Understanding the Quran: Text, Sound & Context

• Sound is integral to the meaning of the Quran.
• Iqra means "Read," signifying recitation and invitation, symbolizing the prophet's purity and the communal sharing of the message.
• The Quran presents itself as a pre-existing book, revealed as complete before its physical form.
• Bismillah symbolizes constant creation and blessings in actions and contracts.
• The most merciful, the most compassionate occurs as a line in Fatiha.

Pre-Islamic Arabic Influence

• Understanding the Quran requires considering the historical context with potential biases.
• Quran, artifacts, history, and foreign accounts provide insights.
• The Quran addresses questions and responses beyond the Prophet, engaging the entire community.

The Elephant Surah

• The story of the Elephant involves diversion from the sacred site to Sanaa, divine protection, and punishment, symbolizing opposition to a divine plan.
• Age 40 is symbolic.
• Haram refers to sacred sites, resources, money, and trade routes.
• The Quraysh tribe had expectations of reciprocity.
• The culture was marked by eloquent poetry.
• Poets, soothsayers, and madmen existed with Kahins (soothsayers) linked to djinn and Majnun possessed by jinn.

Continuity and Difference

• Rhetoric of commerce, human interventions, violent imagery, lack of knowledge, and emotional modulation are demonstrated through contraction and expansion.
• Tribal law is acknowledged.
• Difference emerges through subversion of arrogance, calls to action, afterlife emphasis and modifications to tribal law.
• Lineage connects Abraham and the Prophet.
• Tribal law includes "blood vengeance," with Quranic negotiation for improvement through financial compensation, which is framed as preferable to retaliation.
• Human life is compared to sand dunes, emphasizing impermanence.
• Abraham is recognized as the father of Mecca.

Enfolded and Wrapped in His Cloak

• Similarities include reassurance, emphasis on the Day of Judgement, encouragement, worshipping through hardship, and the symbol of a cloak.
• Differences include night worship (73), interior focus (73), purification (74), harsher tone (74), and exterior focus (74).
• Western scholars may interpret these verses similarly.

Occasions of Revelations

• The Quran was revealed in dialogue.
• The Mi’raj is the ascent to Jerusalem, meeting prophets, and establishing 5 daily prayers.
• The Star reaffirms the message's medium.
• Prophet Muhammad serves as an advocate, and God is merciful.
• The rolling up subverts nature, exposing hypocrisy.

Historical Approaches

• Wahidi considers the Prophet integral to the Quran.
• Occasions of revelations occurred verse by verse.

Data

• Muslim scholars used the Quran and Hadith.
• Other scholars used artifacts as data.
• 610 CE: First revelation.
• 620 CE: Night Journey.
• 622 CE: Migration to Medina, marking the start date.

Prophetic Biography

• Understanding the Prophet's life during revelations, in Mecca and Medina, with followers.
• This humanizes the Prophet.
• Universal vs. Specific applicability emerges.

Literary Approaches

• Analyzing the Quran as literature emphasizes emotive and affective aspects
• Focusing on themes, structure, style, and rhetoric.
• It is a significant part of humanity’s global heritage.

Periods

• Early Meccan texts tackle existential and personal issues.
• Later Meccan texts focus on sacred history and biblical prophets.
• Medinan texts addresses political, economic, social, and military leadership as relating to societal, legal, and historical issues.

Imagery

• Connections between below the earth and the sky are revelation.
• The earth is free from harm and is safe.
• The Quran establishes reality and the sensual.

Creation and Fall

• Humans, created in the highest station, descend to the lowest.
• Ascension and descension occur through cosmic forces.
• Possibility is shown but then retracted "Except those who keep the faith, and work justice."

Recompense

• Theirs is a recompense unending (continuous donation that is ceaseless)
• A possibility, but still doesn’t tel what it is is.
• "What can give you the lie then about the reckoning?" questions reality.
• "Is not God the judge most wise?"

Opposites

• This contrast high and low, believer and disbeliever, promoting emotion and self-reflection.
• Parallelism eases the message.

Surah Ad-Duha (The Morning Brightness)

• Invokes softness like the morning.
• Opposites included morning brightness and night's stillness.
• It speaksto the person directly.
• Repetition softens negativity: "nor forsaken you, nor does He hate you."
• It shows blessings and care from Allah.
• It paints an image of a lost person seeking to be found.
• Do not be harsh to the orphan, those who have lost, or those who desire help.
• Talk about the blessings of your Lord, like the morning and night.

Characteristic Elements of Early Meccan Surahs

• Hymnic invocations of nature.
• Meditation on ultimate questions
• What will be of value at the end of life?
• Experiential sense of intimacy and awe.
• Apocalyptic vignettes

Other Elements

• Common themes include the Day of Reckoning.
• Ethics of social justice and compassion.
• Elusive time.
• Inversion of the familiar.

Use of Language

• Rhymed endings have symbolic meaning.
• Movement and motion reflected thematically and stylistically.
• There is a play on gender.
• Ambiguity and alliteration are used.
• The text has no punctuation or capitalization.

