, and only then Ibn Mujāhid, the first to confine them to seven.12 Abū Shāma likewise: to suppose the present seven the ones meant by the tradition contradicts the consensus of the learned and is the fancy of the ignorant. It is thus beyond doubt that the readings are not mass-transmitted, neither from the Prophet nor even from the readers — and even were they granted mass-transmitted from the readers, they could not be so from the Prophet, resting as they do on single report or on the readers’ own choice.
Some hold the readings authoritative — usable in deriving a ruling of the Law: thus the Kūfans, save Ḥafṣ, read 2:222 as yaṭṭahharna (“until they cleanse themselves,” with doubled ṭ), and drew from it a rule for the menstruant.13 The truth is that the readings are not authoritative and may not ground a legal decision. For each reader is liable to error, and neither reason nor revealed text warrants following one reader in particular; reason bids, and the Law forbids, the following of anything short of certain knowledge. Were it urged that the readings, though not mass-transmitted, still come on the Prophet’s authority as single reports and so carry the weight of a sound khabar al-wāḥid, the answer is threefold: it is not established that they were transmitted at all rather than reached by the readers’ judgement — the more so as the differences arose from the absence of diacritical points and vowel-marks in the codices sent to the provinces, so that each region recited as it had heard from its Companions (so Ibn Abī Hāshim, and al-Zurqānī on why the early scholars first shunned, then were forced to adopt, the pointing);14 not all the transmitters are of established reliability; and even granting sound oral transmission from reliable men, we still know that some of these readings cannot have come from the Prophet, so that they contradict and cancel one another, and none may be preferred without a preponderant ground — whereupon one must fall back upon the governing principle rather than legislate from any reading.
Most scholars, Sunnī and Shīʿī, hold it permissible to recite the Qurʾān in the ritual prayer according to any of the seven readings — some say the ten, some any reading meeting the three tests. Strictly, the first principle would forbid reciting in prayer any reading not proven to come from the Prophet or the infallible Imams, since what the prayer requires is the recitation of the Qurʾān, and one may not make do with what is not certainly of it — so that one would have to combine both forms, mālik and malik, in the Fātiḥa, and choose for the following sūra one free of variants or combine its variants likewise. But the sound instructions of the infallible Imams — that their followers recite “as the people recite,” and “as you were taught” — show that a single reading suffices; the various readings were current in the Imams’ day, and no prohibition of any of them has reached us, whereas their approval has.15 There is therefore no ground to limit the permission to seven or ten. Only two kinds are excluded: the aberrant — such as malaka yawma al-dīn (“He owned the Day of Judgement,” with the past-tense verb, 1:4) — and the invented — such as innamā yakhshā Allāhu min ʿibādihi al-ʿulamāʾa (35:28), reported by al-Khuzāʿī from Abū Ḥanīfa, which inverts subject and object.16 The upshot: one may recite in the daily prayer any reading well established in the age of the People of the House (peace be upon them).
It is related in the traditions of the Sunnīs that the Qurʾān was sent down in seven ḥarfs. It is fitting to lay these out first and then to examine them. The most important of them, all through Sunnī channels — chiefly in al-Ṭabarī’s Tafsīr, and in the Ṣaḥīḥs of al-Bukhārī and Muslim, and in al-Qurṭubī — run to a single pattern.1 Gabriel, they say, recited the Qurʾān to the Prophet in one ḥarf; the Prophet, seeking ease for his community, asked that it be increased, and the number was raised — in some reports gradually, in others at a bound — until it reached seven, “in whichever of which they read, they read aright.” To this is joined a recurring proviso: that the licence held “so long as no verse of punishment was ended with mercy, nor a verse of mercy with punishment” — as one might say halumma for taʿāla, both meaning “Come.” Some report Ubayy b. Kaʿb’s dismay at hearing two men recite differently, and how the Prophet struck his breast and drove the doubt from him; others, the quarrel of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb with Hishām b. Ḥakīm over a reading of Sūrat al-Furqān, each confirmed by the Prophet with the words, “Thus it was sent down; this Qurʾān was sent down in seven ḥarfs”; and one, the dispute of Ibn Masʿūd’s circle over the number of a sūra’s verses, which the Prophet met, through ʿAlī, with the bare command, “Recite as you were taught.”
These reports, however, run counter to what is soundly transmitted from the Imams of the People of the House. The Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir said, in the sound report of Zurāra: “The Qurʾān is one, sent down by the One; the differences come from the transmitters.”2 And when al-Fuḍayl b. Yasār told the Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq that people were saying the Qurʾān had been sent down in seven ḥarfs, he answered: “They lie — the enemies of God. It was sent down in one ḥarf, from the One.”3 Since, after the Prophet, the references in religion are the Book of God and the purified Family of the Prophet, a report that contradicts what is soundly established from them has no standing; so there is no need even to sift the chains of the seven-ḥarf traditions — quite apart from their own disagreement and incoherence, and the mismatch, in some, between question and answer.
They do not agree among themselves. Some make the increase to seven gradual, one ḥarf at a time; others make it leap to seven at the third asking, or command three at the third and seven only at the fourth. In some the increase comes all at once on Michael’s prompting; in others Gabriel departs and returns at each step. In some Ubayy meets one reciter, in others two. And the answer ascribed to ʿAlī — “Recite as you were taught” — has no bearing on the dispute it was meant to settle, which was over the number of verses in a sūra, not over a manner of reading. Beyond all this, the traditions nowhere fix any intelligible sense for the phrase “seven ḥarfs” at all.
Ten interpretations have been offered for the “seven ḥarfs”; each fails.
1. Synonymous words (the “approximation”). That the seven ḥarfs are near-synonyms freely interchanged — ʿajjil, asriʿ, isʿa (“hasten”) — current until ʿUthmān reduced them to one and burned the rest; held by al-Ṭabarī, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, and, al-Qurṭubī says, the majority.4 But this fits only the few places where seven synonyms can be found; it would license the swapping of God’s words for others, undoing the Qurʾān as a standing miracle — against His word, “I may not alter it of my own accord; I follow only what is revealed to me,”5 and “Indeed We have sent down the Reminder, and indeed We will preserve it”;6 and the very dispute that forced ʿUthmān to bind the people to one reading shows the differences to have been a bane, not the mercy the traditions claim.
2. The seven [heavenly] gates. That the ḥarfs are the seven gates from which the Qurʾān came down — prohibition and command, the lawful and unlawful, the clear and the ambiguous, and parables (from a report of Ibn Masʿūd). But by the report’s own wording the gates are not the same as the ḥarfs; another report from Ibn Masʿūd names five; “prohibition” and “unlawful” are one thing, so the count fails of seven; and much of the Qurʾān — the origin and the return, the tales of nations, its proofs and sciences — falls outside these heads.
3. Another such list of seven. Command, prohibition, persuasion, threat, disputation, stories of past communities, and parables (from Abū Qallāba). It falls to the same answer as the second.
4. The eloquent dialects. That the ḥarfs are the tongues of Quraysh, Hudhayl, Hawāzin, al-Yaman, Kināna, Tamīm, and Thaqīf, interwoven in the Qurʾān (ascribed to al-Bayhaqī, al-Fayrūzābādī, and others). But it contradicts ʿUmar, who held the Qurʾān sent down in the tongue of Quraysh and barred Ibn Masʿūd’s ʿattā ḥīn for ḥattā ḥīn; and the quarrel of ʿUmar with Hishām, both of Quraysh, cannot then be over dialect; and the dialects in the Qurʾān are told at some fifty, not seven.
5. The dialects of Muḍar. That they are seven Muḍarī tongues — Quraysh, Asad, Kināna, Hudhayl, Tamīm, Ḍabba, Qays. It falls to all that was said against the fourth.
6. The categories of reading-difference. That the seven are seven kinds of variation (in vocalization; in inflection; in the letters that change the sense; in wording with one sense; in wording and sense together; in word order; in addition and omission). But this classification is arbitrary — whether a change touches sense or form is no ground for a separate count, and script belongs to the writing, not the recited Qurʾān, which is speech; adding the vast agreed-upon body to the categories of difference would yield eight, not seven; and the traditions’ “one ḥarf first” cannot be one of these.
7. Reading-variation in another sense. Al-Zurqānī, from Abū al-Faḍl al-Rāzī, lists seven heads of difference (in nouns; in verb-forms; in inflection; in omission and addition; in word order; in phonetic change; in accent).7 But, as in the sixth, several of these collapse together; truly counted, the heads of difference are but six.
8. “Seven” as mere plurality. That “seven” means only “a good number,” as “seventy” and “seven hundred” do (ascribed to al-Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ). This runs against the plain, sometimes explicit, sense of the traditions, and in any case fixes no meaning for ḥarf, so it is no interpretation at all.
9. The seven readings. That the ḥarfs are the seven readings — whose baselessness was shown in the foregoing chapter. Were “seven readings” meant absolutely, the number of readings is more than seven, for some words are read many ways: wa-ʿabd al-ṭāghūt (5:60) in twenty-two, and uffin (17:23) in above thirty.
10. The accents of a single word. Al-Rāfiʿī holds the ḥarfs to be the varying pronunciations a word takes among the Arabs, the Qurʾān sent in all to ease its reciting.8 This, though the least weak, is still incomplete: it contradicts ʿUmar and ʿUthmān on the tongue of Quraysh, and the ʿUmar–Hishām dispute; it goes against the traditions’ explicit statement that the difference lay in the very words; and it would license reciting the Qurʾān in any dialect, against the settled practice of all Muslims.
In sum, the sending down of the Qurʾān “in seven ḥarfs” admits of no sound explanation; the traditions that assert it must therefore be set aside — the more so as the sound reports of the Imams al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq have shown them false, and have established that the Qurʾān was sent down as one, from the One, the differences arising only with its transmitters.
The word taḥrīf is used in several senses; some kinds of alteration certainly befell the Qurʾān, by the agreement of the Muslims, others certainly did not, and one is disputed. First, the shifting of a word from its sense to another — as in “[some of the Jews] pervert words from their meanings”1 — that is, false interpretation; this has undoubtedly occurred, at the hands of every sect that reads its own opinion into the verses. Second, difference in the vowels or letters of a word while the sense is kept: this occurred, for the readings — as was shown — reached us by single report, so that the revealed text answers to only one of them. Third, the omission or addition of a word or two while the revealed Qurʾān stands preserved: this occurred in the earliest days, ended by ʿUthmān, who burned the variant codices (the differences among them collected by Ibn Abī Dāwūd al-Sijistānī in his Kitāb al-Maṣāḥif) — the alteration being in those discontinued codices, not in the text that has passed hand to hand from the Prophet. Fourth, the addition or omission of a whole verse or sūra that the Prophet recited: this too occurred, as in the dispute over whether the basmala is a verse of each sūra (which the Shīʿa affirm, save in Sūra Nine). Fifth, addition — that something in our text was never revealed: this the whole community denies, by necessity. Sixth, omission — that part of the revealed Qurʾān is lost to the people: this alone is the disputed sense, and the subject of this chapter.
The accepted view is that no such omission befell the Qurʾān, and that what is in our hands is the whole of what was revealed. This is proclaimed by a host of the leading authorities — Ibn Bābawayh (al-Ṣadūq), who counts it among the Twelver creed; al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī at the opening of al-Tibyān, citing his teacher al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā with the fullest proofs; al-Ṭabarsī in the preface of Majmaʿ al-Bayān; Kāshif al-Ghiṭāʾ, who reports a consensus; al-Shahshahānī; al-Fayḍ al-Kāshānī; al-Balāghī; and, by ascription, al-Mufīd, al-Bahāʾī, and al-Qāḍī Nūr Allāh al-Shushtarī.2 Against them stand only a faction of Shīʿī traditionists and a body of Sunnīs — the “Ḥashwiyya,” as al-Ṭabarsī names them, and the theologians al-Rāfiʿī scorns for supposing passages lost in the collecting.3 The common, indeed near-unanimous, position of the Shīʿī scholars and researchers is that the Qurʾān suffered no omission. And here is the pivot of the whole question: the doctrine, widespread among the Sunnīs, that the recitation of certain verses was abrogated is, in truth, nothing other than a belief that the Qurʾān was altered.
