CHAPTER TWO Divine Arrangement

117-123 The Quran An Abiding Wonder CHAPTER TWO Divine Arrangement The Jews were commanded by God to preserve their holy book, the Torah. The responsibility for preserving these early divine scriptures thus fell to their followers, whereas it was God who Himself shouldered the burden of keeping the Quran intact: ‘We have, without doubt, sent down the Message, and We will assuredly guard it.’ (15:9) Earlier scriptures were books of God just as the Quran was. The only difference was that the bearers of those books failed in their task of preserving them, and hence they lost their original qualities. As for the Quran, God having taken it upon Himself to provide His special divine succour for its safeguarding, it remained in its pristine state. This, however, does not mean that angels will descend from heaven in order to keep the Quran under their protection. The present world being one of trial, the realities of the next world remain hidden from us in this life. It can therefore never happen that the angels will virtually come down in order to guard the Quran. All such things are achieved in this world under normal and not extraordinary circumstances. Here this task is to be performed by us normal human beings, and through historical processes, without the veil of the unseen being lifted. Events throughout human history bear out God’s fulfillment of His promise- Muslims as well as non-Muslims, individuals as well as communities have been pressed into this service by God. So far as the former prophets are concerned, they were unable to secure sufficient numbers of followers to provide a strong guarantee of the preservation of the book of God. But the case of the Prophet of Islam is distinctly different from that of the other prophets. On the occasion of Hajjatul wida, the last pilgrimage, which the Prophet performed two and a half months before his death, he was accompanied by one lakh and forty thousand Muslims on the plains of Arafat. One can guess from this that by the end of his life the number of believers, both men and women taken together, must have been around five lakhs. This number is quite extraordinarily large, considering that the world population in ancient times was much less than it is today. After the death of the Prophet this number went on increasing as nation after nation embraced Islam. In this way a vast human group came into being as had never previously existed for the guarding of any other revealed scriptures. Another helpful event that followed was a series of conquests both in and outside of Arabia by which