Later Analysis

• Analyzing based on themes, rhetoric, structure, style, and nature.
• Themes include the day of reckoning, nature, and accountability.
• Opposites are used.

Rhetoric

• Call to action evokes emotion, awe, and intimacy.
• Structure includes parallelism and repetition.

Style

• Imagery, symbolism, repetition, rhetorical questions and oaths by natural phenomena are used.
• Literary qualities of Arabic are gendered, with sound vision.
• Alliteration and rhymed endings occur.

Symmetrical Composition

• Occurs in Late Meccan and Medinan Revelations.
• The Meccan/Medinan divide occurred when the Prophet and followers migrated from Mecca to Medina.
• Medina represented a community in struggle where Muhammad was invited to arbitrate.
• The minority faced persecution and the welcomed majority needed community regulation.
• Longer chapters and verses use ring composition.
• Muslims transitioned from a “persecuted minority” to an “established community.”

Medinan Suras

Structure

• Longer chapters and verses
• Heavy use of ring composition
• Cyclic storytelling with moral ends

Content

• Focus on community and family life
• Legislation of rights
• Arab and Biblical prophet sacred history

Literary style

• Prophetic address
• Shifts of audience (“pagans” became "people of the book")
• Narrative cycles and contrasting imagery

Language

• Grammatical shifts (you, we) and dialogue
• Debates shift from mushrikeen to people of the book

Perspectives

• Mecca focuses on the cosmic
• Medina focuses on legal

Legal Elements

• Legal verses comprise 4-8% of the Quran.
• The Meccan period contains night visions.
• The Medinan period features the Change of the Qiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca.
• The Constitution of Medina fosters solidarity among groups.
• Cracks emerged in solidarity.

Change of Qiblah

• Prayer direction shifted from Jerusalem to Mecca.
• Different approaches inform meaning.
• Abrogation is whether a verse can cancel out another and how to know the order of verses.

Chapter 2: The Cow

• Topics include prayer, alms, and the Quranic challenge (21, 22, 42:3).

Shifts

• Light as guidance, ignorance of guidance, and hypocrites emerge.
• The Quran is presented as dialogue.
• Books, believers, hypocrites, direct commence, warnings, promises, Adam, bowing angels, and Children of Israel appear.

Truth

• Recurring themes concern those who believe versus those who don’t, and hypocrites.
• Reactions to truth vary as a consequence.

Symmetrical Composition

• It is not always moral at the end.

Ring Composition Structure

• Story of Joseph (Q12) is an example:
  • A- Joseph’s dream
  • B - Brothers plot against Joseph
  • C- Joseph abandoned and enslaved
  • D- Joseph accused of seducing governor’s wife
  • X - Imprisoned (Q12:39: “Fellow prisoners, would many diverse gods be better than God, the One, the All-Powerful)
  • D’ Innocence proven
  • C’ Joseph given a royal position
  • B’ Brothers visit asking for help
  • A’ Dream fulfilled

Legal Elements

• Giving and reward, believers and disbelievers, usury and contracting a depth emerge.

Surah Ar-Rahman (The Compassionate)

• This is analyzed through context, rereading, and worldview.

Unique Elements

Themes

• Signs in nature
• Rhetoric through repetition.

Structure

• Rhyme (an an an m m m)
• Style features rhetorical questions, opposites in nature, and dual forms in grammar.

Quran

• Journey from oral performance to book disrupts the flow of the Quran.
• As a recitation, it is new to the Prophet.

Perspectives on Book

• verses

Book

• Verses, revelation with stories, clear arabic
• Truth, scripture, verses, signs
• Scripture communicated as guidance
• Codexes protect the inside

History

• Death of prophet: 632 CE (10 AH).

Rashidun Caliphs

• Followed the Prophet and Quran
• Successors, when Ali dies (661) age of empire becomes Islam as a regional and secular force

Perspectives

Sunni

• Four people collected the Quran.

How did Qu'ran become a book

• After the battle of Yamama, many who knew the Quran died
• Abu Bakr told him to start writing the words Zay’d collectin- Abu Bakr, Umar, Hafsa bt. Umar

Uthman

• Selective, codex, includes contradictions

Other Perspectives

• Ibn Massoud - hated Usman codex. - Ethiopian hertiage Mushaf = codex.
• Hafsa hated it, her own copy better

Qira’at

• Readings, variant readings occur due to the absence of dots.

Dates

• 650 CE: Codification of the Quran
• 1924 CE: Standardization of the Quran

Searching

• Oral tradition, varied dialects, and early written codices inform the searching.
• Skeletal scripts inform the search.
• Multiple copies of text and identifying the correct changes is important.

Concepts

• HAFA -ABUKBAR, THROUGH ZAYD
• Mu’allawat pre Islamic poetry
• Mi’raj - Jerusalem to heave
• Legal/Medinan verses

Explore the Quran's meaning through its sonic qualities and the role of 'Iqra'. Examine its physical form, pre-Islamic influences, and engagement with tribal laws. Understand the Quran's emotional patterns and broader messages.