Most Sunnī scholars hold that the recitation of some of the Qurʾān was abrogated, resting on traditions that the words were Qurʾān in the Prophet’s day. To hold these authentic is to hold that the Qurʾān was altered. Among them: ʿUmar’s declaration from the pulpit that “the verse of stoning” was revealed and recited (Zayd not writing it, since ʿUmar was alone in it);4 a report from al-Ṭabarānī that “the Qurʾān is 1,027,000 words” — three times what we possess; ʿĀʾisha’s word that Sūrat al-Aḥzāb was recited at two hundred verses before ʿUthmān’s codex; Ubayy b. Kaʿb’s that it rivalled al-Baqara in length; the “two valleys” verse and the “sons of Adam” sūra that Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī and the reciters of Baṣra recalled; the report that many verses perished with the reciters slain at al-Yamāma; the “ten, then five, ascertained sucklings”; and the two little sūras al-Khalʿ and al-Ḥafd found in the codices of Ibn ʿAbbās and Ubayy.5 Now the abrogation of a recitation is either the Prophet’s act or that of those who led the community after him. It cannot be laid to the Prophet: that needs proof, and it clashes with the very reports that put the loss after his death; and the scholars agree the Book may not be abrogated by a single report — al-Shāfiʿī and most of his school, and the Ẓāhirīs, denying that the Book can be abrogated even by a mass-transmitted sunna. There remains, then, that the deletion was the work of those who came after — which is precisely the belief in taḥrīf. So the doctrine of altered Qurʾān may fairly be called the view of the majority of Sunnī scholars, however much al-Ālūsī protests that none of them held it, and turns the charge back upon al-Ṭabarsī.6
The truth is that the disputed alteration never touched the Qurʾān, and the Book itself bears witness. The first proof is His word: “Indeed We have sent down the Reminder, and indeed We will preserve it.”7 The upholders of alteration read it away in three ways, all false. That “the Reminder” (al-dhikr) means the Prophet — but the verb “sent down” (anzala) shows it means the Qurʾān, and the preceding verse, “O you to whom the Reminder has been sent down, you are indeed crazy,”8 fixes the sense. That the “preservation” is only from being reviled or refuted — but the Qurʾān has been reviled past counting, and its being unshakable in meaning needs no external guard and is not what a promise of preservation after revelation intends. That the verse preserves the Qurʾān “in general,” it sufficing that it survive with the Hidden Imam — the weakest of all, for the Book was to be kept safe among the people for whom it came down, not sealed away like the Preserved Tablet; one does not “send a gift” and then “keep it safe in one’s own house.” There remains the objection that the verse, being itself Qurʾān, might have been altered too, so that arguing from it is circular. This binds only those who cut off the People of the House; for those who hold the People of the House God’s abiding proof, twinned with the Book, the People of the House’s reliance on this very Qurʾān and their bidding their followers to it establishes its authority and refutes the claim of loss. The second proof is His word: “Indeed, it is an august Book; falsehood cannot approach it, at present or in future, a revelation sent down from One all-wise, all-laudable.”9 Alteration is among the plainest forms of falsehood, and the Book is called “august” — proof against change and loss — so falsehood, and with it alteration, is barred from it for all time. (The Sunna’s witness follows.)
The third proof is the mass-transmitted tradition of the “two weighty things” (al-thaqalayn) — the Book and the People of the House (ʿitra) — which the Prophet left among his community, declaring that the two shall not part until they meet him at the Pool, and commanding adherence to both.1 Two things follow against the belief in omission. First, that belief would end the duty of clinging to the revealed Book — for it would be lost — whereas the tradition makes that duty stand until the Resurrection; so the Book must always be present among the people, not sealed away with the Hidden Imam as a gift is “kept safe in one’s own house.” The objection that only the verses of ordinance need be adhered to fails, for the whole Qurʾān was revealed for guidance, and it is precisely the verses touching authority (wilāya) that the alteration-party claims were dropped — which, if they are Qurʾān, must the more be adhered to. Second, the belief would strip the Qurʾān of its evidential force: for if words may have been dropped, a missing context might reverse any apparent sense — as a man ordered by letter to buy “a house” could not act on it once he saw part of the letter destroyed. Yet the Imams bade their followers reason from the Qurʾān’s apparent sense, which shows that the Book stands as an intact, independent proof, not one whose authority the Imams first conferred.
The fourth proof: the Imams of the People of the House ordered the reciting of a complete sūra after al-Fātiḥa in the first two cycles of the obligatory prayer.2 Were the text in doubt, one holding to alteration could recite no sūra he feared was altered — a definite duty requiring a definite discharge — yet there are sūras, such as al-Tawḥīd, in which no alteration is even alleged, and the Imams enjoined and commended reciting them. Since this ordinance is firmly established, free of any taint of dissimulation (taqiyya), and cannot be a post-Prophetic abrogation (which did not occur after him), it must go back to the Prophet himself — which is only to say that the sūras of the Qurʾān stand unaltered.
The fifth proof answers the claim that the alteration was made under the first two caliphs, or ʿUthmān, or later. Under Abū Bakr and ʿUmar there are but three possibilities, all void: that the whole text had not reached them — impossible, given the Prophet’s and the Companions’ devotion to memorizing and writing it, and the thaqalayn tradition’s witness that a whole “Book,” not scattered fragments, was left behind; that they cut verses not bearing on their rule — pointless, and so not done; or that they cut verses that did — refuted by the fact that ʿAlī, Fāṭima, and their supporters, who contested the caliphate by every text they could muster (Ghadīr and the rest, as al-Ṭabarsī records in al-Iḥtijāj), never once alleged that a verse in their favour had been struck out, nor did ʿAlī in the Shiqshiqiyya sermon or elsewhere.3 Under ʿUthmān it is more far-fetched still: Islam had spread beyond any man’s power to excise a verse; a cut serving his rule would have been known and would have barred his own accession; had he done it, it would have been the plainest charge at his killing; and ʿAlī, on succeeding, would have restored the text — as he restored ʿUthmān’s land-grants, declaring that justice leaves no room for such retention4 — yet he confirmed the very Qurʾān in men’s hands. As for the tale that al-Ḥajjāj struck out verses against the Umayyads and imposed his own codices, it is the raving of the delirious: a mere governor could not touch the pillar of the religion, no historian records so vast a deed, none could erase the Qurʾān from the hearts that held it, and had any verse harmed the Umayyads, Muʿāwiya — mightier than al-Ḥajjāj — would have removed it first, and ʿAlī’s partisans would have made it their proof.5
The first error: that “whatever befell the former communities must befall this one,” so that, as the Torah and Gospel were altered, the Qurʾān must be too. But these reports are single narrations, not the mass transmission claimed, and are not in the four Shīʿī collections; the same reasoning would prove additions to the Qurʾān, which all deny; much that befell past nations has no parallel here (the calf, the forty years’ wandering, Pharaoh’s drowning, the raising of Jesus); so the likeness meant is one of conduct — as when the Muslims at Khaybar asked for a sacred tree “as they have,” and the Prophet said, “you shall follow the ways of those before you”6 — and, at most, the resemblance could still lie in the future, not the past.
The second error: that ʿAlī held a codex unlike ours, which the community refused, and which contained what ours lacks. That ʿAlī had a text of his own — differing in the order of the sūras — is beyond doubt and affirmed by the scholars. But its “additions” were exegesis and interpretation (taʾwīl), and explanations sent down from God to clarify the intent, not Qurʾān dropped from the text. The error springs from reading the later technical split of tanzīl (“what was revealed as Qurʾān”) and taʾwīl (“a non-literal sense”) back into the Imams’ words; but taʾwīl, from a root meaning “to return,” denotes in the Qurʾān that to which a thing comes back — its eventual sense — whether plain to any Arabic-speaker or hidden to all “save those firmly grounded in knowledge.”7
The third error is the body of reports alleging taḥrīf; though many, they must be weighed by their sense, and they fall into groups. The first group — some twenty that name taḥrīf outright — mean, by the plain sense of the last of them (“the speakers of Arabic altered God’s speech from its form”), the variance of the readers; and, for the rest, the twisting of the verses’ meaning against the rights of the People of the House, as when al-Ḥusayn at ʿĀshūrāʾ named his foes “corruptors of the Book,” and as in al-Bāqir’s letter, “they stand by its wording and misconstrue its bounds.”8 Both senses are of the kinds already granted; neither is the disputed omission. The second group — that the Imams’ names stood in the revealed verses — are to be read as exegesis, or as revelation not meant for the text; else they contradict the Book and Sunna and must be discarded. That ʿAlī’s name was not in the text is shown by Ghadīr itself: had it been named, no such appointment, gathering, or fear of the people would have been needed; and al-Ṣādiq, asked why ʿAlī and his house are not named in the Book, answered that the ṣalāt too was revealed without its number of cycles being named until the Prophet explained it.9 The third group — alleging addition and word-substitution (as the pronoun-variant in al-Fātiḥa 1:7, or “the House of Muḥammad” for “the House of ʿImrān” at 3:33) — have frail chains and contradict the Book, the Sunna, and the consensus (affirmed by al-Mufīd, al-Ṭūsī, and al-Bahāʾī) that nothing was added and that all between the two covers is revelation.10 The fourth group — alleging omission alone — meet the same answer, and most are weak or implausible; hence al-Kalbāsī, al-Baghdādī, and al-Karakī ruled that such reports must be construed away or rejected, on the settled principle, from the sound reports of al-Ṣādiq, that whatever contradicts the Book of God is to be cast aside.11 (The fourth error, touching the manner of the Qurʾān’s collection, belongs to the next chapter.)
In sum, the alteration that Muslims dispute — omission from the revealed Qurʾān — did not occur: the Book, the Sunna, the practice of the Imams, and the plain course of history all attest that what lies between the two covers is the whole of what was sent down.
The manner of the Qurʾān’s collection is the last ground the alteration-party adduces: they say it was gathered only under Abū Bakr, after seventy reciters fell at Biʾr Maʿūna and four hundred at al-Yamāma, when ʿUmar and Zayd b. Thābit, fearing its loss, assembled it from palm-branches, flat stones, and the breasts of men — accepting each fragment only on the testimony of two witnesses. Such a method, they urge, could not but lose something; the least it yields is that no certainty of completeness remains. The reply must begin by setting out the collection-traditions themselves and then weighing them. In Zayd’s own account, he shrank from “doing what the Messenger of God did not do” until God “opened his breast,” and gathered the text until he found the close of Sūrat al-Tawba1 with Abū Khuzayma alone; the scrolls (ṣuḥuf) then passed to Abū Bakr, to ʿUmar, and to Ḥafṣa. In the ʿUthmānic account, Ḥudhayfa, alarmed at the provinces’ quarrelling over the reading, moved ʿUthmān to copy Ḥafṣa’s scrolls into codices (maṣāḥif), send one to each region in the tongue of Quraysh, and burn the rest. Some twenty-odd such reports are recorded — including that ʿUmar’s “verse of stoning” was refused because he alone reported it, and that a verse of al-Aḥzāb was recovered from Khuzayma2 — all of them single narrations that inspire no confidence, and, besides, riddled with defects.
They cannot be trusted, for they contradict one another at nearly every point. When was it collected? — under ʿUthmān (tradition 2), under Abū Bakr (1, 3, 4), or under ʿUmar (7, 12). Who did it in Abū Bakr’s day? — Zayd (1, 22), or Abū Bakr himself with Zayd only checking (4), or ʿUmar and Zayd together (5). Was Zayd left to choose what entered the text, or was nothing admitted but on two witnesses? — the reports say both. Was anything left unrecorded till ʿUthmān? — most say no; tradition 2 says yes. Did ʿUthmān strike anything out? — most say no; tradition 14 says he did, and bade the people do likewise. From what did ʿUthmān work — from Abū Bakr’s scrolls (2, 4), or afresh from two-witness testimony (8, 14, 15)? Who asked Abū Bakr — ʿUmar (1), or ʿUmar and Zayd after he consulted the Muslims (10)? Who sent out the master-copy — ʿUthmān (2) or ʿUmar (12)? When were al-Barāʾa’s last verses appended, and by whom — under Abū Bakr (1, 11, 22) or ʿUmar (8); by Abū Khuzayma (1, 22) or Khuzayma b. Thābit (8, 11), between whom, Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr notes, there is no relation at all? On whose witness were they admitted — one man’s (1, 9, 21), or with ʿUthmān (8) or ʿUmar (11) as the second? And who wrote and dictated under ʿUthmān — the four Qurayshīs (2), or Zayd writing and Saʿīd dictating (15), or a man of Thaqīf and a man of Hudhayl (16), or not those (18), or Ubayy dictating with Saʿīd vocalizing (19, 20)? Reports this tangled can bear no weight.
Worse for them, these traditions are contradicted by reports that the Qurʾān was gathered and written in the Prophet’s own lifetime. When Ibn ʿAbbās asked ʿUthmān why al-Anfāl and al-Barāʾa were set side by side without the basmala between them, ʿUthmān answered by describing how the Prophet himself directed each new revelation to its place in a named sūra.3 Al-Shaʿbī names six of the Anṣār who collected it in the Prophet’s day, and Qatāda, on Anas, names four; and Zayd reports, “we used to compose the Qurʾān from parchments in the presence of the Messenger of God” — a report al-Ḥākim calls sound and clear proof of collection in the Prophet’s time.4 Al-Bukhārī’s report that “none had collected it but four” must be rejected, for it contradicts the rest — including al-Bukhārī’s own — and no narrator could have surveyed every Muslim to know it. The Book, too, tells against the caliphal account: its sūras were distinct and current among believer and idolater alike (else the challenge to bring “a sūra like it” were empty), and the very name al-kitāb, “the Book” — as in the thaqalayn tradition, “I leave among you the Book of God and my Family” — denotes a single written whole, not scattered scraps or bare memories. Reason agrees: the Qurʾān’s eloquence, the Prophet’s zeal to have it written and kept, the honour and reward of the memorizers — even women collected it, as Umm Waraqa, whom the Prophet called a martyr “through her collection of the Qurʾān”5 — make it certain it was written in his lifetime. And consensus is decisive against them: the Qurʾān stands only on mass transmission (tawātur), yet these traditions would establish it by two witnesses, or one — Ibn Ḥajar’s attempt to read “two witnesses” as “a written text and an oral report” only distorting them.6 Indeed, were the two-witness method sound as proof of omission, it would prove addition too — which all Muslims deny.
To ascribe the collection to the caliphs, then, is a fancy against the Book, the Sunna, and reason; and even were it granted that Abū Bakr recorded it, the two-witness method described is false, and what he set down was only what mass transmission had already fixed. As for ʿUthmān, he did not first gather the sūras into one volume; he united the Muslims upon a single authoritative reading and destroyed the codices that diverged from it. Al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī states it plainly: “The common view that ʿUthmān collected the Qurʾān is an error; rather he compelled the people to a single manner of reading” — the reading already current by unbroken transmission from the Prophet — banning the variant readings founded on the seven-ḥarf traditions whose falsity was shown before.7 No Muslim faulted him for uniting them, the quarrel over readings having bred strife and mutual charges of unbelief; he was faulted only for burning the other codices and ordering the provinces to do the same, for which some called him “the burner of the codices.” In sum, the tale that the Qurʾān was corrupted in its collecting is a delusion of weak reasoning; the Book between the two covers is the whole of what was sent down.
The Prophet devised no private tongue of his own: he addressed his people in the manner of speech they knew, and brought the Qurʾān that they might understand its meanings, ponder its verses, and act upon its commands and warnings. The Book proclaims this of itself again and again — “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from [someone] other than Allah, they would surely have found much discrepancy in it,”1 “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān, or are there locks upon the hearts?”2 and the like — which is a plain summons to act upon what its apparent sense (ẓāhir) conveys.
Four things confirm that the apparent senses are authoritative and were grasped by the Arabs addressed. First, the Qurʾān was set forth as the proof of the Prophet’s mission, and he challenged all mankind to bring the like of a single sūra — which would be idle were the Book a riddle beyond their understanding. Second, the well-known thaqalayn tradition bids the community “hold fast to the Book,” and holding fast can only mean following it and acting on its contents. Third, the many sound traditions that bid us weigh reports against the Qurʾān and cast aside whatever disagrees with it presuppose that its apparent sense is intelligible to any who know Arabic. Fourth, the Imams themselves drew rulings from the plain sense of the verses: al-Ṣādiq derived that the wiping (masḥ) covers but part of the head “from the place of the [preposition] bi”; he rebuked one who lingered to hear music with “Have you not heard: the hearing, the sight, and the heart — of all these shall he be questioned (17:36)?”; and he settled points of marriage, testimony, and diet by citing verses such as “until she has wedded another husband” (2:230), “Allah has not laid upon you any hardship in religion” (22:78), and “Say, I do not find in what has been revealed to me anything forbidden to one who would eat it…” (6:146).3
A body of traditionists (muḥaddithūn) denied the authority of the apparent senses and forbade acting on them. They urged six things; each is answered.
1. That the Qurʾān is grasped only by those it addresses. They cite al-Ṣādiq’s rebuke of Abū Ḥanīfa (“you have claimed a knowledge God placed only in the folk of the Book’s household”) and al-Bāqir’s of Qatāda (“the Qurʾān is known [only] to those to whom it was addressed”).4 But these concern the full knowledge of the Book — of its inner sense and its abrogating and abrogated verses — as the first tradition’s question makes plain; they do not touch the plain apparent sense, else one must absurdly say Abū Ḥanīfa did not even grasp “Say, He is Allah, the One.” “To them We gave the Book as an inheritance, to those We chose” (35:32) names those who know it as it truly is, not those alone who read its surface.
2. That acting on the apparent sense is forbidden interpretation by opinion (tafsīr bi-l-raʾy). But tafsīr means “lifting a veil,” and the plain sense, being unveiled, needs no lifting; and even were it tafsīr, it is not by opinion. Expounding a sermon of the Nahj al-Balāgha by the common sense of its words is no “interpretation by opinion.” Rather, tafsīr bi-l-raʾy is to rule from the Qurʾān’s general or absolute wording while spurning the particularizations and restrictions the Imams have given.
3. That the Qurʾān’s meanings are too obscure. True, it holds lofty and hidden meanings known only to the People of the House; yet it also has an apparent sense that any master of Arabic and its usage can understand and act upon, once the context is weighed.
4. That we know in sum the intended sense often differs from the apparent (the general being particularized, the absolute restricted). This blocks action only if one would act without first examining the qualifiers; once the Sunna’s particularizations are sought and found, the summary knowledge is discharged — exactly as with the apparent sense of the Sunna itself, which no one abandons on this ground.
5. That the Book forbids following the ambiguous (mutashābih), and the apparent sense is of that kind (3:7).5 But mutashābih means a wording bearing two or more equal senses, on which judgement is suspended until a sign points to one; a wording with a settled apparent sense is not of that kind. And were mutashābih itself uncertain, the custom of the wise — to follow the apparent sense until sure proof turns them from it — would still hold, so that the Master may justly reproach a servant who flouts the plain sense of His words.
6. That the occurrence of taḥrīf bars acting on the apparent sense (a dropped context might reverse it). But taḥrīf was already disproved; and the very traditions that bid us refer to the Qurʾān are themselves the proof that none occurred — for they command us to act by it regardless.
The upshot is that one must act upon the apparent meanings of the Qurʾān: they are the foundation of the Sharīʿa, and no transmitted report may be followed where it contradicts the Book of God. (These matters are treated more fully in the author’s work on legal theory, Ajwad al-Taqrīrāt.)
The books of exegesis and their kin name many verses as abrogated — Abū Bakr al-Naḥḥās, in his al-Nāsikh wa-l-Mansūkh, gathers a hundred and thirty-seven of them.1 This discussion is undertaken to examine them and to show that not one has in truth been abrogated, let alone all. We confine ourselves to thirty-six that call for elucidation; the rest are plainly unabrogated and need no discussion here.
In the lexicon, naskh means to have a thing copied out (transcription), and also transfer, transformation, succession, removal, and cancellation — as one says, “the sun cancelled the shadow.” This last sense was much in use among the early Companions and their successors, who would call nāsikh (“abrogator”) any general ruling later particularized or restricted, since the qualification “cancelled” the earlier breadth. In its technical sense, naskh is the abolition of a matter ordained in the Sharīʿa upon the passing of its appointed term. This is to be distinguished from the mere lapse of a ruling when its external condition ends — the fast ending with Ramaḍān, the prayer’s obligation with its hour, ownership with death — which is no naskh, since only the condition has passed, not the ruling itself. Two stages must be kept apart: the law as legislated (a positive rule laid down for the subject conceived hypothetically — “wine is forbidden” — whether or not any wine exists), and the law as applied externally (binding on the wine that actually exists, ceasing when the wine turns to vinegar). Abrogation belongs only to the first stage, the realm of legislation.
Rational Muslims and others hold abrogation — the abolition of a legislated ruling — to be possible; the Jews and Christians denied it, on a pretext frailer than a spider’s web. Abrogation, they argue, implies either that the ruling’s exigency persists (so its repeal contradicts the Lawgiver’s wisdom), or that God has been overtaken by a change of mind and a fresh discovery (badāʾ), which would impute ignorance to Him. The answer: a ruling laid down by the All-Wise may be meant as a trial, set up and then lifted, each by the wisdom of its moment, with no defect of wisdom and nothing impossible in the change; or it may be a real ruling, yet one limited from the first to a term known to God though hidden from men, and lifted only when that term expires. Abrogation is thus a time-restriction placed on an absolute ruling — just as rulings are restricted by a separate indicator in other respects — and a span of time may well make an act beneficial in one age and not in another, as the sabbath in the Law of Moses, or Friday, the prayer-times, the fast, and the ḥajj in Islam. This entails neither a lapse of wisdom nor the badāʾ that would be inadmissible of God.
This overturns the Jewish and Christian denial — held so as to fix the permanence of the Mosaic ordinances — and the strange thing is that they persist in it though their own Scriptures abrogate in many places.2 The age at which the Levites entered the service of the tent was set at thirty, then lowered to twenty-five, then to twenty; the daily and sabbath offerings prescribed in Numbers were altered in Ezekiel; the binding oath permitted in the Torah was forbidden in the Sermon on the Mount (“swear not at all”); the law of retaliation — life for life, eye for eye — was set aside by “do not resist the evildoer; turn the other cheek”; the covenant of circumcision, kept in the Law of Moses, was lifted from the community in the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of Paul; and the Torah’s provision for divorce and remarriage was annulled in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. All this suffices to show that abrogation stood in the two Testaments themselves.
That abrogation occurred in Islam is undisputed: many rulings of the earlier laws were abrogated by the Sharīʿa, and the Qurʾān plainly abrogated the first direction of prayer (toward Jerusalem). The dispute is only whether a Qurʾānic ruling was abrogated by another verse, by sound sunna, by consensus, or by reason. Abrogation in the Qurʾān is spoken of in three modes.
Abrogation of the recitation without the ruling — as alleged of the “stoning verse,” said to have been Qurʾān whose wording was withdrawn while its ruling stood. But to affirm an abrogated recitation is, as shown earlier, to affirm alteration; and it rests on single reports, which can establish neither a Qurʾānic text nor an abrogation, by the consensus of the scholars — so grave a matter, had it occurred, could not have reached us through one man alone. ʿUmar brought the verse and the Muslims would not receive it, he being its sole reporter; later scholars were then driven to call its recitation “abrogated.”
Abrogation of both the recitation and the ruling — alleged on ʿĀʾisha’s report of the “ten, then five, sucklings”; it meets the same answer already given.
Abrogation of the ruling without the recitation — the mode the jurists and exegetes accept, on which al-Naḥḥās and al-Muẓaffar al-Fārisī and others composed works. Here a fixed Qurʾānic ruling may be abrogated in one of three ways: by a mass-transmitted sunna or a definitive consensus reaching back to the Prophet or the Imam (sound, if proven — never by a single report); by another verse that addresses the ruling and provides for its ending (sound — the scholars’ instance is the “secret-conversation,” najwā, verse3); or by another verse that neither addresses the earlier ruling nor grounds its ending, but merely contradicts it, the later then being taken to abrogate the earlier. This last has not occurred in the Qurʾān — “Do they not contemplate the Qurʾān? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found much discrepancy in it.”4 Many commentators, inattentive to the sense of the verses, imagined contradictions where none stand — even where one verse is but the customary qualifier of another (the particular to the general, the restricted to the absolute) — and so spoke of abrogation, whether from weak judgement or from a loose, merely lexical use of naskh after its technical sense had become fixed. It remains, then, to examine the verses said to be abrogated — which follows.
The verses said to be abrogated are here taken in their Qurʾānic order; the claim is shown, in each, to be groundless. Most of the claims rest, in the end, on Abū Jaʿfar al-Naḥḥās’s al-Nāsikh wa-l-Mansūkh and on opinions ascribed to Ibn ʿAbbās, Qatāda, and al-Suddī.1
(1) “…excuse [them] and forbear until Allah issues His edict” (2:109). It is said to be abrogated by the “sword verse” (9:29). But the verse is decisive, not abrogated: the “edict” is God’s cosmic decree — confirmed by “Indeed Allah has power over all things” — not a later command to fight; and the People of the Book are not to be fought merely for unbelief, but only for aggression, sedition, or refusing the tribute. Forbearance toward their envy stands, and does not clash with fighting them where a just cause requires it.
(2) “To Allah belong the east and the west; so whichever way you turn, there is the face of Allah” (2:115). Said (by Ibn ʿAbbās and others) to be abrogated by the command to face the Sacred Mosque (2:150). But the qibla was fixed by God’s command, not the Prophet’s choice (2:143); the verse states that no place contains God, and the Imams invoked it for the traveller’s supererogatory prayer, the prayer of one unsure of the qibla, and the like. It is a general verse merely particularized for the obligatory prayer — not abrogated.2
(3) “Retribution is prescribed for you regarding the slain: freeman for freeman, slave for slave, and female for female” (2:178). Said to be abrogated by “the life for the life…” (5:45). But 2:178 is precise, while 5:45 is unqualified and merely reports a ruling of the Torah; a general wording does not abrogate a specific one, even if later. The traditions urged against it are weak or single reports, and the People of the House — the authorities after the Prophet — hold the verse’s distinctions to stand; so its abrogation fails.
(4) “…that he make a bequest for his parents and relatives, in an honourable manner” (2:180). Said to be abrogated by the inheritance verse, or by the report “no bequest to an heir.” But inheritance operates only where there is no bequest or debt, so it cannot abrogate the bequest-ruling; the report is unestablished (rejected even by al-Bukhārī and Muslim) and contradicts the sound reports of al-Bāqir, who read this very verse in affirming a bequest; at most it restricts, and a single report cannot abrogate the Book. The “prescription” here is legislative, later softened to a recommendation by the practice and the Imams’ leave.
(5) “Prescribed for you is fasting, as it was prescribed for those before you” (2:183). Said to be abrogated by the leave to approach one’s wives on the night of the fast (2:187). But 2:183 only likens the two fasts in being divinely prescribed, not in their particulars; and no one can show it was revealed before 2:187, without which the claim collapses.
(6) “And for those who can bear it, a ransom: the feeding of a needy person” (2:184). Said to be abrogated by “whoever of you is present, let him fast” (2:185). Abrogation would follow only if yuṭīqūnahu meant “those who are able”; but its sense is “those who bear it with immense hardship” — the frail old, the chronically ill — who are relieved of the fast and its making-up, and feed a poor man instead. The ruling stands.
(7) “Do not fight them near the Holy Mosque unless they fight you therein” (2:191). Said to be abrogated by “kill the polytheists wherever you find them” (9:5). But the specific guides the general, whatever the order of revelation, so fighting is barred at the Sanctuary save in self-defence. The tale of Ibn Khaṭal, slain though he clung to the Kaʿba, is a single report, and in any case the Prophet declared it a licence granted to him for that hour alone.3
(8) “They ask you concerning warfare in the holy month; say, it is an outrageous thing” (2:217). Said to be abrogated by the “sword verse.” But 9:5 makes killing conditional on the sacred months’ passing (“when the sacred months have passed…”), so it cannot abrogate the ban on fighting in them; a general command (9:36) cannot abrogate a specific prohibition; the single reports of Ibn ʿAbbās and Qatāda are answered by Ghābir’s report of the Prophet’s own prohibition and by the People of the House. The Imāmiyya, with al-Ṭūsī in al-Tibyān and al-Najafī in Jawāhir al-Kalām, hold the ban in force.4
(9) “Do not marry idolatresses until they embrace faith” (2:221). Said to be abrogated by the leave to marry chaste women of the People of the Book (5:5) — or the reverse (ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar). Neither abrogates the other: if “idolatresses” means idol-worshippers, the two do not conflict; if it be read more widely, 5:5 merely restricts it, so that a scripturary woman may be wed but an idolatress may not.
(10) “There is no compulsion in religion; rectitude has become distinct from error” (2:256). Said to be abrogated by “strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites” (9:73). But ikrāh here is “that which is opposite to choice,” and the sentence is a statement, not a command: God does not coerce faith, having made the truth plain, so that “whoever is to perish may perish on a clear proof” (cf. 8:42). Lawful compulsion — of a debtor, a thief — always existed in the Sharīʿa; the verse is neither abrogated nor restricted.
(11) “As for those of your women who commit an indecency (fāḥisha)… detain them in the houses until death takes them or Allah decrees a course for them” (4:15); “and the two of you who commit it, chastise them both” (4:16). Said to be abrogated by the flogging-and-stoning penalty. But fāḥisha is not a synonym for fornication; the confinement of 4:15 is a preventive measure (until repentance, marriage, or age set her free), and “appointing a way” is a way of relief for her, not stoning — for how would stoning be “a way” for her? And the threefold dual pronoun of 4:16 points to two men (sodomy), a matter apart from the flogging verse (24:2). Neither verse is abrogated; the flogging and the stoning are a separate ruling, legislated alongside, not in place of, these.
(The temporary-marriage verse, 4:24, and its long discussion follow.)
(12) “Lawful unto you are all beyond those mentioned…” (4:24). It is said to be abrogated by the traditions forbidding marriage to women other than those named. But a particular ruling restricts a general one, whether it precede or follow it, and does not abrogate it — which is why a single sound tradition may particularize a general verse though it can never abrogate the Book. The verse’s generality is not verbal but inferred, and yields at once to any evidence that qualifies it. So there is no abrogation here.
“As to others than these, it is lawful for you to seek [union] with them with your wealth, in wedlock, not in license; for the enjoyment (istimtāʿ) you have had from them, give them their dowries.”1 Most Sunnī scholars hold that the licence of the mutʿa — the fixed-term marriage — was abrogated and forbidden until the Resurrection; the Twelver Shīʿa are agreed that it stands and the verse is not abrogated, and a body of Companions and Successors held likewise. Ibn Ḥazm names Ibn Masʿūd, Muʿāwiya, Abū Saʿīd, Ibn ʿAbbās, Ghābir, ʿAmr b. Ḥurayth and others who continued to hold it lawful after the Prophet, and reports from Ghābir that the Companions practised it in the Prophet’s day, and under Abū Bakr, and almost to the end of ʿUmar’s caliphate; and among the Successors, Ṭāwūs, Saʿīd b. Ghubayr, and ʿAṭāʾ.2
The claim of abrogation rests on two things: that the “enjoyment” in the verse is the mutʿa, and that the mutʿa was afterward forbidden. The first is not in doubt — the reports are many, and Ibn ʿAbbās, Ubayy, and Ibn Ghubayr read the verse “for a specified term.”3 It is the second that fails, for none of the proposed abrogators holds.
The verse on divorcing “at their term” (65:1) neither shortens the mutʿa-wife’s waiting-period nor treats of divorce at all — and the slander in al-Manār that the Shīʿa impose no waiting-period is a fabrication found in no book of theirs, early or late.4 The inheritance verse (4:12) does not abrogate the mutʿa either: it merely restricts inheritance to the permanent marriage, and a wife’s not inheriting no more unmakes her a wife than the bar on a non-believer’s or a killer’s inheriting unmakes them kin. And the traditions adduced — ʿAlī’s report that the Prophet forbade mutʿa “at Khaybar,” al-Rabīʿ b. Sabra’s that he forbade it forever between the Rukn and the Maqām, and Salama b. al-Akwaʿ’s that he allowed it three days at Awṭās then barred it — are single reports that cannot abrogate the Book, and they run against the mass-transmitted reports of the People of the House; besides, a prohibition at some moment need not touch the verse, since it may have preceded the Qurʾānic licence.5
Against them stand many reports, through Sunnī chains, that the mutʿa continued lawful until ʿUmar. Ghābir b. ʿAbd Allāh, again and again: “we sought mutʿa for a handful of dates or flour in the days of the Prophet and of Abū Bakr, until ʿUmar forbade it”; and he reports ʿUmar’s own words from the pulpit — “the Messenger of God and the Qurʾān permitted two mutʿas; I forbid them both and will punish any who practise them.”6 ʿImrān b. Ḥuṣayn: “the mutʿa verse was revealed, and we acted on it with the Prophet, and no verse came down to abrogate it, nor did he forbid it, till he died” — a report al-Rāzī himself relays.7 Ibn Masʿūd recited, in this connection, “Do not forbid the good things Allah has made lawful for you” (5:87); and Ibn ʿAbbās said, “God have mercy on ʿUmar — the mutʿa was but a mercy; had he not forbidden it, none but a wretch would have needed to fornicate.”8
Sabra’s traditions, though many, all pass through Sabra alone; and it is past belief that the Prophet proclaimed a perpetual prohibition to the assembled Muslims at the Kaʿba and none but Sabra heard or reported it — where were the Emigrants and Helpers who recorded his every gesture? where was ʿUmar, that he took the prohibition upon himself? — and they contradict one another, placing it now at the conquest of Mecca, now at the Farewell Pilgrimage. ʿAlī’s “Khaybar” report is plainly false, since by consensus the mutʿa was still lawful at the conquest of Mecca, after Khaybar (some therefore attach “at Khaybar” to the domestic-ass meat, not the mutʿa). The tale of the Syrian who contracted a mutʿa in ʿUmar’s day — witnessed by upright men who saw no wrong in it — ends with ʿUmar’s own words, “had I already forbidden it, I would have stoned you,” and his order, “make it known, that marriage be told apart from fornication”: a plain admission that the ban was his, and new.9
Nor can a claimed consensus abrogate it: a consensus has no weight unless it discloses the mind of the Prophet or the Imams, and one cannot set aside the Book and the Sunna by the verdict of men not preserved from error — else the daily prayer, the fast, or the ḥajj might be abrogated by a jurist’s opinion. And there was no full consensus, so many having dissented. It was ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿUmar himself who, asked how he could differ from his father, answered: “Is the Sunna of the Messenger of God worthier to be followed, or ʿUmar’s?”10 In sum, nothing the abrogation-party clings to serves to abrogate this verse, whose lawfulness in Islam is firmly established. (The survey continues with verses 14–35.)
(14) “For everyone We have appointed heirs to what the parents and near relatives leave, as well as those with whom you have made a compact; so give them their share” (4:33). Said to be abrogated by the kinship-inheritance verse (8:75). But the “share” (naṣīb) here is inheritance, and the verse merely names the three classes of heir without fixing their order — which is drawn from other evidence. Contractual inheritance (through marriage, through clientage, or through the pact of security, ḍamān al-jarīra) is a standing institution, recognized by the Imāmiyya and, for the pact of security, by Abū Ḥanīfa; and 8:75 gives precedence to kin, it does not deny the contractual heir. So the verse is precise, not abrogated.
(15) “Do not approach prayer when you are intoxicated, until you know what you are saying” (4:43). Said to be abrogated by the prohibition of wine (5:90–91) or by the ablution verse (5:6). But nothing in it permits wine, and the ablution has no bearing on it; the three stages of the wine-revelation reported by Ibn ʿUmar show a sequence, not an abrogation.1 Its sense is that the prayer of one whose wits are gone is invalid, and that he is culpable for the drunkenness he brought on himself — a ruling that stands.
(16) “…excepting those who join a people with whom you have a treaty, or who come to you with hearts reluctant to fight you… so if they hold aloof and offer you peace, Allah does not allow you any course against them” (4:90). Said to be abrogated by the command to fight the unbelievers. But it concerns apostates who had professed Islam, and spares them in two cases — refuge with a treaty-people, and withdrawal with an offer of peace (i.e. returning to Islam); when the treaty is revoked (as in Sūra 9) the ruling simply lapses for want of its object, which is no abrogation. The report “kill whoever changes his religion” is, by agreement, conditioned on his refusing to repent, so it does not abrogate the verse.2
(17) “…if they come to you, judge between them, or disregard them… but if you judge, judge with justice” (5:42). Said to be abrogated by “judge between them by what Allah has sent down” (5:48). But the command to judge is itself conditioned on the judge’s willingness — the very proviso the earlier verse states — so there is no conflict; the Imāmiyya (and al-Shaʿbī, al-Nakhaʿī, ʿAṭāʾ, and Mālik) hold it precise, on the sound report of al-Bāqir that the judge may choose. And the many reports that Sūrat al-Māʾida came down whole, and last of all, forbid the idea that one of its verses abrogates another.3
(18) “…the witness between you, when death approaches, shall be two fair men from among yourselves — or two from among others, if you are journeying” (5:106). The Imāmiyya (with Ibn ʿAbbās, Shurayḥ, Ibn al-Musayyib, al-Shaʿbī, and the jurists al-Thawrī and Abū ʿUbayd) hold that a scripturary’s testimony to a bequest is valid when no Muslim is at hand; others (Mālik, al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Ḥanīfa) call the verse abrogated. But it is not: the reports of al-Ṣādiq and the case judged by Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī uphold it; al-Māʾida was the last sūra, containing nothing abrogated; and the “just witness” verses (2:282, 65:2) concern debt and divorce, and in any case are the general that this later, specific verse restricts — “others than you” plainly meaning non-believers.4
(19) “…Eat of its fruits when it fructifies, and give its due on the day of harvest; and do not be wasteful” (6:141). Most Sunnī scholars call it abrogated by the alms-tax (zakāt). But the “due” here is not the zakāt: the reports of the Imams distinguish it (“what is taken from you is the tithe; what you pay is this due”); Sūrat al-Anʿām came down at Mecca all at once, whereas the zakāt was legislated at Medina; the payment falls “on the day of harvest,” unlike the zakāt; and the warning against wastefulness does not fit a fixed tithe. It is a separate, recommended due — not abrogated.5
(20) “Say: I do not find in what has been revealed to me anything forbidden to one who would eat it, save carrion, or spilt blood, or the flesh of swine…” (6:145). Said to be abrogated by the Prophet’s later prohibition of things not named here. But this is a declarative sentence, and declaratives are not abrogated; it states the forbidden foods as they stood at its Meccan revelation, and the later prohibitions are the gradual unfolding of the law — the forbidding of one thing after another, which is not abrogation.
(The survey continues with verses 21–35 and the chapter’s conclusion.)
A long run of verses is said to be abrogated by the “sword verse” (9:5) or by later commands to fight. In each, the answer is one of a few kinds already given: the sword verse concerns the idolaters (mushrikūn) alone, so it particularizes rather than abrogates; a general command cannot abrogate a specific ruling; a duty that lapses when its object ends is not abrogated; and the gradual unfolding of the law is not abrogation.
(21) “Do not turn your backs to them [in battle]” (8:15–16) — not abrogated by the leave to withdraw when outnumbered more than two to one (8:66), which merely restricts it; fleeing the field remains among the grave sins by the reports of both traditions. (22) “If they incline to peace, incline to it also” (8:61) — the sword verse particularizes it to the idolaters (the Prophet made peace with the Christians of Najrān after Sūra 9), and conciliation is left open where the Muslims lack the upper hand, as at Ḥudaybiyya. (23) “Twenty steadfast shall overcome two hundred” (8:65), then “a steadfast hundred, two hundred” (8:66) — revealed together, and a recommendation, not an abrogated obligation. (24) “If you do not go forth, He will chastise you” (9:39) — the duty was on those summoned, not on all, as “the believers should not go forth all together” (9:122) itself shows. (25) “Why did you give them leave…?” (9:43–44) — bound to the case where the sincere were not yet told from the false, and does not conflict with the later leave (24:62). (26) “It was not for the people of the City to stay behind…” (9:120) — continued by 9:122; the duty of jihād is a collective one (kifāya). (27) “Be patient until Allah judges” (10:109) and (28) “pardon with a gracious pardoning” (15:85) — enjoin forbearance under insult while conveying the message, a thing apart from fighting. (29) “From the fruits of the palms and vines you take an intoxicant (sakar) and goodly provision” (16:67) — a declarative verse of God’s signs; sakar may mean “vinegar,” and the verse sets it against “goodly provision,” so it never permitted wine, which was ever forbidden. (30) “The fornicator shall marry none but a fornicatress…” (24:3) — here nikāḥ is intercourse, a declarative about adultery, not marriage; not abrogated by 24:32. (31) “Tell the believers to forgive those who look not for the days of Allah” (45:14) — an ethic of forbearance, and the report tying it to ʿUmar before the Hijra is weak in chain and matter. (32) “Strike their necks… then bind them fast; thereafter free them or ransom them” (47:4) — neither abrogated nor abrogator: killing the warring unbeliever holds while the war rages, and once the enemy is broken the Imam may free, ransom, or enslave the captive, as al-Bāqir’s report explains.1
(33) “…a share for the beggar and the deprived” (51:19); (34) “…a known share (ḥaqq maʿlūm)” (70:24). Said to be abrogated by the alms-tax, which is held to have superseded every other obligatory charity. But the “known right” is not the zakāt: the reports of al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq make it a further, recommended giving — “something a man knows in his wealth and gives out regularly” — and Abū Dharr rebuked Kaʿb for saying nothing is due once the zakāt is paid, citing these very verses; so too Ibn ʿAbbās. The verses are precise, not abrogated.2
(35) “O you who have faith! When you converse privately with the Apostle, offer a charity before your private talk” (58:12) — abrogated by the verse that follows: “Were you afraid to offer charities before your private talks? Since you did not, and Allah has excused you, then maintain the prayer and pay the zakat…” (58:13).3 Here alone al-Khūʾī allows a true abrogation — of the first kind set out at the chapter’s head, where a time-limited injunction ends when its term expires. Many reports, Sunnī and Shīʿī, relate that none acted on the verse but ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, who changed a dinar into ten dirhams and gave one in charity before each of ten private words with the Prophet, before the ruling was lifted.4 The wisdom of legislating it then abrogating it was to complete God’s argument against the community, laying bare that all save ʿAlī set their wealth above private counsel with the Prophet; abandoning the colloquy was no sin, since the colloquy itself was not obligatory — only the charity, had one conversed.
Al-Rāzī sought to excuse the leading Companions, urging that the charity distressed poor and rich alike, so that forgoing it “fostered harmony,” the colloquy being neither obligatory nor recommended. But this, as al-Khūʾī answers, ignores the plain rebuke in “Were you afraid…?”; and were such reasoning sound, every financial duty might be dropped for the sake of “harmony.” Al-Naysābūrī likewise faulted al-Rāzī’s prejudice, asking why ʿAlī may not simply have had a merit the others lacked — as even Ibn ʿUmar owned, counting the colloquy verse among three excellences of ʿAlī he would rather have had than the choicest camels.5
(36) “Whatever spoils Allah has given His Apostle from the people of the towns belong to Allah and His Apostle and the near kin…” (59:8). Qatāda held that this fayʾ verse was abrogated by the one-fifth (khums) verse (8:41). But the fayʾ — what comes without fighting — is not the battle-spoils (ghanīma), so the two do not conflict; and in any case the khums verse of al-Anfāl was revealed before the fayʾ verse of al-Ḥashr, so the earlier cannot be abrogated by the later.6
With this the survey closes. Of the six-and-thirty verses examined — and of the whole hundred and thirty-seven once alleged — not one has in truth been abrogated, save the colloquy verse alone, whose injunction was a time-bound one that lapsed with its term. The Qurʾān stands whole and self-consistent, “had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found much discrepancy in it.”
Having treated the abrogation (naskh) of ordinances, which belongs to the realm of the sacred law, we turn to al-badāʾ — a kind of naskh, but in the realm of creation (takwīn). Its true sense is unknown to many, who have therefore charged the Shīʿa with what they are innocent of — imputing ignorance to God — a charge into which even Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī fell.1 Yet the whole universe lies under God’s sovereignty and power; every possible thing exists only by His will; and His knowledge encompasses all things from eternity, so that His foreknowledge and decree (qaḍāʾ) neither shackle nor contradict His omnipotence — for His knowledge is of things as they will be, that is, as conditional upon His will. The Jews, by contrast, held that all was fixed by the pen of destiny so that “God’s hands are shackled” — a denial of His very omnipotence.
The badāʾ the Imāmiyya affirm falls only in the alterable decree; in the unalterable there is no change. The decree is of three kinds. First, the guarded knowledge God has kept to Himself alone: badāʾ does not occur in it, but originates from it — for, as al-Ṣādiq taught, God has two knowledges, one hidden with Him (whence badāʾ comes) and one taught to His angels, prophets, and the Imams.2 Second, what God has told His Prophet and angels will surely come to pass: here too there is no badāʾ, for God does not belie Himself or His prophets. Third, what He has disclosed as coming to pass in the world, yet conditional on His will not attaching to something else: this is where badāʾ occurs — “Allah effaces and confirms whatever He wishes, and with Him is the Mother of the Book,”3 and “all command belongs to Allah, before and after.” Many reports bear this out: that on the Night of Ordainment the angels record the year’s decree, which God then hastens, delays, effaces, or confirms as He wills; and ʿAlī’s word, “but for one verse — ‘Allah effaces…’ — I would have told you all that shall be until the Day of Resurrection.”4 But in the unalterable decree — the Preserved Tablet, the Mother of the Book, the guarded knowledge — no badāʾ is even conceivable; as al-Ṣādiq warned, “whoever claims something appeared to God that He did not know before — shun him,” for nothing appears to God of which He was ignorant.
Belief in badāʾ, confined to the conditional decree (the Tablet of Effacement and Confirmation, lawḥ al-maḥw wa-l-ithbāt), imputes no ignorance to God and detracts nothing from His majesty. Rather, it affirms that the making and keeping of the world lie under His sovereignty and His will, effective from eternity to eternity; it marks off divine knowledge from the knowledge even of prophets, who know only what He grants them; and it turns the servant toward God in prayer. For to reject badāʾ — to hold, with the “shackled pen,” that all is fixed beyond recall — is to lose hope in prayer being answered, since what is decreed would come regardless and what is not could never be. Hence the reports magnify it: “God has not been worshipped with anything like badāʾ”; “nothing has shown God’s power more than badāʾ”; and “God sent no prophet without requiring of him three: to affirm servanthood, to reject partners, and to acknowledge that God hastens what He wills and delays what He wills.”5
In the Imāmī doctrine badāʾ is from ibdāʾ — iẓhār, the disclosing to creatures of a reality hidden from them — not any new appearing of a thing to God. The word is used so even in Sunnī report: al-Bukhārī has the Prophet say “God resolved (badā li-llāh) to test” the three Israelites; and the Qurʾān speaks likewise of God’s “knowing” by trial — “that We might know which of the two parties would better reckon,” “that He might try which of you is fairest in works.”6 As for the Imams’ foretellings: what they disclose unconditionally belongs to the unalterable decree, in which no badāʾ falls; what they disclose conditionally belongs to the alterable, and remains true even when the divine will attaches elsewhere, since it was uttered as conditional — as ʿAlī told ʿAmr b. al-Ḥamiq of “the year seventy,” adding that after every calamity comes relief, and citing again, “Allah effaces…”7
Exegesis (tafsīr) is the clarifying of God’s purport in His Book. It may therefore not rest on conjecture or personal discretion, nor on anything not established as a proof of reason (ʿaql) or of revelation (sharʿ), for it is forbidden to follow conjecture and to ascribe a thing to God without His leave — “Did Allah give you the sanction, or do you fabricate a lie against Allah?” and “Do not pursue that of which you have no knowledge.”1 The traditions barring exegesis by opinion (tafsīr bi-l-raʾy) are many, in Sunnī and Shīʿī sources alike; hence one may not simply follow any commentator, sound in religion or not, for that too is a reliance on conjecture, which avails nothing in seeking the truth.
The exegete must follow one of three. First, the apparent sense of the text as a competent speaker of Arabic understands it — whose authority was established earlier. Second, what sound innate reason determines, for reason is an inward proof as the Prophet is an outward one. Third, what is established from the infallible guides, the Prophet and the Imams, who are the authorities in religion and whom the Prophet joined to the Book in his testament: “I leave among you two weighty things, the Book of God and my Family; so long as you hold to both you will never go astray.”2 Their word is certain when it reaches us by a reliable, unquestioned transmission, and uncertain when it comes by a weak one that fails the conditions of evidence.
Here is the crux: is a reliable single report (khabar al-wāḥid al-thiqa) from the Imams, explaining the Qurʾān, a proof? Some object that the evidentiary force granted a single report holds only where its content is a legal ordinance, or a matter on which the Lawgiver has built one — a condition, they say, that an exegetical report may lack. The objection is without ground. As shown in the science of legal theory, to admit a reliable report as evidence is for the Lawgiver’s injunction to advance it to the rank of certainty; it is thus one of the ways to sure knowledge — a way resting on obedience rather than on inference — so that whatever may be drawn from a reliable transmitted proof may be drawn from this one too. This accords with the settled practice of rational people, who treat a reliable indicator exactly as they treat knowledge: a thing in a man’s hand is taken as his, and its owner’s rights assigned him, none objecting. The one condition is that the report meet every criterion of evidence — above all, that it not be known false; so a report contrary to the consensus, the established Sunna, the Qurʾān, or a sound rational conclusion cannot be admitted, whether or not it bears on a legal ruling.
If a single report’s authority is established, may it particularize a general injunction of the Qurʾān? The prevailing view — which al-Khūʾī holds — is that it may; some Sunnīs demur (ʿĪsā b. Abān and al-Karkhī allowing it only if the general was already particularized by an external proof, while al-Qāḍī Abū Bakr suspends judgement).3 Three objections are raised, and answered. First, that one may not abandon the certain Book for an uncertain report: but though the Book’s origin is certain, its general wording is not certainly its intent — the apparent sense binds only where no contrary context appears, and a reliable report is just such a context; one merely sets aside one conjectural indicator (the general sense) for another whose authority is fixed. Second, that reports are to be weighed against the Qurʾān and those disagreeing with it discarded: but a specific report expounds the general, it does not contradict it — and the Imams themselves constantly particularized and restricted the Qurʾān, so “what contradicts our Lord’s word we never said” concerns real contradiction, not exposition.4 Third, that if a single report may particularize, it should also abrogate — yet abrogation by a single report is barred, so particularization should be too: but the two are told apart by the consensus barring abrogation-by-single-report, which rests on this — that an abrogation, being a public matter binding on all Muslims, would necessarily be transmitted by many, so that a lone report of it is itself proof of its falsity, whereas a particularization is not of that nature.
No Muslim doubts that the Speech of God revealed to His Prophet was a proof of his prophethood, nor that this speech is one of God’s attributes — “and to Moses Allah spoke directly.”1 The whole community held the Qurʾān to be the Speech of God, and an attribute of God, without dispute — until Greek philosophy entered and split it into factions charging one another with unbelief, so that blood was shed over the question though both slayer and slain professed the oneness of God and the resurrection of “those who are in the graves.” One wonders how a man who sows such discord will answer his Lord — “Indeed we belong to Allah, and to Him do we return.”2 The dispute set the Ashʿarites, who held the Qurʾān eternal and divided speech into a “speech of the soul” (kalām nafsī) subsisting eternally in the divine essence and an “uttered speech” (kalām lafẓī), against the rest — the Muʿtazila and the ʿAdliyya — who held the Qurʾān created and speech to be an attribute of action.
An attribute of essence is one whose opposite can never be ascribed to God — knowledge, power, life: He has never ceased, nor will cease, to be Knowing, Powerful, Living. An attribute of action is one whose opposite may be ascribed at one time or another — creation and sustenance: it may be said that God created this and not that, gave one a son and not wealth. Speech is plainly of this second kind, for it is said that “God spoke to Moses and did not speak to Pharaoh,” and that “He spoke to him at Sinai and not in the valley of the Nile.” Speech, then, is an attribute of action — and no useful end is served by the whole dispute, which lies outside the principles of religion (uṣūl al-dīn) and their branches; al-Khūʾī takes it up only to show his Ashʿarite brethren, the majority of Muslims, that what they treat as a necessary article of belief is a mere speculation with no ground in reason or revelation.
The Ashʿarites affirm a speech beyond the uttered kind, the kalām nafsī, but disagree on what it is — some making it the meaning of the uttered, others a substitute for it. Al-Khūʾī’s analysis: every sentence is either declarative (khabariyya) or creative (inshāʾiyya). The declarative, analysed, needs nine elements — the words in their matter and form, their meanings, the construction and what it signifies, the speaker’s conception of each, the sentence’s conformity or non-conformity with reality, his knowledge of that conformity, and his will to produce it; the creative needs the same but for the seventh and eighth (which concern conformity to an external fact). The “speech of the soul” possesses none of these — so it has no existence at all; and word-coining, as shown elsewhere, is simply the making of an utterance convey an intended meaning, which is the whole of what a sentence is.3 To conceive one’s speech before uttering it is only its mental existence (wujūd dhihnī) — a thing common to every voluntary act, as a writer or painter conceives his work first — and has nothing to do with a “speech of the soul.”
Three arguments are offered, and answered. First, that a speaker conceives his speech inwardly before uttering it, as al-Akhṭal’s verse has it — that speech is in the heart, and the tongue only points to what is there.4 But that inward forming is just mental existence, shared by writer and painter alike. Second, that “speech” may be applied to what is in the mind — “I have words in my mind I do not wish to reveal,” and “Speak secretly or openly, He knows what is in the breasts” (67:13). But everything has two modes of existence, mental and external, and is the same thing in both; this is peculiar to no speech — an engineer too says, “I have in mind a plan I shall draw.” Third, that “Speaker” is rightly said of God, which requires an eternal speech, since the Eternal cannot bear a created attribute. But the ground for calling one a “speaker” (mutakallim) is not an indwelling speech — speech is an accident of the vibrating air, subsisting in the air, not in the speaker — but the act of speaking (takallum), the causing of speech to come to be; and this holds of God as of any other, just as “Withholder” and “Bestower” are applied to the originator of those states though “sleeper” is not applied to the originator of sleep. The thesis of a “speech of the soul,” in sum, is pure speculation with no rational or scriptural ground. It is fitting to close with al-Ṣādiq, as al-Kulaynī reports from Abū Baṣīr: asked whether God was speaking from eternity, the Imam said, “Speaking is an attribute that comes into being and is not eternal; God, the Almighty and Glorified, was when there was no speaker.”5
Here the Prolegomena (al-muqaddima) concludes; what follows in the book is the exegesis proper, beginning with the Opening Sūra (al-Fātiḥa).
With this sūra the book passes from its prolegomena to the exegesis itself. The sūra has several names attested in the reports — the Opening of the Book (Fātiḥat al-Kitāb), by which the Qurʾān is opened in the codices and in the prayer; the Mother of the Book (umm al-Kitāb); the Seven Oft-Repeated (al-Sabʿ al-Mathānī), since its seven verses are repeated in every prayer; and “the Praise” (al-Ḥamd), from its opening word. Its seven verses include the Basmala — “In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful” — counted as the first of them.1
Al-Khūʾī opens with a report handed down by al-Ṣadūq, by his chain from al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-ʿAskarī, from his forefathers, from the Commander of the Faithful, who said: “‘In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful’ is a verse of the Opening of the Book, which is seven verses, its completion being ‘In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful.’ I heard the Messenger of God say: God, exalted, said to me, ‘O Muhammad — “Certainly We have given you the seven oft-repeated verses and the great Qurʾān” — so He set apart His favour to me with the Opening of the Book, and made it stand opposite the whole of the great Qurʾān; and indeed the Opening of the Book is the noblest of what is in the treasures of the Throne.”2 The verse invoked is “Certainly We have given you the seven oft-repeated verses and the great Qurʾān” (15:87), read here as a distinct favour: the seven verses of the Opening set over against the entire Qurʾān.
He adds the report of al-Bukhārī from Abū Saʿīd b. al-Muʿallā, who said: “I was praying when the Prophet called me, and I did not answer him. I said, ‘O Messenger of God, I was at prayer.’ He said, ‘Did not God say, “Respond to Allah and the Apostle when he summons you” [8:24]?’ Then he said, ‘Shall I not teach you the greatest sūra in the Qurʾān before you leave the mosque?’ He took my hand, and as we were about to go out I said, ‘O Messenger of God, you said you would teach me the greatest sūra in the Qurʾān.’ He said: “Praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds” — it is the seven oft-repeated verses and the great Qurʾān that I have been given.’”3
(The exegesis of the Basmala, and then of the sūra verse by verse, follows.)
Al-Khūʾī gathers the sense of the whole sūra into four aims. First, God glorifies Himself — both by what belongs to the perfection of His essence and by what belongs to His acts: His nurturing (tarbiya) of all the worlds, His all-embracing mercy that is never severed from Him, and His sovereignty on the Day of Gathering, the Day of Requital. Second, He confines worship and the seeking of aid to Himself alone, so that none besides Him deserves to be worshipped or besought. Third, He teaches His servants to ask of Him guidance to the straight path — the path that carries them to the life that does not end, the bliss that does not pass, and the light after which there is no darkness. Fourth, He makes plain that this path belongs to those whom He has favoured with His mercy and grace, and that it is other than the path of those against whom He is angered and the path of those who have strayed from guidance.1
Underlying the sūra’s confining of worship to God is a point al-Khūʾī draws out: a rational being submits to another, worships him, and turns to him with his needs, only for one of four reasons — for some perfection in the one worshipped (since the deficient is by nature disposed to bow before the perfect); or for his beneficence and bounty; or out of the worshipper’s own need to draw a benefit or ward off a harm; or before the overmastering might and sovereignty of the perfect, so that one submits for fear of disobeying. Whichever of these the reason considers, he finds it belonging to God alone: for God gathers in Himself every attribute of perfection, untouched by any shadow of deficiency, and it is He who bestows upon all the worlds. He alone, therefore, deserves praise, worship, and to be sought for aid.2
In its language, “name” (ism) means a mark or token (ʿalāma); its opening hamza is a connective hamza (hamzat waṣl), not one of the root letters. The word has several forms, of which four are well known — ism and sim, each with either i or u on the first letter. It is taken from al-sumūw, “elevation,” either because the meaning is raised up by it, emerging from concealment into the open — for the meaning is present to the hearer’s mind the instant the word is heard, after it was absent — or because the word itself is elevated by its coining, passing from disuse into use.3
Some derive it instead from al-sima, “the mark,” but al-Khūʾī judges this an error, and the morphology settles it: the plural of ism is asmāʾ, its diminutive sumayy, its relative form samawī or ismī, and its verb sammaytu and asmaytu. Were it from al-sima, the plural would come as awsām, the diminutive as wusaym, the relative form as wasmī, and the verb as wasamtu and awsamtu — none of which is the case.4
(The analysis continues with the divine names — Allāh, al-Raḥmān, and al-Raḥīm — then the grammar and exegesis of the Basmala, and the question whether the Basmala is part of the Qurʾān.)
“Allāh” is a proper name (ʿalam) for the sacred Essence that gathers in itself every attribute of perfection. The Arabs knew it, and used it, even in their pagan age — as in Labīd’s verse, “Lo, everything but Allah is vain,” and as the Qurʾān reports of them: “If you ask them, ‘Who created the heavens and the earth?’ they will surely say, ‘Allah.’”1
Whether the name is derived or underived is disputed. Some hold it underived, a simple proper name; others derive it — from alaha, “to be worshipped,” since He is the Worshipped; or from waliha, “to be bewildered,” since minds are bewildered before His reality. Al-Khūʾī’s own choice is that it is derived, its root lāha, which carries the twin sense of rising and of being veiled: for God is the One truly elevated, with an elevation into which no lowness enters, and He — at the very summit of manifestness through His traces and His signs — is veiled from His creatures by His own essence, so that no sight attains Him and no thought reaches to His reality.2
“Al-Raḥmān” is a form of intensification (ṣīghat al-mubālagha), on the pattern faʿlān, conveying abundance of mercy. The intensification, al-Khūʾī notes, lies on the side of the mercy shown to creation, not in God’s being described by mercy — for His attributes are without limit, and admit no “more” or “less.” The word occurs always with its object left unstated, and from this its generality is drawn: His mercy encompasses all things. It functions almost as a title (laqab) of God, not applied to any other; and for that reason it is used in many verses without regard to its verbal root — as in “Were the All-beneficent to intend me any harm…”3 The idolaters, who did not acknowledge the name, balked at it: “When they are told, ‘Prostrate yourselves before the All-beneficent,’ they say, ‘What is “the All-beneficent”?’”4 To the breadth of this mercy points the report of the Prophet that God has a hundred mercies, of which He sent down but one to the earth — by which creatures show one another tenderness — holding back ninety-nine with which to embrace His servants on the Day of Resurrection.5
“Al-Raḥīm” is on the pattern faʿīl, a settled and enduring attribute, and — unlike “al-Raḥmān” — it may be applied to others than God, as the Prophet himself is called “most kind and merciful (raḥīm) to the faithful.”6 The relation of the two names al-Khūʾī draws from the word ascribed to al-Ṣādiq: “al-Raḥmān is a name that is particular with an attribute that is general; al-Raḥīm is a name that is general with an attribute that is particular.” For “al-Raḥmān” is particular to God — none else is named by it — yet its mercy is general, embracing every creature; while “al-Raḥīm” is general — others too may be so named — yet the mercy it marks is the particular, enduring mercy God keeps for the believers.7
(The grammar and exegesis of the Basmala follow, then the question whether the Basmala is a part of the Qurʾān.)
The prefixed bāʾ is a preposition, and a preposition needs a word to govern it; here that word is left unexpressed, and the question is what it is. Some supply “I read” or “I say”; some, “I seek help” (astaʿīnu); some take the bāʾ for accompaniment and blessing (“seeking blessing by the name of God”), and some even for an oath. Al-Khūʾī holds that the elided word is “I begin” (abtadiʾu). It cannot be “I read” or “I say,” for the object of reading or saying would then have to be the sentence itself with its meaning, not “by the name of God.” And it cannot be “I seek help”: for seeking help can never be predicated of God — He is beyond needing help, even the help of His own noble names — while the creature’s seeking of help is by God, not by His names, as He Himself has declared, “You alone do we worship, and You alone do we ask for help” (1:5). There remains, then, only “I begin” — a reading confirmed by the Prophet’s word that “every matter of consequence not begun with the name of God is maimed.”1
That the governing word is left unstated, and the phrase “by the name of God” placed first, yields both a seeking of blessing at the outset and a sense of exclusivity — as though the servant said, “by God I begin, and by none besides Him.”2
The sense, then, is that the servant opens his every word and deed by the name of God — attaching the act to Him, drawing on His aid, and seeking the mercy that embraces all things. The bāʾ varies with the deed at hand: for one about to read, “by the name of God I read”; for one about to rise, eat, or the like, “by the name of God I do this” — the context supplying which act is meant. In every case the Basmala binds the beginning of the act to God alone, so that the deed is undertaken in His name and by His strength, not the servant’s own.3
It is no accident that the Book is opened with the two names of mercy. The Basmala teaches that the acts of God rest, at their foundation, upon mercy, and that His chastisement bears the character of an exception — a thing that comes only where mercy has been refused. The servant is thus set, from his first word, before a Lord whose dealing with him is mercy before all else.4
And al-Raḥīm is named after al-Raḥmān because the two complete one another: al-Raḥmān proclaims the general mercy that encompasses the whole of creation, believer and unbeliever alike, while al-Raḥīm affirms the particular, abiding mercy God keeps for the faithful. So the servant is drawn to hope in both at once — the mercy that reaches all, and the mercy reserved for those who turn to Him.5
(There follows the long question whether the Basmala is a part of the Qurʾān and of each sūra.)
The schools divide over the Basmala. Mālik and al-Awzāʿī held it no part of the Qurʾān and forbade its recitation in the obligatory prayers, permitting it only in the supererogatory. Abū Ḥanīfa, al-Thawrī, and their followers had it recited at the opening of al-Fātiḥa, but under the breath. Al-Shāfiʿī counted it a verse of al-Fātiḥa and recited it aloud in the prayers said aloud and silently in the rest — as did Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal — though the reports from al-Shāfiʿī differ over whether it is a verse of every sūra or of al-Fātiḥa alone. The position of the Imāmiyya, which al-Khūʾī upholds, is that the Basmala is a verse of al-Fātiḥa and of every sūra of the Qurʾān save al-Barāʾa, that it is Qurʾān wherever it stands, and that it is to be recited — aloud in the prayers recited aloud.1
The first and weightiest proof is the written codex. The Companions set the Basmala at the head of every sūra but al-Barāʾa, in the very script of the Qurʾān — and they were scrupulous to admit into the codex nothing that was not Qurʾān: they did not write “āmīn” at the close of al-Fātiḥa, nor the seeking-of-refuge though it is commanded before recitation, and they long shunned even the vowel-marks and dots, lest anything be confused with the revealed text. That they nonetheless wrote the Basmala at the opening of the sūras can only mean they held it a verse of the Book. Nor will it serve to say it was written merely to divide one sūra from the next: had that been its office, it would have been written between al-Anfāl and al-Barāʾa, where the division is needed, yet it was not.2 And that the Basmala is itself Qurʾān is plain from its standing within the body of a sūra, in Solomon’s letter: “It is from Solomon, and it begins: In the Name of Allah, the All-beneficent, the All-merciful” (27:30).3
To this al-Khūʾī joins the reports of the People of the House, which come in such number as to be beyond doubt, that the Basmala is a verse of every sūra and that it is recited aloud — as in the sound report of Muʿāwiya b. ʿAmmār, who asked al-Ṣādiq about standing to pray and was told to recite the Basmala with al-Fātiḥa; and the Imams counted its loud recitation a mark of true allegiance. With these stand many reports through Sunnī chains — from ʿAlī, Ibn ʿAbbās, Abū Hurayra, and others — affirming the Basmala a verse of al-Fātiḥa; and the seven canonical readings, whose transmission is mass-attested, all recite it at the head of every sūra but al-Barāʾa. The unbroken practice of the Muslims, and the codices of the Companions and the Successors, confirm the same.4
Against this are set a few reports — that Anas said the Prophet, Abū Bakr, and ʿUmar “used to open the prayer with ‘Praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds,’” not mentioning the Basmala; and, among the Imāmī reports, the sound report of the two Ḥalabīs, in which al-Ṣādiq, asked about reciting the Basmala with a second sūra, answered “no.” But these do not overturn the proofs. “Opening with al-ḥamd” need mean no more than opening with the sūra whose name is “al-Ḥamd,” or that the hearer did not catch a Basmala recited under the breath — it does not deny that it was said. And the Ḥalabī report, standing against the far more numerous reports on the other side and agreeing with the doctrine of the wider community, is to be read as issued in prudent concealment (taqiyya), by the rules that govern conflicting reports.5
Those who deny the Basmala its place argue variously — that a matter so disputed cannot be certain Qurʾān; that some of the seven readers omitted it where a sūra is joined to what precedes; that it was written only to separate the sūras. Each is answered. Mere disagreement is no proof, for disagreement is not among the evidences of the Law; and the argument can be turned about — had the Basmala not been Qurʾān, the Companions would never have admitted it into the codex they kept so pure. The omission by some readers touches only the joining of one sūra to another, not the Basmala’s being Qurʾān. And the “separator” claim has already been shown false by the case of al-Anfāl and al-Barāʾa. The Basmala, then, is a verse of the Book, standing at the head of every sūra save one, and Qurʾān wherever it is found.6
The word is read “al-ḥamdu,” in the nominative — the famous reading — and has been read “al-ḥamda,” in the accusative (governed by an implied verb, “I praise”), and “al-ḥamdi,” in the genitive (drawn along by the lām that follows). The grammarians offer grounds for preferring one over another. Al-Khūʾī, consistent with what he established in the prolegomena on the readings, judges the whole effort of preference to be of no avail: the variant readings are the considered choices of the reciters, not a text transmitted by mass-attestation from the Prophet, so that none is the Qurʾān to the exclusion of the current recitation of the Muslims. What is incumbent in prayer and elsewhere is to recite in the reading current among the Muslims; to adjudicate between the seven is neither required nor of use.1
al-Ḥamd. Praise is the opposite of blame (lawm), and is given only for a beautiful, voluntary act — whether or not that act is a benefit to the one who praises. It stands between two neighbouring words. Thanks (shukr) is the opposite of ingratitude, and is given only for a bounty or benefit received; so praise is wider than thanks, for praise may be for an excellence that brought the praiser nothing. Commendation (madḥ) is the opposite of dispraise, and need not be for a voluntary act at all, let alone a benefit; so praise is narrower than commendation, since praise is confined to the voluntary. The definite article in “al-ḥamd” is the article of the genus — there being no prior thing referred to — so the sense is that praise in its entirety belongs to God.2
al-Rabb. The word is taken from the root r-b-b, meaning the owner who sets things right and nurtures them (whence al-rabība, the step-daughter reared in one’s care). It is not applied absolutely to any but God; of another it is used only in construct — “the master of the ship,” “the master of the house.”3
al-ʿĀlam. “Al-ʿālamūn,” the worlds, is a plural of the kind that has no singular of its own form — like rahṭ, “a band,” and qawm, “a people.” It may be used of any homogeneous class of created things — the world of plants, the world of animals, and the like — and all of them together are everything other than God, each thing a sign (ʿalāma) of its Maker. God is thus the Lord — the Owner, Setter-right, and Nurturer — of every class of His creation.4
The verse both declares a truth and teaches the servant to declare it: that all praise, in its entirety, belongs to God — for He gathers in Himself every perfection, and He is the source of every bounty upon all the worlds. Al-Khūʾī reads the opening verses of the sūra as setting out, one by one, the very motives that move a rational being to worship, which he had laid down before. The perfection of the worshipped and His beneficence — the first two motives — are declared in “All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds”; the third, the servant’s longing for good and mercy, is pointed to by “the All-beneficent, the All-merciful,” for the attribute of mercy calls forth desire for His bounties and the seeking of good from Him; and the fourth, awe before His sovereign might, by “Master of the Day of Retribution.” Having thus gathered every ground of worship into God alone, the sūra turns, in the verse that follows, to its fruit: “You alone do we worship, and You alone do we ask for help.”5
The detached pronoun “You” (iyyāka) is the object of the verb, and its placing before the verb yields restriction: “You we worship, and none besides You; and of You we ask help, and of none besides You.” With this verse the sūra turns from speaking about God — praising Him, naming Him Lord, All-beneficent, Master of the Day of Retribution — to speaking to Him. This turn (iltifāt) is not idle: having come to know his Lord by His perfections, the servant is raised from describing Him at a distance to standing before Him in address, as one admitted at last to the presence. And the “we” of “we worship” is the word of the servant amid the congregation, humbling himself among the worshippers rather than standing forward alone.1
Worship (ʿibāda) is not any and every submission, nor mere obedience, nor the honouring of another. Its reality is a humbling of oneself before a being together with the belief that he is a god, or a lord possessed of an independent disposal over benefit and harm, life and death — a taking of him as a deity (taʾalluh). Where this belief is absent, submission and honour do not become worship; where it is present, even a slight act becomes worship. This is why the Qurʾān sets the whole purpose of creation in it — “I did not create the jinn and the humans except that they may worship Me” — for worship is the servant’s owning, in the very posture of his body and heart, that God alone is God.2
Obedience alone is not worship. God commands obedience to others than Himself — “Obey Allah, and obey the Apostle and those vested with authority among you” — yet none says that obeying the Prophet or a just authority is worshipping him. When the Qurʾān calls the following of Satan “worship” — “Did I not exhort you, O children of Adam, that you should not worship Satan?” — it does so because that following is an obedience joined to a turning away from God and an acceptance of Satan’s bidding in God’s place; it is obedience become allegiance. Obedience, then, is worship only when it carries within it submission to its object as to a lord.3
Nor is bare submission (khuḍūʿ) worship. A man humbles himself before his father, bows to a ruler, kisses the hand of one he reveres — and in none of this does he worship them, so long as he does not believe them gods or lords. Were mere submission worship, the honour the Qurʾān itself sanctions would be idolatry: the taking of Abraham’s standing-place as a place of prayer, the reverence shown God’s signs and His prophets. The mark of the true believer is indeed that he is “humble toward the faithful, stern toward the faithless” — a humility that is no worship of them. Submission becomes worship only when belief in the divinity of its object is added to it.4
Prostration (sujūd) is the utmost degree of submission and self-abasement; and for that reason God has reserved it to Himself and has not permitted His servants to prostrate to any other. Yet when prostration to other than God is performed by God’s own command, it is in truth worship of God and a drawing near to Him — for it is the carrying out of His order and the yielding to His rule, however much, in outward form, it be a humbling before a creature. On this rests the justice of punishing the one who rebels against such a command: he may not excuse himself by saying he will not abase himself before a creature, for the command was God’s, and to refuse it is to disobey God.5 So the angels’ prostration to Adam — “When We said to the angels, ‘Prostrate before Adam,’ they prostrated, but not Iblīs” — and the prostration of Jacob and his sons before Joseph — “and they fell down prostrate before him” — were no worship of a creature, but obedience to God and honour of the one He had honoured.6
Interpreters divide over the prostration to Adam. Some hold it was truly directed to Adam, by way of honouring him — a prostration of greeting and reverence, not of worship, made lawful, indeed commanded, by God for that hour; and since it was by God’s command, it was at bottom an act of worship rendered to God. Others hold that Adam was set as a direction (qibla), the angels prostrating toward him but for God, as the Kaʿba is faced in prayer without being worshipped. Either way, the act was not the worship of Adam, and Iblīs’s refusal was a rebellion against God’s command, not a scruple to be honoured — “he refused and acted arrogantly, and he was one of the faithless.”7
(There follow: how idolatry (shirk) comes about, the confining of the seeking of aid to God, and the question of intercession.)
Since worship is submission joined to the belief in the divinity or lordship of its object, idolatry (shirk) is the ascribing to another of a share in that divinity or lordship — the belief that some being besides God possesses, of itself, an independent power over benefit and harm, life and death, or a disposal in the order of things apart from God. This is the association God does not forgive: “Indeed Allah does not forgive that partners should be ascribed to Him, but He forgives anything besides that to whomever He wishes.” It follows that turning to a creature is not idolatry so long as one does not believe it an independent agent: to seek a benefit through the means God has appointed, or to ask a prophet or a friend of God to intercede, is no shirk, for the seeker holds all power to be God’s and the creature to act only by His leave. The idolater is set apart not by his turning to a means, but by his belief that the means is a god.1
“And You alone do we ask for help” — the seeking of aid, too, is confined to God. Yet the servant plainly uses means: he calls a physician, wields a tool, asks the strong to help him, as Dhū al-Qarnayn bade the people, “Help me with some strength, and I will make a bulwark between you and them.” There is no contradiction. The means have no efficacy of their own; they act only by God’s will, and were He to withhold it they would avail nothing. The independent, ultimate help is therefore God’s alone, and to seek aid through the means He has ordained is in reality to seek aid of Him — since it is He who set the means and He who gives them their effect. The verse denies not the use of means but the crediting of any means with a power independent of God.2
Intercession is the seeking of good by one for another. It is established by the Book and the Sunna, and it is bound throughout to God’s leave, so that it takes nothing from His sole sovereignty. “Who is it that can intercede with Him except by His leave?”; “they do not intercede except for someone He approves of”; and, decisively, “Say: all intercession rests with Allah.”3 The intercessor, then, does not overbear God’s will, nor wring pardon from Him against it; he intercedes only for whom God permits and by the permission God grants, so that his intercession is itself a working of God’s mercy, not a rival to it. Against those who would restrict intercession to the raising of the ranks of the obedient, al-Khūʾī holds — with the mass of the reports — that it reaches also the grave sinners among the believers, lifting from them the punishment they had earned; for the obedient, having no punishment to remit, are the least in need of it.4
The reports of the People of the House affirm the intercession of the Prophet, of the Imams, and even of the believers and the martyrs, for the sinners of the community, and that none abides forever in the Fire save the people of unbelief — the grave sinner among the faithful is brought out by intercession after chastisement or forgiveness.5 The like comes through Sunnī chains in abundance: the Prophet’s word, “I have reserved my intercession for the grave sinners of my community”; and, in the report of Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī, “I was given the choice between intercession and that half my community enter Paradise, and I chose intercession, for it is the more encompassing and the more sufficing — do you suppose it is for the God-fearing? No, it is for the sinful, the erring, the sullied”; and the reports of the Praised Station (al-maqām al-maḥmūd), where the Prophet falls prostrate beneath the Throne and is told, “Raise your head; intercede, and your intercession shall be granted.” The two traditions thus meet upon the same truth: an intercession that is real, that reaches the sinner, and that is wholly by the leave of God.6
(There follows the last verse of the sūra: “Guide us to the straight path.”)
“Al-ṣirāṭ” has been read with an initial ṣād — the famous reading — and with a sīn, and with a sound between the two; the differences touch only the pronunciation of the first letter, and al-Khūʾī, as before, holds it of no profit to prefer one over another. As for the words: guidance (hidāya) bears two senses — the mere showing of the way, and the bringing of the traveller to his goal — and both are God’s, for it is He who points out the path and He who carries to the end of it. The path (ṣirāṭ) is the open, travelled road. And straightness (istiqāma) is that a road be without bend or swerve, the nearest way between the traveller and his goal; so the straight path is the way that leads to God by the shortest course, with no crookedness in it.1
The path prayed for is then defined as “the path of those whom You have blessed.” These are named in another verse: “those whom Allah has blessed, including the prophets and the truthful, the martyrs and the righteous” — so the straight path is the way of the prophets and of those who follow them in truth.2 Against them are set two other classes: “those against whom is wrath” (al-maghḍūb ʿalayhim) and “those who are astray” (al-ḍāllūn). The reports apply the first to the Jews and the second to the Christians; but al-Khūʾī understands this as illustration, not restriction — the verse being general. Those who draw down wrath are all who knew the truth and rebelled against it; those who stray are all who wandered from the path in ignorance, not knowing it. Mankind is thus set before three ways: the way of those who knew and obeyed — and were blessed; the way of those who knew and rebelled — and were met with wrath; and the way of those who never knew — and went astray.3 In grammar, “the path of those whom You have blessed” stands in apposition to “the straight path,” expounding it; and “not those against whom is wrath” is a further qualification of “those whom You have blessed,” marking the believers’ way off from the other two so that each may be shunned.4
A question presses here: why does the believer — already upon the path, else he would not be praying — ask to be guided to it? Al-Khūʾī answers on several counts. He asks, first, for steadfastness and continuance, that having been brought to the path he not be turned from it; for a man may be shown the road and then be cut off upon it, and the prayer means “keep us firm, and let our guidance endure.” He asks, second, for guidance in the particulars of the way and in its farther stages: guidance has degrees without end, and the servant at every rank seeks the rank above it, so that even the prophets sought increase. And the prayer is in the plural — “guide us” — the worshipper asking not for himself alone but for the whole body of the faithful, since no one’s guidance is complete while the community around him strays.5
As to the reality of this path, the reports of the People of the House read “the straight path” as the religion of truth — and, in their tongue, as the way of the People of the House and the allegiance owed them, they being the guides upon it after him; al-Ṣādiq is related to have said that the path of those whom God has blessed is “the knowledge of God and the understanding that comes from Him.” With this petition the sūra closes: the servant, having praised his Lord and vowed Him worship and the seeking of aid, asks the one thing on which all else depends — to be led, and kept, upon the straight path to Him.6
Here the exegesis of the Opening Sūra concludes. What follows in the book is the section of Annotations (al-Taʿlīqāt).
To the body of the book the author appends a section of annotations, expanding points he had touched on in passing. The first and fullest documents the ḥadīth of the two weighty things (ḥadīth al-thaqalayn) — the Prophet’s testament, invoked more than once in these pages as the ground for joining the People of the House to the Book among the sure guides: “I leave among you the two weighty things: the Book of God and my kindred, the people of my house; so long as you hold fast to them both you will never go astray after me, and the two shall not part until they return to me at the Pool.”1
The report is transmitted in more than one wording. The prevailing and best-attested is “the Book of God and my kindred, the people of my house” (kitāb Allāh wa-ʿitratī ahl baytī); another has “the Book of God and my Sunna.” Al-Khūʾī observes that the wording with “my kindred” is the one carried by the sound and widely-transmitted chains, gathered in the most authoritative of the Sunnī collections, whereas the wording “and my Sunna” is not found in the two Ṣaḥīḥs and comes only by weak and broken chains — so that it cannot stand against the former, still less displace it.2
The ḥadīth is related from a great number of the Companions — among them Zayd b. Arqam, Zayd b. Thābit, Jābir b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī, Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī, Ḥudhayfa b. Usayd, Abū Dharr, Abū Hurayra, Ḥudhayfa b. al-Yamān, and others — some reporting it from the Farewell Pilgrimage, some from Ghadīr Khumm, some from the pulpit at Medina, and some from the Prophet’s final illness. That it was heard and handed on by so many, in so many settings, is what carries it beyond the rank of the single report to that of mass-transmission (tawātur), which no doubt can touch.3
The author then sets out its places in the books of the wider community: Muslim in his Ṣaḥīḥ, in the Book of the Merits of ʿAlī; al-Tirmidhī, who relates it from several Companions; Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal in the Musnad, by many chains; al-Ḥākim in the Mustadrak, ruling it sound; al-Nasāʾī, al-Ṭabarānī in his three lexicons, al-Bayhaqī, and a long roll of others besides.4 From the gathering of all these he draws his conclusion: the ḥadīth is established beyond dispute, agreed upon by the two communities; and its sense is decisive — the Prophet set the People of the House beside the Book, bade the umma cling to both, and promised that the two would never part. What is joined to the infallible Book, and clinging to which is a sure preservation from error, must itself be preserved from error; and this is the foundation on which the whole appeal to the People of the House, throughout the book, has rested.5
(There follow the remaining shorter annotations, and then the indices, to the end of the volume.)
After the note on the ḥadīth of the two weighty things, the section of annotations continues, to about page 528, with further documentary notes of the same kind — setting out the chains and the sources of reports cited in the body of the book, and clarifying, with references, points the author had passed over quickly in the argument. They add no new doctrine, but secure what was said before by pointing the reader to where each report and each opinion may be found.
The volume then closes, from about page 528 to its end at page 557, with its indices (al-fahāris): an index of the Qurʾānic verses cited through the book, in the order of the codex; an index of the reported traditions (aḥādīth); an index of the persons named (al-aʿlām); an index of the books and authorities drawn upon (al-maṣādir); and the table of contents of the whole. These are the apparatus of reference — ordered lists of names, titles, and page-numbers rather than continuous prose — and so stand outside what can be set as continuous prose; their office is served by the master Contents at the head of this volume.
With this the book is complete: its prolegomena on the sciences of the Qurʾān — its excellence and inimitability, the readings, its preservation from distortion, its collection, the authoritativeness of its apparent sense, abrogation, the modification in creation, the principles of exegesis, and the question of its origination or eternity — followed by the exegesis of its opening sūra, al-Fātiḥa, verse by verse, and the annotations appended to all of these. And praise belongs to God, Lord of all the worlds.